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.
They seem to have been granting contracts to manage all kinds of critical data to Huawei's Palantir equivalent lately, so it's probably less about security risks and more about the current source of the bribe money.
If they cared about security they would not outsource this kind of stuff to foreign companies. Spain is not Somalia, why not let Indra do it?
The contract with Huawei was about buying storage servers [1], which would then be managed by the Interior Ministry. They were not outsourcing anything.
Odd take. 99.99999% of citizens will never travel to China, so it matters not that the Chinese govt holds their data.
A local company losing the data screws everyone. Palantir getting the data screws everyone, because while foreign, that data will eventually be fed into global systems like VISA, Mastercard, etc, and affect your travel in numerous countries that will be outsourcing their systems to Palantir.
I'm not sure what "travel" even does here. Possessing citizen's info opens possibilities for influence ops, blackmailing, unfair advantage in business and much more. And non-democratic countries are always better at these games, cause they need not be afraid of the next government leaking, investigating, selling whatever they did.
Meanwhile gov't losing info on one citizen screws said citizen, but losing all of it screws the gov't itself, and generally rebalances power in favor of citizens. Which one may say isn't bad.
You can't predict the future. By your own reasoning, you can't say with any degree of certainty that it will never matter if China has a citizen's data just because that person will never travel there.
foreigners are a bit more likely to be loyal to the government and not some separatist opposition? or at least the companies corruption will be quite separate from what impacts the local government
this also came up with the 6th gen fighter designs between france and germany. it works when theres a non-european driving, because both trust the non-europe option more than any fellow european. the local lords are too powerful to be trusted, and too competitive against eachother
>foreigners are a bit more likely to be loyal to the government
Yes, to their own government! Both China and USA have laws to force companies to insert backdoors. These laws have been enforced numerous times. If you think this is a smaller risk than doing things nationally, then indeed you're basically arguing that Spain is Somalia, there are separatist forces roaming around, the country can't enforce its own laws and the government needs to sell everything to foreign governments to stay in power. This is not the case (for now).
Much of Spain is indeed getting very unpleasant in the summer with climate change, but in the north there are still regions that are quite fine at the moment. Where I am, we recently beat the all time temperature record with 35 degrees, but that was a single day. Most days these weeks it isn't going over 25, and I don't think we hit 30 in June except for that single day and maybe one other day.
The problem is that the right is poised to win the next election and will probably undo all the policies you like. They're pretty much against everything that has been done in the last 7 years. I still have some hopes that Sanchez might clinch another term because he's a political survivor, but prospects are not great.
are there missing replies which support the idea of writing sentences that are all lies? is there a bug in HN? Im so confused
the earlier couple comments make sense for some old spanish fascist complainjng that people the older fascists didnt kill are now dying out, but what is this a reply to?
> he gave citizenship to millions of migrants while Spanish has one of the highest unemployment rate of Europe.
This is an interested propaganda
First: This people are not just migrants and some aren't even migrants. They are the grandsons of Spaniards that had to flee the country in the dictatorship and Civil War to avoid being murdered. The parents of this people should have dual-Spanish citizenship yet, unless they voluntarily refused to it.
The idea that the grandsons of Jews from Germany should have some legal path to reclaim German citizenship if they want it, looks 100% reasonable to me. Their families inhabited Germany for generations, much before the mustache disgrace was born. Who was Hitler or Franco to claim "you can't live here because I don't like you"?
And, just for the record, Spain, the country that Nuts calls "antisemite" every two weeks, has granted citizenship also to 72,000 Sephardic descendants since 2015 for a similar reason.
------------
Second: The migrants aren't stealing the jobs from anybody. They were forced to work illegally in conditions that Spaniards wouldn't accept, but still need to compete with.
Prosecuting people that keeps migrant slave workers sewing for 20 hours a day in a dark basement is of top priority to Spanish workers, because this breaks and poison the job market (lowering wages for everybody); and puts the legal workers that do pay taxes on an unfair disadvantage.
Most Spanish workers able to think are very happy with that move to heal the market; And those that aren't should think twice, because this move massively benefits them in their objective to keep their small family business open.
As long as a migrant didn't commit serious crimes before, this grants them a permit to work legally and pay taxes, but is not the same as citizenship. They can't vote.
I'm not a fan of that, but it's not like the opposition is going to be different in that respect (or like they have been different in the past). It's the companies and elites who are demanding those migrants to keep wages low, so the right will happily provide.
We will get the same migration policy (maybe with some purely aesthetic changes for show), but with the whole kit of fawning over Trump and the US, denying or minimizing climate change, cutting taxes for the wealthy, privatizing public services and so on.
Canary Islands are part of Spain and probably unaffected from climate change - we have 19-22°C all year round. If it raises to 25° still pretty livable.
It isn't that simple, Canary Islands already counts with 2.2 million + tourists people and the fresh water is a highly risk resource even when desalinization plants are widespread, the groundwater aquifers are severely compromised.
The mild weather heavily depends on the trade winds. But models predict that due to fact of being so close to Africa heat waves are prone to be more and more frequent compromising the water resources.
Climate change affects places where more people live in the sense that more suffer from it, resources get depleeted fast but the wild temperature fluctuations won’t spare much of the planet in various ways from wet bulb effects, costal erosion, air major currents changing, glaciers melting and so on.
The two capitals (Santa Cruz and Las Palmas) are pretty good spot to live in.
Tourism focuses on the south on both islands. Las Palmas has a beach with a bit touristic activity, but its not drinking tourism like Mallorca or Benidorm. Combined with nice weather all year round overall a greaet place to live. Very walkable cities, you can do without a car. Due to nice weather, you can always go by bike or scooter. Taxis are cheap. Thanks to the tourists, cheap flights all year round, every day, to all major european cities.
But yeah, if you come with kids, factor in private schools. The public system here is broken. As for internet, I pay less than 10€/month for 500Mbit fibre - I couldn't even get that in Germany and if could it would be north of 80€.
> If you live there you're either fully remote, or you work in the tourist industry.
Or you are a doctor, a teacher, an architect or a bananas farmer. Some of the richest families in the islands just export/import commodities since three generations.
Are you sure? It is sometimes close to 30°C in summer in Fue. BTW, did you forget sealevel rises, dust from Sahara, what is you have many days of > 40km/h winds. all those are climate change.
Islands are extremely vulnerable to climate change all over, as they are completely dependent in near-term precipitation for all their water (no rivers, no aquifers).
No rivers and no water is reality here for quite a while already. The islands rely a lot on desalination, and there is a big EU-funded project going on to create a desalination plant that not only is used to supply tap water, but the water basin of a new hydroelectric plant [0]. Desalination pretty much solves water issues, IF you have the energy (ideally renewable).
Climate change is going to affect everywhere, and yes, a lot of Spain will experience desertification over the course of my lifetime. I am moving from Texas to Spain, though, so I am used to heat from a pure personal comfort perspective.
