North Carolina tells retired engineer he can't talk about engineering

Bad law, no law.

Does latin have an implied ‘better than’ in sequences?

[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

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.

It passed the Assembly and is going to the State Senate now.

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.

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.

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.

> 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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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).

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

The UK has an uncodified constitution that predates the US by over 500 years, originally founded on the Magna Carta, signed in 1215.

> 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.

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.

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.

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.

Hence the one-sided nature of the comments here.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

(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.

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.