Are they effective? Do you have data on the number of people they've correctly identified vs false-positives. In fact, do you have any evidence they're even trying to limit false positives?
The reason they are able to very efficiently send a dozen ICE agents to a random persons home to hold them at gun point until they can prove their immigration status is because the goal is to send ICE agents around holding people at gun point and they're happy if they happen to also get it right sometimes.
If I understand correctly, you're saying that in a majority of cases (or something approaching that) the targets of these raids are not subject to lawful deportation?
I would be curious to have data / information showing that.
I'm saying we have absolutely no concrete statistical data, and in the press we have many cases where law enforcement has been deliberately negligent in order to deport people who were here legally. We can actually see them deliberately trying to avoid doing the things you would do if you wanted to establish the people you were trying to deport were here illegally. So it's fair to say, until we have some evidence that these people were here illegally the sensible thing to do is to assume they are innocent.
It's also kind of a problem to say "Oh well, we've got no concrete data, let's continue to let them deport whoever they like and shoot anyone who gets in the way".
If I'm reading this correctly, they're just straight up violating the law. They're sharing information with ICE under an obligation to share information of aliens, but they're actually sharing everyone's information in an effort to identify aliens. That seems like a pretty slam shut case if there were any mechanism to investigate and prosecute it.
I heard a law professor on NPR a few nights back saying how, at the executive level, the rule of law is dead and has been for some time. They cited Jan 6 but recognised how politically divisive that example was, so also gave the failure to enforce the TikTok ban as a less partisan example.
If you take your hands off the wheel you can go a surprisingly long time before you crash. This hands-free period will have to come to an end at some point.
I remember a lot of stuff Bush did in the aftermath of 911 that was illegal. Anyone remember Snowden? And Obama did a drone strike on a US citizen. This has been going on a long time but maybe we used to play pretend better.
There are very clear differences, so I find your argument disingenuous at best. While the legality can be doubted for the examples you gave, those administrations released their legal rationale.
The TikTok rationale essentially came to ‘we want genz voters’
> This hands-free period will have to come to an end at some point
What would that mean? Do you expect the government to put their hands back on the wheel, does the US "crash" and become a dictatorship and/or does it lead to WW3?
It might take some time to end though, executive power without laws is very close to dictatorships, and some dictatorships take a long time to dissolve (if they dissolve at all). They might not even have an end. As an example, look at Russia, from an empire to a dictatorship to an oligarchy. It never seemed full democracy and there's no hope of it changing in the next decade. There's a lot of speculation on what will happen at the end of Trumps presidency
Selectively ... Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.
If we are to learn from the brutal Soviet sanctioned forced deportations of the Baltic nations following world war 2, then justice will come but it will take time.
Once the Baltic nations gained independence they tried everyone involved in the administration of those orders, which took place without trial or oversight and often resulted in the replacement families being deported if the actual tagets could not be found.
Ofc Stalin or any of the power brokers at the time were long dead, so instead it was a parade of lower level admin workers, all who were elderly in their 80s or 90s and who at that time were young, simply doing the bidding of their employers.
The lesson: don't be a bag holder for people who will die before you leaving you to hold the responsibility for their crimes.
For me it was when Eric Holder, the Attorney General under President Obama, straight-up ignored a Congressional subpoena. Maybe the actual event happened earlier than that, but in that moment I marked "rule of law" as a dead letter.
It's pretty clear for decades. When exactly did some higher up in the US gov end up in jail for ordering eg. mass killings abroad, or colluding with others that engaged in mass crimes like initiating wars and conflicts.
US will not lock up a single asshole who helps kill thousands of people abroad (not even inconvenience them with a simple court appearance to have to justify themselves), but it sure can lock up thousands on flimsiest justifications like FTA in court because of whatever, or technical parole violations, or driving on suspended license, basically for failures to navigate bureaucracy while poor.
I'll believe in rule of law when at least shits who materially support mass killings of children will start getting locked up. But alas, no. No such thing.
