Hacker News Reader

Comment by lucaspiller | Hacker News Reader

As UK citizen it really surprises me how much things are licensed and regulated in the US. I've been following /r/diy recently, and in some states you need to be licensed to even change a light switch. I assume this is to prevent someone from doing it wrong and burning down a 10 storey apartment building, but come on? Can't you trust people to use their own judgement as to whether they can do it sensibly or not?

Today I read a story about a car getting tickets for $100k [0], one of the tickets was for being in a "hazardous and dilapidated condition", broken headlights and cracked windows. I'm currently living in Rome, Italy - the traffic wardens would have a field day here, basically every car has some sort of damage from an incident.

Don't even get me started about HOA rules...

[0] http://www.thenewspaper.com/news/39/3958.asp

View on HN

I don't know how I feel about this issue. Haven't decided.

But if my neighbor miswires a light switch and it starts a fire that burns my house down because they're close together, that would suck. In that situation, I would have wanted a say in whether my neighbor chose to do that themselves or hire someone who knows what they're doing.

I'm living in a house that is filled with small jobs that seemed like they were done by someone who didn't know what they were doing. Lots of scrap lumber, mis-matching parts, electrical re-wires that just didn't work, etc. I'm glad I don't need a permit to fix some of that myself, but I would've loved to stop this guy before he did these things.

Or if someone's half-assery endangered otherwise innocent lives. Note: not necessarily crying "save the children!" "Innocent" as in "couldn't influence decision to get someone who knows what they're doing".

> But if my neighbor miswires a light switch and it starts a fire that burns my house down because they're close together, that would suck. In that situation, I would have wanted a say in whether my neighbor chose to do that themselves or hire someone who knows what they're doing.

I'm more or less in the same boat, but leaning towards "not licensing."

Here's how I look at it: in your scenario, would licensing have really prevented any of that from happening? It might give us grounds to sue for damages, but I don't think it would deter idiots from doing what idiots are going to do. Seems more likely to hinder conscious people who can be bothered to look up "the right way" to do something in the first place.

In industrial cases though I absolutely see the need for licensing where safety is concerned - I don't want an untrained person working on the aircraft that's about to transport me across 3000 miles of land mass.

The distinction I would make is a matter of scale and significance I suppose.

That's a good point about the idiots. A lot of this discussion feels similar to discussions around developer toolchains as a safeguard against bad code, in a way. Like, we're all well-meaning people who want to do something about this but maybe making people ask permission isn't the solution?

Scale feels like a good metric for this. Like, if you're a builder making a lot of houses get a permit. If you're a homeowner fixing your own stuff, you're okay. Maybe education? Like, "You're buying a house! Have a free handyman course on us!" or something?

> Scale feels like a good metric for this. Like, if you're a builder making a lot of houses get a permit. If you're a homeowner fixing your own stuff, you're okay. Maybe education? Like, "You're buying a house! Have a free handyman course on us!" or something?

Yep, that seems like a reasonable compromise to me.

What if your neighbour puts a large pot of oil on the stove and drops some water in the boiling oil and the whole thing catches on fire (and the house burns down and your house is near)? Or candles? Or cigarettes in bed?

I don't have numbers, but I would be fairly confident in a guess that many, many more houses burn down because of a combination of open flames and carelessness, than do because of low-level DIY electrical work.

Carelessness and open flames are in many ways unavoidable. Badly wired light switches are avoidable.

Why not just simply require people to sit through a fire safety class and issue them a fire safely license, which would be required for purchasing candles, matches or lighters? And to have an extended "cooking with gas fire safety" class as a requirement for having utility gas in your home?

Because we can choose to draw the line somewhere, however arbitrary it might be.

Using matches to light a stove or fireplace is so common that we've as a society decided to not place restrictions on that activity because the cost outweighs the benefit.

However, doing electrical work on your house is not quite as common and the result of your work will stay with the house and possibly affect future owners. Added to that the work is generally hidden or not obvious and future owners may not know about your substandard work.

Yeah it's a totally arbitrary line, but either we license nothing or we just pick somewhere to draw it.

> we license nothing or we just pick somewhere to draw it

My original comment was because in the UK most of this stuff isn't licensed* - even installing a gas stove doesn't need a license, which I'd argue is a lot easier to screw up than a light switch.

There are 'regulations' on how things should be done, but these are merely guidelines in most cases - you won't have any issues with the authorities when trying to sell your house or with insurers if it's not up to scratch. It would be interesting to see how accidents caused by this compare in the UK and US.

On the other hand two things we do strictly regulate are 'listed' buildings and the removal of trees in your garden.

*I think the same is true for most of Europe.

In many places this is (or used to be) part of a high school diploma. My elementary school had assemblies where firefighters would come talk to us about fire safety. My middle school had a Home Economics class where they talked about grease fires and using burners correctly.

Why? This is clearly a greater danger. Obviously, people should be required to get a license before using a stove. Everyone else will be allowed to buy precooked food ($profit$!) and put it in an approved microwave.

That's true, by about 10:1. Are you saying that we shouldn't bother licensing electricians or getting permits for electrical work because people are burning down houses in fires? It feels like you're presenting this as some kind of refutation to a point I'm not making?

