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European Money Pours into Palantir
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- ramon156 5mo agohttps://archive.is/FwMMp https://archive.is/FwMMp
- mgh2 5mo agoNot 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
- swiftcoder 5mo agoWe'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)
- repelsteeltje 5mo agoThis. 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.
- nradov 5mo agoLand 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 Several other European countries including Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and Poland have recently withdrawn from the Anti-Personnel Mine Ban Treaty.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-convention-russia-ukraine-1d2d9a1daccf2a55265dd0b2db5ebdb5 https://apnews.com/article/poland-land-mines-ottawa-conventi...
- ffsm8 5mo agoUrm, 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
- nradov 5mo agoSo 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.
- dredmorbius 5mo agoThere 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 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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smart_mine>.
- specproc 5mo agoAs 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.
- nradov 5mo ago
- tclancy 5mo agoI'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.
- newsclues 5mo ago[flagged]
- gljiva 5mo agoHow dare they not solve _all_ the problems, instead of only contributing towards solving one!
- swiftcoder 5mo ago> South Africa is really thriving these days eh? I know you meant this sarcastically, but unironically yes. GDP has more than doubled since the end of apartheid, and it has the strongest economy on the continent
- mothballed 5mo agoLMAO, now normalize it against world change in GDP since the end of apartheid. Pre-apartheid they were beating the world average, all times after apartheid they have been behind world average. https://mybroadband.co.za/news/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/DGP-per-capita-global-1.jpg https://mybroadband.co.za/news/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/DG... Especially the last 20 years, it is falling off a cliff in relative performance. Yeah the post-apartheid peak was 10% above the apartheid peak from the 80s.... unfortunately if you can only get 10% better in 40 years it actually represents a massive failure relative to the rest of the world. I'd agree that apartheid was bad, but it seems to be coupled with other factors that led them to fall behind on the world stage. I'm guessing the kind of ideology that accompanies literal filled stadiums shouting "kill the boer farmer" is not so far fetched from the kind of ideology that resulted in Zimbabwe going for broke.
- newsclues 5mo ago[flagged]
- bigyabai 5mo ago> (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.
- awongh 5mo agoPalantir is a defense company. Meta might give away your data to the USA government spying agencies, but it's not on the same level.
- jmclnx 5mo agoTo me, investing in any AI company is very risky, 1 step above junk bonds :)
- tylerchilds 5mo agoBut 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
- tylerchilds 5mo agoKeeping 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??????????
- tylerchilds 5mo agoLook 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.
- tylerchilds 5mo agoThe one above was downvoted once, but the one above went up twice, still nobody wants to talk, just push down arrows.
- tylerchilds 5mo agoA 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
- 5mo ago
- Lucasoato 5mo ago> 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.
- akie 5mo agoSo disappointing
- roysting 5mo agoBlind men see an elephant as a rope, a wall, a spear, a tree, a fan, etc.
- roysting 5mo agoI wonder if Europeans have any clue that this company is a CIA enterprise/front?
- Bombthecat 5mo agoThey don't care
- pessimizer 5mo agoTheir 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.
- fakedang 5mo agoEurope, the evergreen vassal of the United States, willing or not.
- justinclift 5mo agoLooks like the Greenland warning didn't take after all. :(