100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
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User ID: 2039
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
12hr ago
Yep.
Their commercial work is stranger to me. I know that, at one point, they had some bad interactions with big companies and got shown the door but, of late, their commercial work has picked up. This, however, may just be on the back of general AI hype.
Having done both Federal and Commercial work, there's an interesting cultural split; Federal agencies don't mind paying you for 5, 10, 20+ years so long as your hourly rates and line item expenses are "reasonable." Commercial firms generally want you to GTFO as fast as possible, but don't even blink at $600 / hr for a 25 year old writing code.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
12hr ago
I think the macro answer is kind of alarming.
We know that, stretching back to about 2014 through to the present, a disproportionate source of growth in core stock indicies like the SP500 has been tech stocks. Wall Street loves growth. The retail story is that FAANG etc. has created all of these wonderful new innovations and so, wouldn't you know it, of course they're driving economic growth.
My own (poorly researched) pet theory is that there was no alternative. Here's the BLS list of output by major sector of the economy.
"Tech" broadly speaking is hidden in a couple different areas here; Information, Professional services, Management. I don't think that matters. What does is that most of the other large categories are highly, highly regulated; finance, health care, education, utilities, construction, education. Government itself is a major "contributor" to the economy. The two large "trade" sectors mostly reference both everyday and durable goods that people just buy through the course of life; laundry detergent and food all the way up to cars and refrigerators.
So, my theory boils down to; it was so hard to really grow in any non-tech industry after 2008 because of regulatory burdens stretching back to the early 1970s, that the only place for investors to put their money (and, remember, money was cheap for a long time after 2008) was in "tech" because it was, and still largely is, un- or under-regulated. This may be changing with AI hype, but the theory, I think, isn't totally without merit.
Some of those tech investments were legitimate and make real money. Others were goofy nonsense that still make negative money to this day. But, when there's no alternative (and rising inflation (!)) you have to play the game even if it's a very dumb one.
Where this gets more shitty is that employment appears to be growing most in sectors that are heavily tied to gov't spending. Healthcare, education, and gov't. To me, it sort of looks like somewhere around 20% of "professional" workers are making their living through a complicated chutes-and-ladders rearrangement of tax dollars.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
13hr ago
the CEO of one of the most important companies.
Citation needed.
Palantir is a very valuable company in the strict dollars and cents ... sense, but I don't know how "important" they are in the sense of a Ford, General Electric, US Steel, IBM, Standard Oil etc. Even within the post 2008 tech world, I wouldn't put them in front of Google, Facebook, Netflix, or the legacies-turned-cool-again Apple and Microsoft.
To shed some light on what Palantir actually does; they have a data "platfrom" that combines a bunch of open source technologies with their own tooling and integration layer. To be fair to them, this isn't something that anyone could vibe code. A lot of it is hard won engineering knowledge.
Their greatest strength is their greatest weakness -- it's kind of a "do anything" platfrom. Which sounds fun and cool and amazing until you consider that it does nothing out of the box. A big BIG part of Palantir is a role called "the forward deployed engineer." This is a software engineer - a team of them, usually - that sits on site with customers and builds, within the Palantir platform, purpose based "applications." Once the app is up and running, the Forward Deployed Engineers also, sometimes, try to "build back in" whatever they just built into the core Palantir platform.
Sound confusing and kind like a shitty way to do software development? You're not wrong. The Federal market loves this because it's how they've done software for ages -- by paying other people unending dollars to write it for them. The big Beltway Bandit firms like CACI, Booz Allen, Leidos, Deloitte Federal, and literally hundreds of smaller players do more or less what Palantir does, but with shittier marketing and without selling a required software license the way palantir does. All the way back in 2016, this got so bad that Palantir SUED THE ARMY for not giving them a "fair shot" at a contract.
(Again, to be totally generously fair to Palantir, protests over contract awards are common and all large players will use them from time to time. I think actually suing the gov't, however, was quite unusual).
An interesting note about Palantir is that several of its current and former executives are very publicly prominent, especially in tech spaces like X/Twitter and the podcast circuit. You have Alex Karp, Shyam Shankar, Trae Stephens (now at Anduril) among others. They capture a lot of attention and, frankly, a lot of what they say is smart and forward thinking. Still, you can't say the don't market themselves well. The cherry on top (crown jewel) is, of course, that Peter Thiel was an early Palantir investor and J.D. Vance worked for Thiel's investment company before running for Senate. In the good old fashioned DC tradition, a lot of Palantir's success has been because of Who They Know.
In terms of these culture war adjacent manifestos, I don't see how they make any sense from a risk/return perspective. Companies that get involved in culture war stuff often face blowback sooner or later without seeing much bottom or top line growth. If you're familiar with the hilarious tone-deaf "All In" podcast, you'll know that there's a tradition of Silicon Valley types thinking that because they're highly competent in one domain, they think they can easily use "first principles thinking" (what in the actual fuck?) to transfer that competency to another domain. Elon's Doge experiment was his flirtation.
I appreciate the effortful response and like your analysis.
My WTF-age was mostly about clips like this
Bruh.
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