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

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

#131

Post by dasudasu »

squeaky-clean wrote: post #118
dasudasu wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"I'm not a medical doctor, but here is a bunch of medical advice that should be used to prosecute this defendant." It doesn't sound that great either way. Either you have the expertise to make such judgments, or you don't, and shouldn't try to pass off legal opinions you can't legally make with a disclaimer, as if that absolves everything. I can fully understand someone getting irritated at this and trying to go one…

Did you read the bit where 80% of employed engineers in North Carolina don't have an engineering license, but have an industry exemption from state law? He was legally an engineer for decades up until his retirement. 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 si…

His exemption makes his field of practice much more limited than a fully licensed engineer and didn't seem to cover making legal advice in court. Court experts should indeed be held to high standards. At this point, being called an engineer is just semantics. In many other locales, someone not licensed is not even allowed to call themselves that, regardless of their degrees.

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

#132

Post by musingsole »

benglish11 wrote: post #89
wizzwizz4 wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://oll.libertyfund.org/quote/thomas-jefferson-on-whethe... > 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 t…

Thomas Jefferson’s opinion on this issue doesn’t mean “The US was founded on this principle”. If the US were founded on this principle… it would have been part of the constitution.

There's a long standing philosophy that pretty much any and all ideas in the founder's heads are viable as founding principles. Otherwise what good is mining their journals and letters and their acquaintances journals and letters in a continuous attempt to understand what they thought was critical for a society to function.

This largely ignores the rest of society and what they were thinking. From the first perspective, these are all ideas that got smuggled in.

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

#133

Post by hervature »

> But Wayne’s troubles began when he when he agreed to help his son, Kyle, a North Carolina attorney, with a case about a piping system that allegedly flooded a few local homes.

Is anyone more disturbed by the fact that a family member can serve as an impartial expert witness?

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

#134

Post by mindslight »

musingsole wrote: post #130
mindslight wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's utterly incompatible with Common Law, unfortunately.

How so? 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 r…

For the same reason that you can't just make changes to a codebase without understanding its structure. Rewriting the Constitution also means throwing away 200 years of Supreme Court decisions.

It's easy to envision invaliding precedents that rely on things that have changed, but the process of creating those precedents takes so long nobody really knows what the new law means until it's tested. Furthermore, the arguments to invalidate them are also going to be in the form of more legal arguments, so you're adding another whole dimension to the problem. Given how opaque the law is to the average person right now, I'd say we're already at the limit.

FWIW I'm biased against common law too, because it seems to take what is actually policy and brand it as if it were universal truth.

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

#135

Post by CrazyPyroLinux »

erikerikson wrote: post #49
the_lonely_road wrote: post #20

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 homeles…

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…

> Intravenous bleach suggested by someone we trusted

What are you even talking about?

Edit: To clarify, I don't think 100% fatal medical advice is a good analogy for good-faith testimony relating to a "piping system that allegedly flooded a few local homes."

Maybe something more like "Hey I'm not a licensed doctor, but in my experience double-fisting twinkies leads to weight gain."

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

#137

Post by [deleted] »

dasudasu wrote: post #108
nomdep wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the article it says he declared that he wasn’t a licensed engineer. At most, you could argue that his expert testimony is not valid, saying that it is illegal it is a whole different deal. It smells like corruption of the NC government to me.

"I'm not a medical doctor, but here is a bunch of medical advice that should be used to prosecute this defendant." It doesn't sound that great either way. Either you have the expertise to make such judgments, or you don't, and shouldn't try to pass off legal opinions you can't legally make with a disclaimer, as if that absolves everything. I can fully understand someone getting irritated at this and trying to go one…

[deleted]

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

#138

Post by banana_giraffe »

systemvoltage wrote: post #123
travisjungroth wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The worst example of this is Oregon has their own version of the FAA. It’s grandfathered in because it was established before the FAA. You pay $12 a year for an Oregon pilot’s registration. And in return for this bureaucracy, society gets... nothing.

Oregon’s gas pumping laws has some hilarious justifications. > “The dangers of crime and slick surfaces described in subsection (3) of this section are enhanced because Oregon’s weather is uniquely adverse, causing wet pavement and reduced visibility” More here: https://medium.com/policy-northwest/the-insanity-of-oregons-... Safety is important but wet pavements are also a hazard when you leave your house or literall…

My favorite result of that law was when I stopped to get gas in Washington state near the border with Oregon. I made eye contact with two 20-somethings that were arguing back and forth about something. After I'm done one of them worked up enough courage to approach me and ask for help. Being from Oregon, this was their first attempt to fill up a car on their own, and they couldn't figure out how to make the pump work (they didn't push the handle with enough force to engage the vapor recovery).

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

#139

Post by akira2501 »

elteto wrote: post #84

The framing of the title is a bit disingenuous. He is not “talking” about engineering to a bunch of college students. He is providing expert opinion in a court case. This is a whole different deal and I think there is nuance here. Honestly, I don’t like the manipulation with the title and how they are framing the whole thing. Makes me cautious about emitting an opinion.

> He is providing expert opinion in a court case

Aren't courts capable of making that decision themselves? Why should the state be allowed to interfere with sworn testimony?

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

#140

Post by dotancohen »

tablespoon wrote: post #121
Swenrekcah wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just the concept of “jaywalking” as a punishable offense is revolting to me.

> Just the concept of “jaywalking” as a punishable offense is revolting to me. 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…

Just a note for those unfamiliar with the concept of dead posts: To read that post you need to enable "showdead" or something with a similar name in your profile page.
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