North Carolina tells retired engineer he can't talk about engineering
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Let’s start with my personally theory that hopefully won’t color all of the conversation about the individual points. This guy pissed off some people and those people are using their petty power to make his life hell. It’s like the 10’s of thousands of people jaywalking without issue and then the homeless guy that gets arrested for jaw walking. We all know that’s not why he was arrested but the law is clear, he was breaking the law, and they enforced it. So the individual incident dots it’s I’s and crosses it’s t’s as long as you don’t bring up the dreaded ‘uneven enforcement’ issue which is at the heart of everything wrong with the law in America. I have no evidence for the theory but it makes sense with the multiple issues involving this guy mentioned in such a short article.
Next interesting point. Is giving a speech about how to treat a broken bone considered ‘practicing medicine’? Who gets to decide the answer. Is a PHD candidate writing an exploration of the efficacy of the various methods for treating a migraine practicing medicine? What if he’s selling copies of his paper on the checkout counter at the drug store? I use medicine instead of engineering because I think it’s easier to discuss but the point should hold the same regardless of which licensed profession we are discussing.
Shit I have to run but hope to return to this conversation to discuss the other fun questions raised.
Engineers are trained to have expert opinions.
They are expected to consider all relevant factors.
In AEC the relevant factors include compliance with relevant laws and rules such as the building codes and all the documents incorporated by reference.
It is a matter of life safety and the regulation of construction is at least as old as the Code of Hammurabi…it predates the first amendment by three millennia.
In that context an unlicensed person holding themselves out as an expert in engineering has disregarded a basic responsibility, they have ignored a relevant legal requirement: their license.
This raises a legitimate concern. What other corners might they have cut for their own benefit?
Because ignoring licensure is to no one’s benefit but the person doing so. It is a violation of the trust people expect when engaging with engineers. The trust that the engineer will be objective in relevant matters.
Licensing engineers is why you don’t worry when you drive across a bridge…or under one. Or go up a tall building or stand next to it. It’s why collapsed bridges are news.
The article says 80% of engineers are working without a license. From experience, this is especially true for electrical engineering. Someone designing a building's electrical system would have a PE to sign off on plans (or be working under someone with a PE). But someone doing embedded design would not, because there is a completely different approval process for consumer/industrial products - we test rather than simply asserting products are safe because they were designed by a PE.
Without a PE, I am still an engineer. I can say I am an engineer, because "engineer" is not a protected title anywhere in the US. I can speak authoritatively on engineering topics, because I have vast technical knowledge. My opinions on topics I know little about (eg civil engineering) will be tempered with "I think", because knowing one area really well, I am aware of how much I do not know in other areas. Whether anyone chooses to listen to anything I say is their own choice.
What I cannot do is sign off on plans for permits, solicit business that would generally require signing off on plans for permits, or anything else that specifically requires a PE license. Those requirements are in legal force due to the product delivered (eg a bridge requisitioned by the state, a house which needs a building permit) and are not generally applicable for all engineering activity.
There also is the related issue that everybody has the right to technically criticize a situation if they have done the work to make their case. Only a licensed Professional Engineer has the ability to say a bridge is safe, but we all have the right to claim that it is unsafe.
The letter that person received from the board is linked in the article.
It states the person is charged and gives them the opportunity for a written response.
Civil engineering typically requires a PE.
It's more accurate to say that the kind of projects civil engineers work on generally end up requiring a PE, as a condition of actually being built. Small time civil engineering in your own backyard does not require a PE - eg improving drainage, setting up a windmill, building a chicken coop, etc.
Prohibiting people from applying mathematical formulas in court arguments because doing so is "engineering" is a dangerous idea. If you're fighting a speeding ticket, is it "engineering" to independently calculate your speed by measuring the time between two points?
Ultimately if the stormwater calculations are complex enough that the court is unable to follow them itself, then it is up to the court to disregard his testimony because he is not a professional engineer with a trustable opinion. That would be a perfectly reasonable outcome here.
But what the state board is attempting to do is to prohibit anybody from examining technicalities without the right license. That's the path to closed society madness.
The board is investigating a case based on its authority. The authority exists via democratic process originating with the legislative process and state constitution.
The regulation of engineering is within the scope of the states per the US Constitution and established legal precedent.
1. Using mathematical formulas to demonstrate facts, such as pointing out that speed can be calculated by distance over time.
2. Pointing out how a red light camera fails to meet required implementation details.
3. Pointing out how a bridge is unsafe.
4. Pointing out that an expert witness is glaringly wrong.
5. Comment on the details of a public proposal.
Nutt's case is analogous to 3. Nutt did not design the stormwater system. He is critiquing it for a poor design. In an open society, that is everyone's right. The court can choose to find his reasoning lacking or simply non-understandable, but he shouldn't then be getting attacked for having spoken his opinion.
Errors and disagreements are common in engineering, as in any art, and so any honest engineer should be worried about criminalizing debate. Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow.
Licensure boards can be notoriously aggressive, which is why this case is getting attention. Furthermore, state-chartered entities are commonly over scoped because they're really just extensions of the state executive, with only court cases to push back on them. Your argument from status quo is uncompelling.
https://ij.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/NC_Engineering_ema...
Nutt's position is that their claim conflicts with his first amendment right to free speech, specifically his right to state his opinion on technical matters.
I agree with Nutt. NC is effectively attempting to criminalize my ability to represent myself in court and many other areas of society (enumerated in a sibling comment) - due to having the "regulated knowledge" of engineering without the corresponding license, I would be unable to state my opinion. Instead I would have to hire a PE that concurs with me simply to express my own opinion.
And if you attempt to provide expert testimony in your own defense, the court will likely laugh at you. You will have to hire an outside expert to provide expert testimony.
"The yellow light timing is below table X of the traffic code, and therefore my ticket for running the red light is invalid because I was not given the chance to stop in time."
That's an argument that an individual can straightforwardly make and a judge can choose to accept or not by following the same reasoning. It involves engineering analysis, yet it is low stakes enough to make hiring a Professional Engineer prohibitive.
Under the North Carolina board's position, a person who makes this argument is committing a crime. That effectively creates a privileged class of people whose decisions (or oversights) cannot be questioned even when they're blatantly wrong - in this example, the traffic engineers responsible for the intersection.
Suppressing testimony by punishing people for speaking honestly (nor merely disregarding their testimony) undermines the very foundation of thr legal system.
This is obviously wrong. Lying is broadly protected by free speech but firmly illegal, not just inadmissible, in court testimony. Courts also have the ability to compel testimony under criminal penalty, while free speech includes the right to say nothing or dissemble. Evidentiary standards place further requirements even on the source of what you are saying, regardless of its truth.
Or as the 6th Circuit put it, "The courtroom is a nonpublic forum, where the First Amendment rights of everyone (attorneys included) are at their constitutional nadir."
Even if he's 100% correct, that doesn't mean he has a first amendment right to testify!
He has not practiced engineering in any way whatsoever.
2. There is some precedent implying a free speech concern: https://reason.com/2019/01/02/judge-confirms-that-oregon-eng...
The preponderance of precedent favors the board’s concerns and right to investigate.
Being slightly familiar with North Carolina professional regulations, I suspect this holds true at the state level in particular.
The legal argument is inconsistent. It claims that the regulations don’t apply because the regulations apply via the industrial exemption in the regulations…never mind the retired.
You seem to have missed the legal argument in the Oregon case which had nothing to do with an industrial exemption.
Nutt became required to get a license when he began practicing engineering outside the "industrial exception".
They are doing something that is only to their own benefit in a context where other people’s lives are at stake.
Quite simply it is unprofessional. A person without a license can hire a licensed professional for oversight. That’s the responsible thing to do.
In the US, engineering licensure requires supervised experience, testing, and typically (but not always) formal education at the bachelor level.
One requirement of professional practice is not working beyond one’s competence irrespective of having a license and engineering boards take that seriously.
I guess that’s the thing, an unlicensed person doing unsupervised work requiring a license is some combination of incompetent, unqualified, or negligent.
To put it another way, licensure ensures that a person has a minimum amount of skill, training, and experience. And that they take responsibility.
Yes you can hire an engineer to supervise your work.
Then you have successfully avoided responsibility for it.
And legally as well.
A license would allow you to take responsibility for what you do.
I can understand why someone wouldn't want it.
I don't understand why someone who has chosen that route whines about it.
Bad law, no law.
Does latin have an implied ‘better than’ in sequences?
The phrase seems to be a rehash of a quote from St Augustine: "lex iniusta non est lex" meaning "an injust law is not a law", which is more clear.
Soviet Union still felt the need to hold elections and have laws, China officials were removed using charges of corruption, etc.
-- Óscar Benavides
> It’s like the 10’s of thousands of people jaywalking without
> issue and then the homeless guy that gets arrested for jaw walking.
[1] https://www.vox.com/2015/1/15/7551873/jaywalking-history
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_streetcar_consp...
