without trusting anyone.

Well, except of course the entity that gave you the hardware. And the entity that preinstalled and/or gave you the OS image. And that that entity wasn't fooled into including malicious code in some roundabout way.

like it or not, there's currently no real way to use any significant amount of computing power without trusting someone. And usually several hundreds/thousands of someones.

The best you can hope for is to focus the trust into a small number of entities that have it in their own self interest to prove worthy of that trust.

I'm sorry that my attempt to find out what you want to be able to provide useful help annoyed you.

Don't you have it exactly the wrong way around?

Also, since the hate itself is already irrational, any additional "quirks" in that hate shouldn't be surprising anyone.

I find that to be a tricky thought experiment.

Can you run a country in a way that peppers the general population with "all is well" propaganda thoroughly and still manages to capture all the necessary information to make properly informed decisions at some high level?

You'd need some "elite" layer of people who get to see unfiltered, honest information, but how would you even collect that information if even local, low-level government actors are subject to (and meant to believe) the propaganda?

Basically what I'm asking is: if I ignored moral concerns, is there a world where keeping the majority ignorant could actually lead to more efficiency than letting knowledge of the state of things spread?

Have you heard of TV tropes? It's a wiki of ... well, tropes in story telling (warning: for some people following a single link to https://tvtropes.org/ means they find themselves half a day later with 32 tabs open and having read up on all kind of story tropes while having forgotten what time is).

On the one hand it will help you recognize the tropes and figure out how many of them are used in all story telling (yes, even the good ones), but on the other hand it can help appreciate that it's not the tropes or the broad strokes that make up a story, but how well it's told.

There's a reason there are so many movies/stories/plays that are just re-tellings of some Shakespear play or another: it doesn't matter that the outcome is known from the start. The journey and how well it's told is what's important.

So basically: "Oh yeah, that guy's gonna betray me. I wonder how and why exactly!"

I like to imagine that whenever there was a particularly slow day or someone was particularly stressed, they just opened the prepared article and tweaked and improved it a bit ... it's probably the collaborative work of many people over many years.

(Edit: this was meant as a reply to an apparently now-deleted (?) comment about why he deserves the anonymity of having his last name abbreviated).

He deserves it for the same reason a single mother raising a kid that gets involved in an armed robbery deserves it: basic human rights.

The idea of those is that they are universal and you'd have to have a very good reason to supersede them. If they are not universal, then they are just "suggestions" and then we end up with exactly the kind of society that this guy wanted.

And yes, being a major political actor is a good reason to lose that anonymity (which is also how it's handled in European media, there is no reporting on Angela M. or Emmanuel M.).

But this guy is a not a public figure in any reasonable sense any more. He's a stupid old guy that was one of the founding members of a extreme-right splinter party of a right-wing popular party in 1967. That party was banned in 1988. So it (and he) has not been relevant to anything for 35 years. He tried to become relevant with this stunt, fucked around and found out.

In fact, reporting on his full name is probably what he wants: publicity is what he was attempting to achieve, but anonymity is what he deserves (both as a basic human right and as punishment IMO).

Vielleicht weil die Datenlage schon lange nicht mehr das Problem ist?

Studien und Informationen haben wir schon lange. Sehr lange. Ja klar, rein technisch ist "mehr verifizierte Information zu einem wichtigen Thema" schon was gutes. Aber was wir wirklich brauchen (und zwar schon vor 10, 20, 30, ... Jahren) sind tatsächliche Veränderungen.

You only need to follow this advice if you (the player) have an antagonistic relationship with your DM.

Your character might suffer from the ideas you give them, but the player should get enjoyment from the situations you got.

More often than not the best answer to "Wouldn't it be hilarious if X happened?" is "Would it? Let's see! ..."

Jetzt hab ich schon zweimal gelesen "Echtzeitüberwachung soll in der EU nichts mehr kosten" und gedacht "na toll, nicht mal die Kosten werden die jetzt aufhalten ...".

I know at least one FAANG company that had (has? don't know) a policy of not using any hardware that was ever used in travel to China. If you had to go there on a business trip, you got a loaner laptop (and got your account severely restricted) and when you got back they wiped and discarded the laptop.

Always has been.

The "ham-fisted" assassinations have always been about just the tiniest sliver of deniability while definitely sending the message "we can reach you" and not making a secret about who "we" is.