One interesting point is that Spain is well-situated in terms of its energy mix: it's a leader of renewables in Europe. It was also able to negotiate a carve-out from collective energy pricing (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iberian_exception), so Iberian energy markets are generally cheaper than broader European markets. This will have downstream economic effects for the country and makes it easier to afford using AC. I will always install AC wherever I live. There are far too many avoidable heat deaths in Europe in particular given their level of economic development. I don't blame them at all given the need is relatively new, but it's really a sad phenomenon.
If you are a true climate doomer (realist?), also, Spain is going to fare as well as one can in Europe should the AMOC collapse. It's not the best place to be globally in a scenario like that, though, to say the least.
For me, with everything going on in terms of world events, life choices are basically just placing bets about the future. There is no truly safe or best choice in a lot of scenarios.
Nice. I don't know what your comfort with swimming is but battling extreme heat also happens to be much easier when you have large welcoming bodies of water for humans to wade in, and with easy and cheap access for the common man. It boggles the mind that for all its coast line the only place the US has that's comparable is Hawaii pretty much.
Sure extreme heat might ruin the seas too eventually (there is already talk of Asian jellyfish species being spotted in record warm sea temperatures) but the amount of due dilligence needed is non-existent compared to the US, Australia, or far east Asia.
They also have colder beers than Germany probably for the same reason. Nothing beats the culture acclimation of wincing while sipping lukewarm beer under the July sun in 100+ degrees Berlin.
And then you'll have to choose another country after the next elections. Or even before, cause liking politicians from afar somehow much easier than when living in the same country.
Ventless temperature control units are extremely popular there so it's probably not an unwise investment but you're not really ahead of the curve. The construction of most European buildings[1] lends itself poorly to anything that requires knocking a hole in a wall but the systems that can exhaust heat through water lines are usually quite reasonable to set up.
1. Though this is significantly less prevalent in Spain due to a lot of reconstruction happening after the civil war - that isn't to say buildings there are perfect, they just have different problems than the classic German 30cm thick stone wall.
The price of AC gases had skyrocketed by EU laws, and more than half of the bill are just taxes.
Some gases, like ammonia are easy to manufacture, other are being banned by environmental concerns, and other depend on international trade nets that can be shocked at any time if somebody trumped that morning. Investing in AC should depend heavily on the kind of refrigerant used in your product.
I'll simplify it for you, populists from left and right (Trump and Sanchez) main trick is blaming the elites for preventing the will of the people.
This usually puts them in conflict with the judiciary, that and the fact populist government are usually incredibly corrupt (also due to contempt of existing standards)
People in the comments here are praising the move, so presumably something is public. I've googled but I can't see some specific breach or documented misuse. Is the objection to Palantir strictly political?
There's been a lot of recent scandals going public against the social democratic party ruling on spain now (PSOE) and its previous dirigents. See Zapatero case. leaked by US agencies recently once Spain put some kind of friction to the Rota south spain bases getting involved on anything vs Iran.
The president P. Sanchez, has been clearly antagonizing Trump in these and other intl issues (even if only visible in spain, as he is not that relevant internationally, etc)
But anyways, this seems like deepstate fighting vs current US admin and current Spain admin, one can infer "Palantir" is basically a gag order away from giving the US govt anything it wants, so as an antagonist. to its current admin, it seems smart to avoid having them as critical providers.
why choose china? Makes no sense, but probably the only other big bro Spain can rely on if the US isn't it anymore
well it could be limited to companies who are entirely dedicated to surveillance and massive data collection on citizens like palantir. particularly with that and how ideology based palantir appears to be.
i’m sure they wouldn’t be nearly as concerned about a US company that manufactured screwdrivers or nike or something similar.
The Spanish government trusting the CCP over Palantir is wild.
The CCP's intolerant, cruel and authoritarian nature is a direct threat to humanity in ways that Peter Thiel could barely imagine in his darkest dreams.
The lack of perspective on show here is astonishing. They are destroying trust with vital Western allies -- trust is gained in drops and lost in buckets -- and Lurch and his dodgy friends are clearly out of their element.
> is a direct threat to humanity in ways that Peter Thiel could barely imagine
Care to outline a few of those threats? The ones that Thiel allegedly cannot imagine?
I'm American, I get why Spain's feeling trepidation. I can't trust my own government with data if it could be used against me. I actively seek out Chinese translation, AI and search engines when I want privacy from the US. It's safer with the CCP than the geriatric nutjobs that fell off the Overton window.
I thinking OP is worried about China exporting its political influence outside.
In China, the Ministry for State Security has the legal authority to seize and investigate your devices without warrant nor active case, for instance. This can be, legally, motivated by dissident political thought.
You are mixing apples and oranges. The infamous Huawei deal was buying tons of HDD servers. Any deal with Palantir is handling all your data to the NSA.
Because the NSA has such a great record of getting punished from their transgressions, right?
For foreign countries, handling your data to either the Chinese surveillance apparatus or the USA one makes no difference. In fact, any company with such deep ties with a foreign intelligence agency as Palantir should be automatically considered a security thread in other nations.
Anyway, the deal with Huawei was about buying hardware, not handling over data.
Congressional oversight doesn't mean much here, since the CCP also serves that role.
The real problem is that, even though US is, in practice, a de-facto two-party between democrats and republicans, the PRC is a de-facto one-party system. There's also the overall opportunities for change and revolution that US society provides, that are absent in the PRC.
please, compared to thiel & co., the ccp are basically choir boys. and they worked well for china. they cleaned their cities of unbreathable air and reduced poverty in a very short time span. we cannot say the same for the americans robber barons and their political wing, like trump&co. how can you deny the most basic reality and evidence?
It is possible and this in particular is a decision that I'm sure the US will pressure the government to reverse. However, it's misguided to see the entire world through the US political lens where reversing policy decisions is seen as a free win by the voting base. Spain's current democracy is only about fifty years old and extremism is viewed very negatively so outright undoing is generally less common then gradual undermining.
Palantir is profoundly untrusted in Europe in part because of Alex Karp. He is viewed as a dangerous neo-nationalist (not incorrectly).
Never really sure why Anduril doesn't catch the same grief; they are maybe even creepier. Perhaps Palmer Luckey is just a less visible obvious Bond villain crackpot.
What is creepy about Anduril? Anduril simply sells weapons. There's nothing mysterious or nefarious about it. European countries want to buy weapons too.
> Anybody here think that Palantir is not a security risk for Spain?
It boggles the mind a bit, but I’ve seen a few comments on here with people defending them to the tune of “what’s the big deal, they just help governments with their data! They're innocent” which is uh, either aggressively naive, or just paid PR behaviour.
> The firm holds a €16.5 million contract signed in 2023 with the Armed Forces Intelligence Center (CIFAS), which is scheduled to expire this upcoming November.
> Military leadership, including the Chiefs of Staff of the Army and Navy, has lobbied Defense Minister Margarita Robles to renew the contract, citing the platform's operational superiority.
