Are you implying that the demand for these evil services absolves the suppliers from any moral responsibility? Simply because “if we don’t do this somebody else will”.
It’s an evil service and no matter who requests it or supplies it, doing so is an evil act.
>Are you implying that the demand for these evil services absolves the suppliers from any moral responsibility?
No, you are implying that. I'm saying that evil are (primarily) those who use it, not (just) those who make it. You can try to make whatever you want, if nobody will buy it to fund it, then you won't have money to make it, so your evil thign won't exist. Palantir only exists because governments are evil and willing to fund it to buy it and use it. If you want likes of Palantir to not exist then you need to hold your government accountable to not spend money on evil things.
Are gun makers evil and responsible whenever someone gets killed by a murderer, or are those who pull the trigger responsible for who they kill?
> Are gun makers evil and responsible whenever someone gets killed by a murderer, or are those who pull the trigger responsible?
Yes. There's a reason Remington decided to settle for $73M dollars with the sandyhook parents even though they didn't "pull the trigger" [1]. That's not a number you pick because you think you'll win the case.
>There's a reason Remington decided to settle for $73M dollars with the sandyhook parents
It's only because of how the legal system works in the US(for better and for worse), with profit-seeking ambulance chasing lawyers, and where cases are decided on the emotions and societal moral panics of the people in the jury and the negative image such cases can cause to a brand, not if someone or a company is objectively right or wrong in the eyes of the law.
Meaning it's cheaper to pay people off even if they're legally wrong, than try to prove you are right but then deal with the bad publicity of the emotionally charged mob with pitchforks and torches who blames you for their kids dying and looks bad in the media.
Keep in mind parents of that time also blamed violent videogames like Doom for it, so it's not like they were right about who was to blame, they were just looking for retribution from anyone they could, aided by unscrupulous ambulance chasing lawyers looking to cash in on the drama that was feeding on the public's emotions amplified by the media also cashing in.
So highly mediatized and politically divisive/charged legal cases, are not (always) great examples of objectivity and righteousness of the US legal system.
I absolutely knew you’d bring up guns and gun making but it’s not a valid comparison. If the gun companies were also involved in the actual shooting of people part that would work.
Palantir were in no way obliged or coerced into making an evil thing, they just decided being evil for money was ok.
>I absolutely knew you’d bring up guns and gun making but it’s not a valid comparison. If the gun companies were also involved in the actual shooting of people part that would work.
Do you have an argument on this that isn't child Redditor armchair level?
>Palantir were in no way obliged or coerced into making an evil thing, they just decided being evil for money was ok.
You keep beating it around the bush and avoiding to address the fact that if Palantir wouldn't do that, then dozens of other companies would.
You can't expect for society and especially for-profit businesses to run on morality in order for evil apps to never be made, but you need the government to do that by rule of law and force behavior of companies so that no Palantir ever exists.
Palantir could decline to build this and so could everybody.
If somebody proposed to you that you could have a lucrative contract in exchange for an intrusive system that provides a bedrock for authoritarianism, you are arguing it’s perfectly ok because if not you, somebody else will and that makes it OK.
>Palantir could decline to build this and so could everybody.
The issue with this broken argument you keep repeating is that it only works in a fantasy setting where the world only runs on morality, where countries could also decide to not have nuclear weapons and never got to war with each other and share resources fairly, and end world hunger and all that, while my argument is based on how things work in the real world which isn't run on morality but on rule of law enforced by force of violence, and such power corrupts, so the world is run in a corrupt fashion by powerful and corrupt people, meaning the existence of various Palantirs is virtually inevitable unless the voting population heavily protests to force the governments' hands.
>you are arguing it’s perfectly ok because if not you, somebody else will and that makes it OK.
No, I never said that. You're good at pretending to misunderstand things I never claim to have things to build arguments upon.
There are several things that make Palantir uniquely objectionable, though:
1) They're private-sector and have low hiring standards, which can lead to Boeing-esque quality control issues
2) They have every incentive to fleece US taxpayers, becoming another over-fattened rice-bowl defense contractor
3) Exporting Palantir products could create diplomatic crises and conflicts of interest undermining American security (see: NSO Group)
We can't ever avoid spyware since Google, Microsoft and Apple already built the perfect surveillance state a decade ago. But we can prevent taxpayers from being scammed, and reject the enshittification of the federal government's defense budget.
its clearly a democratically approved legal act though. If its as evil as you suggest, the better approach would be to convince your peers that its evil and thus should be made illegal
There is a torrent. Objectively it’s uneven but the I’m biased toward it because I watched it on release. Space Bastard Travis is a terrible villain but Servalan is very attention getting. The simple fact that none of the characters felt safe made it compelling on first viewing and Avon’s cynicism vs Blake’s idealism makes for satisfying viewing despite the obvious budget constraints on the screen. Definitely seek it out but don’t expect Firefly production values.
