5 ms·

You're missing the forest for a piece of bark on a tree. His point is that engineering licensing boards should be more than just a government-sponsored cartel f

You're missing the forest for a piece of bark on a tree. His point is that engineering licensing boards should be more than just a government-sponsored cartel for rubber stamping conforming license requests, and practitioners should do more than just validate that projects meet the required specifications according to accepted standards, but that the industry -- from individuals to institutions -- should also operate with an ethical and moral imperative to learn and improve and grow the discipline at the current edge of its domain of competence. If "accepted standards" are shown to be wrong then it's not good enough to continue using them, as if the legal indemnification provided by standing behind an "accepted standard" is the only thing that matters.

tbrownaw 4y ago
Doesn't that already happen though? A bridge fails due to water hanging from the cables making them asymmetric and coupling wind energy into bridge oscillation, and cables get redesigned with a spiral thingy to prevent that in the future. Asbestos turns out to cause cancer, and suddenly it's no longer an allowed building material. Or whatever.
- infogulch 4y ago
  TFA links to a 2014 post by Strong Towns [1] that describes exactly such a failure and espouses frustration at the lack of response. This post, among others, was cited as evidence for harassing the author over a short lapse of license (while it was not in active use), which was blown up into an uncharacteristic, disproportionate, and unwarranted demand to publicly sign documents admitting to dishonesty, misrepresentation, and fraud. The existence of such a document regardless of details would be enough to completely discredit and dismiss all of the author's speech. It's rank protectionism and speech silencing in the guise of following rules and procedures. [1]: https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2014/12/3/just-another-pedestrian-killed https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2014/12/3/just-another-p...
  - tbrownaw 4y ago
    ...a drunk driver hits people crossing in sleet (ie, low visibility) and a crosswalk is so certain to have helped that whoever didn't put one there deserves to be sued. I'm slightly curious to know how closely the actual reason for removing the half-assed crosswalk rather than turning it into a real one matches the clearly editorialized reason he's accusing them of having. I suppose there's no possible way it could have been something like "too many drivers won't respect it and it'll give pedestrians a false sense of safety" or such.
    - infogulch 4y ago
      By arguing the validity of the article's points you implicitly admit the space to discuss it and thus we fall directly into free speech. The important debate here is not whether Strong Towns is or is not correct, the debate is whether people can use government bureaucracy and process as a stick to silence speech they dislike. None of the allegations made by the license board have anything to do with the validity of Strong Towns' claims, just that he signed his name with "PE" while being fully qualified as a PE but with a lapsed license.
      - Aloha 4y ago
        I don't really agree with the perspective Strong Towns presents, but I'd agree that this is an egregious overstep. Like what Oregon was doing to a guy several years back.
        alisonkisk 4y ago
- wolverine876 4y ago
  > Doesn't that already happen though? A bridge fails due to water hanging from the cables making them asymmetric and coupling wind energy into bridge oscillation, and cables get redesigned with a spiral thingy to prevent that in the future. Do you think it happens automatically or every time? It happens when ethical people make it happen, partly through organizations like Strong Towns.
pdonis 4y ago
> His point is that engineering licensing boards should be more than just a government-sponsored cartel for rubber stamping conforming license requests And I explicitly stated how that should be done in my comment. That is not "a piece of bark on the tree". It's the forest. As long as "professions" depend on governments to license them, the problem will continue.
- infogulch 4y ago
  He didn't abuse his lapsed license in a professional capacity and he paid the requisite late fee and accepted other reprimands, there's nothing left that needs protection here. They don't need a signed statement admitting dishonesty and fraud that can be bandied about in unrelated contexts to cancel his advocacy speech about how the engineering profession needs to make some changes.
  - pdonis 4y ago
    > He didn't abuse his lapsed license in a professional capacity Yes, I know that. And yet the state licensing board kept after him. In other words, the state licensing board is obviously not applying objective professional standards to his behavior. Why not? Because it's a government organization, i.e., it's political, not professional. So the only way to fix the problem he's having is to not have the licensing organization be a government organization.
    - wolverine876 4y ago
      Plenty of government organizations are not political; that's how most of the civil service works.
      - alisonkisk 4y ago
        They are not political up until the moment an important enough issue comes up to make them political.
    - infogulch 4y ago

