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Oregon Fines Man For Writing a Complaint Email Stating 'I Am An Engineer' (vice.com)
pogopop77 quotes a report from Motherboard: In September 2014, Mats Jarlstrom, an electronics engineer living in Beaverton, Oregon, sent an email to the state's engineering board. The email claimed that yellow traffic lights don't last long enough, which "puts the public at risk." "I would like to present these facts for your review and comments," he wrote. This email resulted not with a meeting, but with a threat from The Oregon State Board of Examiners for Engineering and Land Surveying [stating]: "ORS 672.020(1) prohibits the practice of engineering in Oregon without registration -- at a minimum, your use of the title 'electronics engineer' and the statement 'I'm an engineer' create violations." In January of this year, Jarlstrom was officially fined $500 by the state for the crime of "practicing engineering without being registered." Since the engineering board in Oregon said Jarlstrom should not be free to publish or present his ideas about the fast-turning yellow traffic lights, due to his "practice of engineering in Oregon without registration," he and the Institute for Justice sued them in federal court for violating his First Amendment rights. "I'm not practicing engineering, I'm just using basic mathematics and physics, Newtonian laws of motion, to make calculations and talk about what I found," he said. Sam Gedge, an attorney for the Institute for Justice, told Motherboard: "Mats has a clear First Amendment right to talk about anything from taxes to traffic lights. It's an instance of a licensing board trying to suppress speech."
Don't live in America.
Spotted the Redflex employee!
I just read ORS 672.007. Under Oregon law saying "I'm an engineer" counts as "practicing engineering". There is still a first amendment issue.
https://www.oregonlaws.org/ors...
Still, I must say:
I'm the tooth fairy.
I'm an engineer.
I'm a unicorn.
Fuck you, Oregon.
They are trying to restrict the audience to Adblock users only by making the website unusable for everybody else.
It didn't handle your mother's meatloaf well, did it?
Science advances one funeral at a time- Max Planck
He's and EE not a Civil or Mechanical engineer. He's got no business at all using his engineering degree to discuss things way outside the realm of his field. The state was 100% correct and should have fined him in the thousands.
Unless you're a civil rights attorney, you have no business at all using your degree (if you even have one) to discuss free speech. If it's not within your field of study, then you obviously can't know anything about it since civil rights are very technical and specialized and require years of study before you can even utter one word about the topic.
Oregon prohibits drivers from pumping their own gas as only state licensed Gas Station Engineers have received the proper education and certification to properly perform such a complex task. You can only imagine the carnage that would result if lay people would refill their own vehicles.