I don’t know about this. If you were doing a recipe app on DOS likely you were using dBase or a clone of it and all those apps looked the same because of the character based limitations of the PC. Borland environments were similar.
That's the point, those jobs went away, the need for a job didn't. No one seems to know what long term opportunities are going to be created by AI, we only know that it is going to erode existing opportunities.
I don’t understand why central banks seem to use such a blunt object like interest rates for every inflation problem. It would make sense to rise if the cause of inflation was accelerated economic activity, not price rises due to supply restrictions. How does hurting mortgage holders even more help with not starting wars? All it can do is have a double dampening effect on the economy as people pull back their discretionary spending.
Using interest rates for this kind of inflation is guaranteed to cause a recession.
Central banks didn't use to do this, in the post-war period up until about 1980, they tried targeting the monetary aggregates like M2.
Unfortunately they discovered that the size of monetary aggregates was outside the control of central banks, these were demand determined by the public's desire for money balances. So all attempts to control the growth of monetary aggregates failed.
Having an inability to control anything else, the central banks turned to the one thing they could control -- overnight interest interest rates, and from that, bond yields more generally. That is the one tool in their toolbox.
Bob is correct here. The other tool people keep forgetting about is fiscal policy; government deficit spending is inflationary, and the US is currently running a very large deficit and was floating even more inflationary ideas like directly bribing voters to vote Republican in the midterms.
Really the problem is that everyone wants to make lots of money (economic growth) so they can spend more (increase consumption) but without anyone else raising their prices as a result. Unsquareable circle.
He's right about interest rates. But he's missing the point behind the debate: whose policy choices got us to where we are today where this is necessary? Republicans.
Not just Trump, Republicans as a whole. They are not fiscally conservative at all, and their culture wars and religious crusades are going to bankrupt the nation.
They'll sell you up a rope to corporate donors asking for deregulation. And we've seen exactly what happens when there is money to be made at the expense of other people's lives: spoiler alert, people like money more than they care about other people's health.
I don’t think we have a wide enough Overton window when it comes to economic discussions, the neoliberal revolution of the 1970s killed a lot of little levers of economic control in most post social democratic countries. Instead we were promised a new age of free trade and economic liberalism and one single, shiny lever to control the speed of the economy like the governor on a steam train.
Yet here we are 50 years later suffering booms and busts just like before. Nobody seems to want to acknowledge the failure of 50 years of industrialisation destruction that in hindsight was the inevitable outcome of open trade and the retreat of governments.
To answer the question, yes I think there are other options and trade barriers need to be part of that conversation.
It's not good for the economy when no one is willing to move for the next 20-30 years. And it's not good for the people who are unable to move to chase a better job as well.
We’ve seen this doesn’t work nearly as well as the homogeneous culture people would like us to believe. Ambrose Bierce nailed it (paraphrasing) the bible is an excellent book for your neighbour.
It is a total fantasy that Australia would throw back in with the ghost empire that is the UK. They literally have nothing to offer us apart from a figurehead head of state.
As a non-Australian, I’d say your country’s own immigration policy is fairly unwelcoming.
I get no country wants to accept a wave of 80 year olds that will be a burden to its social welfare systems.
But I find it strange one would automatically deny seasoned working professionals in excellent health with knowledge, experience, and finances to offer — just because they were born before the premier of Good Morning Australia in 1981.
Per capita, Australia lets in more migrants per year than almost any other wealthy country. Our immigration process is non political - it’s run by a government department who write, publish and enforce our policies. Which is a huge step up from many other countries we could name.
You may disagree with our selection criteria. I wish we provided exceptions for people I like too. But at a large scale, I think it’s much better that we make our rules clear and stick to them.
> Our immigration process is non political - it’s run by a government department who write, publish and enforce our policies.
This is a deeply unserious claim.
You could make a claim for it being setup as non-partisan. But non-political? Government officials aren't subject to political issues? That's a new one.
> One Nation said on Monday it would cut the number of temporary migrants in Australia by more than 750,000 over three years, targeting international students and family members of skilled migrants.
> Hanson’s announcement comes as Labor and the Coalition consider new cuts to overseas arrivals, in an increasingly charged contest before the next federal election. Hanson will hope her plan plays well in the lead-up to the Victorian state election, due in November.
Almost the entire tech crew who were working for Honeywell in Canberra seemed to be from a team that worked in Port Moresby in the late seventies to maybe the early eighties. Their stories were mostly a mix of late stage colonialism and machete terror.
