BJBBB

Please read again. You do not understand the risks where one does not pro-actively protect one self.

Please note 'attractive nuisance' and 'calculus of negligence'. For a claimant's lawyer to be successful in California; that is, a settlement without going to trial, all they have to do is file a tort based on one or both of these two.

Based on on my insurance agent and my legal counsel, I had no choice to pursue the criminal prosecutorial path or my lawyer and insurance carrier would be legally allowed to walk away from me. So I chose my family's livelihood over the kid.

Your analysis was shallow and has no bearing on the legal reality of my world. If that is not how your world works, than good for you.

"“Yes it was wrong, yes it was illegal. But in my eyes, in that time of moment, I didn’t really think about that...What went through my mind was, ‘Okay, I’m never gonna get this opportunity again.’ So I went for it. And, well, this happened,”

People, please note that this is criminal trespass. While it is a non-violent crime, it can still screw your future.

We have about 2 acres of greenhouses surrounded by a 8ft fence that is marked with private property/no trespassing signs. The same kid kept breaking into the greenhouses, and other than making my dogs go bonkers, the kid caused no harm. But as my lawyer demanded that a police report be filed, and because we have several cameras in and around the green houses, the kid was an easy bust and prosecution. And he saw no crime with satisfying his curiosity about our greenhouses until it came time for his scholarship and job applications. The boy is royally screwed.

Of interest to me because I have been doing agricultural process monitoring and production control systems for about 30 years. And most of my clients' systems are at least semi-custom and re-invent wheels for no other purpose other than to do it their way; that is, silos (pun not intended). But where NDAs and IP agreements allow, I have attempted to standardize some architectures.

But was disappointing to see the way the LF is organizing this - no representation from the ag industry's heavy hitters and no specific and attainable goals.

Should this be done by an Operating Systems organization? Other than centralized control and logistical systems, ag engineering is not the realm of microprocessors and operating systems, and code monkeys. Ag engineering is a world of hardware, micro-controllers, FSMs, and scheduler stacks.

But then, if not the LF, whom has the organization to do this?

Unintended side effect - continued decrease in funding of pubic education.

My experience - niece and nephew went to non-secular school grades 6-12. Almost half of each senior class took calc. Not because they were smarter, but because they were of middle-class families that enforced educational aspirations and expectations. Almost all parents I spoke to chose this school not for spiritual reasons but to remove their child from their perceived mediocrity of public schools.

This school also offered scholarship, based on need only, to local inner-city children. None of these children had been in an 'exceptional' track in public school. But the scholarship kids all excelled and did well academically.

Perhaps, but the writer does seem to properly represent the mindset per C and C++:

"...learning C++ is not the same as learning C"

Do not understand your question about retirement when you indicate that what you want is a sabbatical. There is a significant difference. It is important for people in the engineering space to write stuff that is not ambiguous.

If you feel "burnt out", take a sabbatical while still doing stuff that keeps you connected to your profession. Assuming no health issues, you are too young to retire and may not have adequate assets to retire at less than 40 if you intend to remain in California in particular, and the USA in general.

I dunno. I live in San Diego County. My house monitor has recorded 14 power outages during previous 11 months. Three were planned power cuts, two were due to high winds, and the remainder varied between 3 minutes to over 14 hours where SDG&E could offer no explanation. My neighbor's PV system measured 16 power outages during same period, so my system may have missed some 'glitches'.

I used to live in Anza Valley (Riverside County), where the local co-op lost power at least once per month.

California do not have reliable power. California utilities have been charged with various felonies. California utilities had previously been allowed, by the state government, to increase rates without requiring routine maintenance to power and gas infrastructure.

For North America, tree preservation may be just as important as tree planting. But fire and conservation regulations can be at odds.

Per my CFP insurance carrier, I can no longer plant trees on my property. And the CDF and local fire marshal is encouraging most owners to cut down all vegetation. I routinely see bobcats, coyotes, deer, hawks, falcons, rabbits, squirrels, roadrunners, quail, many species of snakes, many species of butterflies, etc (also saw a mountain lion in the area last year). Last week, a Ca biologist pleaded with me to do nothing to a 5 acre stand of old oak trees (was going to do some tree trimmming), while the fire authorities routinely threaten me with fines.

Background and caveat. I am that uncle the parents fear. I let my nieces and nephews do about anything they want - until the wife-unit shuts it down...