Until then it's all just bullshit that normal people have to submit to, and ruling class gets to excuse itself from with endless lawyering, exceptions, and nonsense, while it's clear they're still just scum psychos doing scum psycho things.
> But, as Chayes studied the graft of the Karzai government, she concluded that it was anything but benign. Many in the political élite were not merely stealing reconstruction money but expropriating farmland from other Afghans. Warlords could hoodwink U.S. special forces into dispatching their adversaries by feeding the Americans intelligence tips about supposed Taliban ties. Many of those who made money from the largesse of the international community enjoyed a sideline in the drug trade. Afghanistan is often described as a “failed state,” but, in light of the outright thievery on display, Chayes began to reassess the problem. This wasn’t a situation in which the Afghan government was earnestly trying, but failing, to serve its people. The government was actually succeeding, albeit at “another objective altogether”—the enrichment of its own members.
> I'm reading this correctly, they're just straight up violating the law
HHS says “under the Immigration and Nationality Act, ‘any information in any records kept by any department or agency of the government as to the identity and location of aliens in the US shall be made available to’ immigration authorities.” If that’s true, they’re following the law.
Key part of what you wrote: "as to the identity and location of aliens" - so whatever claim they have to access health information applies to aliens. The big question is: are they harvesting citizens' health records illegally as part of this effort, and if so, when do those responsible see jail time?
They're unsure because a lot depends on the legal status of children born to non-citizen parents in the US after a executive order tried to revoke birthright citizenship: https://www.bmj.com/content/390/bmj.r1538
If that EO was legal, then sharing the data is, too. If it wasn't, then it's probably a privacy violation, but the CMS isn't allowed to make that call themselves, they have to rely on court decisions for it. And challenging EOs is not trivial.
HHS is broader than CMMS. Someone who was formerly legal could now be illegal. But more prominently, Miller and Noem have focused on illegally deporting pending asylum cases to juice their numbers. Those folks may show up in HHS (and IRS) data.
I’m against using health data to benefit ICE but what you’re saying doesn’t make sense. There needs to be a critical mass of data for it to be useful to Palantir. If they are passing Medicare and Medicaid data, does that mean that undocumented migrants are getting Medicare and Medicaid?
It’s not. Palantir “receives peoples’ addresses from the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS)” [1]. That’s broader than Medicare or Medicaid.
If you’re on a legal visa and have to get a prescription filled, I think you’ll wind up in those data. (Same if you are legally on Medicare with a spouse who overstayed their visa.)
> does that mean that undocumented migrants are getting Medicare and Medicaid?
Not necessarily. As I said, these data are broader than CMMS. And the targets of the current ICE are not undocumented migrants. (I live in Wyoming, near the Idaho border. The farm workers are fine.)
I think it's pretty clear they are using Medicare and Medicaid data. They both fall under the umbrella of HHS so it would technically be correct to say they got data from HHS, but it seems like it's specifically Medicare and Medicaid data.
“Several federal laws authorise the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) to make certain information available to the Department of Homeland Security (DHS),”
> > does that mean that undocumented migrants are getting Medicare and Medicaid?
> Not necessarily.
Not necessarily, but probably. I was told explicitly that undocumented migrants weren't getting Medicare and Medicaid services, but at this point, I don't know who to believe.
If you go to an emergency room at a hospital which accepts Medicare (so, essentially all of them), you will be screened, and if in danger, medically stabilized (modulo difficult pregnancies in some states with anti-abortion laws, unfortunately).
I assume if you then fill paperwork out, they’d have your data - though I’m not sure why you’d agree to fill it out if you know you can’t pay, and that you’re just going to be discharged.
I'm open to either conclusion, but what law / right do you think is being violated?
As a general rule, the first amendment protects the right to say, e.g. "John Doe lives at 123 Main St." John may not like that people know that, but that doesn't generally limit other peoples' right to speak freely.