There is no apt response other than for the over 50% of Americans who voted in favour of their current situation to all suddenly change their minds about gay frogs and space lasers and stolen elections. I can’t see it happening.
> There is no apt response other than for the over 50% of Americans who voted in favour of their current situation
Single-digit percentage points of turnout changes would swing the House and Senate. Double-digit percentage changes in voter turnout, as in 15 to 30 percent of unlikely-to-vote registered voters turning out for Democrats in deep-red Republican stronghods like Alabama and Mississippi, gives Democrats a Congressional supermajority.
MAGA voters aren't dropping their identity for a while. Possibly never. Most voters who aren't registered or don't vote are lazy and nihilstic and worth ignoring. But a tenth should be pitchable. In a reach, a third of them could find motivation.
You can't make it mandatory at the same time as restricting access to it. Voter participation in the US being low is a design feature. Having it on a Sunday, auto enrolling citizens, having more accessible polling places, etc would also increase participation.
I think mandatory voting is only reasonable if their is an official spoil option that should trigger something if selected enough. The outcome is tricky in parliamentary/party based systems, as if you have a revote just going to end up with the same parties, but I also think its quite undemocratic to force someone to participate and therefore tacitly support a system that may be screwing them. In a democracy no one should be forced to pick between (what they consider) terrible options.
I'm excited to see all the nutty takes about oil prices from the same people who don't belive in vaccines.
I kinda hope they bring back the old idea that oil is actually formed out of non-biological matter and so that means its just basically infinitly seeping up from the earth, we just have to drill a bit deeper. But I think that's a little too nerdy for them
When I was a kid in the 1980s, the scientific shows and authors all agreed that petroleum was made of dinosaurs. Triceratops and Brontosaurus had died ?? MYA and got compressed into the oil we're drilling for today.
It was only about 3 years ago when I learned that petroleum comes from almost anything organic. So, ferns and trees and moss, in addition to Velociraptor and Triceratops, I guess?
Perhaps the more accurate description would be that as a kid, you misunderstood descriptions that petroleum was from decayed organic material from long ago, when dinosaurs roamed the Earth.
You realize that vaccine hesitancy isn’t new and wasn’t a right wing thing? The right wing only has a disbelief about the covid vaccine and probably rightfully so. It went from: you can’t get it if youre vaccinated; okay you can get it but you can’t spread it; okay okay you can get it and spread but maybe the severity is reduced.
Measles was eliminated in the US by 2020. Texas had an outbreak last year with 2289 confirmed cases. They’re up to 2900 cases this year. The right-wing readily laps up all the misinformation it spews.
> the over 50% of Americans who voted in favour of their current situation
Small nitpick: while Trump won the popular vote, he did not earn over 50% of the votes. There were enough third-party votes that he won with only 49.8%.
> Even Saudis couldn't have stopped them. That's not particularly American election issue
Energy prices are absolutely an American election issue. Variations in real personal disposable income growth and inflation predict a vast majority of the variation in election outcomes after accounting for incumbency.
And Iranian proxies seizing the Bab el-Mandeb–and the U.S. being unable to help Saudi Arabia respond militarily while Iran cements control of the Strait of Hormuz–is the direct result of an American foreign policy choice to, once again, blunder into a war in the Middle East.
Uh... and Iran and the Straight of Hormuz?? Did you forget to mention that? Is that an election issue? And who funds the Houthis? And why would they want to close the straight to us? Is it something to do with supporting Israel? No? Ok.
Houthis were in a weird truce with Saudis and Yemeni government for the last few months. Without US war in Iran destabilising the area, I am pretty sure houthis diplomats wouldn't have been bombed by Saudi Arabia. They might have broken the truce anyway, Houthis still claim south Yemen (wrongly imho, South Yemen is probably the most secularised area of the middle east, probably due to its high literacy rates and Marxist leanings, this would be a really hard sell. Also, Houthis, like Saudis, and former north Yemen leaders, has a clan-based leadership, which isn't a thing at all in South Yemen).
Imho a peace over the old borders could have been possible without additional destabilisation from the US. The Iran war made that impossible. Hopefully a peaceful resolution can still be found, quickly.
Houthi's were also recently active against Israeli assets as Palestinian solidarity. Another situation that could not have happened without US intervention (support in this case).
The houthis are part of Iran's 'Axis of resistance' and have also publicly stated one reason for their recent increase in activity being Palestinian solidarity.
Given the Iran war and Israels genocide only being possible through US support I'd say the US has a pretty big hand in the matter.
It’s an evil service and no matter who requests it or supplies it, doing so is an evil act.
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