1. Note any disposition for science or engineering - it was obvious very early (pre-school) in a particular niece and nephew. One other did not develop said disposition until well into high school.

2. Provide an environment. A nephew used to play with my o-scope and function generator during his early grammar school years and played with other stuff on my bench. He later watched me model stuff using MathCad in the 90s. And he recently got (yet) another degree in computational physics.

3. Be logical. Allow curiosity. Allow and never disparage supposedly 'self-evident' questions.

4. When a STEM interest is noted, be ready for the "what is the difference between science and engineering?" question. Do not mistake a STEM interest for a desire to pursue a STEM career. The others nieces and nephews are, or will become, ranchers, business people, and artists; and the artists were probably the most intelligent of the lot.

5. Exposure to, and enjoyment of, an activity are not the same thing and will not necessarily result in similar outcomes.

But for some on-site hardware jobs, demand seems to have increased (anecdotally?).

Was about to go full-time retired, but people started calling during the summer. Very senior level engineers having experience in test, manufacturing, quality, regulatory, product safety, and EMC, and that can code, that are willing to go to customers' sites seem to be in demand.

Towards the end of 2019, I was not going to renew my LLC because most of my long-term clients had either departed the area or had been bought up by Big Corp.

I am guessing that my increased on-site demand will continue through 3Q 2022. Then I will retire when the others decide it is safe to return, or their other options decrease, or when I die from the plague du jour.

Any hardware skills/knowledge?

For my last seven contracts, the most apolitical and areligious (is that a word?) engineering teams have been hardware people. The more evangelical have been software people.

So it would seem if you continue to hang around groups consisting of mostly coders, you will not be happy much.

The biggest advantage to this category to technology is load bearing. Per My godson, he never went on patrol with less than 25kg hanging off of his body.

Perhaps they can have some level of immunity to penetration by 12mm + rounds. But this type of bullet has an insane amount of kinetic energy. So it is gonna knock the crap out of you and take you out of the battle, and you may not be effective again for the next battle. At less than 500m, you are probably toast after receiving a M2 round.

I dunno; proximity can be important for HR stuff. A former client brought in a recruiting consultant mostly because she was black and was an alum of a 'traditional' black school. The kid had many connections and brought in some serious engineering talent (good h/w engineers are more difficult to find than s/w engineers in this industry segment).

FWIW, I am an older white male that is both conservative and progressive.

No. And not to the parent comment. Senior enlisted schools are tactical and strategic and philosophical, with a heavy emphasis on ethics. Even technical schools have both tactical and strategic subject matter to provide the basis for reasons and rationale for systems specs and design.

For example, before they ever see a fleet unit, junior Marine officers have had 10 weeks of OCS (not for academy grads), 26 weeks of TBS, then they are sent to the school house for their specialties, which can be for a few months to over a year. OCS and TBS are essentially run by senior enlisted personnel.

And I sat in two schools where officers and enlisted go the the same school, and where NCOs were coveted by the officers' after-school study groups.

Guess again, Batman.

Seems to be interesting. The description in the landing page is indeterminate. Any examples available?

No privacy statement/policy available. You are asking for someone's email - so you might consider providing this up front before the email address is provided.

As a victim of two violent crimes during the last 15 years, and the target of a vindictive civil tort by a person that had been declared insane in both legal and clinical terms, to me the sense of 'morality' as rationale does not seem reasonable.

There are many people that make, and continue to make, a series of poor choices. Some of these choices, while seemingly innocent and benign, can affect other people and make their lives not worth living (as mine has become). Lack of of an malevolent intent may not always be an indicator for punishment of criminal acts. Negative societal effects, victims' personal tragedies, and other stuff must be considered for determination of punishment.

That said, there are some that have been swept up by the legal system that may not have received an appropriate punishment in moral terms. But I have no solution to this mess that lies at the intersection of legal, societal, moral, and ethical domains.

A view from another side. I am not a recruiting specialist, but have been retained by clients to "screen the candidates for someone like me". Greed and avarice typically win, so I tend to accept these follow-up gigs.

The types of engineering that I do are not the most technically difficult. But it is a very small piece of the engineering pie, so there are not many out there with my combination of skill-set and education and experience. That is, I may not be representative of what the client probably needs in the long-term, as I was hired by the client to solve a particular and unique problem.

So I typically screen for someone under 45 (I am over 60) that has done and is interested in certain types of math, programming, test, and hardware design. This is how interviews need to be structured - and just devolving algorithms and citing random information and doing circuit node calculations from schematics will be less likely to identify the engineer that you need.

