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What a fascinating case. There are so many details in such a short articles that is each worth its own discussion! Let’s start with my personally theory that h

What a fascinating case. There are so many details in such a short articles that is each worth its own discussion! 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.

rpeden 5y ago
I know it's a typo, but jaw walking definitely sounds like an arrest-worthy offense. :)
- dstick 5y ago
  I don’t know, that seems enough punishment in and of itself ;-)
brudgers 5y ago
What is engineering other than expressing an opinion? 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.
- mindslight 5y ago
  No, an engineer without a Professional Engineer license is not "cutting corners". They most likely just don't do the type of work that requires getting a PE. 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.
  - brudgers 5y ago
    The person subject to the complaint prepared stormwater calculations and submitted it as evidence in a legal proceeding. 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.
    - mindslight 5y ago
      Engineering generally refers to design and building, of which analysis is a single part. So it's not immediately apparent that Nutt was practicing engineering at all. 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.
hliyan 5y ago
This is why the letter of the law is so important, paradoxically. It is never good to have unreasonable/archaic laws in the book and have law enforcement look the other way. Since almost everyone ends up breaking them, it allows law enforcement to basically charge any selected person. Such laws should be struck off the book. I believe in Latin, this is called Lex malla, lex nulla - roughly translates to "No law is better than bad law".
- _nalply 5y ago
  Correct would be lex mala, lex nulla (omit one L).
  - Aeolun 5y ago
    This is weird. Even I can see that it seems to say nothing but: Bad law, no law. Does latin have an implied ‘better than’ in sequences?
    - blix 5y ago
      What's implied here is 'is', i.e. "a bad law is no law." 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.
- dankboys 5y ago
  The uk has a lot of these when it comes to speech and there are some fantastic examples
- ReptileMan 5y ago
  This is literally MO of every totalitarian government - make it impossible to not be a law breaker, so we can arrest you at anytime.
  - comicjk 5y ago
    I don't think that's necessarily true. This is a trick for working around the rule of law, but totalitarian governments don't need that subtlety. They have dummy courts and full control over what's legal. To take the most extreme example, Nazis didn't pass harsh jaywalking laws and then use them on Jews; they actively made laws against Jews.
dotancohen 5y ago
> It’s like the 10’s of thousands of people jaywalking without > issue and then the homeless guy that gets arrested for jaw walking. I'll take the opportunity to branch OT. This selective enforcement has always been such a problem, has there ever been any attempt - anywhere - to address it? Such that if a citizen can demonstrate selective enforcement he can also be absolved of the same crimes that the rest of the population is absolved of?
- Swenrekcah 5y ago
  Just the concept of “jaywalking” as a punishable offense is revolting to me.
  - benrbray 5y ago
    The term "jaywalking" is intentional slander of pedestrians popularized by car manufacturing companies who were hell-bent on subjugating American cities to the automobile. [1] https://www.vox.com/2015/1/15/7551873/jaywalking-history https://www.vox.com/2015/1/15/7551873/jaywalking-history [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_streetcar_conspiracy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_streetcar_consp... [3] (Not Just Bikes) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MWsGBRdK2N0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MWsGBRdK2N0
  - xf1cf 5y ago
    Ignoring the ford conspiracies how exactly should jaywalking be treated then? It's both a danger to the drivers and the people. 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.
erikerikson 5y ago
Particularly in advertising providing medical advice and what can be said is highly regulated. 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.
- teorema 5y ago
  I'm probably in the minority with this, but I think all licensing laws should be abolished. Even with cases like the one you describe, other mechanisms could be used to handle the problem and those individuals likely at are risk for doing things on their own anyway. 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.
  - mindslight 5y ago
    > 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. 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.
  - tablespoon 5y ago
    > I'm probably in the minority with this, but I think all licensing laws should be abolished. Even with cases like the one you describe, other mechanisms could be used to handle the problem and those individuals likely at are risk for doing things on their own anyway. > 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.
e40 5y ago
This guy pissed off some people and those people are using their petty power to make his life hell. And "pissed off" in this case means behaving perfectly normally, legally and how we all hope a person would behave.
bsder 5y ago
Every time something like this comes up, I think the same thing: "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.
- s1artibartfast 5y ago
  Yes, Licensing boards should get to decide who carries a license, but the customer should decide if they want a licensed engineer. 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.
mcguire 5y ago
The guy provided expert testimony in a court. The opposition reported him to the Board of Examiners. The Board of Examiners requires a PE license for those who provide expert testimony. He is going to get to pay the fine. "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".
- Buttons840 5y ago
  Your last example is backwards. In this case the guy without an engineering license is demonstrating what is wrong. So the example should be: 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.
  - vharuck 5y ago
    The prosecution should take the amateur's opinion to a certified expert to (1) meet the legal requirements for an expert witness, and (2) verify the amateur is correct. Trial lawyers do this kind of thing all the time with experts. Even if the lawyer understands and can explain the problem, in the US at least, he cannot himself give testimony. He needs to present it through a witness.
    - username90 5y ago
dada78641 5y ago
> Next interesting point. Is giving a speech about how to treat a broken bone considered ‘practicing medicine’? 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.
- beerandt 5y ago
  >Is giving a speech about how to treat a broken bone considered ‘practicing medicine’? 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."
echelon 5y ago
> Shit I have to run but hope to return to this conversation to discuss the other fun questions raised. 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.