[3] (Not Just Bikes) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MWsGBRdK2N0
We can't get rid of cars and streets. That cat is over a hundred years outside of the bag. It's moved on, had it's own family, and died.
Jaywalking as a punishable offense makes sense to me at least. The level of punishment is often excessive certainly. $250 fine for stepping onto the street is far too much for a first offense (but perhaps for a habitual jaywalker it makes sense). Hell, I'm guilty of doing it a lot in my exurb area. However, when I do it it's because there's 2 miles between posted crosswalks and I make sure I can cross safely before trying. There aren't enough crosswalks - certainly.
Jaywalking laws create important predictability. I can assume that the average civilian is deterred by jaywalking law enough to not randomly step out onto the street at will. This means I can anticipate them only at crosswalks and intersections. You're already busy dodging drivers distracted with doing anything but driving (makeup, listening to podcasts, eating, reading a book, etc). If we didn't have these laws the risk to driving would be much higher. Many people think humans stand no chance against cars, but one errant jaywalker going through a car window can kill everyone in the vehicle given sufficient enough velocity. It's important to remember a 45 mph impact on a ~125-200 pound human carries with it tremendous momentum. Assuming they don't go through the car window, that same flying body can do lethal damage to law abiding people walking on the sidewalks.
The UK doesn't have jaywalking laws. I understand that. But the UK is far more "walkable". The US is by-and-large not. Especially as you get into "normal" towns and not major metros like LA and NYC. I would be willing to agree jaywalking laws need to be done away with if the US was more walkable.
It's a required compromise to allow pedestrians and high-speed automobile traffic to coexist. This unfairly-dead comment has a good discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27561530
Get rid of it, and you'll either have more pedestrians getting run over (e.g. some distracted guy on his cell phone accidentially rushing out in front of some car, getting killed in the process and traumatizing some driver) or you'll have to lower speed limits, which would make longer-distance travel more inefficient and inconvenient.
Actually, I don't think it's so much the fine itself but the sense that not crossing at a crosswalk is "wrong." The the laws against the behavior (and the penalties necessary for such a law) are there mainly to create that understanding.
Of course self-preservation is also a factor, but I'd wager the behavior is more effectively inhibited when it's not the only factor.
Do you have a reason beyond your gut to believe jaywalking penalties work?
I think this comment demonstrates the perverse value system I’m commenting against. I don’t mean this as an insult to you, merely to point out how people have been programmed to think people shouldn’t be able to live in a city without being terrified of their lives so we don’t mildly annoy drivers.
The scenario that would actually be likely to happen is the exact opposite. A distracted driver running over and killing a pedestrian that’s crossing on a green light or a zebra crossing. That happens very regularly.
Cars have no business driving faster than 15-20mph on a city steet.
Where do you live where you think it is reasonable to set a speed limit below 35 mph?
EDIT: And in fact most of the residential streets here are 25 mph, and I think only that high because it's the minimum posted speed limit in the state of Pennsylvania. (I'd like to see that lowered personally, and more importantly some traffic calming that's actually effective.)
It's not a perverse value system, it's acknowledging reality. Cars aren't going away anytime soon, because they provide real benefits. In a world with cars, pedestrians can't act like they did when cars didn't exist, laws or no.
No diver (with some homicidal exceptions) wants to hit a pedestrian, just like no pedestrian (with some suicidal exceptions) wants to get hit by a car. To minimize those kinds of events, both groups need to act in certain ways (with added motivation provided by penalties); it's objectively inferior to try to concentrate responsibly only on one group or the other.
> The scenario that would actually be likely to happen is the exact opposite. A distracted driver running over and killing a pedestrian that’s crossing on a green light or a zebra crossing. That happens very regularly.
Pedestrians shouldn't be crossing on a green light (in my city, there'd be a "don't walk" light in that case).
> Cars have no business driving faster than 15-20mph on a city streets.
Maybe in a dense city or a residential neighborhood (where I live streets with unposted limits are 25mph, which covers almost all residential streets), but it's a fact that other areas were built with arterial roads that need traffic to flow much faster.
The problems you describe seem absent from my experience living all my life in Sweden's second largest city with plenty of pedestrians and motor vehicles crossing the same streets.
It passed the Assembly and is going to the State Senate now.
If I'm about to cross the road, I am perfectly capable of deciding when it's safe or not. If the light is red but there's no traffic, it's safe to cross.
If I'm standing at a crossing and the light is green, meaning that I can walk, but there's a car out of control heading down the road (or an ambulance with its sirens on, etc) then it's not safe to cross, regardless of the green light.
I'm living in Germany at the moment, and you definitely get angry looks and comments for crossing when the light is red (especially if there are children around - because teaching kids to think for themselves and take personal responsibility for their safety is bad?). I find it all very weird.
So it’s prudent to instil in them a respect for the rules. Then when they’re teenagers they’ll automatically rebel and learn about personal responsibility :)
Personally I jaywalk when it's safe and no kids are around.
When I hear the word, I tend to think of people who take for granted that a car will stop for them and probably even conspicuously turn away from it.
I don't think of it as meaning "crossing the street where there is no marked crosswalk" absent traffic, or "crossing the street at an intersection" even if there is no marking and someone who wants to make a turn.
It's not an offense in my country. It is also not a term you learn in school. So when I was in the US for the first time, and had a policeman shouting "No Jaywalking", I had no idea what he meant.
A judge in London gave a convicted drug user a conditional discharge following the former Lord Chancellor admitting to using the same drug. Not a precedent-setting case, however.
https://www.legalcheek.com/2019/06/judge-tells-cocaine-user-...
For good reason too. Intravenous bleach suggested by someone we trusted may have caused some real harm. It would seem reasonable to remove a doctor's license to practice medicine for giving such advice.
Of course broad scale communication is different than specific testimony in court, especially from a seasoned practitioner.
I'd say if someone took IV bleach and it caused harm, the appropriate response isn't license revocation, it's a civil or criminal lawsuit.
The past year is full of examples of the dangers of regulating speech by government in the name of medical safety. The FDA decision on the antibody treatment for Alzheimer's provides a converse example, of how expertise can be foolish.
So if someone posts an article on Faceboot about the benefits of injecting bleach, and their friend does it, then they get criminally charged? How about our comments right here for mentioning it and thereby validating it as something to consider doing?
One of the aspects of licensing is making it so that certain people's opinions can be considered trusted, with corresponding liability. Your suggestions would seem to create more restrictions on speech, rather than less.
I'm sympathetic to the goal of making licensing more fine grained, but there would have to be a lot more competition and dynamicness on the part of those requiring most licenses (eg planning boards) for this to possibly make sense.
> I'd say if someone took IV bleach and it caused harm, the appropriate response isn't license revocation, it's a civil or criminal lawsuit.
The obvious problem with that is that it won't work: people harmed by some rando who decided to play doctor may not have the resources to sue, or may turn to some other incompetent rando lawyer who will lose their case. It would also likely to be hard to get a (now even more overworked) DA to take up such a case as a criminal prosecution unless there was a death or grievous bodily harm involved.
A lot of libertarian solutions seem to want to replace a workable but imperfect systems with unworkable awkward alternatives.
If you eliminate the license requirement, what law would the criminal lawsuit be based on? And how would that law be written so it did not apply to a surgeon working on my heart? At what point would it apply to the surgeon?
Something without any "mandatory" trusted anchors and no censorship. One must be freely able to put any trust links they believe they want to do, as well as decide for themselves if they trust some established institutions or believe everything is a hoax and decide to trust someone else, say a person or organization we may call a charlatan. Basically, anyone should be able to make any calculations on that graph as they see fit, and use those results for themselves. Just like it already happens.
It obviously would be incredibly broken and plagued with all sort of issues, but it would reflect the society. And I'm not sure how it can be made viable - no web of trust except for the original one (the society itself) had ever worked. It probably need some modern fads - be it dancing pigs like Facebook did for their graph, or potential profits of cryptocurrencies, I honestly don't know. And I readily recognize it could lead to privacy problems, especially given the current trend of radical ostracization upon any slightest disagreement.
But if it somehow works (it probably won't, sadly) it could be the ultimate solution to licensing boards, fake news, propaganda and many other kinds of memetic storms.
But surely, society can't remove licensing requirements before there's a viable alternative.
Just a random thought.
Bad money drives out good. Bad speech drives out good, too.
How exactly? I could be wrong, but I believe it won't make things any worse. I see three scenarios:
First, let's say someone is an antivaxer, already subscribed to that belief. If they're reading some posting, the fact that some other antivaxer vouched for that post's author doesn't change much.
If someone had not made any opinion yet - they won't have any trust connections on that matter, so if they're reading an anti-vaccine posting, they won't have any impact. Their query to the web of trust would say "no idea, you don't have any trust anchors set on this matter, go figure out whom you trust first".
