I do agree blocking Palantir is a good move but the Spanish government is doing it for the wrong reason. Spain is storing all sort of data on Chinese servers, including their Intelligence, and Judicial wiretaps.
> Spain is “making a big mistake,” said Bart Groothuis [...] “Spain is now dependent on the country with the largest and most sophisticated offensive espionage program directed against us.”
I highly doubt he's naive enough to believe the "against us" qualifier exempts the operator of the largest and most sophisticated offensive espionage program ever.
In addition to the more well-known stuff, China DDoSed Github because they were mad that two projects let Chinese citizens read non-propaganda news in 2015.
And Israel is attacking various countries - okay not in quite in Europe, but pretty close to the southeastern EU member states.
So you have one country which is in a very loose alliance with a country that's attacking a country around the periphery of the EU, and another country that's joined at the hip with a country that's attacking another country around the periphery of the EU, just slightly further away.
Don't be fooled. Israel is also attacking countries in Europe
They did when being caught messing with elections in Scotland, Europe, for example. Whom Europeans vote are none of the Israel business. And there is a reasonable suspicion that they were sending sex traps for decades to blackmail European elites, left and right. This is not how a real friend behave.
The reason everyone hates them is that they've been committing genocide for decades and have refused any sort of peace process. All the countries around them have offered to guarantee Israel's security in exchange for just letting the Palestians live their lives free of oppression but Israel is not willing to give up its land grab because the narrative that 'everyone is trying to destroy us' is what keeps the right wing in power and allows the population to look the other way.
Even the US was concerned recently that Israel was planning not just to sabotage the peace talks with Iran but to assassinate the Iranian representatives:
The only reason Israel has its back to the wall is that its 'never again' attitude has extended to any concept of solving problems that doesn't involve military force, and since they've had the backing of the US that means they've been able to get away with anything they wanted so far. It's the asshole little brother whose big brother will beat you up if he ever runs the risk of facing the consequences of his actions.
If Israel had any desire to live in peace with their neighbors then maybe they would, but either they don't want peace except through victory, they don't want peace if it means giving up the ability to continue their ethnic cleansing of Palestine to build more settlements, or they want peace but they don't believe that anyone else wants it (despite everyone else trying to work towards it except them).
If they hadn't been so focused on aggression, genocide, and apartheid for the past 70 years maybe this all could have been solved, but the narrative that they're the only bastion of democracy and freedom in West Asia/North Africa and that's why everyone wants to destroy them doesn't hold up to the barest of scrutiny.
china has no political agenda outside of their country (that includes taiwan from their pov). all they care about is staying in power at home and keeping up the economy. they only sell to russia because its a good way to make money.
belt and road, deals with african dictators, selling cars and phones to europe, temu and alibaba, open source llms, all of that is for higher tax revenue. a lot of chinese companies are part state owned so thats another way it directly benefits the government.
even the illegal police stations only exist to make sure overseas chinese communities dont support opposition movements back home. is it a good thing? definitely not, but its also not a threat to the host country as a whole.
the spying they do is either economic espionage thats good for the world (trade secrets should not exist, thats what patents are for) or good old state on state action like everybody else is doing. i bet russia and america each have more spies in europe than china.
There is no reason for chinese elite overproduction other than to wage war by other means. They performed acts such as naval blockade of Australia as a show of force when such a thing was deemed necessary.
Europe is bled dry and will cease to exist rather soon if nothing chnages.
except for all of the hacking and industrial espionage, e.g. Salt Typhoon
let's be clear: MAGA is doing everything they can per Dugan-esque playbooks on how to destroy US-EU relations, but don't pretend for a second that China is some magical bastion of human rights or fair, competitive practices.
You are literally wrong, the data is stored in Spain on their servers and managed by their government. The risk as stated by EU and US is allowing Chineese nationals to *enter* the data storage facilities (direct quote from the article you shared).
Yes, it's still bad but they are not as stupid to just have their servers located in China for this.
It's expensive to home-grow your own solutions and if you try transitioning too many services at once the cost will be outrageous and you'll probably open other security holes. I am glad Spain is taking this step and I hope they continue this trend - but outright refusing to use any software built abroad requires a massive investment in domestic tech. That investment would likely pay economic dividends but it is a cost that needs to be measured against other investments Spain needs to make and in Spain's case resilience against global warming is especially important.
