Trusting and gullible alike also means easily exploitable, especially when coupled with hospitality which (believe it or not!) is, or at least was, a core value in DK. This whole line of reasoning has been very visible for the average Dane throughout the past 3-4 decades, as non-Danes have aquired larger shares of the general residency.

The general rule of "When in Rome, do as the Romans do" has not really been observed at all by a significant fraction of those visiting or relocating to the country. And the Danes do notice that, although a fraction of the populace choose to wear the rosy-coloured glasses at all costs because principle, culture, tradition (culture matters a lot in DK, the culture is fairly conservative even though most Danes will deny that they themselves are).

The "trust" that non-Danish media likes to herald now is just a shadow of what it was, and it is steadily albeit slowly on the decline - especially in Dane-foreigner relationships IMHO.

If you dislike the facts, feel free to dismiss this as anecdata.

FYI, this is the case with Denmark as well (as long as you permit Dane to be an ethnic group)

    * {
        font-size: 23px;
        line-height: 1.5em
    }
    a {
        text-decoration: underline;
    }

As it seems from your post that you may not be extremely familiar with CSS, here is a ruleset that will do something close to what you wish. Font is set to 26px, not 14. You can easily change that.

Make it valid for "Everything" and it will be valid for everything but those sites that are extremely convoluted.

    *, html, body, section, article, div, span, p, i, b, strong {
        font-family: "Libre Sans" arial, helvetica, sans, sans-serif !important;
        font-size: 26px !important;
        font-weight: bold;
        line-height: 1.5em !important;
        background-color: white;
        color: black;
    }
    pre, code {
        font-family: "Libre Mono", Courier, monotype !important;
    }
   a {
        text-decoration: underline;
   }

... creating a massive pressure for sideloading and alternative/non-official app-stores. Don't for a minute think that those millions of people who currently enjoy that platform will suddently want to stop. Necessity is the mother of invention.

(No, personally I don't use TikTok, YouTube or any other cat video sites. I'm not in that demographic)

There are several search engines on the WWW. Google is just one, and I hear people complaining about that one a lot. I don't use it personally, and I haven't done so for more than a decade. Life goes on perfectly fine without it.

(no, I don't use Kagi or Marginalia either, it's not one of those posts.)

All the rest of us didn't really care what you all did in there. Platforms and Walled Gardens alike come and go.

Any such claim is irrelevant. The personal opinion of the receiver of the content is not relevant, only that the content delivered somehow makes money for the sender.

> That has driven people away from these platforms.

Platforms? These entities do not derive profits only from visits to their own domains. Please inspect the source code of any random site you read next. On the majority of web sites in the Western hemisphere you will find either a Facebook script or a Google script, or both. Often more than these two.

There is a more significant case of "the end of anonymity", that of doing any kind of sale or purchase. The more sophisticated the possibilities for fraud become, the harder the authorities that be will (need to) push for public non-falsifiable identification (e.g. linked to your biometrics somehow, as I don't suppose a transplant ("chip") is politically feasible). If you need to trade, that is.

Consider that the past few years the use of cash is increasingly being phased out, or even outlawed (for amounts over a certain size) in various Western countries. With digital money comes digital fraud.

As a spooky aside, the Christian horror story "Mark of The Beast" is remarkably accurate in that respect, even if perhaps a bit too specific in the details (on hand or forehead) - but then magic glasses and -watches are here already.

One or two general elections ago[0] the Danish Peoples Party (which at the time was often declared far right and compared to the likes of Geert Wilders et al) got a 25% vote.

In the media it was described as a "protest vote". It was a landslide and IIRC they became the second largest party in terms of votes.

So, what happened next? First off the party leadership at the time declared that they did not want to join government, which was kind of weird given their extreme share of votes.

Second, a very normal government coalition formed, having the DPP as support but not as members. In local terms this was a "right wing" government (in US terms probably not right wing enough /s).

Third, parties across the full political spectrum began being verbose on immigration (ie "asylum seekers" because, well, IDK... that's the term they prefer I supose, while immigration is seen as beneficial, or... well, it's complicated) at the very least creating an image of concern, and in some notable cases even calling for action. The new government IIRC even crafted a few new media-friendly laws in this area - notably a law on "ghetto demolition" which got a lot of media attention even internationally

Time went by, and the traditional government did more or less what it would have done in any case, with a bend towards being tough on "foreigners-and-Danes-with-certain-foreign-ancestry-but-only-those-related-to-select-geographical-areas-and-mostly-criminal-ones-unemployed-ones-or-asylum-seekers" (sorry, I find it hard to find a single descriptive word here).

