European Money Pours into Palantir | Hacker News Reader

European Money Pours into Palantir

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129 pointsrobtherobber45 comments

> This is according to data compiled by an international investigation coordinated by Follow The Money, a platform for independent journalism, and in which EL PAÍS participated.

The catchphrase "Follow the money" originated in a docuseries related to Nixon and the watergate scandal, but was also Giovanni Falcone's investigative method, based on tracing Mafia through their money laundering initiatives.

Not sure why this matters as most pension index funds also include Meta by the same lines... everyone buying into these indexes is complicit, no surprise

We've successfully campaigned to make many of those same investors divest from fossil fuel investments. I don't see why investments in crazy surveillance tech should get a pass (and yes, Meta absolutely falls in the same bucket)

This. Giving markets free reign, usually doesn't result in alignment with long term best interests or political objectives.

It took years of activism and voting with our money to get banks, pension funds and similar institutions to stop funding cluster munitions, land mines, nukes, oil, tabacco. Now big tech and some AI companies are on the radar.

Land mines and cluster munitions have been essential for Ukraine to defend itself against the Russian invasion. Several other European countries including Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and Poland have recently withdrawn from the Anti-Personnel Mine Ban Treaty. It's cheap and easy to for activists to pretend to be morally superior when they're sitting safely behind computers and don't have to deal with real world consequences.

https://apnews.com/article/poland-land-mines-ottawa-conventi...

As someone who's worked in numerous war zones, and has had to deal with the real world consequences of UXO, I firmly disagree.

Biological and chemical weapons could help you win, nuclear weapons could help you win. We don't use this stuff for a reason.

The enemy is using them against you anyway, so you are just losing out.

So then the Ukrainians should just roll over and stop trying to resist? Losing your country is a far more serious consequence then dealing with some UXO later.

There is a big leap between not resisting and using weapons that are widely agreed to be abhorrent. You're framing a false binary choice here: either deploy weapons that the majority of countries have deemed unconscionable, or lose your country in its entirety.

There is also a difference between why we fight and how we fight. Fighting in self defence does not give a state the right to conduct a war in any way it chooses.

There are numerous ongoing conflicts in which we've seen states shed hard-won agreements on how wars should be fought. It's an incredibly dangerous trend which is leading us into a new era of horror.

Where would you put the limits on Ukraine's actions? What is beyond the pale?

What an ignorant comment, totally disconnected from reality. It literally was a binary choice: without using land mines and cluster munitions the Ukrainian defenders would have been overrun by superior Russian numbers.

You ever been in a war zone, son? You ever see what happens after? I assure you there's no ignorance in my comments.

Urm, that they're invaluable in an active warzone is unquestionable.

The issue with this tech is that they - at least historically - didn't have an expiration date. So if that war ends and you let your children play in the woods... Maybe occasionally one won't be coming back anymore.

That's the reason why they got a bad image. Because that's literally what happened post ww2 - for decades.

Maybe nowadays they could built them with a forced timer for exploding - if they did, great! If not, your descendants may consider you insane for that opinion in a few decades

There are expiring ("non-persistent") munitions, though generally they're safed (triggers are deactivated) rather than exploded. The former does leave explosive materials in the field, but makes the likelihood of detonating these much lower.

Self-destructing mines are also used, with timers set to explode after deployment. There's some description of these, and problems with them, here: <https://www.fcnl.org/updates/2022-07/understanding-landmines>.

Other capabilities under the rubric "smart mine" are also possible: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smart_mine>.

So then we agree that it's morally positive for European investors to put money into companies developing advanced land mines.

As for descendants, well the people killed by Russian attacks won't have any more descendants. So that point is kind of moot.

I've been regularly thinking about Apartheid-era South Africa. It was a massive Thing for me as a Catholic school kid in the '80s because it seemed (to me) so clearly wrong yet accepted. There were clearly "lefties" making it visible without a lot happening but then "How did you go bankrupt? Two ways: Gradually, then suddenly" happened. And a lot of it started with university students petitioning their schools to divest and that spreading. It will not be fast, but these things can happen and we should start to build a framework for it.

And yes, yes, Enemies Lists are fraught with problems and have a history of eating themselves, etc. But the one thing I know is worse is not trying.

> (and yes, Meta absolutely falls in the same bucket)

s/Meta/FAANG

Decoupling Meta and Palantir from your 401k would not derisk your retirement from surveillance technology. You'd have to kick out Microsoft and Apple and Google next, at which point you've already forfeit most of your portfolio's growth.

Palantir is a defense company. Meta might give away your data to the USA government spying agencies, but it's not on the same level.

https://archive.is/FwMMp

I wonder if Europeans have any clue that this company is a CIA enterprise/front?