tbrownaw 4y ago

Doesn't that already happen though? A bridge fails due to water hanging from the cables making them asymmetric and coupling wind energy into bridge oscillation, and cables get redesigned with a spiral thingy to prevent that in the future. Asbestos turns out to cause cancer, and suddenly it's no longer an allowed building material. Or whatever.

infogulch 4y ago
TFA links to a 2014 post by Strong Towns [1] that describes exactly such a failure and espouses frustration at the lack of response. This post, among others, was cited as evidence for harassing the author over a short lapse of license (while it was not in active use), which was blown up into an uncharacteristic, disproportionate, and unwarranted demand to publicly sign documents admitting to dishonesty, misrepresentation, and fraud. The existence of such a document regardless of details would be enough to completely discredit and dismiss all of the author's speech. It's rank protectionism and speech silencing in the guise of following rules and procedures. [1]: https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2014/12/3/just-another-pedestrian-killed https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2014/12/3/just-another-p...
- tbrownaw 4y ago
  ...a drunk driver hits people crossing in sleet (ie, low visibility) and a crosswalk is so certain to have helped that whoever didn't put one there deserves to be sued. I'm slightly curious to know how closely the actual reason for removing the half-assed crosswalk rather than turning it into a real one matches the clearly editorialized reason he's accusing them of having. I suppose there's no possible way it could have been something like "too many drivers won't respect it and it'll give pedestrians a false sense of safety" or such.
  - infogulch 4y ago
    By arguing the validity of the article's points you implicitly admit the space to discuss it and thus we fall directly into free speech. The important debate here is not whether Strong Towns is or is not correct, the debate is whether people can use government bureaucracy and process as a stick to silence speech they dislike. None of the allegations made by the license board have anything to do with the validity of Strong Towns' claims, just that he signed his name with "PE" while being fully qualified as a PE but with a lapsed license.
    - Aloha 4y ago
      I don't really agree with the perspective Strong Towns presents, but I'd agree that this is an egregious overstep. Like what Oregon was doing to a guy several years back.
      - alisonkisk 4y ago
wolverine876 4y ago
> Doesn't that already happen though? A bridge fails due to water hanging from the cables making them asymmetric and coupling wind energy into bridge oscillation, and cables get redesigned with a spiral thingy to prevent that in the future. Do you think it happens automatically or every time? It happens when ethical people make it happen, partly through organizations like Strong Towns.

pdonis 4y ago

> His point is that engineering licensing boards should be more than just a government-sponsored cartel for rubber stamping conforming license requests And I explicitly stated how that should be done in my comment. That is not "a piece of bark on the tree". It's the forest. As long as "professions" depend on governments to license them, the problem will continue.

infogulch 4y ago
He didn't abuse his lapsed license in a professional capacity and he paid the requisite late fee and accepted other reprimands, there's nothing left that needs protection here. They don't need a signed statement admitting dishonesty and fraud that can be bandied about in unrelated contexts to cancel his advocacy speech about how the engineering profession needs to make some changes.
- pdonis 4y ago
  > He didn't abuse his lapsed license in a professional capacity Yes, I know that. And yet the state licensing board kept after him. In other words, the state licensing board is obviously not applying objective professional standards to his behavior. Why not? Because it's a government organization, i.e., it's political, not professional. So the only way to fix the problem he's having is to not have the licensing organization be a government organization.
  - wolverine876 4y ago
    Plenty of government organizations are not political; that's how most of the civil service works.
    - alisonkisk 4y ago
      They are not political up until the moment an important enough issue comes up to make them political.
  - infogulch 4y ago