I assume the purpose of Palantir is to enable the Federal government to circumvent the constitution by framing their new spy agency as a public/private partnership. From that lens the funding makes sense.

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mapt 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

The purpose of Palantir is to watch over Mordor and the other lands of Sauron. He's only got one eye, one attention span, he needs intelligent agentic processing to administrate the realm. Who are you going to entrust, Gorthak The Orc? The Nazgul? They have their own priorities, their own limitations.

It was incredibly expensive to run East Berlin as a panopticon state, with a large fraction of the population on the payroll as informers to the 100,000 Stasi agents. Obvious conclusions were missed all the time because of the sheer difficulty of keeping track of facts cross-referenced on paper in filing cabinets in a large office building. This volume of classified siloed information is toxic for the occupation, operationally unusable. People were disappeared or even executed on mere suspicion because it would have been too difficult to rustle up proof.

Thiel looked at our prospects for effectively running an authoritarian surveillance state in Afghanistan and Iraq, looked at how many American contractors we would have had to devote to that, how many people we would have had to torture on a routine basis, how fast we might learn the language, and said "I think I can do better. A softer touch, a smarter system for controlling people. This is what AI is for, running society after this liberal democracy fiction falls away"

	▲	da_chicken an hour ago \| parent [-]
		NB: The Palantir were created by the Elves, not by Morgoth or Sauron. The problem is that it takes a lot of will to use one and not have things of importance hidden (it shows what you think is important, not what is important), and as it turns out holders of one stone can influence what holders of other stones can see, if their will is greater. The Enemy doesn't get ahold of a stone until Minas Ithil falls and becomes Minas Morgul, and that's well into the Third Age. Two thousand years after the Last Alliance of Men and Elves, the second defeat of The Enemy, and the first destruction of Sauron. Which is still a thousand years before the start of Frodo's adventure. Lots of time in Middle Earth. The rest of your comment is, unfortunately, spot on.

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imdsm 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

There's no federal government in the UK, nor constitution

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Zigurd 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

You are technically correct. But the distinction between devolution and a Federation of states gets very blurry when you take a look at what's happening with voting in the US these days.

You are technically incorrect about the UK not having a constitution. It's just not all compiled into a single written document.

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codeduck 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

There is absolutely a Constitution in the UK, it is simply not codified into a single document.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constitution_of_the_United_Kin...

More importantly, the UK is a Constitutional Monarchy, with ultimate legislative power vested in Parliament rather than the Monarch.

	▲	howerj 42 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		I find it weird that people would downvote this, I know you should not complain about it, but this comment is correct. The UK does have a (uncodified) constitution. Also of note; even countries with a codified constitution have parts that are uncodified.