> This is according to data compiled by an international investigation coordinated by Follow The Money, a platform for independent journalism, and in which EL PAÍS participated.
The catchphrase "Follow the money" originated in a docuseries related to Nixon and the watergate scandal, but was also Giovanni Falcone's investigative method, based on tracing Mafia through their money laundering initiatives.
Not sure why this matters as most pension index funds also include Meta by the same lines... everyone buying into these indexes is complicit, no surprise
We've successfully campaigned to make many of those same investors divest from fossil fuel investments. I don't see why investments in crazy surveillance tech should get a pass (and yes, Meta absolutely falls in the same bucket)
This. Giving markets free reign, usually doesn't result in alignment with long term best interests or political objectives.
It took years of activism and voting with our money to get banks, pension funds and similar institutions to stop funding cluster munitions, land mines, nukes, oil, tabacco. Now big tech and some AI companies are on the radar.
Land mines and cluster munitions have been essential for Ukraine to defend itself against the Russian invasion. Several other European countries including Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and Poland have recently withdrawn from the Anti-Personnel Mine Ban Treaty. It's cheap and easy to for activists to pretend to be morally superior when they're sitting safely behind computers and don't have to deal with real world consequences.
Urm, that they're invaluable in an active warzone is unquestionable.
The issue with this tech is that they - at least historically - didn't have an expiration date. So if that war ends and you let your children play in the woods... Maybe occasionally one won't be coming back anymore.
That's the reason why they got a bad image. Because that's literally what happened post ww2 - for decades.
Maybe nowadays they could built them with a forced timer for exploding - if they did, great! If not, your descendants may consider you insane for that opinion in a few decades
I've been regularly thinking about Apartheid-era South Africa. It was a massive Thing for me as a Catholic school kid in the '80s because it seemed (to me) so clearly wrong yet accepted. There were clearly "lefties" making it visible without a lot happening but then "How did you go bankrupt? Two ways: Gradually, then suddenly" happened. And a lot of it started with university students petitioning their schools to divest and that spreading. It will not be fast, but these things can happen and we should start to build a framework for it.
And yes, yes, Enemies Lists are fraught with problems and have a history of eating themselves, etc. But the one thing I know is worse is not trying.
If you're asking me to rate things on a scale where human freedom comes behind some economic measure, you are asking the wrong person.
On edit: it would be nice when these GOTCHAs are offered, if the offerer stopped and asked themselves, "Did centuries of colonialism denying education to the natives have any bearing on what I am asking?"
I know you meant this sarcastically, but unironically yes. GDP has more than doubled since the end of apartheid, and it has the strongest economy on the continent
LMAO, now normalize it against world change in GDP since the end of apartheid. Pre-apartheid they were beating the world average, all times after apartheid they have been behind world average.
Especially the last 20 years, it is falling off a cliff in relative performance. Yeah the post-apartheid peak was 10% above the apartheid peak from the 80s.... unfortunately if you can only get 10% better in 40 years it actually represents a massive failure relative to the rest of the world.
I'd agree that apartheid was bad, but it seems to be coupled with other factors that led them to fall behind on the world stage. I'm guessing the kind of ideology that accompanies literal filled stadiums shouting "kill the boer farmer" is not so far fetched from the kind of ideology that resulted in Zimbabwe going for broke.
>I'm guessing the kind of ideology that accompanies literal filled stadiums shouting "kill the boer farmer" is not so far fetched from the kind of ideology that resulted in Zimbabwe going for broke.
Zimbabwe's failure is pretty clear: total corruption under one man. South Africa, post-Apartheid, has an unhappy history of corruption as well. But it is confounding how one reaches for the "anti-white racism" explanation before considering how centuries of colonial "oppression" (which a fun euphemism for violence and denying education) might lead to a situation where government functions poorly when you abandon ship and leave your government setup in place for people with no experience and no mentor to figure out.
> (and yes, Meta absolutely falls in the same bucket)
s/Meta/FAANG
Decoupling Meta and Palantir from your 401k would not derisk your retirement from surveillance technology. You'd have to kick out Microsoft and Apple and Google next, at which point you've already forfeit most of your portfolio's growth.
