> the amount of socially necessary labor decreases with each passing year.

Isn't this Lump of Labor fallacy? There is not a fixed amount of work available because human desire is limitless. (and therefore so is human suffering, but that's a different discussion!) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lump_of_labour_fallacy

as someone who works for TR, this makes me sad.

As a former TR employee, I can empathize. There is immense value in the West Key Number System, editorial headnotes, aggregating everything, and transforming documents into a consistent, uniform representation. Still, it does feel "off" that TR and Lexis have exclusive contracts for digital delivery of codes and case law for so many jurisdictions.

The Zotero lawsuit in Sept. 2008 broke a lot of my faith. I stuck around for a further two years trying to change things as best I could, and even managed to reshape TR's open source software policy, but I couldn't resolve the cognitive dissonance around competent legal practice virtually requiring a subscription to Westlaw and/or Lexis Nexis.

So, I got out. Ended up way happier. You can get out, too. TR has plenty of brilliant folks--engineers, managers, and executives alike--but it's hard to have organization-scale clarity of purpose and execution when you're dealing with 60,000 people.

TR?

Thomson Reuters, the parent company of Westlaw (the contractor who presently has the contract in DC)

I hear what you're saying, and I basically agree. However, I still see some shops building new product with Jakarta Struts, hand coded javascript, and no continuous integration. They spend way too much time doing things that could be automated, which would allow them to spend more time on quality, or more features. (Say, if you want to use a java webstack, have you heard of spring & jquery, and maybe you should try hudson for your builds?) So, its also important to keep abreast of whats happening in the field, so long as you don't fetishize the newest/latest thing.

Exactly. Unfortunately this kind of discussions often leads to "black"/ "white" suggestions instead of the looking for a good balance between poles.

I wish all the energy of these polarized discussions would go into learning of the ways to find a good balance.

relevant visualization of where research happens: http://www.nature.com/polopoly_fs/7.8087.1355853889!/image/c...

I'm really curious about all the research coming out of Iran. would not have expected a country under lockdown to be doing so much research.

I'd like to see the same visualization, but for the distribution of the nationalities/origin of the actual paper authors.

i.e. of the ~300K papers published in the US, how many of those papers were authored and co-authored by immigrants (H1-B, or naturalized) etc.

I suspect that a greater % of these papers were written by foreign born researchers.

I would expect the general trends to be about the same, though all less pronounced.

Say 25% of the researchers in the US were born in the US: The US column would drop significantly but since that other 75% is probably spread more or less evenly across the other columns, they would only all rise a little.

The only really dramatic change I would expect would be to mainland China. It probably wouldn't loose much, but would likely gain quite a lot.

..."and as president, I promise to up our research unit output by a factor of 50%. I assure you my opponent does not have a comparable strategy for increasing research unit output - nor any other factors, such as his misguided job-unit creation plan."

> The UK used to have something similar;

British imperialism didn't work well for anyone. I certainly hope America abandons its imperial pretensions. As an American, it doesn't make me proud.

> FBI/CIA agents doing police-work without reporting to local authorities

That's not "police work"! That's criminal activity. But I can tell I'm preaching to the choir.

um the CIA are not police and neither are the FBI in there internal security role nor sould they - note that the only time MI5 had an ex copper as a boss as a disaster

That's what I was thinking. Any direct answer to that question would delight the swarms of injunction-happy Apple lawyers.

If you're under age 70, and you wear a bow tie, you might be Tucker Carlson.

also, interesting he doesn't have anything to say about the incumbent. http://www.philadelphiacontroller.org/biography-of-city-cont...

Is there a term limit or something? They're both dems.

Philadelphia is a one party town. The real race is the primary.

as a Philadelphian, this is great.

Thanks.