Of course they know, their same governments have signed some kind of five eyes intelligence treaties before. Palantir will probably have new customers now that Europe is re-arming.

In any case these same governments are probably also approving the purchase of Huawei cell tower equipment.

No. That information is carefully hidden. For example, you comment when viewed from EU shows as * *** * ***** ** ** ** ** ** **** * * ** *****/***?

You do realise saying this about a publicly traded company without any evidence is just full on qanon level conspiracy theory right?

Their own countries' representatives, and certainly their intelligence services, are also CIA enterprises/fronts. And the CIA (and the US diplomatic corps as a whole) are just representatives of elites, and their sole purpose is to protect those elites' business interests. At the dawn of the project they only employed elite children and ex-Nazis.

That's the other major flaw in the "decouple from the US with European alternatives" marketing campaign. These "US" companies don't have any more loyalty to the US than they have to your country. Their investors are from all over the world. Their employees and executives are from all over the world. If your "European alternatives" to a technology-enabled total surveillance state are owned by the same people, isn't the entire conversation silly? Are you arguing over whether the PO Box is in Delaware or in Germany?

NATO is more obedient to US intelligence than Palantir. Palantir gives orders to US intelligence. The purpose of NATO is to indulge the unearned sense of superiority of EU/British citizens and their denial that the reason they were partially occupied by Russia is because they launched a war of extermination on Russia that killed 20 million civillians. It indulges it in order to manipulate guilty Europeans to do what Palantir wants.

The paranoia that has been whipped up in the European middle-class about Russia is similar in nature to the paranoia that gets whipped up in the US about black Americans. White Americans imagine that black people are going to rise up and kill them all because they can't help but imagine how they would feel about being enslaved and having the children of those enslavers walking around with the fruits of that, calling them lazy. Non-Jewish Europeans imagine how they would feel if the Soviet Union had invaded Europe, walked into tens or hundreds of villages, rounded up all the citizens and put them into a barn, then set the barn on fire. "The USSR must want to kill us all," they think.

It's only natural that they call the Americans to save them. We literally preserved Spain (the initial event of the war) for the fascists, and West Germany for the Nazis that we didn't feel were valuable enough to import to the US itself.

This is an interesting jumble of truths and illusions (not to fault you, but illusions as in deceptive perspectives imposed on you, while at the same time claiming that others are falling for deceptions/propaganda). You are almost right on several things, but the perspective would have to shift to see things for what they really are, how they function and why.

I will not bother addressing most of the things you listed that require a perspective shift, because I am not trying to start a debate or conjure the ire of people's cognitive dissonance; but knowing quite a bit about NATO, let me just put it this way; in most abusive and delusional dynamics, what one party believes is true, is usually really not only advantageous to the other party, but usually also not even close to the perceived nature of the relationship. European NATO "patterns" don't get to take their families to the USA for government subsidized vacations and even live in the USA just out of the generosity of our hearts.

They don't care

Europe, the evergreen vassal of the United States, willing or not.

Looks like the Greenland warning didn't take after all. :(

To me, investing in any AI company is very risky, 1 step above junk bonds :)

But Palantir isn’t an AI company.

They’re a guilt-free hands-washing service.

You pay them money, and they absolve you of your sins. That’s what Peter Thiel is on about.

That’s the technological progress he’s charioting us into his political theocracy with. The ability to label anyone that stands in his way “the Antichrist” which is just another loophole exploitation of the patriot act.

An ai company lol

Keeping score on this one

Currently at 1 point but that’s because at least two people upvoted it and two people downvoted it

If I’m wrong, call me out.

Am I wrong??????????

Look just because you have their stocks in your portfolio doesn’t negate that their business is primarily in managing the narrative around who lives and dies.

The one above was downvoted once, but the one above went up twice, still nobody wants to talk, just push down arrows.

A shame cause you need to spend a lot of intellect on this site to even be able to down arrow at all and you spend it on… checks notes…. Do u rly want me to say ur perspective or I’d love for you to state your own opinions out loud plz

The morality of it aside, Palantir is probably a much safer investment bet than most others in the AI space. They're older and more established than a new startup picking up the steepness of the hype curve with a half-baked idea, but they're also newer and more agile than an aging tech giant that suffers from the innovator's dilemma and a ton of bloat. They have a strong reputation among their target market and they've been building a sound business and a lot of tooling and infrastructure on Big Data and machine learning for well over a decade.

I would feel icky investing in them but any comparison to junk bonds would be the last of my concerns.

Palantir significantly pre-dates the current LLM era, and is more of a defence-contractor-slash-private-intelligence-agency than an AI company

So disappointing

Blind men see an elephant as a rope, a wall, a spear, a tree, a fan, etc.

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