EDIT: What's the emoji for "my tone is sincere, I'm misunderstanding what he's saying you downvoting heathens?" ( =

I'm saying we should stop pretending the reason you can't do light DIY electrical work in your home has anything to do whatsoever with public safety.

By and large in the US, you can as far as the government is concerned--especially if the scope is such that a permit doesn't need to be pulled and the work inspected. (There may be exceptions in some states, but it hasn't been the case in my experience either as a matter of law or as a practical matter.)

The viral Australian "Dumb Ways to Die" video from a couple of years back by Metro Trains Melbourne included a snippet about "doing your own electrical work" which seemed rather incongruous to me as a fairly typical American with a house who doesn't think twice about swapping light switches and such. (Especially given the popular image of self-reliant Australians and all that--however atypical sheep and cattle stations may be of the average resident.)

When I commented about this previously though, I was told it reflected strong union etc. rules in Australia.

In practice, in the US, lots of people do some amount of their home repairs including electrical. I'm sure, in many cases, that work is theoretically supposed to be done by a licensed electrician, plumber, etc.

But many of us learned electricity with the understanding that doing it wrong can kill us either during the fix or some later time during the usage. With that in mind we tend to respect it and do the right thing. I can't tell you how much of what was done on my house by "licensed" electricians and plumbers is absolute crap. I take pride in what I do and if I'm going to take a short cut I make sure it's not a dangerous one.

Can't you trust people to use their own judgement as to whether they can do it sensibly or not?

No, you can't. And it's not a matter of "sometimes you can't trust people to do the job right", it's that more times than not an amateur will cut corners, or more accurately, won't know enough to even know that they're cutting corners. For example, my wife and I bought a VW Westfalia camper van a few months ago. After 35 years it's been through a few owners. I wouldn't let any of the previous owners anywhere near my house wiring. Stuff works, but it's half-assed in a lot of places. Twist two wires together, cover it in tape. I'm a solder-and-shrink-tubing guy myself, but c'mon, at least use a Scotchlock or something.

I've owned houses with outlets that had no ground because the person that put the outlets in couldn't be bothered, so they snipped the ground wire so that it was out of the way. Yeah, you plug stuff in and it would work, but would you trust the culprit to wire your house? And so on, and so on.

The summary is, I've seen enough half-assed work over the years (and some of it from "professionals" that people paid money for) that I do not trust people to use their own judgement. Do I think a license should be required to install a light switch? That's a different question. Are you going to trust the person that took a database class a few years ago to "use their own judgement as to whether they can do it sensibly or not" when it comes time to write the backend for your contact management system? I'll bet you they'd eventually deliver something that mostly works. Do you want to maintain it?

> Can't you trust people to use their own judgement as to whether they can do it sensibly or not?

Individually, yes, you can expect people to act in their best interest. When doing things for others, not so much. Look at the #ventyourrent movement for examples of the way people are being treated in pursuit of profit -- not high rents, but the sheer number of landlords that either fail to maintain, or negligently maintain their properties in a way that puts tenants at risk.

The US has a serious problem with licensing and regulation, but that also seems to be a product of their litigious culture as a whole.

If you're willing to limit your search, at least in the US, HOAs in some cities are optional. E.g. when looking for houses in LA, no HOA was a soft requirement of mine. Every house built in the 80s or later seemed to have one, so we ended up with a house built in the 70s. Some of the HOA rules were kinda ridiculous (could not have garage open unless a car was exiting or entering, wtf).

In a condo building though, I don't know how you can get around an HOA.

> In a condo building though, I don't know how you can get around an HOA.

Condos pretty much have to have an association to manage them. You typically own the interior of the unit. The association owns the exterior and the land.

It's definitely an "it depends". I'm in a Purple state (Missouri, about half Democrats and half Republicans, sort of trending Red, but with plenty of independent spirit and all that), and being about to buy a home made in 1910 in my home town, I looked up the city's code. I can do wiring entirely by myself, IF I submit a plan, and get the wiring inspected, just like is required for professional electricians.

Which is exactly what I will do, because though I've been doing wiring of various sorts at a smaller scale since the '70s, I very much want someone double checking my plans and work. And this makes sense in many ways, e.g. there's about a foot separating my and my neighbor's garages, and while more between our houses, if mine were to catch fire, the fire department would have to earn their pay to keep it from catching on fire.

And echoing others, yeah, all people, pro and diy types, most certainly cannot be entirely trusted to do it right.

> I assume this is to prevent someone from doing it wrong and burning down a 10 storey apartment building, but come on? Can't you trust people to use their own judgement as to whether they can do it sensibly or not?

You might enjoy the long-running series of photo galleries called "Home Inspection Nightmares" on the "This Old House" site: http://www.thisoldhouse.com/toh/info/0,,20211283,00.html

And I'm sure 99% of those nightmares are caused by DIY and not somebody who could potentially be licensed. Much like the pilot who is taking his own life at risk as well has his passengers, the DIY-er is living in the house that he might destroy.

Or selling his house to some poor unsuspecting sap.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com