Palantir wins contracts because they are better at what they do. If Europe wants to maintain digital sovereignty while not being left behind they need to have a heart-to-heart conversation about how to fix that.
You have this backwards then, the chiefs of staff of the military are career roles, they are petitioning the minister of defense, which is a political position (PSOE), to keep Palantir.
yeah, he seems to have the same issue a lot of these guys have. i’m convinced we’re going to find out at some point they’re all on some kind of modern meth type drug that entirely breaks their reality. the similarities between so many of their shifts are too striking.
Someday, the US will be just a bubble where no other country gives their data to.
We continue this decent into fascism to the point that nobody likes us.. or values us. Is this their idea of Utopia?
Why don't you stop using American sites and services now then? I see comments like this a lot but no one wants to be personally inconvenienced to stop using hn/youtube/reddit/whatever.
It's what heritage foundation, elon and all the other billionaires want. This is not what most americans wanted, is it? How much of the population voted for orange man?
For context: The former Spanish president in the socialist party is being investigated with corruption activities related with Venezuela, happening in the years after he quit the presidency. It is not looking good for him.
On Mars 2026, US Homeland Security played a prominent role in providing sensible info that lead to the prosecution. Apparently they obtained that info after spying on a phone from [person of interest] in Venezuela.
Helping Spain to expose corruption is a good thing of course, but when who does it is, what could be the biggest stronghold of MAGA in US government, we can suspect that they don't do this out of sheer generosity. Trump keeps saying that "is not happy" with Spain, and this corruption scandal greases the path to power for the Spanish equivalent to MAGA party on the forthcoming 2027 elections so... hum
Palantir could be, or not be, related with the leak. In any case blocking it just right now, by the socialist party, would be the logical reaction if they are involved.
There is a certain brand of conservative Republicans who have learned to weaponize antisemitism against Democrats. The general operating theory is that, since the Holocaust, anyone with even Jewish heritage can do no wrong (though I question the sincerity of the view).
Palantir's CEO, Alex Karp, is the son of a Jewish man. I specifically say "son of," because I understand Jewish heritage to be matrilineal and I don't see Alex Karp engaging in any specifically Jewish traditions. But he does also seem to be one of the "Weaponize the Holocaust" Republicans. Thus, you get defenders such as this.
I find it unbelievable that the current chief of Nato (Rutte) is basically an extension of Palantir. He is making sure countries are signing contracts with this extreme company that on pair with the Nazi ideology. They would support mass extermination camps. You probably think this is over exaggerated. But no its not. This company is evil.
You're out of your mind -- and politically radicalized -- if you think that Palantir is on part with the Nazis. And this kind of facile comparison is offensively trivializing those who died in the holocaust.
One of the things we need to learn from the Nazis is the banality of evil. They were not some unique video game bad guys. They were ordinary people doing mostly ordinary things that added up to an atrocity. Mostly they just had some bad opinions. The individual concentration camp guard had a vague bad feeling about the project but apart from that they felt the same as a security guard at a prison feels today.
And the Nazis were already around for 10 years before the holocaust began. And for all that time they were still the Nazis, but nobody considered them that badly, because they just seemed like a political party with some bad opinions. And we should think about that. Was it possible to stop them in the first 10 years of existence, before they did the holocaust, thereby preventing the holocaust?
Yes palantir is fascist organization. They did not done the murders only because they dont have power yet. That is claim of CEO, I am just listening to what he says and writes.
Jews complained about nazi long before holocaust, btw. So did opposition.
“offensively trivializing those who died in the Holocaust” - calling someone nazi or fascist is not trivializing Holocaust. These are clear terms and both Palantir and Karp often publish texts with fascist ideological elements and views. Read something they published like Technological republic. They are not hiding it.
You're moving the goalposts. The original poster wrote that Palantir is on par with the Nazis. (Typos notwithstanding.) That's what I'm responding to.
And yes, it is offensive and trivializing to the millions that were murdered to suggest that that their murderers were on the same moral footing as a modern government software consultancy. (The views that you read into some of their executives are, in fact, not equivalent to actions such as exterminating millions of people.)
The ceo of the company supports mass termination of people. It's pretty obvious to me. This is the type of company that build ways to achieve evil ideology
So you are saying that using term nazi or fascist can be used only for people that do holocaust and more. Okay so I guess we shall just wait and see?
What the CEO says and writes in their book to promote the company suddenly doesn't matter? Palantir is suddenly just some run of the mill software consultancy? Their founders/CEO meddling in politics I assume also doesn't count?
And no, you're moving the goalposts again. My comment is strictly about Nazis, not "nazi or fascist". If you can't even keep this straight, then my time is wasted on you.
That's the problem? I thought that Nazism and Fascism are often used interchangeably because Nazism = Fascism+ (racism,antisemitism).
Ok this might be a misunderstanding then. What you are saying is that Palantir are not Nazis because they are just Fascists and calling them Nazis is hollowing out the term and is disrespectful to holocaust survivors? I don't know i guess i could be convinced. Palantir still seems to have quite a bit of that racial sprinkle "Western Supremacy" in their manifestos.
Spain is really going in the right direction, I wonder why no one countries inspire from what they are doing
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.
https://www.politico.eu/article/spain-huawei-contract-judici...
That is rather disturbing but this had me lol:
> 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.
espionage is a lot less bad than conquering by force.
the US properly fucked up by very publicly declaring intent to conquer greenland and canada
Right now you either give it to China or to the US.
China is not publicly threatening to invade the EU.
I think the EU needs to produce this themselves but right now they don’t and they don’t have any large, trustworthy allies.
so.. hand over your data to china to spite orange man. yes excellent move.
It’s not spite it’s just logical - US/Israel are a known bad actor.
China is also probably bad, but currently there’s no evidence they’re as bad as US/Israel
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.
China is supplying Russia, which is attacking an European country.
Thus, from my POV that sentiment is BS.
China is an adversary in a panda costume.
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.
It's not exactly a ringing endorsement of the US
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.
Israel has its back to the wall and needs every advantage, since literally everyone else around them hates them.
they have the US congress and a few cats-paws in Europe, and if that runs out, they die
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:
https://www.israelnationalnews.com/news/429561
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 is also supplying Ukraine and the countries that supply Ukraine.
Maybe you meant North Korea?
Germany is also supplying Russia, should Spain exit the mostly-Germany-controlled EU?
What?
Think they're referring to oil and gas sales
China is allowing their companies to trade with Russia. That's all. China has not blocked trade with Ukraine either.
China also stands to benefit long term with a Russia that continues fighting and weakening itself.
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.
The Spanish public overwhelmingly trusts China over the US, so from their perspective, this is not necessarily a bad move.
Obviously, the best move would be to keep the data in Europe instead.
It makes no sense at all to trust either.
>Obviously, the best move would be to keep the data in Europe instead.
While 80% of Europe is subservient to the US?