The morality of it aside, Palantir is probably a much safer investment bet than most others in the AI space. They're older and more established than a new startup picking up the steepness of the hype curve with a half-baked idea, but they're also newer and more agile than an aging tech giant that suffers from the innovator's dilemma and a ton of bloat. They have a strong reputation among their target market and they've been building a sound business and a lot of tooling and infrastructure on Big Data and machine learning for well over a decade.
I would feel icky investing in them but any comparison to junk bonds would be the last of my concerns.
You pay them money, and they absolve you of your sins. That’s what Peter Thiel is on about.
That’s the technological progress he’s charioting us into his political theocracy with. The ability to label anyone that stands in his way “the Antichrist” which is just another loophole exploitation of the patriot act.
Of course they know, their same governments have signed some kind of five eyes intelligence treaties before. Palantir will probably have new customers now that Europe is re-arming.
In any case these same governments are probably also approving the purchase of Huawei cell tower equipment.
Their own countries' representatives, and certainly their intelligence services, are also CIA enterprises/fronts. And the CIA (and the US diplomatic corps as a whole) are just representatives of elites, and their sole purpose is to protect those elites' business interests. At the dawn of the project they only employed elite children and ex-Nazis.
That's the other major flaw in the "decouple from the US with European alternatives" marketing campaign. These "US" companies don't have any more loyalty to the US than they have to your country. Their investors are from all over the world. Their employees and executives are from all over the world. If your "European alternatives" to a technology-enabled total surveillance state are owned by the same people, isn't the entire conversation silly? Are you arguing over whether the PO Box is in Delaware or in Germany?
NATO is more obedient to US intelligence than Palantir. Palantir gives orders to US intelligence. The purpose of NATO is to indulge the unearned sense of superiority of EU/British citizens and their denial that the reason they were partially occupied by Russia is because they launched a war of extermination on Russia that killed 20 million civillians. It indulges it in order to manipulate guilty Europeans to do what Palantir wants.
The paranoia that has been whipped up in the European middle-class about Russia is similar in nature to the paranoia that gets whipped up in the US about black Americans. White Americans imagine that black people are going to rise up and kill them all because they can't help but imagine how they would feel about being enslaved and having the children of those enslavers walking around with the fruits of that, calling them lazy. Non-Jewish Europeans imagine how they would feel if the Soviet Union had invaded Europe, walked into tens or hundreds of villages, rounded up all the citizens and put them into a barn, then set the barn on fire. "The USSR must want to kill us all," they think.
It's only natural that they call the Americans to save them. We literally preserved Spain (the initial event of the war) for the fascists, and West Germany for the Nazis that we didn't feel were valuable enough to import to the US itself.
This is an interesting jumble of truths and illusions (not to fault you, but illusions as in deceptive perspectives imposed on you, while at the same time claiming that others are falling for deceptions/propaganda). You are almost right on several things, but the perspective would have to shift to see things for what they really are, how they function and why.
I will not bother addressing most of the things you listed that require a perspective shift, because I am not trying to start a debate or conjure the ire of people's cognitive dissonance; but knowing quite a bit about NATO, let me just put it this way; in most abusive and delusional dynamics, what one party believes is true, is usually really not only advantageous to the other party, but usually also not even close to the perceived nature of the relationship. European NATO "patterns" don't get to take their families to the USA for government subsidized vacations and even live in the USA just out of the generosity of our hearts.
The catchphrase "Follow the money" originated in a docuseries related to Nixon and the watergate scandal, but was also Giovanni Falcone's investigative method, based on tracing Mafia through their money laundering initiatives.
It took years of activism and voting with our money to get banks, pension funds and similar institutions to stop funding cluster munitions, land mines, nukes, oil, tabacco. Now big tech and some AI companies are on the radar.
https://apnews.com/article/poland-land-mines-ottawa-conventi...
The issue with this tech is that they - at least historically - didn't have an expiration date. So if that war ends and you let your children play in the woods... Maybe occasionally one won't be coming back anymore.
That's the reason why they got a bad image. Because that's literally what happened post ww2 - for decades.
Maybe nowadays they could built them with a forced timer for exploding - if they did, great! If not, your descendants may consider you insane for that opinion in a few decades
As for descendants, well the people killed by Russian attacks won't have any more descendants. So that point is kind of moot.