The original saying: Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.
I think an intellectually honest take is that it's advantageous and prudent to depend on allies and neighbors; leveraging each party's strengths for efficiencies over strategic autonomy. This trade-off is commonly debated with depending on US military hardware in favor of EU military hardware (e.g. France's long standing position for EU strategic autonomy), or vendor lock-in with AWS vs cloud-independent offerings.
The problem is when an ally becomes inconsistent and/or uncooperative; a high stakes version of prisoner's dilemma. At which point do you replace an ally's offerings with more expensive, and often inferior, alternatives? The general populace rarely has the appetite for the short-term economic pain required to achieve long-term strategic independence.
> In political science, the term banana republic describes a politically and economically unstable country with an economy dependent upon the export of natural resources.
but also, ismt that a description of dutch disease?
a banana republic is a country where the US installs a brutal dictatorship on behalf of a banana company, and the punishment for not helping grow cheap bananas for rich americans is a slow, tortuous death
It appears it’s pork, which lands in China. Current corrupt government is fighting tooth and nail in order to not start a trade fight with China at EU level.
You do realize that when a term was coined many years ago its definition might be broadened?
I don't have any insight into what to call it right now, but I thought for several decades after WWII it was still fascist? If anything being a banana republic might not be as as bad as what it used to be
I did a whole Wikipedia deep dive on this several months ago. I vaguely remembered hearing how long it took for it to switch back, but the history around it is kind of fascinating; the son of the previous king was groomed to be the successor of Francisco Franco, and I guess he did a good enough job convincing him that he was ideologically in agreement so that the power was passed to him, which he then used to reinstate a republican form of government.
would be better to be on spanish servers, but decoupling from american tech remains a public good, especially if using american tech bans american competitors
This section is hilariously hostile towards Palantir.
"Wired wrote that some people think Palantir "maintains a giant, centralized database of information collected from all of its clients", which is untrue."
'some people' is a classic weasel word[0] used to prop up the writer's opinion. This sentence is even funnier because it initially appears to state that Palantir has a centralized DB of clients data, only to finish with "...which is untrue." If the claim is untrue, why lead the section paragraph with it unless you're intending to smear or mislead? If I were to end sentences with "...which is untrue" I could write any number of things on Wikipedia.
It's as though I wrote "A YN user wrote that 'john_strinlai works for the CCP and uses ChatGPT to write all his posts', which is untrue."
I'll keep reading but rhetorical chicanery like this colours my interpretation of the article in general.
EDIT the section goes on: "[We can't pin anything specific on Palantir here]; still it is generally accepted that abuses by governments and data management failures can happen." What does that have to do with Palantir? "data management failures can happen" why is this in the section on "Palantir:Controversy"? This article is not good.
EDIT 2: This section is just comedy gold... 'Palantir "remains open to the critique of potentially being an accessory to acts of deportation, imprisonment, and racism through its contracts".' Open to critiques of potentially being an accessory to "racism?" What is this, the Future Crimes unit from Minority Report? This "future crimes" accusation is especially ironic in relation to the critiques of Palantir itself!
So I haven't read this whole section (it's quite long) but if this is the nature of the "smoking guns" I don't think much of it. Potentially maybe doing something according to 'some people...' this shouldn't hold water for any rational person.
If someone objects to Palantir for working with ICE I understand that, and if that's the nature of Spain's objections they should just say so.
>'Palantir "remains open to the critique of potentially being an accessory to acts of deportation, imprisonment, and racism through its contracts".' Open to critiques of potentially being an accessory to "racism?" What is this, the Future Crimes unit from Minority Report?
No. What that means is, "there's nothing here that prevents these tools from being used in this manner". It's not about what may happen in the future, it's about the current situation, which is that the tools are already produced with the objectionable capacity. It's the same reason speeding is punished, even when no harm follows as a consequence; the act is inherently reckless, regardless of the actual consequences.
Someone in ICE uses Microsoft Excel to maintain a list of people who they believe should be send to an internment camp. Therefore Microsoft is an accessory to that?
Where do you draw the line? Are we arguing there is a level of software capability that is simply too dangerous?