It is only if they have a friend they trust on the subject vaccines, and that friend happens to be an antivaxer, they may have a "your friend vouches for this" result. This is the only scenario I see, where someone could be swayed towards a certain opinion, and I'd be damned if this doesn't already happens without any technologies, completely organically. It's their peer group that sways them, so the technology in question here doesn't make it worse or better, it just accelerates the process.
Again, I could be wrong about either or all of those. I readily recognize all of this stems from my beliefs in humanity (in general) as something that can work out its way through any amount of dissenting opinions, finding out the truths. I mean, historically, society had worked this way. And a controversial belief that accelerating this is a good idea - I admit, I don't have a rational arguments for or against this part - it's just a belief. Guess it comes from hatred of seeing all those slow simmering almost-pertpetual memetic wars and being unhappy about their fallout, yet not believing any forcible silencing of opposing forces is a viable approach.
Oh, and just to clarify: it's extremely important that trust must not be ultimate (exceptions apply for closest peers, e.g. partners or parents), but limited to a subject. E.g. I may trust someone on subject X but at the same time know they're avid subscribers to what I think is a false belief on subject Y, so I explicitly distrust them on that matter.
They see that it is vouched for by 1000 other people. They see that a countering article that is also vouched for by 1000 people, but those people are all so-called "experts" and they've read HN and know that "experts" are biased and have perverse incentives and such. Or they just flip a coin. Either way, they believe the anti-vax article.
Because the feedback loop is very open, they see no consequences for their choice. So they also vouch for the anti-vax article.
Oh, no, no, if I understood your idea - that's something I really want to avoid. This sort of query must explicitly be against the recommended/designed use. It cannot be a popular vote, it must be peer-to-peer. A web rather than a cesspool. A query must result in "no paths to any trusted sources found".
Just like in the real world - my opinions on, say, some processes in metallurgy (something I have no clue about) cannot depend on opinion of someone I don't have any connections with, even if they're renown expert in that field. I may trust them through some institutions, certification programs or something like that - say, they graduated from some university that I consider trustworthy. But if there are no connections at all I can't say anything about that person's credibility. Best I can do upon reading their opinion is that it's self-appraised.
This web must be designed in a way that people they don't know, people that aren't connected to one's node in the web through peers they know and trust, mustn't have any significant weight, no matter how many there are. One should be free to make their own arbitrary queries, but this online popular vote thing is already known to be a very flawed metric.
Not to mention it would require to solve that very hard one-true-identity problem. If all your connections are people you know, and their connections are people they know, identity becomes a non-issue. As long as the small world hypothesis is close enough to the reality, this should work. And it would be a non-issue even if someone invents a fake identity - it'll either a recognized legit alter ego (pseudonymous account, who still may express opinions people listen to), or a meaningless fake person that no one knows (that may vouch for whatever, the only connections is through its creator).
Ah, right. I think I got it now. That's where the issue is.
It could be that this web of trust just cannot work unless it covers most of the world. If it would, I believe it would be just a technical aid, a machine-coded representation of an already established "organic" web of trust.
But it must start from zero, and it cannot grow as it would be lethally poisoned, becoming a place composed mostly of controversial vouches. Could be very true. I need to think about this.
One immediate thought is that even a graph of only the "bad voices" (for arbitrary definition of bad) can be perfectly useful, as a sort of noise ("fake news", "lunacy", "bullshit" - however we want to call it) filter. It's not that a web of trust spreads opinions, it spreads relations to their opinions. And a signal that someone vouches directly or indirectly (although "vouching" is not a good term for this case) can be perceived arbitrarily. So maybe it's not that bad. It may be bad by reinforcing echo chambers, but it could also be good in pointing out the connections, those bridges between the factions where arguing is not moot.
Defense: The patient was already ill. Can the opposition prove that the prescription of bleach, specifically, caused the harm, in the face of the patient's underlying disease? The risks of the treatment were adequately explained to the patient, as indicated by the patient's signature on this form. The patient voluntarily accepted those risks.
Bottom line: the patient is dead, and civil or criminal liability ain't going to bring 'em back.
In that case it is an efficient use of resources to require anyone that practices law in a court room to meet some minimum bar (hey I think I found out why it is called the bar exam).
What are you even talking about?
Edit: To clarify, I don't think 100% fatal medical advice is a good analogy for good-faith testimony relating to a "piping system that allegedly flooded a few local homes."
Maybe something more like "Hey I'm not a licensed doctor, but in my experience double-fisting twinkies leads to weight gain."
Are you referring to Donald Trump? (There, invoked.) He's a moron and there's plenty to criticize him on. Which is why it's bizarre to see this particular false[0][1] narrative thrown around so much even to this day. If you watch (TDS trigger warning; transcripts in [0][1]) what he actually said[2] and the immediate followup and clarification[3], we can definitely agree that he's not a great communicator, but I think that whole thing got taken out of context in a very dishonest way.
[0] https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2020/jul/11/joe-biden/... [1] https://www.politifact.com/article/2020/apr/24/context-what-... [2] https://youtu.be/PsQnfpfIa_o?t=26m20s (1 min) [3] https://youtu.be/PsQnfpfIa_o?t=30m35s (30 sec)
Who that was even remotely trustworthy suggested that?
And "pissed off" in this case means behaving perfectly normally, legally and how we all hope a person would behave.
"Register as a professional engineer, jerk."
If you've done actual engineering work for 20+ years, getting a PE is neither that hard nor that expensive and confers quite a bit of legal protection as well.
If your cause-du-jour isn't worth taking the time to go get a PE, perhaps you don't believe in it very much.
As for the vast hordes of HN who think they're a software "engineer" because they can open Visual Studio Code, go pass the the FE (Fundamentals of Engineering) exam and get back to me. Every professional engineer has passed that exam. If you can't muster up that much effort, why should we call you "engineer"?
> Is giving a speech about how to treat a broken bone considered ‘practicing medicine’?
Quite possibly. And what happens when that speech gives the WRONG treatment for a broken bone?
> Who gets to decide the answer.
Generally the licensing board for precisely the reason I gave above.
Customers/employers usually seek professional licensure for as a lazy stopgap against outright fraud for work with poor oversight and high liability. This is why PE's are predominately required for government and civil infrastructure.
For example, It takes a PE to certify a handrail on a municipal bus, while a company could design and sell a neurosurgical robot without a single PE.
In this specific case, if a court and jury don't find a PE license to confer meaningful credibility over someone without, then that seems to be a problem for the licensing board, not the person providing testimony, or the client who hired them.
"Is giving a speech about how to treat a broken bone considered ‘practicing medicine’?"
Giving the speech in a court, on the witness stand, under oath, claiming to be an expert in treating broken bones?
How about an example from engineering? A bridge collapses and fifty or sixty people die. In the resulting lawsuit, Bob, a nationally recognized bridge engineer, testifies, with many pages of reports, that the design of the bridge was substantially bad. Ted, who has a degree in engineering and worked for 20 years as an engineer (designing coffee makers, say) testifies that according to his calculations, of which he presents a plethora, the bridge design was entirely adequate and the failure was an "act of god".
A bridge collapses and people die. In the resulting lawsuit a licensed engineer says, with many pages of reports, that everything was done correctly and the collapse was "an act of god". But an amateur who only knows a little about civil engineering points out one single thing they did incorrectly; he doesn't know everything about engineering, but he does know this one thing they did was wrong. The government then charges the amateur with a crime for knowing a little and speaking about what he knew.
That leaves the risk of a board ousting (or implicitly promising to oust) people based their expert testimony in court. Which would fall back onto the board's rules about revoking licenses. Lawmakers would likely get involved if any funny business happened; revoking isn't an obscure bylaw, but one of the two major purposes of the board (giving licenses being the other). I'll admit this hypothetical gets too complicated and delves too deeply into politics for me to guess likely.
Do you know of any historic examples besides police unions? I'll admit they match your worry, but the police benefit from massive public support that borders on mythology. So it's hard for politicians to do much about those problems.
That said, I’m not sure if being licensed means anything more than ‘I paid my dues to the state board’.
Take a test
Study under an actual PE for a period of time
Take another test
Pay some money
Do some work
I studied Engineering in school, but I didn't get a PE because taking the test was too much effort and I wasn't going to work with any PEs, so I assume that actual PEs know stuff that I don't know.
The right and duty of every citizen, what's your point? The oath obligates you to tell the truth, people testify about fraud and murder without being experts.
Regardless of whether it is, you can really tell the hypocrisy. Medicine is a vastly more protected profession than engineer. The article states about 80% of engineers nationwide work legally without a license. That would be unthinkable for any form of medical work.
And yet, there are vastly more people giving out medical advice without a license, and even performing all kinds of quack procedures like faith healing as replacement for medical science.
Some retired engineer talking about his profession while technically not having a license is an absolutely minuscule problem, if it even is one, compared to the reprehensible alternative medicine industry.
