So why do they campaign individually? Why do they talk about their values or priorities at all? Why does it matter that they live in their electorate? If you’re just getting Hivemind Unit #173, why maintain the fiction of local representatives?

You vote for the person, you should get the person.

Interesting. We mostly use DBAN at work because it’s a one-button process you can walk away from, and it has drivers for hardware old enough that we’re disposing it. Nobody’s ever selected the fancy super-paranoid stuff as far as I know.

If the hardware won’t boot, we take a layer-1 approach instead :D

Most of these answers are mostly right: deleting a file on disk doesn’t actually erase the data, it just marks the space as available to write over - meaning that so long as nobody’s used the space since, you can go retrieve the contents with an undelete utility.

Most of the time, people don’t care - but if for instance you’re selling the PC or there’s highly sensitive information involved, that might not be good enough.

As such, there are utilities that can go out and specifically overwrite the contents of a file with all zeroes, so ensure that it’s dead-dead - and there are other utilities that can do the same to an entire disk.

There’s one wrinkle: Magnetic HDDs don’t reliably erase and overwrite completely in a single pass; just like rubbing out pencil writing, it can leave faint impressions under the new content, and it is actually possible (with serious effort by forensic recovery people) to glean some of the previous content. If there’s serious money / security at stake, a simple overwrite is not enough, so there’s software that certifiably-randomly scribbles over each bit, seven times over, making the chances of recovering the original astronomically slim. Again, this can be done for individual files or the entire disk.

SSDs aren’t prone to leftover impressions, thankfully - what’s gone is gone. And they have one other neat feature: while a magnetic disk can only be erased one bit at a time, so large disks can take hours - SSDs can just open the floodgates and ground every cell at once, fully erasing the entire disk in an instant.

This instant-erase, while comprehensive… returns before you’ve even taken your finger off the ENTER key, so fast it feels like it can’t possibly have done anything, it must be broken, how can I trust it? So BIOS manufacturers hype it up, call it something impressive to underline that it’s big and powerful, and actually impose a 10-second countdown to make it feel like it’s doing something complicated.

Any of these different things have been called ‘secure erase’ at various points, so it’s a little context dependent. But from the end-user perspective: this data is getting shredded then incinerated then added to cattle feed; it’s not coming back.

Israel: “lol oopsie woopsie, never mind”

Leave. If nothing else, you’ll get to call yourself Wasraeli.

mmm yes, slavery. Delightful.

‘Racism’ is a good enough umbrella term for ‘being shitty to people because of some demographic category’. Whether the basis is ethnic, national, religious or anything else doesn’t seem like an important distinction. Nobody considers ‘race’ to be a useful term any more, after all.

That horse bolted decades ago; the term is lost.

Just call it racism and be done. We don’t need specific terms for different demographics.

Imagine making a whole chicken out of chicken-nugget goo.

It will look like a roast chicken. It will taste alarmingly like chicken. It absolutely will not be a roast chicken.

The sad thing is that humans do a hell of a lot of this, a hell of a lot of the time. Look how well a highschooler who hasn’t actually read the book can churn out a book report. Flick through, soak up the flavour and texture of the thing, read the blurb on the back to see what it’s about, keep in mind the bloated over-flowery language that teachers expect, and you can bullshit your way to an A.

Only problem is, you can’t use the results for anything productive, which is what people try to use GenAI for.

You are literally helping them bomb the intended recipients of that aid, you smug hypocritical bastards.

Oh no, some nazis could get hurt

I know about Teardrop. I’m talking about the European version, the third one in the linked video - and specifically about one effect they’re using in it.

Your mum.

no, I’m asking about Israeli Israelis. Where are the ordinary city-dwellers getting up and marching to protest the ongoing slaughter, as you’ll find in just about every other city in the world?

So where are the protests about it?

When Israelis give a damn about the ongoing genocide, lmk.

So, here’s the thing.

Regardless of a hundred different ethical and meta-ethical theories that people espouse, what everyone actually reacts to with outrage is plausibly-generalised threat perception.

If someone’s actions are directly threatening you, you’ll feel anger and/or fear.

If someone’s actions don’t affect you or yours, but :stuff like that: being commonplace definitely would, then you will feel outrage.

If I kill people and take their stuff, you’ll be very upset: you’re a people, and you like stuff - and if we let the general case happen, the specifics could come bite you in the ass soon enough.

If I kill and eat animals, most people don’t consider it plausibly worrying that they or little Timmy will be next. We have great big enormous taboos against eating people, so that slope just don’t slip - and as a result they just don’t have a problem with it.

(If I go and torment animals for lulz, then that’s a very different case; people who are cruel to animals are often even worse to people, after all - and so people see that as monstrous. And again, if you want to manufacture consent for some atrociy, the easiest way is to reclassify the victims as qualitatively different. Oh good lord no, we’re not killing people and taking their stuff, that would be awful. Nonono, we’re killing :group: and taking their stuff, totally different proposition…)

So when vegans are horrified at people killing and eating (or breeding and milking, or whatever) animals, and go to great lengths to try and elicit that same outrage, there’s a disconnect and dissonance going on. The non-vegans don’t have the emotional trigger of perceived threat, so to have them keep trying regardless is seen as pearl-clutching and sleeve-tugging, like making up a sad story and loudly demanding that everyone weep about it on the spot. It’s uniquely annoying. And when you combine that with (perceived) moral superiority and a hypercritical attitude, it comes across as something like a Karen with BPD. It’s calling red on someone else’s scene; everyone is supposed to cater to the vegan’s emotional distress when there’s no corresponding emotion in themselves, and honestly that just provokes people to schoolyard bullying.

That’s at the core of it, I think. There’s a bunch of other annoyances around it, but I think they’re mostly after the fact.

Honestly if you want to make people feel that general existential threat, frame it in terms of ecological damage. Animal agriculture is horribly unsustainable and causes huge enviromnental problems, not least of which are are a truly gigantic carbon footprint. Pushing that angle would actually stand a chance of being effective, tbh. But annoyingly (from the outside), it seems that the most vocal vegans don’t want people to be outraged on that basis, they want them to be outraged for the poor little lambikins, and will settle for no less. I can see their point, and I can be a stubborn bastard myself about not settling, but jesus fuck it’s annoying.

Not a vegan, though I’ve been mostly-veggie for the last couple of years for health reasons. It’s interesting how it shapes your perceptions; eating meat doesn’t seem wrong to me, but it has started seeming weirdly excessive and uncreative.

Consulting: “what are you going to do about it? Yeah, didn’t think so.”

Obvious Israeli shill is obvious.