Maybe everyone should just stick to "I have my own biases, and I don't like Alex Karp's politics because they don't match my own. I'd rather this software was developed by someone from my side of politics - but still have the same capabilities".
>Someone in ICE uses Microsoft Excel to maintain a list of people who they believe should be send to an internment camp. Therefore Microsoft is an accessory to that?
Utterly disingenuous. Surveillance software is primarily sold to governments to spy on individuals. It doesn't exist for any reason except for the powerful to oppress the weak.
>Where do you draw the line?
"I just kept turning the heat up and the frog seemed perfectly fine. The fact that it's cooked now can't have anything to do with my actions." I don't have to propose a generalized demarcation criterion to say whether a particular example is on either side of the line.
Since when has Palantir sold surveillance software? They sell data integration software and they don't store, transfer or share customer's data.
If surveillance software is your issue, then companies like Cisco or Huawei are provide the hardware and software. But like most technology, there is always potential to use it for things we disagree with politically or personally.
Their CEO is a megalomaniac who brags about "killing people"[0] and can't string together coherent sentences on live television[1]. Did I mention it's backed by Peter Thiel who is openly and actively trying to tear down the world's oldest constitutional democracy in favor of a technocratic oligarchy[2]?
And you believe the State of Spain decided to blacklist Palentir for these reasons ? Because that was the original question of the person you are replying to.
> This section is hilariously hostile towards Palantir.
Funny, one comment ago you had no idea what the controversy around Palantir was. How could you possibly know the wikipedia article is hostile? It might be downplaying the controversies around Palantir.
This reaction almost makes it seem like you were being completely disingenuous with your first post, and had already made up your mind about Palantir. Curious.
I think in general people are a bit distrusting of a tech firm headed by billionaires with deep political ties that sells AI driven surveillance state technology to governments
> I can't figure out what the specific objection to Palantir is.
You have to be trolling, a single online search tells you how the company CEO is the textbook definition of technofascism. Take a look at his manifesto if you don’t know
So the objections to Palantir are political? I know nothing about Spanish politics so I assume that makes sense in the Spanish political context. This helps explain why I can't find a specific concrete concern, it sounds more vibes-based. Thank you!
if you take the time to read karp’s manifesto and look into thiels beliefs, then maybe it wouldn’t seem “vibes-based” for you.
an example that may cure you of your “vibes-based” confusion, karp, palantirs ceo, argues clearly for authoritarianism and aggressive surveillance of the general population. he hilariously tries to convince people that the best way to have democracy is to not have it at all. a kind of “to protect your freedom, we’ll take away your freedom” idea that only a certain kind of person falls for.
so yes, people may find it silly to pretend those politics aren’t troubling, particularly when its relating to a government. i’m sure you’re aware that considering political ideas when thinking about how a government is operating isn’t “vibes-based”, it’s integral.
does this one example appease you that it isn’t “vibes based”? if this example doesn’t help you understand, both karp and thiel are not at all shy about their anti-freedom views. they’ve spoken loudly and publicly about them all over the place. if you’re truly curious, there is plenty of info out there you can read.
just be aware, they try to couch their ideas in rhetoric like “the best way to have democracy is to let us take it from you” or “let us surveil you so you can know you have privacy and freedom” kind of nonsense. it’s pretty obvious so i’m sure you won’t be tricked.
"he hilariously tries to convince people that the best way to have democracy is to not have it at all."
I'm sorry but I can't find where he said this. I'm finding it confusing and suspicious that the objections to Palantir & Alex Karp are all so vague and seem to lack the rigour typically required of assertions made here on YN. Usually if you declare something like someone "argues clearly for authoritarianism," you're expected to link to a source of this claim.
People keep telling me here it's so obvious Palantir is bad I shouldn't require any specific evidence and I'm stupid if I don't see it; I'm only reminded of the emperors new cloths.
> How would you interpret Thiel's “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible"?
The point is that democracies tend to want to erode liberties. Take the age gating bills floating around as an example.
The solution Thiel proposes is not eliminating democracy. It's building technology that governments cannot easily control. Cryptocurrency is one good example of this.