As for the problems cited by the writer - they are relevant, but are structural and should be self evident to anyone out of school for more than one or two years.

Some people do not know that they are subject matter 'experts'; as they typically have to have respected colleagues state this. My wife and myself are examples - I have told her for years that there is almost no one else at her level, but she dismissed my claims until well known (in their fields) professors started to call her frequently for advice and ideas.

I considered myself competent in some stuff, but never an 'expert'. About 10 years past, peoples in various IEEE societies prodded me to publish stuff and do talks at some of the respective annual symposiums. I still do not consider myself an expert - because I do know some actual experts in some of my professional fields and endeavors, but there are other engineers that do rank me as such, which I have accepted because it gets me more work.

My wife became an expert by solving some difficult problems. She solved these seemingly intractable problems by deep observations, knowing what questions to ask, and knowing whom to ask questions.

I have increased my professional competence by education (both formal and self-taught) and carefully choosing companies and problems to solve. But I am too general of a practitioner to be considered an 'expert'.

“When I was in jail at Beaumont, Texas I talked to one of the correctional officers there who shared with me a story about her friend who lost her identity and then lost everything after that,” Ngo recalled. “Her whole life fell apart. I don’t know if that lady was one of my victims, but that story made me feel sick. I know now that was I was doing was just evil.”

Earnest question. Other than a sociopath or psychopath, how could an adult human not know from the beginning that their actions are immoral and unethical?

About 20 years past, helped a friend of a friend build a manufacturing process, get accredited, and wrote some templates for his QA, QC, NRTL submittals, etc. Did this mostly gratis. Got many good references, which became the beginning of a side business.

Got my pilot's license and instrument rating through the old military flying club system (while all else were getting drunk on liberty). It has oft been the difference between servicing a happy client or perhaps getting hit with a tort (the latter has yet to happen directly to me, but it has happened to a member of the consortium because he was not able to get to a site before a critical deadline.

No. No. And no.

If remembered correctly, FMFM 1 came about in the 1980s; please correct if otherwise. I was in enlisted bootcamp during the 1970s, and excerpts from the marksmanship manual, which is the fundamental skill of a Marine, were the first manual, other the the 'red' guidebook, that I read during my enlistment. These original marksmanship manuals were truly good literature. And they were mostly written by experienced SNCOs.

It is disappointing, although not surprising, to see some former officers jump into assumptions prior to completely reading and parsing the comments.

This is going to be different, and is not intended to be sarcastic.

The Lathe of Heaven by Ursula Le Guin First read during my high school years in the Amazing SF magazine; and was later published as a book. The work was criticized by the 'elite' of the SF community at the time. Have recently re-read and got the same impressions of how as both a species and as individuals we are fools that understand very little; that is, we are too stupid to know that we are stupid.

Calvin and Hobbs by Bill Waterson. Was my favorite non-mandatory read during my college years. Calvin Ball can teach us much about life, and his snow-men art is the dark that we always be in all of humans.

Marine Corps Reference Publication (MCRP) 3 Rifle Marksmanship. [this is the current version, but am not certain of the designation for this manual when I first read it during the late 1970s]. This summarized the philosophy of combat, the physics of interior and exterior ballistics, and describes the zen-like state of the marksman. It is not as sterile as the US Army marksmanship manual, is more complete treatise of combat shooting and weapons care, and is brutally honest in that the USMC is preparing you to efficiently kill other humans. Very sobering.

I dunno; methinks the ham arts have arrived at a new steady state. I am a boomer and have been a ham since 19 (the military avionics schools proctored the test for each graduating class). My Nephew is a gen 'Z' guy, and has an extra class (the boy can pass these tests half asleep).

A major difference is SDR. All of you code people can do DIY stuff by pounding on the keyboard, and hand-held radios have become dirt cheap. So nothing is dying - it is just re-inventing itself.

For that type of stuff, probably a stupid idea because the root cause was poor process control by the factory. Typically modern production lines mitigate troubleshooting and re-work by building it correctly, which was supposedly the original reason for all of the ISO 9k hoopla. And re-working stuff on the factory floor does bad things to long-term product reliability, so my solution to the problem at hand was doubly stupid.

1998 - automated troubleshooting program for use by people on the production line for power conversion hardware. Worked, but system abandoned by employer after I quit.

