Why do the worst companies have the best names.
They're never able to live it down. It always comes up. And it makes them seem, in a way, careless.
In fact, there's a very interesting theme there: The Palantir are only as useful as their users are wise. The power to see is disastrous if you don't know where to look and how to interpret what you see.
If they named it with that in mind, I'd say it's a very thoughtful name, and a prescient caution. But I doubt it.
People barely understand what the company does, but boy do they want to tell you all about the name.
It's marketing gold. Because rather then "who was that? Some firm named something corp" instead you're spending 5 minutes reinforcing how bad the name is..just building a ton of word association games for a name derived from a well known fiction work and really building up the message that the company is named Palantir and they sell products to the government.
Year Military Spending (billions of RM) % of GDP
1933 0.7 1.0%
1934 4.0 5.1%
1935 5.5 7.0%
1936 10.3 12.2%
1937 11.5 12.7%
1938 17.2 17.2%
1939 38.0 23.0%
Did they build their military to go to war? Or were they force to go to war as the nature of their economy forced them?
So did the German Nazis back then now I think about it.
Maybe there is something with cult-like thinking, fascist or not, where the aesthetics seduces more people into wanting to be a part of it all?
It's neurological. They feel emotional disgust if the regimentation isn't there.
It's not just fascists, either; totalitarian regimes _in general_ tend to be very keen on this sort of thing.
Offhand, the only totalitarian I can think of who seemed to put in a particular effort on hair is Stalin. But in general, stylish clothes, mad hair seems to be the rule.