Ah sorry, I meant to write "calls for". To be more specific:
> he hilariously tries to convince
people that the best way to have democracy is to not have it at all. a kind of “to protect your freedom, we’ll take away your freedom” idea that only a certain kind of person falls for.
Where does he say anything like this? You made some specific allegations about what he said in his manifesto. Can you point to the passage that you're referring to when you make the above point about not having a democracy?
Yes, the objections to Palantir are mostly just partisan politics. Efforts to portray Karp or Thiel as especially dangerous usually involves some taking some quote and applying a massive leap in logic.
Like, Thiel says that it's easier to change the world by inventing new technology than through democracy. And people turn around and try quote this to prop up the claim that he wants to abolish democracy.
Is making the government's job hard a good thing? If medicare delivers care half as good as it could have been, that's a good thing? If fraudsters go unchecked because the FBI is stymied, is the country better off?
>Is making the government's job hard a good thing?
Maybe. The government performing its functions more is not necessarily a good thing. What if the government has decided that some of its functions involve torturing prisoners, or disappearing people?
It's strange that you would ask this question like the answer would be an uncontroversial no.
For anyone causally scrolling by, know these people are trolls. The founder of Palantir has called technology an "incredible alternative to politics", saying:
> you could unilaterally change the world without having to constantly convince people and beg people and plead with people who are never going to agree with you through technological means
If that's not "technofascism" then idk what is. Trying to spin that as culture war bullshit is disingenuous.
You realize that "changing the world without politics" doesn't mean overthrow of democracy. It means founding businesses to produce goods and services that change the world. Google and Facebook absolutely changed the world, not through politics, but by creating technology.
If that were the case, then why do they spend millions of dollars on lobbying every year? Why does Meta have a "president of global affairs" plucked from Republican political circles? [1]
You realize that lobbying is working within the framework of an electoral democracy? When environmentalists lobby for more stringent emissions rules, they're not overthrowing democracy they're participating in it.
So the answer your question: Meta spends millions on lobbying to influence elected officials, because it knows has to work within the democratic system.
I'd say they changed the world first and foremost through technology. Their lobbying effort is mostly focused on keeping the government from interfering with their technology efforts.
But back to the main point, quoting someone saying you can change the world though technology instead of democracy and trying to use such a statement as evidence that they want to abolish democracy is nonsense.
Facebook was created more than a decade earlier than your link. Of course if the government starts to threaten to regulate social media, Meta will want to influence the decision to benefit them. But Facebook changed the world well before the regulation push, and I'm pretty certain Facebook would have preferred that the government continued to remain uninvolved.
Palantir builds analytics, tools to better use and interpret the data that the government already has. The data collection, the actual surveillance, is done by the government.
Palantir started with analytics because the founders believed the US was making poor use of data, and needed better tools.
Prior to Palantir data was being siloed which was a feature if you ask me. Then Palantir found a way to break that and it played out recently eg. ICE hunting people
Again, where does Karp or Thiel say they want to get rid of democracy? They've said that government is bad at solving a lot of problems, sure. But that's a far, far cry from calling for the abolition of democracy.
What is this in reference to? Karp has said that US tech companies should be more willing to work with military and intelligence agencies. By that standard, though, Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Booz Allen Hamilton, heck even Microsoft are all supporters of "technofascism".
They’ve been paving the path to the main US industry -> weapons. You gotta do what you gotta do to turn the profit. But you guys have also sacrificed a lot of human life.
So your answer is yes? The companies like GM, Cadillac, etc. they were buildings tanks to defeat the Nazis were themselves fascists, because producing armarments is an inherently fascist endeavor? Even if the military they're equipping is actively fighting against real fascists?
or pressed the government into building more arms, and using them against the citizenry?
theres a pretty significant change between when the US was at declared war and when the companies making arms started pressing the US into undeclared war for the sake of selling the government more arms
This is a company where 88% of employe political contributions went to Democrats. Even if many employees are apolitical, the allegations of fascism are absurd.
Without even getting into how shady his actual product is, have you seen that recent he did? He was babbling about alpha, kept babbling about how people were stealing "ontology" (yes i know it's their application layer for agents), I wouldn't trust his business on him alone. I trust even less considering how familiar I am with it.
Define doing. The government is completely block from legislating since the coalition parties will not approve any law, only those that can help their separatist movements. The national budget hasn't been renewed since 2023, affecting new projects.