Or just keep it in Spain? It's not exactly a developing nation. Can they simply not build a server and find people willing to take care of it?
Ghana can host their own IT infra. Why not Spain?
As opposed to what? American servers with Isreali backdoors?
How about Spanish servers?
I will never understand this helplessness that comes from these European countries. They are choosing to be dependent on foreign powers.
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.
You know, we all thought you were allies. But you tricked us well.
> Fool me once, shame on... shame on you
— George Bush, 2002
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.
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> In political science, the term banana republic describes a politically and economically unstable country with an economy dependent upon the export of natural resources.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banana_republic
What natural resource export is Spain’s economy dependent upon?
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 knew it was a little while after WWII (college history was long, long ago!) but didn't realize it was ... 1975-1977!!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_transition_to_democrac...
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.
Hell, how can you be a banana republic when you're not even a republic?
(Sorry for the pun, I'll see myself out.)
> (Sorry for the pun, I'll see myself out.)
No worries, I can see the a-peel.
They deliver part of hardware but the data itself is hosted in Spain and operated by the interior ministry.
still not the worst of reasons.
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
If the data is encrypted before the upload I see no problem
Huawei is the complete data custodian. They are the ones doing the encrypting.
Maybe Spain has people on the inside (of Huawei.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harvest_now,_decrypt_later
Can’t form a COMINTERN if the US is watching.
So? And other countries are storing their data in the US, not covered by gdpr
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did you hit up wikipedia? the controversies section would be a start. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palantir#Controversies
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.
0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weasel_word
>'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.
>They sell data integration software
Uh-huh? Which is used for what?
>they don't store, transfer or share customer's data.
LOL. Yeah, that's the issue, here.
>If surveillance software is your issue, then companies like Cisco or Huawei are provide the hardware and software.
Whataboutism? Sure, I have no problem lobbing the same criticism at them.
If Microsoft sells ICE a subscription to Office then yes.
How about selling cakes to gay couples?
Only a bigot would see a problem with that.
Here's an easy one:
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]?
[0]: https://youtu.be/G5gC_fParbY?si=isXSwbgUsdsQyGFD
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0A3sGymV6kY
[2]: https://research-information.bris.ac.uk/ws/portalfiles/porta...
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.
not for these reasons alone but let's not pretend like they didn't factor them in at all
its kinda funny that HN has swapped from being an owners and their immediate supplicants (founders) forum to a workers one
Well, you start with an obviously false claim, I did not continue reading.
> 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.
Well the CEO doing a public speaking tour where he sounds like a complete lunatic probably isn't helping...https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c4gjkj7975po
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
Whom should we buy surveillance software from then? Vegan art society?
It's like saying we shouldn't buy guns from gun makers and tickle our enemies with rose petals instead.
Feels like Kremlin bots are having a field day here.
> 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"?
Are you going to suggest that Thiel's role as chairman of Palantir is ceremonial and he's just there to make the tea and arrange the flowers?
> 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.
Can you point to where Karp falls for abolishing democracy? I can't seem to find that part.
> falls for?
what does that mean?
advocates for the fall of?
palantir might not be particularly exciting, but the increase in government power by having access to joins is incredibly antidemocratic
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.
> says that it's easier to change the world by inventing new technology than through democracy
It had a better ring to it to me when Buckminster Fuller said essentially this. He was trying to do it through design rather than control.
its not partisan politics when both partisan parties increase their use of palantir
the actual partisan politics of freedom and making the government's job harder is entirely left out of the politics
when the billionaires own all of the politicians, thats not particularly surprising
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.
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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.
See quote at 13m14s in https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DZ95Gmvg_D4
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]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joel_Kaplan
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 was specifically responding to this claim:
> Google and Facebook absolutely changed the world, not through politics, but by creating technology.
But it sounds like we're on the same page that they did change the world in part through politics?
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.
Au contraire, their lobbying efforts are focused on creating regulatory moats around their businesses: https://techcrunch.com/2020/02/17/regulate-facebook/
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.
> founding businesses to produce goods and services that change the world
Why begin with surveilance though?
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
He's a troll, carry on...
Yes it does. He and Thiel are open about the fact they don’t believe in democracy and want to get rid of it
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".
> By that standard, though, Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Booz Allen Hamilton, heck even Microsoft are all supporters of "technofascism".
certainly! fascism requires industry that cooperates with the state to produce the means of control; these are all companies that do exactly that!
By this logic, Ford and Boeing were contributing to technofascism when they were building tanks and planes for the Allies in WWII.
I don't think that most would agree with your understanding of technofascism.
Ford propped Nazis in WW2, maybe that’s why you can’t put your finger on it.
And Boeing? And General Motors? And the hundreds of other companies that produced armarments?
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?
I don’t think we can say that clearly looking almost ninety years back, but those 90 years lead to where we are today.
pressed into service?
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
Ukraine got rid of their nukes and look what happened.
Drop your guard down and you'll get eaten for breakfast.
There were fascist elements in what allies were doing to defeat fascism.
> heck even Microsoft are all supporters of "technofascism"
no one in their right mind is going to argue with that, not sure what your point is
Microsoft, a company mostly centered in the Pacific Northwest, is not exactly full of right wingers: https://www.opensecrets.org/orgs/microsoft-corp/summary?id=d...
Most of their employees are foreign and dont even fall on the left right poltical spectrum.
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.
Most employees who donate vote left but but most employees may not necessarily vote.
owners and workers arent the same group
washington is full of right wing elites, even though the citizens are quite left wing
repeat that and look back at it?
the military industrial complex is certainly a fascist institution
That's ridiculous. All he espouses is that all of this stuff is going to happen and so you might was well do it right (with Palantir).
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.
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c1w21gn340xo
At this point, can you tell me one non corrupt government?
At least they are doing stuff for the people
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).
Either way, fuck Palantir
Looks like we’re doing this in the UK soon too.
Edit: not sure what the downvotes are. Burnham literally said he’ll do it today.
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."
But how many did he deny?
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.
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Which aspect is unsustainable?
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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.
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> 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.
Ah, so these immigrants are indeed part of some sort of caliphate army — just one that was let in without a fight? Yes, that makes sense.
> Immigration on Hacker News is like the dumbest topic here.
Insert "We're All Trying To Find The Guy Who Did This" meme.
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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.
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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.
At no point did anyone say that being against mass migration is hate speech.
But if you're like "these vermin hoards are poisoning the blood of our people," then... yeah.
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I think the immigration is what keeps Spain from turning into another Japan or Germany - a stagnant, overly old place stuck in time.
And in Spain most immigrants are from Latin America with close enough culture and language to avoid most integration problems.
I wouldn't say most.
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").
spain has a significant rich-brit problem of englishmen spending lots of money and not learning spanish
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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.
Germany has had an immense amount of immigration over the past couple decades.
Immigrants but not immigration because there aren’t enough resources to help all the people to integrate.
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.
> were living in a world were state debt was seen as the devil's spawn.
