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Palantir is under immense economic pressure to deliver this integration at high quality on time. This incentive structure, combined the publicly traded nature of the company, risks corrupting its core founding goals of embodying the evil of Sauron on earth and hurting as many people as it can, as badly as possible. However, Thiel is an extremely competent, mission focussed leader and I agree with the doctors: he will get this program back on track mission-wise without pissing off shareholders too much.

(</s>? Maybe? hard to say tbh)

> The US technology company was awarded a £330 million contract in 2023 to collate operational data, including patient information and waiting lists.

That contract value is ridiculous - how many full time staff do they have on this project and what rates are they charging? How can some say ‘operational data collection’ is worth a third of a billion to NHS over the alternatives of using a third of a billion on patient healthcare and actual medical research? This needs an investigation around how this contract was ever approved.

A system whereby millions of people seek services from thousands of potential providers, with a life-or-death need to track which services and products were delivered where and when ... ya. It is a billion-dollar data problem. But that is the cost for the luxury of being able to walk into any hospital in the country and expect them to know everything about your conditions at a moment's notice.
I mean, for comparison, the UK Gov "Integrated Data Service" costed around £250m and delivered literally nothing.

Building software for and integrating 200-ish NHS trusts, who generally have their own cloud/tech stack etc, is not actually super cheap.

What were NHS execs thinking signing a contract with palantir?

Either they are completely ignorant about what palantir is and who it's owned by (would be very concerning) or they are corrupt and were bribed.

It seems a bad idea in the first place for a public organization to award a single company a huge contract for both the software licences and all the consultancy and implementation efforts.
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A contrarian view although I do dislike contracting with foreign companies for roughly similar reasons: Palantir's technology looks good and I think it probably works. Most things don't work.
Brits: left EU, drifted to US that treats them like crap. A wise choice, what can I say.

"We send the EU 350 million pounds a week. Why not send it to Palantir instead?"

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fire them, plenty would be happy to have the job
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We've banned this account for posting several egregious comments in the past few days. (This one isn't the worst; I'm just commenting here because it's the most recent.) This account holder has a history over several years of registering new accounts and continuing to post in blatant breach of the guidelines. Please stop wasting everyone's time with this practice. Very few people see the comments.
As an interesting linguistic coincidence (or not), FDP is a commonly used acronym in Portuguese, standing for "filho da puta", literally, "son of a whore", but semantically it's approximately "asshole/jerk/dickhead".
Do I as a patient get to opt my medical information out?
Any government that hands over citizen's data to a private entity, even more so one that is primarily foreign, should be investigated for being a traitor to the public. That's a general statement, not solely confined to the Palantir guys. They kind of gave it away by chosing that name alone already - damn thieves (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palant%C3%ADr).
... are we saying government should never use any corporate to deliver services? Not Outlook? No Google Workspace? No AWS? I am so confused.
palantir is a US company subject to the cloud act. patient data from 123 hospital trusts is now one mlat request away from us law enforcement regardless of where the servers sit.
Only if Palantir owns the servers and the storage. A lot of what Palantir does is on a clients infrastructure. The entire platform is installed on client infra. At least the one we have where I work is.
Why do Epsteinist Companies feel they have the right to not only billions of dollars of citizens in other countries, but also their health record data?
The Palantir brand has become incredibly toxic and, from what folks report, the software just isn’t very good either. A lot of smoke and mirrors hype not matched by substance.
> While Louis Mosley, the executive vice-chair of Palantir in the UK, maintains that such campaigns are ideologically motivated and could harm patient care,

this is EXACTLY why it is of outmost importance to own those critical systems, and not delegate them to foreign companies, especially if from a country explicitly hostile towards Europe