Never heard of it. Sayings of a druggist? Is it on a broadcast channel? But you have me wondering what it is, so off to websearch...

But maybe you can help? So here's the mess I've gotten myself into. I do not believe that I watched a single movie in 2025, so my answer for that one has to be "Null". Don't watch much TV these years, though I'm frequently obliged to eat while the news is on TV. I remember lots of stuff about bears in 2025... Certainly not a "favorite" given the news stories of 2025 and nothing else comes to mind from the snips and bits that have caught my eye.

So that leaves books, where I have too many to choose from. The link for 2025 is https://shanenj.tripod.com/cgi... if that ancient webserver feels like working today. A number of the books impressed me favorably, but whenever I look again my "favorite" is different. (By the way, I'm still eager to replace that database. Given the server's condition, I can only run the PERL parts locally and some of the code is older than PERL and seems increasingly fragile and flaky with age. Any recommendations?)

Most people are interpreting the Ask Slashdot as a request for recommendations, which is where my Subject kicks in hardest. What are your interests? What's your history and current context? However, if you have a specific question, possibly in relation to the linked table, then I might be able to provide a less useless response than HAL 9000's. (Among my current in-progress books is Army of None by Paul Scharre. It's about autonomous weapons, but can't yet say if I'd recommend it.)

Sounds interesting, though my previous encounters with that author left me thinking he was rather odd if not crazy. At least three decades ago I concluded that too much computer use was not good for mental health. (And I might be a poster child.)

Really? More moderation abuse for the annual transition? Hope that it's part of the end of a bad year rather than the start of another bad one? Since the abusive moderation was "Redundant", I guess that justifies replicating the reaction? So whatever happened to ol' Scott Adams?

And more thoughts about the problems with determining which part of the profits came from where, but... No interest in solutions around today's Slashdot, so...

Really? More moderation abuse for the annual transition? Hope that it's part of the end of a bad year rather than the start of another bad one? Since the abusive moderation was "Redundant", I guess that justifies replicating the reaction?

Really? More moderation abuse for the annual transition? Hope that it's part of the end of a bad year rather than the start of another bad one?

This. And it's the same in movies and TV series of the last couple of years. Many of which are not lacking in good direction, acting talent, compelling visuals, good production values. And ruined by utterly garbage writing.

You are displaying a great example of availability bias, where you're using immediate examples of recent events to quickly reinforce your existing stereotype. Yes, we have had two significant commercial airline accidents in the United States this year, the Potomac Mid-Air Collision and UPS 2976. But these are outliers in an otherwise continual trend downwards for accidents and fatalities as a whole in the commercial airline industry. You cannot deny these statistics. And we can use these accidents and learn from them, which pushes that trend-line further and further down each year.

Commercial airplane travel is incredibly safe, and it continues to get safer, assuming no current president decides to mess with air traffic controllers, regulations, and enforcement.

...while we ignore our safety and maintenance needs on the planes

I vehemently disagree. Airplanes continue to be the safest way to travel, and airlines are mandated to follow maintenance schedules routinely. Because insurance. If airlines (at least in the US and EU) don't follow standard safety and maintenance procedures with their aircraft, then they have an accident resulting from that, the FAA and NTSB will discover the negligence, and then ohhhh boyyyy, there'll be hell to pay.

Guess someone took a page out of the "Al's Glass" playbook.

Mod parent funny, but I was expecting at least one joke about sending the bombs to Nigeria as some sort of perversion of Christmas presents...

That's the joke I was hoping to see, but obviously too much to expect from Slashdot. I can provide the context, though I can't write a good joke.

Lots of bear problems in this (mathematically interesting) year of 2025. Bears have no predators and their population has been growing steadily while there are lots of abandoned buildings in rural Japan. (The Japanese word in Romaji is "akiya" for empty house.) So the idea of the joke would involve "solving" both problems by letting the bears have the empty houses for more convenient hibernation and thus getting them out of human's hair. Of course that doesn't work because there are usually still some people living nearby... (However there was a recent major fire that was apparently stoked mostly by abandoned houses.)

However I think the "depopulation thing is a typical fake problem. Various solutions, but I'm rather skeptical that Japan's government (as fundamentally restructured by the Americans after the war) is capable of finding any of them. Hmm... Maybe it isn't as fake as I thought?

Recommend reading? Tokyo Junkie by Robert Whiting. Closeup personal view of the entire thing from the early '60s.

What is my view? That in our current world trending towards further economic de-regulation, the disadvantaged are exploited by the advantaged, leading to a ever-widening gap between the advantaged and the exploited. I take umbrage with this, because I had the experience of being an exploiter in my past, but later in life, I directly witnessed and was moved by the affects of exploitation on the exploited.

You are myopic in your worldview of economics. It's very easy to perceive the world can work for everyone just as it has worked for you. You have succeeded in life, but you fail to perceive that your success cannot be duplicated by the population at large. And, believe it or not, the choices you make as a consumer are actively keeping lots of people throughout the world economically challenged.

For example, next time you bite into a chocolate candy, don't forget that child labor in Africa made that bar of chocolate affordable. Say all you want about "the price on which an employer and employee agree." The fact is, there are poor people in Africa that sell their children to cacao farmers to harvest cacao for chocolate producers, because existing economic inequality get taken advantage of to maximize profit. You could choose to pay more for a chocolate bar that guarantees that it wasn't produced using child labor, but hardly anybody does, because chocolate.

I cite this example to highlight that, in a world of pure capitalism, there are some winners, but there are lots of losers. Without strong regulations, capitalists will exploit the losers, who are just another resource to be leveraged to maximize profits. This only stands to accelerate with how A.I. is being leveraged to replace workers, which many capitalists see as another economic opportunity to enrich the already rich and powerful. Meanwhile, I see it as further harm to the average individual who just seeks to pursue happiness. Hard to accomplish that without a job that pays a sustainable wage.

We all depend on one another to live. I assume you're not growing your own food, or building your own home, or programming your own cell phone; I assume you aren't paving your own roads, or generating your own electricity, or teaching your own children; I assume you aren't forging your own steel, or drilling your own oil, or defending your own soil. Everything you depend on to make your own life livable is the actual product of the labors of a world around you. Should each contributor not receive appropriate compensation so that their lives are just as livable as your own? Instead, the world we presently live in allows for someone to be paid $0.20 / hour to pick coffee, someone else to be paid $7.75 / hour to sell it, someone else to be paid $30 / hour to buy it, and yet someone else $5,000 / hour to profit off of it. How do you justify this inequality, when every individual is of the same flesh and blood? I don't. In fact, I call it some real fucked up shit.

(By the way, we do need to and actively support farming communities. It's called the U.S. Farm Bill, and it pumps billions of dollars into the farming industry annually. Because every president realizes that food shortages are a political bombshell that can cause nationwide upheaval if the government doesn't do everything within its power to minimize food shortages.)

Hmm... Doesn't seem like a productive FP, even though it started with the joke. What I was looking for was the Captain Obvious statement/joke about the relative numbers of people in the new occupations versus the people who lost their jobs to AI.