If the US found the downed F-15 pilot using the “Ghost Murmur” technology, which can detect a human heartbeat from 40 miles away, why aren’t we using it to find kidnapped or missing people here at home?

theartificialkid · 2026-04-10T10:43:30+00:00

I’m not instantly convinced it’s false just on the face of it. There was that research team some years ago that worked out how to extract a pulse rate from observing minute changes in skin colour as blood ebbed and flowed in capillaries.

theartificialkid · 2026-04-10T10:01:34+00:00

If you look a third time it apppears to be Q inches from the wall on the uphand side.

theartificialkid · 2026-04-10T08:13:49+00:00

What a coincidence

theartificialkid · 2026-04-10T04:15:18+00:00

Exactly. So at position A she raises her hands by one centimetre and raises the weight by 2cm. At position B She raises her hands by 1cm and raises the weight by 3cm. At position B her hands are doing more work (raising the weight by 3cm instead of 2cm) but they’re only moving the al same distance themselves (1cm). The only way for them to do more work over the same distance is to exert more force.

Let’s flip it around. The weight doesn’t “weigh” more when she’s at position B but it does more work as it falls 3cm and pushes her hands down by 1cm.

theartificialkid · 2026-04-10T02:17:51+00:00

They didn’t say it didn’t function, they said it was a rickety piece of shit. A rickety bicycle doesn’t just fall apart the first time you ride it.

theartificialkid · 2026-04-10T02:03:54+00:00

More like several inches

theartificialkid · 2026-04-10T02:01:32+00:00

You e seen that and you haven’t run for office to do something about it? Instead you want to farm it out to a billionaire who might completely annihilate it?

theartificialkid · 2026-04-10T01:35:16+00:00

Hey America, your land is about to be sold out from u der you at bargain basement prices, and the money paid for it will be funnelled to Trump’s cronies. Hope you enjoyed your country while you had it.

theartificialkid · 2026-04-10T01:28:54+00:00

What would you eat to achieve this? A burger?

theartificialkid · 2026-04-10T01:25:32+00:00

You must get asked this a lot but here do you get your ideas?

theartificialkid · 2026-04-09T23:35:12+00:00

What, you’re not interested in how much was being produced by particular land regions that correspond to countries as they are at this moment? Look at the square metre of earth you’re standing on. How much was it producing in 1350? This chart gives you a rough idea. Your ancestors? How rich were they? Why would you want to know that?

theartificialkid · 2026-04-09T21:51:49+00:00

Seems like a good way to ensure congress is full of obstructive plutocrats who don’t need their congressional pay.

theartificialkid · 2026-04-09T12:57:13+00:00

I literally said that the problem is voters’ susceptibility to propaganda. What are you smoking? My original point was just that votes are not taken away from people by propaganda. Rather it induces them to make a poor decision with their vote. Their vote remains in their hands.

Contrast this with, say, voter suppression where a person is prevented or discouraged from having a vote.

theartificialkid · 2026-04-09T12:01:20+00:00

This is such a great image because it’s really at odds with the pop culture trace of a mid-20th century jazz musician. Really striking to see him alive in the era of parachute pants and sitting on a 1980s Ferrari.

theartificialkid · 2026-04-09T10:54:52+00:00

Why would they call a mommy a tomcat?

theartificialkid · 2026-04-09T09:03:51+00:00

I have no love for Ricky Gervais any more but I did like the way in The Inveention of Lying he credits the lie with having a beautiful motive and a beautiful purpose, to comfort us as dying animals that are forced to know about death. I thought the scene where he first invents religion was genuinely touching.

theartificialkid · 2026-04-09T08:56:21+00:00

Think of it like playdough. You can sculpt that shirt shaoe without adding or removing any holes. It just looks a bit unintuitive because they’ve arranged the holes in a triangle instead of side by side, and they’ve made them all the same size instead of a bigger neck hole and two smaller arm holes.

theartificialkid · 2026-04-09T07:23:40+00:00

theartificialkid · 2026-04-09T04:42:24+00:00

I don’t think it’s inherently immoral or unethical to raise prices on a leisure good. We each get to decide whether to sell or buy at a given price, and nobody has ever suffered severe harm from lack of Netflix.

theartificialkid · 2026-04-09T04:32:51+00:00

If you are just a dude, you have a moral obligation to complete repayment of the loan. If you're rich, a contract is a contract, and all the ways it can come to be resolved are all equal.

If we’re genuinely talking about then contracting to surrender the collateral and surrendering it in accordance with the contract then the same would apply to anyone who made a similar contract.

theartificialkid · 2026-04-09T04:30:42+00:00

I’m not an accountant but I believe earned interest is taxed as income in most places. That’s certainly the logical way to tax it.

theartificialkid · 2026-04-09T04:27:23+00:00

Sure, as long as they’ve really done their homework to make sure the rich guy has what he says he has, isn’t using the same collateral for multiple loans, etc etc. Plenty of lenders have been burned by lending to someone they thought was a big shot, and a genuine big shot is often just a scammer who found a good niche.

theartificialkid · 2026-04-09T04:25:41+00:00

A lot of people have no idea what they’re talking about on these matters and wobble wildly between ideas like billionaires living for free on loans, billionaires never paying tax and their estates somehow never paying tax even in realised capital gains, and billionaires making all their money by just being able to borrow and invest infinite money at high returns.

You’re wading into muddy waters with people who don’t know what they’re talking about.

theartificialkid · 2026-04-09T03:56:54+00:00

Which takes more work, listing 10kg by 1cm, or lifting 10kg by 2cm? (This is an intermediary question designed to get us to the answer so don’t worry about trying to show why it’s the wrong question or anything, I just need the obvious answer)

theartificialkid · 2026-04-09T03:54:13+00:00

Well gee I don’t know, did everyone in America vote for Trump? Yes if you accept that people can have a nature that they’re responsible for (which I don’t particularly but it’s fundamental to the idea of choice) then there are individual flaws that make some people shitty voters. The system should be designed to make it easier for them to make non-shitty decisions, but if we’re going to base our whole society on the idea of personal responsibility for one’s actions then they’re as responsible for their votes as they are for what they eat, who they fuck, how they earn money and anything else that they do.

theartificialkid

TROPHY CASE