For many (most?) states, this is a determination spelled out broadly by law, and left up to the licensing board itself to implement, interpret, administer, and enforce.
So the answer, in those states, is:
"Practicing engineering is whatever the state licensing board says it is."
Off-topic, but I really love that you contributed a healthy starting point for conversation with a few great observations, then left us waiting for more. People have lots to talk about with what you started, you've piqued interest in the rest of your analysis, and I'm curious about why you had to leave.
Glad you didn't abandon your comment or edit out that you've taken away so much more than you let on.
The whole idea is to prevent these little long-running fiefdoms from continuing indefinitely, where board members just become more concerned about their own power than their stated purpose.
People being people it's not perfect, but it does go a long way to cut down on this type of abuse.
And I had a mistake in my timing, it's every 12 years.
> The question Whether one generation of men has a right to bind another, seems never to have been started either on this or our side of the water… (But) between society and society, or generation and generation there is no municipal obligation, no umpire but the law of nature. We seem not to have perceived that, by the law of nature, one generation is to another as one independant nation to another… On similar ground it may be proved that no society can make a perpetual constitution, or even a perpetual law. The earth belongs always to the living generation… Every constitution, then, and every law, naturally expires at the end of 19. years. If it be enforced longer, it is an act of force and not of right.
I think Thomas Jefferson is a reputable source for my assertion.
If the US were founded on this principle… it would have been part of the constitution.
If that were true, we wouldn't have had the first block of amendments. There's plenty of stuff that didn't make it into the original constitution because the founders thought it was obvious.
This largely ignores the rest of society and what they were thinking. From the first perspective, these are all ideas that got smuggled in.
They can also declare that legislation violates human rights, but that declaration is non-binding. They are effectively just asking Parliament to go back and fix the law.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supreme_Court_of_the_United_Ki...
You need more than one because the founding of the US was a group effort. Not all ideas pitched by any given founder made it in, and even when one did many of those who voted to include it had a different understanding of what it meant.
Every so often the foundations of common law get to be re-evaluated which could be disastrous. But in practice it's likely the foundations would be similar cycle to cycle. Further, to the degree that the roots of rulings change due to a new constitution, don't those ruling trees need to change? The constitution changing is a signal that the people, their needs and their values have changed and so should all rulings based on those ideas.
--As an aside, I'm biased against common law. I appreciate my ancestors but I question accepting all of their prior decisions as taken until proven otherwise.
It's easy to envision invaliding precedents that rely on things that have changed, but the process of creating those precedents takes so long nobody really knows what the new law means until it's tested. Furthermore, the arguments to invalidate them are also going to be in the form of more legal arguments, so you're adding another whole dimension to the problem. Given how opaque the law is to the average person right now, I'd say we're already at the limit.
FWIW I'm biased against common law too, because it seems to take what is actually policy and brand it as if it were universal truth.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_national_constitutions
The UK has an uncodified constitution that predates the US by over 500 years, originally founded on the Magna Carta, signed in 1215.
Texas takes government Texas Ranger seriously.
Texas Leg passed legislation in 2011 to have ERCOT reviewed whenever the PUC (its regulator) is reviewed: https://www.sunset.texas.gov/reviews-and-reports/agencies/el...
Not saying it's good nor bad.
But it would be nice if jobs programs produced more benefit.
Actual benefit comes when people get paid by other people voluntarily making the exchange
And all I can think about are the two attendants running back & forth trying to get as many pumps going as they can, running ragged for a completely bogus reason. Then sometimes the attendants don't even try and the wait is longer, yet those are making the more rational choice of not driving themselves crazy making shit money for a worthless task.
I don’t think that is the case for a redundant board.
Security jobs, and working at a gas station, allowed me to do all my homework.
For every 1 soldier actually shooting bullets or 1 bonafide back-bending farmer there are 999 comfy desk jobs for college educated people in the same org chart. Many for whom college was paid for by that government. Is that good or bad?
I’m gonna go with bad.
I'd rather have people on welfare than in these bureaucratic jobs that actually hamper progress, because well they need to be 'involved'
Is that always the case? No, of course not.
I live in a place with a severe homeless problem. I wish these people had pointless government jobs rather than be out begging on the street.
So we could take 5,000 of them and have them dig holes all day. And the other 5,000 could fill in the holes on the following days. That's about as productive.
Or, if we're viewing it purely as a jobs program, find meaningful work, even if it was just patrolling the town they would have pumped gas in & instead picking up any and every piece of litter and garbage they see, documenting potholes they see in the road or loose branches around power lines for the town's DPW to deal with proactively.
Bureaucracy isn't that different from code. Some of it's dead legacy that needs to be removed, some of it's legacy that needs to be improved/replaced, some of it's legacy that's good enough, some of it's there for a damn good reason no matter how ugly it looks.
And when it comes to code, you probably trust devs who have specific insights into issues with code and promising replacements.
> “The dangers of crime and slick surfaces described in subsection (3) of this section are enhanced because Oregon’s weather is uniquely adverse, causing wet pavement and reduced visibility”
More here: https://medium.com/policy-northwest/the-insanity-of-oregons-...
Safety is important but wet pavements are also a hazard when you leave your house or literally do anything outside. Laws that try to masquerade for progressive causes for the sake of your “safety” are rampant in Oregon. There are so many of these insane laws piled up over the years. A friend of mine who was an licensed Architect in the state of Oregon recently moved to Phoenix. Reason? Unbelievable mess of laws and regulations that make it impossible to construct anything but a bog standard house.
One consequence is that our state gas tax hasn't been raised in decades. That's why our gas is cheaper than across the border in WA. They pay a much higher per gallon tax than we do. My town has gotten around this by adding a $10 a month fee for road improvements to our water bills. Other cities and towns let their roads crumble.
I'd estimate that only a small proportion of stations in NJ are attached to any convenience stores that sell things. On highways, yes. Off of highways around towns, they're often attached to a mechanic's garage, and the only things sold beside gas is windshield fluid and a spare quart of oil.
It's notable that NJ and Oregon both have cheap gas relative to many other parts of the country due to close proximity with oil refining &/or transportation infrastructure, which means lower costs to get it to the gas stations.
Although in NJ that discount is slowly going away as the state gradually ratchets up tax on gas purchases. Without that tax they would have by far the cheapest in the country by roughly 16% or $.50/gallon. Now NJ is only cheaper than most when there's a spike in oil prices stemming more from transportation costs, or at least that's what I've observed.
It is the worst possible way to create a 'jobs program'.
Not quite right: It makes buying gas more expensive.
The state of Oregon could, instead, increase gas taxes by a few cents and devote that wealth to some other economic activity. The net result of the law is waste.
While driving home, I remember thinking that Gas Station Attendant was looking at me funny.
It wasen't until a few years later I heard about the law.
(There's a stretch of highway 101 around Shasta that is a Speed Trap. The cops pull over four vechicles at a time and give everyone tickets. They supposedly use a plane, but I never saw one. They got busted a few years ago, but I heard they are doing it again.)
It would be amusing if Oregon required an electrician to plug in an EV at a public charger.
Do not mind if it is a jobs program. People need the work. Rain sucks. Handling gas sucks.
I get to catch up on a text, queue a show up for driving and pretty much never mind a wait.
shouldn't you not be watching shows while driving? Or do you mean podcasts or something?
I may abuse the general term "show", and am happy to own that as well as can't be arsed to improve. To me, it is all just a show.
Anyway, here they are. All very different styles, but all very good:
John Lee
William Dufris
Stefan Rudnicki
Scott Brick
In fact, if you enjoy scifi/fantasy, The Psalms of Isaak by Ken Scholes has a full cast with all of the above except for John Lee. (John Less
That series is a very thoughtful set of books, not easily placed into a nice category of high/low fantasy & doesn't romanticize feudalism societies with royalty, lords, etc being the only notable characters. That always annoys me about some types of fantasy: Taking a style of government that is brutal & freedom crushing for 99.99% of the population & focus on the lucky few who where fancy clothes and go to feasts, with a token peasant as "the chosen one".
To clarify:
I am part of society and value my time. Having fuel pumped is a great deal. I benefit significantly. Others do as well. Apparently enough of us do.
Besides, basic labors really add up in our lives. They provide great value and the people who do them should earn enough to live a reasonable, dignified life same as anyone else.
I do not want to do basic labors, but will when required. There are more interesting uses of my time. Getting the use of that time is how we should value basic labors.
I value that highly.
A little slack in the system is a very good thing. Think people with troubled past getting a start to build on. That is necessary, or we pay much harder in other ways.
Pay them to attend junior college or something. The payoff is a million times higher.
A while back, my kid was on a baseball team coached by a guy who included pumping gas in the set of things he does to exist, show up for work and do things in this world.
Who are you to judge and put such shame on work that has respectable value? I will answer for you: nobody, same as me, that's who.