You’re not kidding, it’s literally set in the German constitution: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_balanced_budget_amendme...
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.
Yeah, I like to live in Germany but the leadership is extremely good at missing lifetime opportunities…
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.
Just came back from Japan and I found it vibrant and modern.
Did you visit the countryside?
Japan has an aging problem and a big misogyny problem too.
Literally every country has a countryside problem. From US to Russia to Asia to any country in Europe.
Name the country and I will easy find the spots where it is not vibrant and modern, and then say "did you visit those?"
Say, I heard France has great cuisine, but I had street food in Paris and it was meh.
Doesn’t change facts about Japan‘s problems. In certain parts they are just less visible.
Avoiding cherry picking does in fact change facts.
It doesn’t change facts. Cherry picking change the perception of facts, like your visit of Japan
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.
Change for the sake of change is what cancers are.
Why does it need to change?
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Except they don't seem to be an Isreali puppet state
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It seems in current discourse, turning a European country into another USA is a compliment.
Why do you thinks so?
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.
This seems ridiculously short-sighted and backwards.
Is your assumption that palantir is a good thing?
Sure Palantir has plenty of allegations. But giving same contract to China is insanity.
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.
This prevents palantir being used against people, what are you talking about? How will blacklisting military tech affect you?
They seem to have been granting contracts to manage all kinds of critical data to Huawei's Palantir equivalent lately, so it's probably less about security risks and more about the current source of the bribe money.
If they cared about security they would not outsource this kind of stuff to foreign companies. Spain is not Somalia, why not let Indra do it?
The contract with Huawei was about buying storage servers [1], which would then be managed by the Interior Ministry. They were not outsourcing anything.
[1] Concretely these: https://support.huawei.com/enterprise/en/flash-storage/ocean...
>Spain is not Somalia, why not let Indra do it?
The data may be safer with the CCP, at least they won't lose it.
Right up until some kid named "Bobby Tiananmen" makes the whole database delete itself ;)
Dunno, losing it maybe safer from a citizen's POV.
Odd take. 99.99999% of citizens will never travel to China, so it matters not that the Chinese govt holds their data.
A local company losing the data screws everyone. Palantir getting the data screws everyone, because while foreign, that data will eventually be fed into global systems like VISA, Mastercard, etc, and affect your travel in numerous countries that will be outsourcing their systems to Palantir.
I'm not sure what "travel" even does here. Possessing citizen's info opens possibilities for influence ops, blackmailing, unfair advantage in business and much more. And non-democratic countries are always better at these games, cause they need not be afraid of the next government leaking, investigating, selling whatever they did.
Meanwhile gov't losing info on one citizen screws said citizen, but losing all of it screws the gov't itself, and generally rebalances power in favor of citizens. Which one may say isn't bad.
You can't predict the future. By your own reasoning, you can't say with any degree of certainty that it will never matter if China has a citizen's data just because that person will never travel there.
One in a million?
> Spain is not Somalia, why not let Indra do it?
foreigners are a bit more likely to be loyal to the government and not some separatist opposition? or at least the companies corruption will be quite separate from what impacts the local government
this also came up with the 6th gen fighter designs between france and germany. it works when theres a non-european driving, because both trust the non-europe option more than any fellow european. the local lords are too powerful to be trusted, and too competitive against eachother
>foreigners are a bit more likely to be loyal to the government
Yes, to their own government! Both China and USA have laws to force companies to insert backdoors. These laws have been enforced numerous times. If you think this is a smaller risk than doing things nationally, then indeed you're basically arguing that Spain is Somalia, there are separatist forces roaming around, the country can't enforce its own laws and the government needs to sell everything to foreign governments to stay in power. This is not the case (for now).
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I really like what Spain is doing recently. If it weren't for climate change, I'd consider moving there.
Much of Spain is indeed getting very unpleasant in the summer with climate change, but in the north there are still regions that are quite fine at the moment. Where I am, we recently beat the all time temperature record with 35 degrees, but that was a single day. Most days these weeks it isn't going over 25, and I don't think we hit 30 in June except for that single day and maybe one other day.
The problem is that the right is poised to win the next election and will probably undo all the policies you like. They're pretty much against everything that has been done in the last 7 years. I still have some hopes that Sanchez might clinch another term because he's a political survivor, but prospects are not great.
I still think it will be a coalition and not a full right government.
How is the AC situation now is Spain? Has the country mass adopted AC in homes and offices?
Most homes and public spaces have AC installed, but it doesn't help as soon as you set your foot on the street.
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He didn't give citizenship, but legalised their status as immigrants.
You're far better off having a million new young workers than having a million undocumented young people hidden in the shadow economy.
They were already there. Flicking a switch and turning them into participants in the economy and society at large is a positive move.
And tax payers of course! It's not a bad idea at all.
they were already there? they came in the last 3 years. and who let them in? and what is being done to prevent another illegal million from arriving
Please only worry about the USA. That's enough insanity the world can handle at a time.
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is this a robot that screwed up?
are there missing replies which support the idea of writing sentences that are all lies? is there a bug in HN? Im so confused
the earlier couple comments make sense for some old spanish fascist complainjng that people the older fascists didnt kill are now dying out, but what is this a reply to?
where's the rest of the lies?
(sorry if this is against the proper rules)
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> he gave citizenship to millions of migrants while Spanish has one of the highest unemployment rate of Europe.
This is an interested propaganda
First: This people are not just migrants and some aren't even migrants. They are the grandsons of Spaniards that had to flee the country in the dictatorship and Civil War to avoid being murdered. The parents of this people should have dual-Spanish citizenship yet, unless they voluntarily refused to it.
The idea that the grandsons of Jews from Germany should have some legal path to reclaim German citizenship if they want it, looks 100% reasonable to me. Their families inhabited Germany for generations, much before the mustache disgrace was born. Who was Hitler or Franco to claim "you can't live here because I don't like you"?
And, just for the record, Spain, the country that Nuts calls "antisemite" every two weeks, has granted citizenship also to 72,000 Sephardic descendants since 2015 for a similar reason.
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Second: The migrants aren't stealing the jobs from anybody. They were forced to work illegally in conditions that Spaniards wouldn't accept, but still need to compete with.
Prosecuting people that keeps migrant slave workers sewing for 20 hours a day in a dark basement is of top priority to Spanish workers, because this breaks and poison the job market (lowering wages for everybody); and puts the legal workers that do pay taxes on an unfair disadvantage.
Most Spanish workers able to think are very happy with that move to heal the market; And those that aren't should think twice, because this move massively benefits them in their objective to keep their small family business open.
As long as a migrant didn't commit serious crimes before, this grants them a permit to work legally and pay taxes, but is not the same as citizenship. They can't vote.
I'm not a fan of that, but it's not like the opposition is going to be different in that respect (or like they have been different in the past). It's the companies and elites who are demanding those migrants to keep wages low, so the right will happily provide.