2001 - 'real-time' monitoring and analysis of data coming from the ATE stacks on the factory floor with various trending graphs and other stuff for consumption by quality and manufacturing engineers. It worked well, but politics in the Mexico factory sunk it to create more jobs to do this stuff manually.

2006 - automation of XRF process. The technician blew the power head, so most of this testing was eventually outsourced to a local lab.

2007 - automation of "Type" tests and high-speed data acquisition for single fault conditions and thermals and other stuff. UL was too stupid to understand anything, and would not accept data unless the tests were done manually and data was hand recorded.

2019 - 'universal' environmental recording and control systems for use in test chambers and agricultural. Reliable and accurate, but too expensive and required the customer to understand a bit of physics to implement the zone mixing feature.

Let me turn this around a bit. I have worked with and interviewed former FAANG employees. A few were good to go, as is, for some programming and software engineering positions, but have not found any that could make reliable systems-level stuff or do anything that was not narrowly defined.

Recent contract was to screen about 100 applicants for a quality position in a large well-known (mostly) hardware company, so the salary was commensurate with a FAANG, and better than average for this area. In addition to the algorithmic stuff, the position required knowledge of MISRA, functional safety/SIL (IEC61508), control systems (mostly PID stuff), machinery safe code (IEC62061), instrument control code, test-driver code, and some other stuff. We did not care if there was no direct functional safety experience, but the applicant did need some level of hardware knowledge and some basic Physics. The FAANG people all bombed.

Methinks you people are over-thinking this stuff and over-rating the FAANG gang. That is, go find a non-FAANG job that requires you to grow and allows diverse professional opportunities.

"Unfortunately, many of our would-be leaders have opted out or have been pushed out of this system. They've become engineers, scientists, bloggers -- too scared to share their opinions (even shutting down). To hold a nuanced opinion different from the "socially accepted" by one group or another will get you "canceled". In this case, "canceled" can mean anything from losing your job, to losing financial platforms/instruments (i.e. PayPal, VISA, YouTube revenue, etc.), to receiving threats on your life."

Our consulting consortium is, not by design, a freakin UN assemblage of engineers. About 1/3 are female and includes two Indians, one Iranian, one Canadian, one Irish, two Mexicans, one Brazilian, one Polish, and the token Texan. With the exception of the guy from Texas, we are all the offspring of immigrants. The guy from Texas talks a bit funny, but being from a distant and strange land, that is to be expected; and his great grandmother was born into an enslaved family in the Carolinas. All except three have served in the military.

The one rule we have is there will be no sexual, political, racial, or religious discussions once at the client's site; that is, we only talk about solving the customer's problem. We do not have lunch or take breaks with clients, we do not accept invitations to any client's social functions, and we have 'physical protection' clauses in each contract.

During the last five months, all members have seen clients' technicians, engineers, or managers either sent home or fired for sexual, political, racial, or religious comments. The workplace has become a very hostile environment, which probably reflects the generally polarized and intransigent American environment. We have decided to give the U.S. another 10 to 15 months to see if America is lost (not my words); otherwise, were splitting up and heading to other places. Also, one of our Indian engineers was being recruited last year by a political committee to run for a local position, but decided the risk to the family was not insignificant.

Most consulting engineers are both specialists and generalists. I do mostly compliance and manufacturing consulting. Most of my contracts are for a simple gap analysis. Which oft turns into an implementation contract that entails test engineering (hardware and software), manufacturing engineering, quality engineering, and product and process approval and accreditation.

Where hardware and software meet, there is no such thing as a pure specialist. You will not get many future gigs if your skill and experience set is narrow.

Software engineers are, by both education and corporate training, intellectually corrupt.

Hardware engineers tend to be less corrupt than software engineers.

The most ethical and meritocratic, and the least racist, group of people in America is the military.

The F-4 was the best fighter-bomber ever made. The A-6 was the best close-air support aircraft ever made.

ANSI C is the best commonly-used programming language. Python is a distant second. Rust is fun only because of its complexity.

Location: Riverside and San Diego counties of California

Remote: Yes

Willing to relocate: Yes

Technologies: Data Acquisition and Control Systems - analog front-end design, signal conditioning and processing. PCB layout.

Agricultural control and monitor system design and fielding.

Quality Systems - QMS (ISO) implementation, writing formal processes, determination and authoring.

Compliance and Regulatory - product safety assesments and Type Tests; submittals to NRTLs and national bodies. EMC pre-scan and mitigation.

Résumé/CV: on request

Email: bjoconnell@gmail.com