And "attend college" = not waste? I must be frank: implying people who do basic labors are somehow wasted, or in need of education is not a reputable assessment. Not to mention, "who pays?" Are we going to put free college out there? I sure hope so, and support that idea. In that scenario, one could pump gas, live small and get an education. More of that in our society please!
The place I get my gas from does my windows, we sometimes catch up on a bit of local news, exchange a joke, "you want that to go?" got that started, and yeah, I chuckled. And more.
"Human capital"
I reject that idea entirely. There is no waste in any of this.
Lives break down into thirds, one of which is work, one is sleep, and the remaining one, ideally funded reasonably by the work and a healthy society, is for people to just be people. Maybe that means hanging out with family, coaching a team, making art, fixing stuff, who knows, and more importantly, who cares?
"A life", "wasted", why? Because you do not feel good about how other people live their lives? Let them do that, you have your own to manage.
I sure do not need my entire life judged by the work I do, nor do I care to have that other third be anything other than what I feel makes the most sense for me, mine, others who I value.
In the scale of things? Yeah, it is a little slack. Easy work. And plenty of people value it. I sure do.
Frankly, in light of the massive abuse, killing, poisoning of "human capital" we do globally, along with our general apathy when it comes to taking care of our own people, I find this line of discussion laughable!
Seriously.
In simple, priority terms, as in something we really should get after?
This does not rate. At. All.
Frankly, I would love a Federal and State based program to get more basic labor done. Think of the WPA and CCC from New Deal era times.
So many people need skills, an out from or alternative to service work. Not a thing wrong with service work, but many will want or need to do better. There are simply not enough better jobs for that to happen.
Our parks, roads, towns, many things need work. So, let's get that work done. People can get some real skills out of that stuff. Great! I happen to have many of them growing up how and where I did. I think nothing of building, repairing, whatever. It is familiar and I was shown the good stuff by skilled people. Frankly, these skills can be worth 6 figures in a life. Fix it, help others, improve it, build it, etc...
And when we have all that work in progress, maybe we can then discuss whether pumping gas is a priority or not. Nice problem to have, if you ask me. How can we have it?
That is the kind of what is worth what discussion I would welcome and require to reconsider fuel attendants.
Hemp definitely needs regulation, but the OLCC notoriously over-regulates for the sake of control and income. I'm pretty confident that is OLCC got control, they'd end up putting a lot of folks out of business through excessive red tape
Heck when traveling through NJ and there was a single attendant at a busy station, I got out and pumped my own gas. No one cared.
Some quick googling turns up nothing more than the state Department of Aviation, which looks serve the same purpose as other states' departments of aviation. Namely, to maintain state-owned airfields and support some planning functions.
The longer a law has been in place, more care needs to be taken in changing it. (not that it should not be changed )
- barbering
- cosmetology
- dietitians
- dyslexia therapy
- behavior analysts
- polygraph examiners (!)
- auctioneers
- etc. etc.
A dietitian giving bad advice could cause serious harm.
A dyslexia therapist could provide no benefit to the patient.
A cosmetologist could cause someone's hair to fall out.
Like, having something deeper than yelp reviews to help make someone's hair not fall out seems reasonable...
My dad was a doctor who lost his license (nothing dramatic or gossip-worthy involved). He was primarily treating opiate addicts with something called Suboxone. It is sensitive enough that the state puts a hard limit on patients you can have - 100. This means people who need the treatment are often on waiting lists because the doctors who have the qualification to write Suboxone are often at their 100 patient limit. Father told the medical board they need to find placements for his 100 patients or they will end up dead WITH ABSOLUTE CERTAINTY. Medical board couldn't give two shits since that's not their problem, last we know at least three died within 4 months or so of not being able to find a new doctor.
All the other licensing requirements do is favor incumbents and restrict competition. Amazon was against paying local sales taxes - until they eventually figured it out; now they are a huge proponent for forcing all online retailers to have to collect all local taxes. Will squeeze out the little guys or drive them into their web store solutions.
Regulations rarely benefit small business or their customers.
Also who seriously pays attention to if someone has a license or not? You can still get a bad haircut or advice from a licensed person. What I find appalling is the more rigorous the licensing the less some people question the people who hold them. Indeed, it's now a thing to criticize any critical thinking around "experts" (such as the anointed one, Saint Fauci) - utterly disgusting.
See "Competition and Monopoly in Medical Care" by Frech.
What tends to happen, however, is that the requirements to acquire a license grow beyond basic health and safety to include a ton of formal education. This is probably due in part to the fact that practitioners are well represented among the people designing the licensing requirements, and they have a vested interest in erecting and maintaining barriers to new entrants.
For example, it typically takes 1,500 hours of instruction to become licensed to cut peoples hair in exchange for money. That amount of training might be reasonable for someone working with potentially harmful chemicals, but on the other hand I can give someone a pretty decent buzzcut and have approximately zero hours of training (but would still face civil penalties if I were to open Frankus' Buzzcut Studio).
It's also worth noting that licensing doesn't necessarily have to be enforced by the state, (although I agree that basic knowledge of the health and safety aspects of an occupation is probably a reasonable requirement to be state-enforced).
You could have a private credentialing agency that certifies practitioners who have completed additional study or exams, or have a certain minimum amount of experience (something along the lines of Microsoft's MCSE credential, but for, say, applying makeup).
I sometimes think they want to license everything because it brings in a fair amount of money in fees.
Yeah the polygraph one seem anachronistic, but if people still use them I appreciate the state trying to make sure the practitioners aren't more snake oil-y than the field at large.
What do you imagine you're getting from hypothetical oversight? It is not theoretically possible to be more snake-oily than the field at large.
You've completely failed to distinguish a legal licensure scheme from an independent endorsement scheme.
I mean, the key difference is that with a market solution you're policing one market with another that's even harder for consumers to evaluate than the first one, and consumer choice is what (supposedly) keeps markets in check, so all you've accomplished is making the situation worse. At least using government changes the mechanism by which we apply pressure to the regulators, and their incentives, rather than presenting a worse version of the same thing, so it has the potential to be an improvement.
You cannot hold someone accountable without a government, because otherwise there's no way to create consequences. Having a private certification authority only adds a layer of indirection.
Free-market dynamics require a lot of intellectual overhead.
For example, in a theoretical world with unbound computation and information-sharing, all stocks on the stock-market should be perfectly priced, and all doctors should be of known qualities. And all of those supplements in the pharmacy should be of known effect, and priced perfectly given that knowledge.
But in more limited contexts, where folks don't have infinite free information and computation, centralized authorities can help provide standards. For example, if you go to a licensed medical-doctor, then you may not know their exact quality, but at least you can generally infer that they're competent enough that the state hasn't yanked their license. Ditto for most other licensed professions.
Anyway, to answer your question: the government does it because it's too costly for everyone to do it themselves. When that changes -- this is, when consumers start to acquire a level of knowledge where they can make informed decisions and find government regulation stifling rather than helpful -- then they petition the government to change in response to such new circumstances.
> intellectual overhead
aka transaction costs.
Licensing, credentials, certification are just the cost of doing business. Open markets are built on transparency, accountability, fair rules, impartial referees, etc.
Sure, it all sucks. The alternative is worse.
Well sure, we'd all like that. But those of us who have experience dealing with government regulatory bodies (even justifiable ones like building inspectors, fire inspectors, etc.) are skeptical for good reason. The competence of your licensing overlords will vary greatly.
Because hepatitis is real.
Same deal with an acupuncturist.
It does seem like quite a few of the things that require licenses in Texas would be just as safe with a certificate and random inspections (like they do with food handlers).
[Their site](https://www.tdlr.texas.gov/diet/diet.htm) says that:
> The Dietitians program licenses and regulates dietitians in Texas. A license is required to use the titles "Licensed Dietitian" and "Provisionally Licensed Dietitian." A license is not required to use the titles "Dietitian" or "Nutritionist."
Haven't checked the others, but at least that one seems pretty reasonable.
Also, hospitals tend to have licensed-dietitians to handle stuff like making meal-plans for patients, which is apparently a more involved process than one might think, especially for patients with multiple complications.
https://capitol.texas.gov/tlodocs/87R/billtext/html/HB01560F...
Realistically a law that requires a majority vote to continue the agency is better. That way if something in government cannot muster say 60% of the vote. It’s abolished.
I would like to see the feds do similar with executive offices.
I’d also like to see these for charities
I’d also like to see it for non-profits.
Often their original intent or charter does not reflect their current state.
Often it’s inertia and people wanting to perpetuate these organizations that keep them going morphing them beyond their original intent.
While in principle checking in on laws seems nice, a mandatory review deadline or it goes away would not be a viable solution in our current political climate.
But even in a more ideal climate, it seems that Congress would be tied up with the reviews and have no time to actually address new or contemporary issues.
Perhaps if it was structured so that a small percentage of laws were randomly selected and some check was enacted so that a minority couldn’t easily kill the law.
But potentially also the NFA, Marijuana prohibition, and much more.