It's right there in the article, there are specific federal laws authorizing them to make specific information available - for example, they can make any record kept about the identity or location of aliens available. Right, that's a specific limitation on what they can share, even the HHS spokesperson made clear they don't share information on US citizens and permanent lawful residents. But then the article goes on to reveal that ICE has all the personal data of every person receiving Medicaid.
If the law says you can share aliens information, but not Americans information, and then you do share Americans information I think you're probably breaking the law, and at the very least there should be a process to find out what the basis is for you doing it. Normally these things would be decided by a court.
Please stop using the word alien to refer to humans.
It's dehumanizing and it leads to a path where you can justify humiliating, torturing, and murdering other humans. Which is already happening with ICE.
> Please stop using the word alien to refer to humans
It’s the legally-correct term.
For what it’s worth, I’m a naturalized American. When I was doing my citizenship paperwork, I found the term fun. The word doesn’t dehumanize. Murdering people does.
> Genocide starts with separating people into them and us
This is an unsubstantiated slippery slope. We can categorize people, even sort them by desirability for some purpose, without resorting to dehumanization much less genocide. (Citizenship and immigration necessitate an us-them delineation. So do team sports, families and like club memberships. Us and them are fine. Us versus them is dangerous.)
And to add to that, it's not a neutral environment. If there's 1% of scenarios that are incorrect, people will figure out they haven't been billed for something, figure out why, and then tell their friends. Before you know it every teenager is walking into Amazon Fresh standing on one foot, taking a bag of Doritos, hopping over to the Coca Cola stand, putting the Doritos down, spinning 3 times, picking it up again and walking out of store, safe in the knowledge that the AI system has annotated the entire event as a seagull getting into the shop.
It's pretty common for crypto wallets that have been linked to illegal activity get blacklisted. So by sending a bit of crypto to the guy that figured out who he is, if/when the government investigate and freeze accounts the guy who busted him will get their account frozen too.
Yeah that's not going to work for long. You can draw a line in 2023, and say "Every paper before this isn't AI". But in the future, you're going to have AI generated papers citing other AI slop papers that slipped through the cracks, because of the cost of doing reseach vs the cost of generating AI slop, the AI slop papers will start to outcompete the real research papers.
I find it interesting, in the last couple of years Apple started to push towards higher RAM minimums in their phones - largely associated with the roll out of Apple Intelligence. But now it's looking a lot like Apple Intelligence will never be delivered and by the time they roll something out it'll be Gemini backed. So I wonder if that was kind of a waste and now they're going to get hit double for it with the sky-rocketing RAM prices. Presumably on-device inference is largely dead at this point. I can't imagine Apple releasing a device that goes backwards on RAM though.
> I can't imagine Apple releasing a device that goes backwards on RAM though.
Why not? Apple does not usually make a big deal about including RAM numbers in their presentations. They don't even list it on their official specs page for their phones. Apple does not really have that much RAM in their phones, only 12GB for their 17 Pro. Some of their competitors explicitly tout 16GB.
Sure, the tech media will try to make it a big deal, but most consumers will not care if the phone performs better than their previous phones.
I guess the good news for Apple is their margins are so high to begin with that they can probably swallow it for a while before pushing increases onto their consumers who will probably largely be happy that it improves the perceived status of their favoured brand
This is fascinating. Whenever I heard about matrix management it always seemed a bit weird that you have essentially two organisational structures in tension with each other - the function group lead is always going to be in tension with the product managers over how their products are resourced. I guess an obvious failure mode is you end up just stripping on direction out which is what they're doing here. One thing that goes unsaid in these situations is often the decision making for how that's done is quite political.
No, they also access information through Facebook owned by Trump ally Zuckerberg, X owned by Trump doner and DOGE former official Musk, or via media organisations like CBS who have recently had their editorial standards changed to be more friendly to the regime. It's fine though people can here about the regime through neutral pundits like Jimmy Kimmel, who definitely hasn't come under any pressure to comply with the regime talking points. It's alright we've got NPR, which is definitely not under attack.