And yes, yes, Enemies Lists are fraught with problems and have a history of eating themselves, etc. But the one thing I know is worse is not trying.
On edit: it would be nice when these GOTCHAs are offered, if the offerer stopped and asked themselves, "Did centuries of colonialism denying education to the natives have any bearing on what I am asking?"
I know you meant this sarcastically, but unironically yes. GDP has more than doubled since the end of apartheid, and it has the strongest economy on the continent
https://travel.gc.ca/destinations/south-africa
https://mybroadband.co.za/news/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/DG...
Especially the last 20 years, it is falling off a cliff in relative performance. Yeah the post-apartheid peak was 10% above the apartheid peak from the 80s.... unfortunately if you can only get 10% better in 40 years it actually represents a massive failure relative to the rest of the world.
I'd agree that apartheid was bad, but it seems to be coupled with other factors that led them to fall behind on the world stage. I'm guessing the kind of ideology that accompanies literal filled stadiums shouting "kill the boer farmer" is not so far fetched from the kind of ideology that resulted in Zimbabwe going for broke.
At least we have finally settled that.
>I'm guessing the kind of ideology that accompanies literal filled stadiums shouting "kill the boer farmer" is not so far fetched from the kind of ideology that resulted in Zimbabwe going for broke.
Zimbabwe's failure is pretty clear: total corruption under one man. South Africa, post-Apartheid, has an unhappy history of corruption as well. But it is confounding how one reaches for the "anti-white racism" explanation before considering how centuries of colonial "oppression" (which a fun euphemism for violence and denying education) might lead to a situation where government functions poorly when you abandon ship and leave your government setup in place for people with no experience and no mentor to figure out.
s/Meta/FAANG
Decoupling Meta and Palantir from your 401k would not derisk your retirement from surveillance technology. You'd have to kick out Microsoft and Apple and Google next, at which point you've already forfeit most of your portfolio's growth.
I would feel icky investing in them but any comparison to junk bonds would be the last of my concerns.
They’re a guilt-free hands-washing service.
You pay them money, and they absolve you of your sins. That’s what Peter Thiel is on about.
That’s the technological progress he’s charioting us into his political theocracy with. The ability to label anyone that stands in his way “the Antichrist” which is just another loophole exploitation of the patriot act.
An ai company lol
In any case these same governments are probably also approving the purchase of Huawei cell tower equipment.
That's the other major flaw in the "decouple from the US with European alternatives" marketing campaign. These "US" companies don't have any more loyalty to the US than they have to your country. Their investors are from all over the world. Their employees and executives are from all over the world. If your "European alternatives" to a technology-enabled total surveillance state are owned by the same people, isn't the entire conversation silly? Are you arguing over whether the PO Box is in Delaware or in Germany?
NATO is more obedient to US intelligence than Palantir. Palantir gives orders to US intelligence. The purpose of NATO is to indulge the unearned sense of superiority of EU/British citizens and their denial that the reason they were partially occupied by Russia is because they launched a war of extermination on Russia that killed 20 million civillians. It indulges it in order to manipulate guilty Europeans to do what Palantir wants.
The paranoia that has been whipped up in the European middle-class about Russia is similar in nature to the paranoia that gets whipped up in the US about black Americans. White Americans imagine that black people are going to rise up and kill them all because they can't help but imagine how they would feel about being enslaved and having the children of those enslavers walking around with the fruits of that, calling them lazy. Non-Jewish Europeans imagine how they would feel if the Soviet Union had invaded Europe, walked into tens or hundreds of villages, rounded up all the citizens and put them into a barn, then set the barn on fire. "The USSR must want to kill us all," they think.
It's only natural that they call the Americans to save them. We literally preserved Spain (the initial event of the war) for the fascists, and West Germany for the Nazis that we didn't feel were valuable enough to import to the US itself.
I will not bother addressing most of the things you listed that require a perspective shift, because I am not trying to start a debate or conjure the ire of people's cognitive dissonance; but knowing quite a bit about NATO, let me just put it this way; in most abusive and delusional dynamics, what one party believes is true, is usually really not only advantageous to the other party, but usually also not even close to the perceived nature of the relationship. European NATO "patterns" don't get to take their families to the USA for government subsidized vacations and even live in the USA just out of the generosity of our hearts.