Overwhelming congress gives states more impetus to solve their own problems instead of let the federal government be so bloated.
is there a Sunset Commission for the Sunset Commission? :-)
More specifically, 20 years ago I remember learning Texas had some of the strictest laws on using the term "engineer". You could not call yourself a "software engineer" in Texas if you have were been licensed by the state. https://www.chron.com/news/article/Law-to-decide-if-programm...
Now, my knowledge is 20 years of date, and Texas law appears to now allow "engineer" in a business card of a software engineer[1], but my point is that the Texas Board of Professional Engineers would be the one to determine things like this, and I see no way that that board (a "self-directed semi-independent agency of the State of Texas") would be discontinued under the Sunset Commission.
Therefore, I don't see how that mechanism could be use to cut down on this specific type of abuse.
[1] The current laws are at https://engineers.texas.gov/downloads/enf_pub.pdf .
> Except as provided by Subsection (f), a person may not, unless the person holds a license issued under this chapter, directly or indirectly use or cause to be used as a professional, business, or commercial identification, title, name, representation, claim, asset, or means of advantage or benefit any of, or a variation or abbreviation of, the following terms:(1) “engineer”;(2) “professional engineer”;(3) “licensed engineer”;(4) “registered engineer”;(5) “registered professional engineer”;(6) “licensed professional engineer”; or (7) “engineered.” ...
> (f) Notwithstanding the other provisions of this chapter, a regular employee of a business entity who is engaged in engineering activities but is exempt from the licensing requirements of this chapter under Sections 1001.057 or 1001.058 is not prohibited from using the term “engineer” on a business card, cover letter, or other form of correspondence that is made available to the public if the person does not: (1) offer to the public to perform engineering services; or (2) use the title in any context outside the scope of the exemption in a manner that represents an ability or willingness to perform engineering services or make an engineering judgment requiring a licensed professional engineer.
It looks like (f) was added 20 years ago, and it allows someone to say they are a software engineer on a business card. Exception (f) does not allow a non-licensed engineer to say they are an engineer when an expert witness in a court case.
If something is disbanded, how often was it due to a legitimate issue of not being necessary, and how often to satisfy a political grudge, bias, or simple lack of understanding by non-expert politicians?
I like this idea in theory, but I'd also like to know more of what the results have been in actual practice because there seem to be multiple failure modes.
I live in Spain where engineering is very regulated. This results in some engineers spending 6+ years in university to gain the same status as their international peers who studied for 3 or 4 years.
There's no point in enforcing this other than collecting fees to pay the salaries of people who don't really do anything.
It is a license to speak truth about a profession and perform it. Making bullshit illegal. It works for certain professions where the individual can be a commodity and the customer can't reliably determine the trust themselves.
When you're designing bridges or homes or public infrastructure, a lot of times it can be very difficult to pick a good expert (which is necessary, these things can screw up and end lives and waste billions), so you have professional organizations which do the verification for you. Somebody else makes the "hiring decision" which is fine.
But if you lose focus of what the purpose is, you get bureaucratic zealots who follow regulations without any attention to what they are for.
Seeing that makes me think that they should lose their license, which goes against the feeling I feel in this engineers case.
That makes me worry that I'm making my decision based on if I think what they're saying is correct or not, not if they should have the right to say it.
Whether it's a medical professional, architect, engineer, etc., I don't have a problem with the speech and actions of a person being regulated by a professional organization while they are claiming to be of that profession. i.e. legally protecting the term doctor/nurse/engineer/lawyer/etc. is just fine.
If you are not, you need to make it clear that you are indeed not a licensed professional.
Generally in the US engineer is used pretty loosely. Some states are stricter. But even those who are, like apparently Texas, my first-hand experience is that most people don't pay much attention.
The autism link to vaccines isn't at the "further research necessary" stage, it is at the "not absolutely impossible but much evidence against" stage.
The only reason the link exists at all is that vaccines and first signs of autism can happen at similar times and often a vaccine will make a person/small child briefly feel unwell which gets pointed to as a "first sign" because humans find patterns where there aren't any and want something, anything to blame instead of not knowing.
Saying the equivalent of "the science is settled" is always not true because how could we possibly know all of the variables that matter. And in science, all factors matter.
There is no such thing, you can study something until the heat death of the Universe and still have a nonzero uncertainty.
>Saying the equivalent of "the science is settled" is always not true because how could we possibly know all of the variables that matter. And in science, all factors matter.
There is a wide gap between "further research is necessary" and "the science is settled" and you seem to be arguing on both sides depending on if that argument is in favor of the autism link. The link stopped being an interesting or pressing scientific question, the necessity or urgency of continuing to research it is quite low and anyone making funding decisions would be wise to allocate mostly elsewhere. There's no problem with continuing to search if a research group wants, researching unpopular questions is important, but let's not misrepresent the state of the research and the reasonable conclusions which can be drawn from the data. "further research necessary" is a phrase that evokes a sense that there is little evidence on which to base conclusions, there may be a hint of an effect, perhaps with contradictory evidence. This is not the case for the autism link, there is indeed a large statistically sound corpus of evidence pointing in the "no link" direction.
I am not arguing that vaccines could cause autism. What I am arguing is that we don't know what causes autism and that we don't know if vaccines are an aggravating factor. That seems like an important question to me.
By the way, there can be a "large statistically sound corpus of evidence" for "no link" and still be wrong. Most importantly, all of that evidence could have missed important factors.
But beyond that point, as the medical field has lied to us more and more this past year, I no longer take what they say at face value. I dig in myself. And while they have convinced me that there is no direct link, they haven't convinced me that vaccines are definitely not an aggravating factor.
What benefit is there? One fewer person in a critical role due to an incredibly punitive decision is obvious downside. It's like sending someone to jail for a speeding ticket. Absolute fucking madness.
I've no clue myself where the line should be drawn, but there's at least a debate to be had (by people who understand the scenarios a lot better than me). For example, would you say the same about a nurse who tells every patient they see that smoking cigarettes is the best way to prevent cancer, even if apart from constantly saying that they were doing a fine job in other areas?
I'm not going to pretend to have an answer for what we should do about people like her, but I do know that destroying their lives (squashing genuine, well meaning dissent) is not the answer.
Or are you proposing that she be thrown on the streets, jailed, exhiled, or executed? What do you propose? I too can be uncharitable but that probably doesn't lead to productive conversation.
Furthermore you do seem to be consistently saying a nurse, at a hospital, giving medical advice that doesn’t meet standards of care should not face normal malpractice charges not even face a suspension of license. (Just go to a quack hospital!)
I mean yeah that is position, but like I said elsewhere in this thread, I can’t distinguish it from libertarian “license to toast” bullshit.
Hence the one-sided nature of the comments here.
"he is an engineer at heart and speaks up when he sees people make what he believes to be engineering mistakes. He has written letters to state and county governments and testified before a county commission. But Wayne’s troubles began when he when he agreed to help his son, Kyle, a North Carolina attorney, with a case about a piping system that allegedly flooded a few local homes"
If he were telling lies, he would be legally accountable to the individuals or companies that his lies harmed. That would probably be an easy case to bring against him to stop him from telling lies. But this approach of trying to silence him on grounds of not technically being an engineer shows plainly that he is telling enough truth that he wouldn't be accountable for lying and causing harm.
Cases like this are probably common, although the methods of silencing vary from situation to situation. While the US may not be as corrupt as many other countries, it still has a significant amount which ultimately harms the general public and certainly harms the few individuals that find themselves on the wrong side of a corrupt authority.
[0] https://www.aclu.org/news/free-speech/the-problem-with-censo...
[1] https://www.aclu.org/legal-document/prosperity-foundation-v-...
Licensing laws used against people are more likely to be used for political cover rather than to protect the public.
While there is some value in credentials for quick judgements and floor requirements, there is never an honest reason to bar someone from giving their opinion or testifying. Everyone is always free to not listen or disregard that opinion.
We place similar expectations on legal and medical advice, and wrong engineering advice is arguably more dangerous than both. (For values of 'engineering' involving 'building heavy machinery, physical infrastructure, etc. which lives depend on - a wrong diagnoses can kill one person, a bad load calc can potentially kill thousands if a stadium collapses. I don't mean giving advice on page layout in CSS needs to be regulated.)
Edit: Note that I'm not saying he should be gagged, and the circumstances definitely need to be considered, just that I understand the reasoning behind standards for advice presented as authoritative. What's going on in TFA more smacks of union protectionism than genuine caution.
We do and received terrible medical advice during the latest pandemic while people trying to correct it were getting banned from social media. We are also reaping results of decades of terrible dietary advice.
The track record for censorship isn't great.
The dietary advice thing is mental the deeper you look into it, too. Breakfast is the most important meal of the day! Wait, it was Kelloggs saying that. More than two eggs a day will make you die of heart disease? Apparently not any more. Was that dodgy advice from the pork board or did Big Egg just buy off the right people? Fat is bad for you and makes you fat, says CSR. Actually sugar makes you fat AND causes cancer, but dietary fat is fine, says Brownes Dairy.