If you haven't noticed a sweeping attack on free speech in US media, then I just don't think you're paying attention, and playing it off as if it's "just" Tiktok is at best disingenuous.
A CDN, a static HTML5 player and a very good lawyer for when the DOJ comes knocking, like they did with Hannah Natanson, Jacob Frey and Tim Walz.
You'd do that I guess, right, if you saw something happening you thought was bad - you'd run straight into a legal fight that could bankrupt you? Nah, you're a tough guy on the internet! Nothing scares you!
If they were going to bankrupt you with a legal fight, how would posting the video on Tiktok help? Do you think Tiktok is going to assume the liability for what you post? Because they aren't.
Well isn't it interesting that at the same time that these social media platforms were getting off the ground, the VC class decided founder control was super important and now essentially all of the biggest companies in the world are in the sole control of men who do questionable activies on islands in the Caribbean.
Now you wonder what these companies are doing to shape events, and the answer is that Tim Cook is attending a private showing of a PR project for the wife of the president premiering on a competing streaming network whilst people hold vigils for the people that the regime has murdered.
Back in the late-90s, I was watching a panel on CNN discussing the new "information age". Everyone talked optimistically about how the internet was gonna benefit humanity because people would be better informed - only the best information would make its way to the top, all the crap would be filtered out. But there was one naysayer, and I'll never forget what he said: More information is not better information. Others on the panel couldn't believe his cynicism; said he didn't understand people. I think about that a lot these days.
Alternate explanation: they are paying intense attention... to the palms that are pressed desperately against their eye sockets as they attempt to See No Evil.
It's quite a simple story, wall street likes companies that make profits - and by that I mean that they receive more in revenue than they spend. Now there's really a few ways of making more profits.
You can invest (spend more) and hope that that investment yields more revenue down the line. This is bad. Wall street doesn't like this, because you're definitely making less profits now because you're investing money you could've given back in profits, you might make more in the future - but no guarantee. Risky! Wall street hates this!
You can raise margins. This can be good. As long as demand is fairly inelastic this will pretty directly translate into profits. But you can only do this for so long, by definition you just always want to do this until you can't any more, so you've probably already pulled this lever as much as you can.
You can cut costs. This is good. Wall street likes this. You definitely get more profits right now. It could impact your ongoing growth, but that's just maybe! You can be more efficient right? And even if it does impact your future growth that's not going to show up for years. So right now, you're more valuable!
When you look at Musk's portfolio there was a point where things were looking shaky. He'd massively overpaid for X, Tesla performance was struggling and had huge head winds partly because he had needed to come up with money for the acquisition. It was really quite funny watching those bankers get their faces ripped off on the debt financing.
But then Musk did what he's done repeatedly before - shuffled around money to bail out one of his bad bets. Just like Tesla saved Solarcity.
Today, let's just say that X is worthless. It doesn't matter, they bailed out the investors with the xAI move anyway. It doesn't matter, xAI gets bubble valuation- raised a 20bn round, and burns cash in a way that X just never would. It's looking highly likely they can roll up xAI and Tesla to essentially bail out Tesla (and in the process give Musk the control of Tesla he wants). And even if that side of operations fall through entirely, he's got SpaceX/Starlink which would on it's own make him a multi-billonaire.
Money is just not an important factor when it comes to X, what is important is his ability to push his political agenda and he literally has congresspeople saying they would punish Britain if it enforces it's regulations on X.
That article is from 1 week before xAI merged with X at a valuation that essentially just bailed out the original investors but because the companies are private there’s no legal reason the deal had to be economical.
The reason they are able to very efficiently send a dozen ICE agents to a random persons home to hold them at gun point until they can prove their immigration status is because the goal is to send ICE agents around holding people at gun point and they're happy if they happen to also get it right sometimes.
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