We will get the same migration policy (maybe with some purely aesthetic changes for show), but with the whole kit of fawning over Trump and the US, denying or minimizing climate change, cutting taxes for the wealthy, privatizing public services and so on.
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Canary Islands are part of Spain and probably unaffected from climate change - we have 19-22°C all year round. If it raises to 25° still pretty livable.
It isn't that simple, Canary Islands already counts with 2.2 million + tourists people and the fresh water is a highly risk resource even when desalinization plants are widespread, the groundwater aquifers are severely compromised. The mild weather heavily depends on the trade winds. But models predict that due to fact of being so close to Africa heat waves are prone to be more and more frequent compromising the water resources.
No, but the island's climate will still be chill.
Most places will be unaffected. It'll only affect places where humans are, and we're not even close to filling up the planet
Climate change affects places where more people live in the sense that more suffer from it, resources get depleeted fast but the wild temperature fluctuations won’t spare much of the planet in various ways from wet bulb effects, costal erosion, air major currents changing, glaciers melting and so on.
> It'll only affect places where humans are
What?
I think he meant to say the "planet" where humans are
Ok but most of the populated areas of the Canary Islands are a tourist shithole, not somewhere you would want to live.
The two capitals (Santa Cruz and Las Palmas) are pretty good spot to live in. Tourism focuses on the south on both islands. Las Palmas has a beach with a bit touristic activity, but its not drinking tourism like Mallorca or Benidorm. Combined with nice weather all year round overall a greaet place to live. Very walkable cities, you can do without a car. Due to nice weather, you can always go by bike or scooter. Taxis are cheap. Thanks to the tourists, cheap flights all year round, every day, to all major european cities.
But yeah, if you come with kids, factor in private schools. The public system here is broken. As for internet, I pay less than 10€/month for 500Mbit fibre - I couldn't even get that in Germany and if could it would be north of 80€.
There's very little decent work though. If you live there you're either fully remote which is rare these days, or you work in the tourist industry.
> If you live there you're either fully remote, or you work in the tourist industry.
Or you are a doctor, a teacher, an architect or a bananas farmer. Some of the richest families in the islands just export/import commodities since three generations.
Oh yeah I was thinking tech sector when I wrote that. Because of the community here.
Yes, you must bring your remote job unless you want to work for less-than minimum wage in a restaurant.
Are you sure? It is sometimes close to 30°C in summer in Fue. BTW, did you forget sealevel rises, dust from Sahara, what is you have many days of > 40km/h winds. all those are climate change.
Canary Islands will be affected (severely) for any change on the sea currents. Because the marine trophic chains will change.
A warmer ocean means much bigger storms over the islands. This has both positive and negative aspects.
Islands are extremely vulnerable to climate change all over, as they are completely dependent in near-term precipitation for all their water (no rivers, no aquifers).
No rivers and no water is reality here for quite a while already. The islands rely a lot on desalination, and there is a big EU-funded project going on to create a desalination plant that not only is used to supply tap water, but the water basin of a new hydroelectric plant [0]. Desalination pretty much solves water issues, IF you have the energy (ideally renewable).
[0]: https://renewablesnow.com/news/construction-starts-on-200-mw...
Desalination solves water issues for tap water. Islands may be short on surface area.
I would also never use the word "solve", as this is just for human usage. The ecosystems themselves are irreversibly destroyed.
I'm moving there.
Climate change is going to affect everywhere, and yes, a lot of Spain will experience desertification over the course of my lifetime. I am moving from Texas to Spain, though, so I am used to heat from a pure personal comfort perspective.
One interesting point is that Spain is well-situated in terms of its energy mix: it's a leader of renewables in Europe. It was also able to negotiate a carve-out from collective energy pricing (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iberian_exception), so Iberian energy markets are generally cheaper than broader European markets. This will have downstream economic effects for the country and makes it easier to afford using AC. I will always install AC wherever I live. There are far too many avoidable heat deaths in Europe in particular given their level of economic development. I don't blame them at all given the need is relatively new, but it's really a sad phenomenon.
If you are a true climate doomer (realist?), also, Spain is going to fare as well as one can in Europe should the AMOC collapse. It's not the best place to be globally in a scenario like that, though, to say the least.
For me, with everything going on in terms of world events, life choices are basically just placing bets about the future. There is no truly safe or best choice in a lot of scenarios.
Nice. I don't know what your comfort with swimming is but battling extreme heat also happens to be much easier when you have large welcoming bodies of water for humans to wade in, and with easy and cheap access for the common man. It boggles the mind that for all its coast line the only place the US has that's comparable is Hawaii pretty much.
Sure extreme heat might ruin the seas too eventually (there is already talk of Asian jellyfish species being spotted in record warm sea temperatures) but the amount of due dilligence needed is non-existent compared to the US, Australia, or far east Asia.
The no AC in Europe thingy is mostly central and north Europe, where, in fairness, it didn't use to get very hot but now have heat waves fairly often.
Spain, Portugal, Italy and other southern European countries have very wide spread AC usage.
>southern European countries
They also have colder beers than Germany probably for the same reason. Nothing beats the culture acclimation of wincing while sipping lukewarm beer under the July sun in 100+ degrees Berlin.
At 100+ European degrees, your beer would be boiling and you'd be cooked alive.
that was F degrees obviously, so 38 in "euro".
And horchatas!
The current government has little chance to get re-elected, and the next one will revert most of these decisions.
It could be worse can only take a government so far. Eventually, just preaching to the choir catches up with you.
And then you'll have to choose another country after the next elections. Or even before, cause liking politicians from afar somehow much easier than when living in the same country.
I imagine there will be a lot of AC retrofitting across Europe in the coming years. Investment opportunity?
Ventless temperature control units are extremely popular there so it's probably not an unwise investment but you're not really ahead of the curve. The construction of most European buildings[1] lends itself poorly to anything that requires knocking a hole in a wall but the systems that can exhaust heat through water lines are usually quite reasonable to set up.
1. Though this is significantly less prevalent in Spain due to a lot of reconstruction happening after the civil war - that isn't to say buildings there are perfect, they just have different problems than the classic German 30cm thick stone wall.
The price of AC gases had skyrocketed by EU laws, and more than half of the bill are just taxes.
Some gases, like ammonia are easy to manufacture, other are being banned by environmental concerns, and other depend on international trade nets that can be shocked at any time if somebody trumped that morning. Investing in AC should depend heavily on the kind of refrigerant used in your product.
Galicia is supposed to be nice
Will face the same oceanographic problem that Canary Islands. Galicia is richer than they should be, thanks to the Artic. And also thanks to Ethiopy.
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In the CPI Spain is not that far off from countries like France, Italy or the US and better than the global average.
https://www.transparency.org/en/cpi/2025
I'm currently living in Mexico and here corruption is a much more serious issue.
I am talking about the current government corruption cases, I assume Mexico is worse, but Spain isn't great for Europe either
The made up cases are so many that they deflect each other and the few real ones. The real scandal is the state of our judicial power.