I think the whole expert testimony business is suspect as the definition of “expert” varies so much. But I think the correction is in the law specifying what is expect and not and making that better is the place to focus.
It seems like the correction would be to invalidate his testimony, not to arrest him.
It’s really hard to have legal expert testimony and separate true experts vs people with other motivators (money, family, etc).
You mean, "presenting from a position of expertise without very specific and questionably relevant credentials demanded by a local regulatory body." His education and career experience are certainly qualifications substantiating his expertise.
From the OP:
> “In this country, we rely on people to decide who they want to listen to rather than relying on the government to decide who gets to speak,” said IJ Attorney Joe Gay. “North Carolina’s engineering board is getting that important principle exactly backwards.”
Amen, brother.
For a state or local entity to curtail First Amendment rights, they must have a compelling interest in doing so. There is very little reason to believe that passing tests administered by the local engineering board actually provides any protective value to the public in a context where the person in question is merely criticizing a design (not building anything) and already has extensive hands-on experience in the subject they are speaking on. It's quite possible that, in cases like this, licensing demands mostly exist for the Board to arrogate power and money to itself. The Board must clear a much higher bar to legally punish people for speech.
I think that the only thing an engineering license should grant you, in this case, is the right to call yourself a licensed engineer, which conveys some degree of authority. I don't think he made that claim.
Of course, both the lawyers and the judge can take both credentials and experience into account when evaluating the credibility of such a report.
Obviously, if someone isn't licensed they can't present themselves as being licensed and various regulatory agencies and the like may require someone to be licensed in order to sign off on various documents.
Not to "talk about engineering". To provide expert testimony as an engineer.
Honestly, I don’t like the manipulation with the title and how they are framing the whole thing. Makes me cautious about emitting an opinion.
So imagine if 80% of doctors didn't have some sort of license allowing them to speak about their practice.
> In fact, like the majority of engineers nationwide, Wayne was not required to get a license since he worked for a company under the state’s “industrial exception.”
> By some estimates, 80% of engineers nationwide work legally without a license. By the Board’s interpretation, most engineers in North Carolina could not legally comment publicly on engineering.
But as the grandparent comment you responded to explained, he isn't calling himself that, because he declared that he wasn't a licensed engineer. Shouldn't the court be able to decide whether to accept him as an expert witness?
"(4) Engaging in engineering or land surveying as an employee or assistant under the responsible charge of a professional engineer or professional land surveyor." is, I think, the only one to apply.
Yeah, it sounds like something the opposition's lawyer should try to prevent being accepted as expert witness testimony. I'm not a lawyer, but I have seen "My Cousin Vinny" so I understand that there are procedures for doing this.
On the other hand, maybe the opposition's lawyer wasn't able to prevent the witness from being accepted as an expert because the witness actually was an expert and ought to have been accepted as an expert, in spite of not being a doctor. Maybe she was a professor of pharmacology or something. Thus she could justifiably claim to say with expertise "X drug would be very likely to kill a patient of type T and should not be prescribed to them." But this sounds a lot like medical advice (I mean, a person with condition T who heard the testimony might decide not to take drug X), even though it isn't. It's expert witness testimony.
We try to prevent people from giving medical advice without a license because medical advice tends to be given in private to people who tend to trust it implictly and will thus suffer the consequences of it being dangerously wrong. When medical advice is given in public in front of a hostile enemy lawyer, this is less of a concern.
On a side note, I think you'd be sad to learn how common it is for this to apply to testifying coroners.
Engineering licensure is generally opt-in for activities that require it, and you obviously don't need to be a licensed engineer to testify plainly in court (contrast with signing off on plans for a building, for which you do), so he should be in the clear.
Of course getting this close to what the state board considers their turf (Professional Engineer expert witnesses, whose testimony carries more weight) explains why they're trying to stomp on him - similar to that engineer in Oregon who got legally harassed for a bunch of years for doing math about red light cameras.
Aren't courts capable of making that decision themselves? Why should the state be allowed to interfere with sworn testimony?
Would they be prohibited from testifying as well? Or what if the Board claims classroom activities are too close to ‘practicing’ engineering for their comfort?
At least in medicine this isn't the case; the AMA effectively limits the number of positions available. The ratio of doctors to patients has hence been steadily decreasing over the past few decades.
The AMA lobbies intensely for more residency spots and more medical schools and has since at least the debate over the ACA.
But to decide a license is needed for anything other than "advertising you have a license" is perverted. Some government official who wants to control people, not keep them safe and organized. Its all about power I guess.
I find it hard to believe that any engineer would not know this because I was told companies and the gov. use PEs to sign off on designs that impact the public when I was getting my degree in mechanical engineering.
The question here is whether this man was truly barred from speaking publicly about engineering or whether he was barred from testifying about engineering.
The former would be a problem due to its broadness, but the second would definitely not be.
It looks to me more the latter: he "helping his son" by "speaking about engineering" is a written report in a court case.
Quite a bit of framing
You can waffle with "it's not the same part of HN" or something, but honestly it sounds more like a lot of HN just doesn't like anything which might prevent them from offering their opinion in inappropriate contexts, and their mechanism to avoid this is to refuse to let anyone judge the appropriateness of a context.
Big "what's next, a license to toast" energy from all this tbh.
Yes, according to the current law, which is not serving the needs of society well. If an engineer has been working for many years for a company which was not required to have a license, this is already a sufficient proof of qualification and licensing board should not be able to sanction anyone in such case. On the contrary, they should offer a way to obtain a post-factum license either as a result of exam or based on audit of previously implemented projects, and the cost of such license should not be prohibitive, only covering the reasonable share of the expenses of the board.
The purpose of licensing for society is to restrict certain activities only to qualified individuals and businesses to reduce risks of unacceptable damage. This restriction does not imply that a license should be obtained in order to do something, only that there must be a proof of qualification and a license is a sufficient proof. When and how this proof is presented, should not matter, as long as it happens. The law must only create a liability for those people, who cannot present a verifiable proof.
He likely did not as it would be an involved process and may require insurance.
He is not a party in the court case so presumably his testimony is that of an expert witness. Providing expert testimony as an engineer sounds an awful lot like practicing engineering. He is not licensed and he is not practicing under the aegis of a licensed firm. He's in violation of the law.
A better question would be whether he had done piping & fluids vs. another civil engineering specialty such as bridge design.
I don't think that is the main question, the testify vs speak is secondary. He is not a "Licensed Engineer", but he IS an "Engineer" (Graduated Engineering school, and worked legally his whole life as an Engineer in the subset of "engineering" that doesn't require a license). So he is an expert in "Engineering" (the subset) by schooling and legal work experience, and should be able to provide expert testimony on the field where he is an expert. He is not thou, an expert in "Licensed Engineering", so he can't provide expert testimony on that. The question them becomes: The testimony he gave applies to the subset of engineering that is only allowed to a "Licensed Engineer"? Or in other words, would he be forbidden from working on the thing he is testifying about? If the answer is yes, then he broke the law, by presenting himself as an expert Engineer in a matter restricted to licensed, then he wrongly presented himself as licensed. If the answer is no, if the matter discussed is something he was allowed to work on (before he retired) without a license, then there is nothing wrong with his testimony.
And balancing those two important interests most states have drawn the line at: you can’t tell (or insinuate to) the public you’re a licensed attorney if you’re not and you can’t file legal documents with a court or a regulator on behalf of someone else unless under the supervision of a licensed attorney.
You can, however, spout your terrible and blatantly wrong legal opinion all over the internet, tv, and in print to anyone willing to listen. No law license required. Many people have even made a career of it.
There's no problem with the court declining to treat him as an expert witness. This is about the state threatening to arrest him for truthfully describing his experience and opinions.
What's missing is the fact that the conduct in question happened in a courtroom. If I drive over a bridge and it collapses and kills me, I don't get to hire a lawyer and an expert witness from the afterlife and have them try to impeach the credibility of the bridge designer or demonstrate the unsuitability of his plans and, if I manage to convince a jury, I get to be resurrected. Since I can't do this, the state enacted some rules about what kind of qualifications the guy designing the bridge has to have.
But in a courtroom, if I don't like this unlicensed engineer the other side wants to put on the stand, I can try to prove he doesn't know what he's talking about. I can hire my own engineer to help me come up with tricky questions to make a fool of him on the stand and maybe prevent him being accepted as an expert. I can cross-examine him with help from my own engineer to prepare. I can have my own engineer testify to rebut his claims. I have all sorts of options besides causing him to be threatened with violation of professional licensing laws.
The point is that the professional licensing laws exist to protect people in situations like driving over a bridge. They do not exist to protect the public from the risk that unlicensed people may testify in court about engineering, thereby potentially producing injustice. This is because lawyers already exist to do this job, and are extensively trained and licensed to do it. That's why the lawsuit attacks the professional licensing laws as _overbroad_, not inappropriate in the context of certifying people to design bridges and that kind of thing.