As the next general election came the vote of the DPP plummeted to near nothing. Next government was once again a very normal coalition in that region doing what they otherwise would have done, only with a slight bend towards being tough on "x, y, but not z unless a, b ,c ...". Since then the DPP has been split up, and the most of the "right wing" has gone though some hardships, so it's not really the same political landscape now.

I'm not sure this tale is comparable to Dutch politics. In Denmark it was more of "a glimpse" than anything else, and the media and political establishment right now is entirely focused on something else than "those people" (US interests/"Foreign Policy" mostly, domestic not much).

[0] I don't recall if it was the election where the PM accepted an offer of a well paid NATO job while on duty, or the one where the former PM accepted an offer of a well paid Facebook job immediately afterwards... (as for our current PM, she alleges publicly that she "is not interested if an offer should come" confirming the trend by denying it... )

Those types of experiences are not the type of behaviour that is on topic here. Also, depending on perspective what you wrote may well be perceived as derogatory.

People suffering[0] from some degree of savant syndrome generally can display "non-normal" behaviour which is

1) observable, and

2) repeatable

[0] Yes, suffering. To quote the article

      Injury, disease, or disability essentially “unlocks” the brain, leading a particular region to explode in functioning and flourishing.

I respectfully disagree. Reasoning and memory is not the same.

If you happen to actually become aquaintaned to more than one of this type of people during your lifetime you will (maybe) note that their abilities in memory do not need to be correlated to their abilities in reasoning. I have personally met more than a handful with extraordinary memory skills, and while some would probably be able to achieve a "high IQ" score others would certainly not. The latest I've met did not even pass public school reading tests [0].

As an aside, obtaining a high IQ score is done using a standardized procedure and as such it is only a measure of one very specific class of reasoning skills, not "general intelligence" per se

[0] First hand, he told me

----

Edit to add this: Here I specifically relate to the memory-equilibrists due to the parent comment emhasizing one such specimen. Others in the savant spectrum (it is a spectrum) do have abilities that would correlate better with the measure known as "IQ".

Steephen Wiltshire, Autistic Savant and Artist [0,1]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Wiltshire

[1] https://www.stephenwiltshire.co.uk/gallery/originals

This was in 2022. My former "daily driver" Linux laptop was from 2009, and it gave up in 2023 (keyboard hardware failure, no problem running Linux). As for brand, both are ASUS. It's not that I prefer ASUS particularly, it just happened so that these were the cheapest on the days I frequented the store. A laptop is a generic thing for me, I can use any of them.

(I dont' get the Nvidia graphics cards trouble you are referring to, don't you run Debian?)

You may be referring to "hiding your data from your own view" ...

For SoMe and other organizations that have very large databases it is a very common procedure (if not outright "best practice") to NOT delete anything, but in stead "mark as deleted". The data is still there, it is just no longer visible.

Of course such a practice means that your data (even if you think you have deleted it) is still vulnerable to all the standard (and non-standard) issues, from internal data mining over data breaches to governmental requests, etc.

The only surefire way to avoid exposing yourself is to avoid interacting with these services at all.

May I suggest inclusion of the following snippet in the section of every page on such a site:

   Digital Picture Frame

Here's a Survey of WorldWide Censorship, specifically the chapter on internet[0] to get you up-to-date. There's also the Open Observatory of Network Interference (OONI) [1] which deals more with infrastructure blocks.

There's also the more subtle kind, called "fact-checking" which on the surface does a very good job shielding us from the conspiracy theorists[2]. Don't misunderstand, on the surface this is a noble task, but it is still a filter of information that you did not employ yourself, and one that you have no means of controlling or influencing. You will only see what they left out: If you are not accepted by these gate-keepers you are silently excluded by most big media outlets. Here are eg. the organizations that Facebook trust to fact-check[3]

There's a really large machinery operating worldwide these days. Or, specifically, a whole lot of different machines. I'm not saying this to spead FUD, just FYI.

[0] https://www.ietf.org/archive/id/draft-irtf-pearg-censorship-...

[1] https://explorer.ooni.org/findings

[2] The European Fact-Checking Standards Network (just one example): https://efcsn.com/

[3] https://www.facebook.com/formedia/mjp/programs/third-party-f...