This is pretty common in any country going through a populist phase, they go against the judicial, as is happening in the US
what are you even talking about..
embarrassment of a child
I'll simplify it for you, populists from left and right (Trump and Sanchez) main trick is blaming the elites for preventing the will of the people.
This usually puts them in conflict with the judiciary, that and the fact populist government are usually incredibly corrupt (also due to contempt of existing standards)
calla ruc que ets un tros de ruc
"The decision stems directly from growing official concern over the potential misuse of classified information linked to national security."
What are the specific concerns?
As the contracts are going to a chinese company. The officials making the decisions likely like their bribes wery much.
I imagine that’s classified.
People in the comments here are praising the move, so presumably something is public. I've googled but I can't see some specific breach or documented misuse. Is the objection to Palantir strictly political?
There's been a lot of recent scandals going public against the social democratic party ruling on spain now (PSOE) and its previous dirigents. See Zapatero case. leaked by US agencies recently once Spain put some kind of friction to the Rota south spain bases getting involved on anything vs Iran.
The president P. Sanchez, has been clearly antagonizing Trump in these and other intl issues (even if only visible in spain, as he is not that relevant internationally, etc)
But anyways, this seems like deepstate fighting vs current US admin and current Spain admin, one can infer "Palantir" is basically a gag order away from giving the US govt anything it wants, so as an antagonist. to its current admin, it seems smart to avoid having them as critical providers.
why choose china? Makes no sense, but probably the only other big bro Spain can rely on if the US isn't it anymore
OK so this is not specific to Palantir, but about entrusting sensitive Spanish data to any US based company. If so, that makes sense.
well it could be limited to companies who are entirely dedicated to surveillance and massive data collection on citizens like palantir. particularly with that and how ideology based palantir appears to be.
i’m sure they wouldn’t be nearly as concerned about a US company that manufactured screwdrivers or nike or something similar.
The Spanish government trusting the CCP over Palantir is wild.
The CCP's intolerant, cruel and authoritarian nature is a direct threat to humanity in ways that Peter Thiel could barely imagine in his darkest dreams.
The lack of perspective on show here is astonishing. They are destroying trust with vital Western allies -- trust is gained in drops and lost in buckets -- and Lurch and his dodgy friends are clearly out of their element.
> is a direct threat to humanity in ways that Peter Thiel could barely imagine
Care to outline a few of those threats? The ones that Thiel allegedly cannot imagine?
I'm American, I get why Spain's feeling trepidation. I can't trust my own government with data if it could be used against me. I actively seek out Chinese translation, AI and search engines when I want privacy from the US. It's safer with the CCP than the geriatric nutjobs that fell off the Overton window.
I thinking OP is worried about China exporting its political influence outside.
In China, the Ministry for State Security has the legal authority to seize and investigate your devices without warrant nor active case, for instance. This can be, legally, motivated by dissident political thought.
You are mixing apples and oranges. The infamous Huawei deal was buying tons of HDD servers. Any deal with Palantir is handling all your data to the NSA.
The NSA have Congressional oversight and are held accountable for their (mis)deeds, more or less.
The Chinese MSS and the Chinese Communist Party itself aren't even accountable to God.
Because the NSA has such a great record of getting punished from their transgressions, right?
For foreign countries, handling your data to either the Chinese surveillance apparatus or the USA one makes no difference. In fact, any company with such deep ties with a foreign intelligence agency as Palantir should be automatically considered a security thread in other nations.
Anyway, the deal with Huawei was about buying hardware, not handling over data.
Congressional oversight doesn't mean much here, since the CCP also serves that role.
The real problem is that, even though US is, in practice, a de-facto two-party between democrats and republicans, the PRC is a de-facto one-party system. There's also the overall opportunities for change and revolution that US society provides, that are absent in the PRC.
De jure one-party system. No other political parties are permitted.
PRC does actually allow different political parties: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_political_parties_in_C...
They, however, need to be approved by the CCP, so this multi party system is only de jure.
please, compared to thiel & co., the ccp are basically choir boys. and they worked well for china. they cleaned their cities of unbreathable air and reduced poverty in a very short time span. we cannot say the same for the americans robber barons and their political wing, like trump&co. how can you deny the most basic reality and evidence?
The people who raised concerns about the awful things the Chinese Communist Party has done in the process are unfortunately unavailable for comment.
I take the ccp over thiel any day
Unfortunately this order will probably be revoked in 2027/2028, we'll see.
It is possible and this in particular is a decision that I'm sure the US will pressure the government to reverse. However, it's misguided to see the entire world through the US political lens where reversing policy decisions is seen as a free win by the voting base. Spain's current democracy is only about fifty years old and extremism is viewed very negatively so outright undoing is generally less common then gradual undermining.
Great news for Spain. I hope more European countries wake up to what's going on.
why not simply make it illegal? why make it a ban specific to one company, are they trying to make their own copy?
Palantir is profoundly untrusted in Europe in part because of Alex Karp. He is viewed as a dangerous neo-nationalist (not incorrectly).
Never really sure why Anduril doesn't catch the same grief; they are maybe even creepier. Perhaps Palmer Luckey is just a less visible obvious Bond villain crackpot.
What is creepy about Anduril? Anduril simply sells weapons. There's nothing mysterious or nefarious about it. European countries want to buy weapons too.
There are European alternatives to Anduril. But there are no European alternatives to Palantir, that's why.
They didn't ban any company, they just ordered public services and public companies not to use what has been classified as a security risk.
Anybody here think that Palantir is not a security risk for Spain?
> Anybody here think that Palantir is not a security risk for Spain?
It boggles the mind a bit, but I’ve seen a few comments on here with people defending them to the tune of “what’s the big deal, they just help governments with their data! They're innocent” which is uh, either aggressively naive, or just paid PR behaviour.
> Anybody here think that Palantir is not a security risk for Spain?
why is THAT your take and not "WTF WHY ARE THOSE CAMERAS LEGAL IN GENERAL?"
they could be attached to non-US-owned-tiktok which is clearly the biggest security threat to have ever existed
jesus fuck, biggest security threat is that IT SPIES ON ALL CITIZENS
it doesn't matter where the data go - THE VERY COLLECTION OF IT IS BAD
> The firm holds a €16.5 million contract signed in 2023 with the Armed Forces Intelligence Center (CIFAS), which is scheduled to expire this upcoming November.
> Military leadership, including the Chiefs of Staff of the Army and Navy, has lobbied Defense Minister Margarita Robles to renew the contract, citing the platform's operational superiority.
Palantir wins contracts because they are better at what they do. If Europe wants to maintain digital sovereignty while not being left behind they need to have a heart-to-heart conversation about how to fix that.
clearly not better if they cant win a spanish contract?
?
They won the contract, the military wants to keep it, the politicians are threatening to blanket kill all palantir contracts.
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Your argument is that the Spanish military is run by the mafia?
Well not hard to see. PSOE is a criminal organization and they happen to lead the government and as a consequence the military.