What we have is a corrupt president and party he'll bent on remaining as long as possible to not face the polls
There are two takes here (and I'm impartial because I no longer live in Spain):
- The government lost their trust and should resign.
- The coalition parties are sabotaging the government even when none had the majority (even if together they do).
indeed, and he has apparently already been walking the walk
>"Burnham did not grant the US tech company any contracts during his nine years as Greater Manchester mayor, and is minded to take the same approach in Downing Street."
I know I’m a conspiracy theorist but I’m looking out for random scandals, random high profile deaths, random infrastructure issues and random large scale accidents.
Oh? I did not realize there were warlord armies rampaging through the countryside in hope of establishing dynastic Muslim rule. Pat yourself on the head for such an astute historic parallel.
> Immigration on Hacker News is like the dumbest topic here
"Dumbest" wouldn't be the word I'd use here, considering the views on immigration are sharply divided by education level. I reckon HN has an overrepresentation of people with (at least) a college degree, relative to the general population.
I don't know, but I'm not deranged enough to say that Muslim immigrants in my country are part of an invading force. All the ones I know are quite nice, actually.
Personally, I care far more about the dehumanization of my fellow human beings than how open or closed the borders are.
As I said above, I care far more about the dehumanization of my fellow human beings than how open or closed the borders are. (It's possible to have sensible and humane immigration policy along any point on that axis.) Slandering immigrants as "invaders" or "parasites" should be met with the harshest possible rebuke, if not outright prosecution for hate speech.
My concern is not the people coming in but the use of hate speech laws to silence any voices that oppose different viewpoints. If being against mass migration is hate speech its time to get rid of hate speech laws.
It's around 55–60% of immigrants who come from Spanish-speaking countries.
Also, this uses official numbers, which reflect a larger Spanish speaking share than there is in reality (as people from Spanish-speaking countries have more straightforward visa processes).
So the real percentage is probably much lower (as there are a lot of undocumented migrants. 1.2 million applied for "legalization").
Besides the mentioned comments Spanish speaking immigration is much more welcomed by radical right
AND
Germany had a lot of German speaking immigration from Eastern Europe. There are just no German speaking minorities left in other countries.
Which is a political choice - not necessarily a resource problem. Germany, if any, would have the resources to help with integration but for decades most people and politicians were living in denial that people from other countries that came to Germany actually wanted to stay and _live_ there or were living in a world were state debt was seen as the devil's spawn.
Yes, correct, and thanks for the addition.
To illustrate this quite emotional approach to state finances, the policy of not increasing the the debt was nicknamed "the black zero" ("die Schwarze Null") which got so infamous that the employees of the German Federal Ministry of Finances posed as a "black zero" in this photo: https://www.bundesfinanzministerium.de/Content/DE/Bilderstre...
Remember, this was at a time when German government bonds were sold with _negative_ interest.
So, Germany was refusing to take on any further debt at the time to invest (i.E. in social capital like workers, better immigration, in infrastructure etc. etc.) and is now trying to rectify this partially, at a time where interest rates are close to 3%. Personally, to me as a non-economist, this feels like a missed opportunity of a lifetime.
They have a real negative view of humanity. All lazy and corrupt. And that in a country with over 600M unpaid overtime hours and lots of things done based on voluntary work. Maybe some kind of projection.
Pretty ironic that the Christian party doesn’t act christian and the social party doesn’t act social.
If you went to Japan in the 90’s, 00’s or 10’s, you’ll find the issue is that Japan still feels mostly the same. It’s a wonderful country, but post-Japan’s asset bubble and crash there’s been noticeably less change.
A country with narcissistic criminal as leader who damages the US science for decades, kills people by dismantling USAID. The raising costs because of his four-week-war against Iran doesn’t help either but damages the economy worldwide.
I didn't say I think so - I said in current discourse - e.g. this site and x.com. The narrative is that Europe is stagnant and US has pulled ahead, at least economically.
I think that can be consistent with Trump destroying the long term future of the country and the planet.
Politicians and governments like to introduce crap like blacklisting when they have a good excuse to (a target the public agrees with) so that later it's easier for them to use against arbitrary targets.