rpeden 5y ago

I know it's a typo, but jaw walking definitely sounds like an arrest-worthy offense. :)

dstick 5y ago
I don’t know, that seems enough punishment in and of itself ;-)

brudgers 5y ago

What is engineering other than expressing an opinion? 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.

mindslight 5y ago
No, an engineer without a Professional Engineer license is not "cutting corners". They most likely just don't do the type of work that requires getting a PE. 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.
- brudgers 5y ago
  The person subject to the complaint prepared stormwater calculations and submitted it as evidence in a legal proceeding. 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.
  - mindslight 5y ago
    Engineering generally refers to design and building, of which analysis is a single part. So it's not immediately apparent that Nutt was practicing engineering at all. 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.

hliyan 5y ago

This is why the letter of the law is so important, paradoxically. It is never good to have unreasonable/archaic laws in the book and have law enforcement look the other way. Since almost everyone ends up breaking them, it allows law enforcement to basically charge any selected person. Such laws should be struck off the book. I believe in Latin, this is called Lex malla, lex nulla - roughly translates to "No law is better than bad law".

_nalply 5y ago
Correct would be lex mala, lex nulla (omit one L).
- Aeolun 5y ago
  This is weird. Even I can see that it seems to say nothing but: Bad law, no law. Does latin have an implied ‘better than’ in sequences?
  - blix 5y ago
    What's implied here is 'is', i.e. "a bad law is no law." 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.
dankboys 5y ago
The uk has a lot of these when it comes to speech and there are some fantastic examples
ReptileMan 5y ago
This is literally MO of every totalitarian government - make it impossible to not be a law breaker, so we can arrest you at anytime.
- comicjk 5y ago
  I don't think that's necessarily true. This is a trick for working around the rule of law, but totalitarian governments don't need that subtlety. They have dummy courts and full control over what's legal. To take the most extreme example, Nazis didn't pass harsh jaywalking laws and then use them on Jews; they actively made laws against Jews.

dotancohen 5y ago

> It’s like the 10’s of thousands of people jaywalking without > issue and then the homeless guy that gets arrested for jaw walking. I'll take the opportunity to branch OT. This selective enforcement has always been such a problem, has there ever been any attempt - anywhere - to address it? Such that if a citizen can demonstrate selective enforcement he can also be absolved of the same crimes that the rest of the population is absolved of?

Swenrekcah 5y ago
Just the concept of “jaywalking” as a punishable offense is revolting to me.
- benrbray 5y ago
  The term "jaywalking" is intentional slander of pedestrians popularized by car manufacturing companies who were hell-bent on subjugating American cities to the automobile. [1] https://www.vox.com/2015/1/15/7551873/jaywalking-history https://www.vox.com/2015/1/15/7551873/jaywalking-history [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_streetcar_conspiracy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_streetcar_consp... [3] (Not Just Bikes) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MWsGBRdK2N0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MWsGBRdK2N0
- xf1cf 5y ago
  Ignoring the ford conspiracies how exactly should jaywalking be treated then? It's both a danger to the drivers and the people. 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.

erikerikson 5y ago

Particularly in advertising providing medical advice and what can be said is highly regulated. 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.

teorema 5y ago
I'm probably in the minority with this, but I think all licensing laws should be abolished. Even with cases like the one you describe, other mechanisms could be used to handle the problem and those individuals likely at are risk for doing things on their own anyway. 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.
- mindslight 5y ago
  > 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. 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.
- tablespoon 5y ago
  > I'm probably in the minority with this, but I think all licensing laws should be abolished. Even with cases like the one you describe, other mechanisms could be used to handle the problem and those individuals likely at are risk for doing things on their own anyway. > 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.

e40 5y ago

This guy pissed off some people and those people are using their petty power to make his life hell. And "pissed off" in this case means behaving perfectly normally, legally and how we all hope a person would behave.

bsder 5y ago

Every time something like this comes up, I think the same thing: "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.

s1artibartfast 5y ago
Yes, Licensing boards should get to decide who carries a license, but the customer should decide if they want a licensed engineer. 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.

mcguire 5y ago

The guy provided expert testimony in a court. The opposition reported him to the Board of Examiners. The Board of Examiners requires a PE license for those who provide expert testimony. He is going to get to pay the fine. "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".

Buttons840 5y ago
Your last example is backwards. In this case the guy without an engineering license is demonstrating what is wrong. So the example should be: 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.
- vharuck 5y ago
  The prosecution should take the amateur's opinion to a certified expert to (1) meet the legal requirements for an expert witness, and (2) verify the amateur is correct. Trial lawyers do this kind of thing all the time with experts. Even if the lawyer understands and can explain the problem, in the US at least, he cannot himself give testimony. He needs to present it through a witness.
  - username90 5y ago

dada78641 5y ago

> Next interesting point. Is giving a speech about how to treat a broken bone considered ‘practicing medicine’? 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.

beerandt 5y ago
>Is giving a speech about how to treat a broken bone considered ‘practicing medicine’? 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."

echelon 5y ago

> Shit I have to run but hope to return to this conversation to discuss the other fun questions raised. 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.