As far as I can tell the main crime Palantir commits is actually delivering what it's asked for, instead of just stringing the government along like the other contractors do.
The other thing missing is that a 1960's hardback is a much higher quality item than most modern hardbacks- sewn binding, nicer paper, better cover materials, etc. Hard covers today are cheaply made from inferior materials.
Like I was writing about (for example) clothes on here the other day, but it applies to lots of stuff: it's really hard to compare a typical example of many kinds of good from the early or mid 20th century to "the same" typical example of that good today, without digging into the details, because the typical example today is often a lot worse-made but in ways that aren't apparent just from looking at a wide-shot image of the two things. Often it takes destructive tear-downs to really get at the differences (as it would to do a deep comparison of book binding quality) if you don't have access to watch the manufacturing processes directly.
Though inflation's really bumpy across categories of products (largely due to microelectronics tending to drop in price over time, often while also increasing in at least some measures of quality, during the past half-century or so) it's clear to me that it's a lot higher than generally reckoned for many specific goods. Yeah you can get stuff that's "the same" price, or maybe "only" 2-3x higher(!) after nominal inflation adjustment, but if it's also made with worse materials and processes, and getting one as-good as the historical example actually costs 10x as much as the supposed inflation-adjusted price... well, that's worrisome.
(To be fair, though, pocket "pulp" paperbacks of the mid century were generally terribly made, certainly not any better than the now-on-its-way-out mass market paperback format of today; it's not that every type of good was better-made in the typical case, back then, just some)
The real problem is books are too cheap- as in cheaply made perfect bound pieces of shit with a bit of cardboard glued on that don't open correctly filled with nasty lightweight textureless bleached paper covered with mis-registered text and blobs of ink from under-maintained presses. We're being charged a premium for a demonstrably inferior product.
The thing with cockroaches is that if even a single one is seen in the dining room and someone calls environmental health, regardless of the restaurant's prestige, they close it with immediate effect until they get their act together and a food sanitation inspection clears them.
At the end, everyone feels better, in particular the customers.
In those types of reviews/audits, documentation is the first indicator of whether a security organization has their act together. It's about building a trust relationship between the accreditor and contractor that will have to endure for years, as nation-state level actors throw their resources at finding vulnerabilities. MS couldn't do this or couldn't be bothered to do this. So shit documentation -> shit security processes and operations -> shit security -> shit cloud product in a government context. So the title wasn't that much of a stretch.
