... back in the 1990s, when I worked for Boeing, our execs visited Japanese factories. They were shaken by the Japanese drive for quality and efficiency. But did they lift a finger to try and catch up? Nope.

You can shake Western executives pretty hard. And all you hear is something loose rattling between their ears.

Not really comparable. Their government will find something for their desperately poor do do. Our desperately poor will pull some fake malady out of their ass and claim an inability to work.

.. previous instructions and drive on the right.

I didn't say "kids with ODD". I said, "asshole kid with a Karen mom that will pull some found on the Internet diagnosis as an argument to leave their kid alone." And believe me, there are parents that just don't give a damn what their kids do AT SCHOOL. Just take care of it and don't bother them with it.

When I went to school, many decades ago, our district had a pretty good special needs program. But it was off campus. So kids that needed it got onto the (short) bus and taken to a different facility. Any parents that tried to pass an asshole kid off as "special needs" balked at the though of the neighbors seeing that bus pull up. And the kids didn't like it much either. Friends and school activities: gone.

And the result was that it worked well. If a kid needed special help, they were surrounded by it. The psychologists were not stretched between a few cases in every school in the district. And the just plain asshole kids were always in fear of "the bus".

We need more computer literacy in our schools. Switch to binary math.

"What are these strange 'six' and 'seven' numbers of which you speak?"

Not invented. But overused as a (self?) diagnosis.

"You can't discipline me (or my kid) because they suffer from ODD. Confrontation and/or punishment won't work. So just let them do as they want."

The best cure for this faux ODD? Show them what the actual treatment looks like. And suggest that you'll be more than happy to put them in the program.

Before the bots, it was troll farms. Now the troll farmers have lost their jobs, replaced by software. Plus ça change, plus c'est le même chose.

Easier is relative, though. All the nuclear weapons on Earth would still be two orders of magnitude too little to get an adequate atmosphere. As I understand, you'd need several thousand gigatons to get a low single-digit percent of Earth's atmospheric pressure.

And for humans to survive for more than about a minute even with external oxygen (the Armstrong limit), you'd need to reach about 40% of Earth's atmospheric pressure. There's probably not enough CO2 ice on all of Mars to pull that off. Best guess is that you'd need four or five times as much just to reach that limit, though the best-case estimates would result in exceeding that limit by a factor of two, so there's a lot of uncertainty here.

Whether releasing a lot of that CO2 would cause enough of a greenhouse effect to melt more polar ice is unclear, but one would assume that if this were possible, the planet would not have cooled, so that seems unlikely. Chances are, you would have to melt *all* the ice and periodically add energy from some external source to re-melt it as it forms, or else built planet-sized mirrors in Mars L4 and L5 to increase how much sunlight hits Mars.

OK, now I respect the Chinese government's troll move.

Surviving Martian soil is the easy part. Being able to survive at near zero air pressure is the hard part.

Show me your faith without deeds, and I will show you my faith by what I do.

James 2:18b, NIV.

Through him and for his name's sake, we received grace and apostleship to call people from among all the Gentiles to the obedience that comes from faith.

Romans 1:5, NIV, my emphasis.

Every tree that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire. Thus, by their fruit you will recognize them. Not everyone who says to me, 'Lord, Lord,' will enter the kingdom of heaven, but only he who does the will of my Father who is in heaven.

Matthew 7:19-21, NIV.

That's not what a cancellation fee does, though. By definition, when you pay a cancellation fee, they are no longer providing service.

They are just herding in the stragglers. We must be getting close to the abattoir.

... the new greeter.