You have this backwards then, the chiefs of staff of the military are career roles, they are petitioning the minister of defense, which is a political position (PSOE), to keep Palantir.
I mean.. just take a minute and listen to the CEO. The guy is having a hard time time. Clearly out of touch imo.
https://youtu.be/0A3sGymV6kY
yeah, he seems to have the same issue a lot of these guys have. i’m convinced we’re going to find out at some point they’re all on some kind of modern meth type drug that entirely breaks their reality. the similarities between so many of their shifts are too striking.
> i’m convinced we’re going to find out at some point they’re all on some kind of modern meth type drug that entirely breaks their reality
It's called being out-of-touch obscenely wealthy coupled with a massive ego.
With some experimental peptides sprinkled in.
You are probably thinking about ketamine.
Interview is gold, he is right.
sad to see usage of this word. blocklist is easy to write.
Larry Ellison: « We are always glad to help ! »
[… Plus the fact that I need another boat!]
Someday, the US will be just a bubble where no other country gives their data to. We continue this decent into fascism to the point that nobody likes us.. or values us. Is this their idea of Utopia?
Unfortunately, yes. The American right has looked at Russia as a model for what they want America to be for some time.
Its what the US wants, and honestly at this point we should just completely cordon off the US from the rest of the world and give it to them.
Why don't you stop using American sites and services now then? I see comments like this a lot but no one wants to be personally inconvenienced to stop using hn/youtube/reddit/whatever.
>Why don't you stop using American sites and services now then?
So it is what you want.
I honestly don't care. I just push back on some of this rhetoric by challenging those who say this to actually practice what they preach.
It's what heritage foundation, elon and all the other billionaires want. This is not what most americans wanted, is it? How much of the population voted for orange man?
Look, this is not a bad thing per se, but the US reaction will tell you everything you need to know.
Anything short of declaring them a proscribed organization is insufficient.
Alex Karp is clearly off his rocker. This is a good move.
He cannot stop talking about murdering people.
Every country needs to do this now
For context: The former Spanish president in the socialist party is being investigated with corruption activities related with Venezuela, happening in the years after he quit the presidency. It is not looking good for him.
On Mars 2026, US Homeland Security played a prominent role in providing sensible info that lead to the prosecution. Apparently they obtained that info after spying on a phone from [person of interest] in Venezuela.
Helping Spain to expose corruption is a good thing of course, but when who does it is, what could be the biggest stronghold of MAGA in US government, we can suspect that they don't do this out of sheer generosity. Trump keeps saying that "is not happy" with Spain, and this corruption scandal greases the path to power for the Spanish equivalent to MAGA party on the forthcoming 2027 elections so... hum
Palantir could be, or not be, related with the leak. In any case blocking it just right now, by the socialist party, would be the logical reaction if they are involved.
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Sauron identified
The world's a scary place, but that's no excuse to make it worse.
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What on earth are you even talking about
There is a certain brand of conservative Republicans who have learned to weaponize antisemitism against Democrats. The general operating theory is that, since the Holocaust, anyone with even Jewish heritage can do no wrong (though I question the sincerity of the view).
Palantir's CEO, Alex Karp, is the son of a Jewish man. I specifically say "son of," because I understand Jewish heritage to be matrilineal and I don't see Alex Karp engaging in any specifically Jewish traditions. But he does also seem to be one of the "Weaponize the Holocaust" Republicans. Thus, you get defenders such as this.
https://responsiblestatecraft.org/peter-thiel-israel-palanti...
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Get rid of this pestilence! Fark Palantir
I find it unbelievable that the current chief of Nato (Rutte) is basically an extension of Palantir. He is making sure countries are signing contracts with this extreme company that on pair with the Nazi ideology. They would support mass extermination camps. You probably think this is over exaggerated. But no its not. This company is evil.
Pretty sure he would do unspeakable things if it meant getting a pat on the head, and a Good Boy, from the real head of nato.
You're out of your mind -- and politically radicalized -- if you think that Palantir is on part with the Nazis. And this kind of facile comparison is offensively trivializing those who died in the holocaust.
One of the things we need to learn from the Nazis is the banality of evil. They were not some unique video game bad guys. They were ordinary people doing mostly ordinary things that added up to an atrocity. Mostly they just had some bad opinions. The individual concentration camp guard had a vague bad feeling about the project but apart from that they felt the same as a security guard at a prison feels today.
And the Nazis were already around for 10 years before the holocaust began. And for all that time they were still the Nazis, but nobody considered them that badly, because they just seemed like a political party with some bad opinions. And we should think about that. Was it possible to stop them in the first 10 years of existence, before they did the holocaust, thereby preventing the holocaust?
Yes palantir is fascist organization. They did not done the murders only because they dont have power yet. That is claim of CEO, I am just listening to what he says and writes.
Jews complained about nazi long before holocaust, btw. So did opposition.
“offensively trivializing those who died in the Holocaust” - calling someone nazi or fascist is not trivializing Holocaust. These are clear terms and both Palantir and Karp often publish texts with fascist ideological elements and views. Read something they published like Technological republic. They are not hiding it.
It's not even some radical view.
You're moving the goalposts. The original poster wrote that Palantir is on par with the Nazis. (Typos notwithstanding.) That's what I'm responding to.
And yes, it is offensive and trivializing to the millions that were murdered to suggest that that their murderers were on the same moral footing as a modern government software consultancy. (The views that you read into some of their executives are, in fact, not equivalent to actions such as exterminating millions of people.)
The ceo of the company supports mass termination of people. It's pretty obvious to me. This is the type of company that build ways to achieve evil ideology
millions isnt really all that many people anymore.
it would not be at all surprising for palantir to be involved inunited health killing millions
most nazis dodnt kill millions themselves, they instead helped measure and optimize the killing of millions - a goal that palantir shares
So you are saying that using term nazi or fascist can be used only for people that do holocaust and more. Okay so I guess we shall just wait and see?
What the CEO says and writes in their book to promote the company suddenly doesn't matter? Palantir is suddenly just some run of the mill software consultancy? Their founders/CEO meddling in politics I assume also doesn't count?
Seems like somebody has lot of $$$ in PLTR
I have zero dollar exposure to $PLTR.
And no, you're moving the goalposts again. My comment is strictly about Nazis, not "nazi or fascist". If you can't even keep this straight, then my time is wasted on you.
That's the problem? I thought that Nazism and Fascism are often used interchangeably because Nazism = Fascism+ (racism,antisemitism).
Ok this might be a misunderstanding then. What you are saying is that Palantir are not Nazis because they are just Fascists and calling them Nazis is hollowing out the term and is disrespectful to holocaust survivors? I don't know i guess i could be convinced. Palantir still seems to have quite a bit of that racial sprinkle "Western Supremacy" in their manifestos.
They're already helping run ICE's concentration camps. If Trump asked them for help with extermination camps they'd agree immediately.
[dupe] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48748392