I was originally trained as a materials engineer, and nearly 20 years ago there was no clear PE exam to take for that discipline, so I never considered getting one.
Today, I wouldn't want to be encumbered with the E&O insurance and other restrictions of a PE, and I would have to review extensively to pass the test.
In my professional experience, it has always been nice to have a 3rd party look over your design, and the expense is of no consequence if the customer/law require the review.
For a legal case, I'm not surprised that the barrier of entry for expert testimony might be a PE.
I'd be interested to understand from a lawyer here on HN what the extent of protected speech is in a courtroom situation.
> In fact, like the majority of engineers nationwide, Wayne was not required to get a license since he worked for a company under the state’s “industrial exception.”
A half-minute search on Google didn't seem to produce anything of relevance, but I did come across numerous articles talking about licensing not being needed. Would be curious to see more hard data on the number of un-licensed engineers and if there is any correlation to issues / shoddy work or not.
It's also possible for unlicensed engineers to work under the supervision of a licensed engineer (PE), often the PE will be the one to stamp drawings etc.
AFAIK, it's required as part of the process of getting a PE.
(from FBPE 61G15, FL Admin Code)
7. Experience should be gained under the supervision of a licensed professional engineer or, if not, an explanation should be made showing why the experience should be considered acceptable.
A large degree of the correlation is lack of experience, so there are corner cases where unlicensed individuals build something safe.
But generally it won’t meet building code and the building code describes the very worst construction that is legal…
…and even that is hard to get right because licensed professionals struggle with it all the time and that’s why I was reviewing plans.
Also, he was never licensed as an engineer, it's not as if his engineering license lapsed after testimony.
You can throw out all expert testimony in the US if you wish, I guess that would put CSI out of business.
I wonder if this org is just fine with non-CPAs handling their finances.
Is anyone more disturbed by the fact that a family member can serve as an impartial expert witness?
So you often get each side with a biased witnessess arguing the other biased witness is wrong.
Having done this sort of work... Sort of. We were picked in part because we had already publicly written about a case in a way that supported one side's position. (Obviously the side that reached out to us.) There was nothing in our report I didn't personally agree with.
I'd add that my understanding is that, while some people do a relatively large amount of expert witness work--we did not--the preference is that expert witnesses don't do this as a full-time gig where it becomes a matter of supporting what whoever paying them wants.
To me, it feels like any potential bias should be disclosed in legal filings and argued by the other side of the case during the legal dispute, and the judge/jury should weigh this in whatever decision-making process they employ.
In closing, I'd say this. Preparing for a serious trial might cost tens of thousands of dollars or more. Do you really want to live in a world where you can't offer to help a family member or friend who asks for your help in a subject matter you know about?
Oh, you don't have a programming license? You aren't allowed to write C++.
I don’t have a degree, no license, or accreditation, yet I’ve worked for government contracts, medical software, and designed hardware for doctors. Would I then be sued for giving advice from my proven track record? I’ve never called myself an engineer yet most of my job titles say Engineer.
Criminal charges for expressing your opinion is another.
An airplane pilot is licensed and will talk trash w/ people about flying and not get in trouble unless they express an opinion like ‘i love to drink a six pack before I get in the cockpit’.
Other people say what they want about aviation and unless it is something like ‘I used this one weird trick to smuggle a sniper rifle past the X ray backscatter machine’ or ‘kewl! I jammed the gps on a plane and saw the coordinates change on ads-b’ you won’t face criminal charges.
There was a day when Wilhelm Reich was sent to jail and L. Ron Hubbard exiled at sea. Today, it seems almost impossible to face criminal charges for bogus health information.
Being a paid expert witness is different than “expressing your opinion.” It’s one thing to be subpoenaed and compelled to testify and another to swear and speak authoritatively. Expert testimony “opinion” could result in people going to jail, or in this case paying large sums of money.
I imagine a case of medical malpractice where an unlicensed doctor was expertly testifying as to the proper procedure. That seems inappropriate.
So let the lawyers bring in whatever supposed experts they can find, and let the lawyers from the other side poke holes at their credentials? Same procedure as with eyewitnesses, which are not usually licensed.
It was a bare-faced, rent-seeking money grab from some entrenched licensing board. I mean, I've used Ohm's Law in my software career, and I've made smoke come out of things on a professional basis. But it's hardly necessary for a security engineer to know about impedance matching.
Not sure why you are being downvoted.
I donate to them and encourage others to do so as well. And if you were one of the people complaining in that other HN thread about the alleged changes in the ACLU, consider donating here instead, rather than just not donating to any civil rights groups.
It is a great many countries.
Outrageous. Something definitely smells. Worth further investigation.
Given that the case cites numerous times he gave his opinion in "public and quasi-judicial" fora without mentioning reprimand, it seems like it's the latter. That's doesn't sound like a first amendment violation. Truth is not the only bar to clear in legal testimony.
It is worth distinguishing that engineers are regulated because their opinions carry legal weight. They carry legal weight because the truth is difficult to determine and even experts (i.e engineers) can’t readily determine it absolutely (hence safety factors).
The safety valve for engineering opinion’s weight is engineers are personally liable for errors in judgment (no corporate protection).
Engineering licences are really meant to protect unqualified people making bad designs which get made and produce safety/quality issues - their purpose isn’t to work out who should be able to say what. They are about making sure something physical gets built correctly according to code.
The idea that someone could see a safety issue related to the engineering of something and wouldn’t be able to raise it (in either a casual or legal setting) because they don’t have a licence is clearly absurd.
Suppose, for example, an engineer testified that bricks should never be used in housing because in his professional opinion bricks cause cancer. His source is a blog post as reliable as a supermarket tabloid.
How do you prove he's intentionally lying, rather than just insane or confused or stupid?
By making it a license issue instead, you at least move the goal as to whether his statements meet some minimum standard of professional expectations or care.
This is all just hypothetical, in practice I don't know to what extent these license authorities are supervising engineers. But ideally I'd like an engineer to at least have some pressure to remain honest when they testify in court.
1 https://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Institute_for_Justice
2 https://ij.org/press-release/oregon-engineer-wins-traffic-li...
It appears from the IJ's "details" (https://ij.org/case/nc-engineering-speech/)that Nutt is a chemical engineer. ("Wayne Nutt spent over 37 years as a practicing engineer, mostly working for the DuPont corporation in North Carolina. In that time, he worked with a variety of different technologies and designed and built a variety of things, including pipes for transportation of fluid, while developing deep expertise in chemical engineering and technology.")
He provided expert testimony on a water drainage issue. ("Wayne’s trouble started when he volunteered to testify as an expert witness in a case his son, an attorney, was litigating. The case involved a piping system in a housing development that allegedly caused flooding in nearby areas, and Wayne, who had designed plenty of pipes in his day, volunteered to testify about the volume of fluid that pipe could be expected to carry.")
Then, "After Wayne testified truthfully that he was not (and never had been) a licensed engineer, the lawyers for the defendant threatened to report him to the North Carolina Board of Examiners for Engineers and Surveyors. Wayne didn’t take the threat seriously; he wasn’t designing anything or building anything, he was just offering his opinion about something that might have happened in the past."
Offering expert testimony appears to fall under the definition of "practice of engineering" (https://codes.findlaw.com/nc/chapter-89c-engineering-and-lan...). "The practice of engineering in North Carolina for projects or testimony impacting the public in North Carolina requires that the individual and company must be licensed in North Carolina. ... Our Board considers that any testimony that requires engineering knowledge to adequately provide and to protect the public falls with the definition of the practice of engineering and requires a NC PE license." (https://ij.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/NC_Engineering_ema...)
The court appears to have allowed him to provide the expert testimony, but the Board is doing what it does.
There's not much to see here; no one except the IJ is saying anything about "he can't talk about engineering"---the topic in question is expert testimony and I don't think federal courts are going to regard that as some form of protected speech in this situation.
On the other hand, the internet has become this fucking enormous megaphone of people who have no idea what they're talking about, they are also completely free to put up fucking billboards IRL about, say, how the pandemic is a hoax and how vaccines are dangerous — nobody bats an eye, and there's really is no efficient way to get them to shut the fuck up about stuff they've got no clue about.
Now I'm not saying there should be censorship (although requiring tinfoil hat wielders to pay hefty license fees sounds very tempting), but it looks like today it's way easier to silence a real subject matter expert than a pompous charlatan, and that's plain unfair.
The problem of today is that misinformation scales far more easily than quality information, and it’s because we don’t have the tools to filter out well-written (grammar and tone) misinformation.
I’m not sure credentialism alone is the answer though.
These engineers are no more practicing engineering without a license than anti-vaxxers are practicing medicine without a license.
(OTOH, maybe we're on to something there...)