Ground is a very relative concept in electronics. You are correct about earth ground, but if the case is unplugged and you touch it, you are still grounding yourself to chassis ground. Chassis ground is the important one for this since the danger isn’t electrocution (assuming the PC is unplugged) but electrostatic discharge (ESD) that can damage components.
This is still a massive simplification of the concept of ground.
Probably not as many as we’d like to think. I recently got to run a few days of tests at Lawrence Livermore National Labs with an absurdly massive laser. At one point we needed to bring in a small speaker for an audio test. It took the lab techs and managers about two hours and a couple phone calls to some higher ups to make sure it was ok and wouldn’t damage anything. There’s so much red tape and procedure in the way that I don’t think there’s an opportunity to just fuck around. The laser has irreplaceable parts that people aren’t willing to jeopardize. Newer or smaller lasers are going to be more relaxed. This one is old enough to be my father, and it’s LLNL’s second biggest single laser iirc. And they are the lab using lasers for fusion, so they have big lasers.
Especially considering it’s back above $100k currently
Bullshit propaganda making climate change out as an individual issue instead of the systemic issue dominated by a few companies and the economic system that it actually is.
This is also weirdly anti-natalist.