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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."
Now if this were a conservative state run by big corporations, you would also have them suing this guy for violating the proprietary intellectual property right of the algorithms used to control yellow lights. See there is no difference between conservatives and liberals. They both want to fuck you in the ass and will use any governmental, corporate monopoly, or legal statute to ensure that your ass is good and fucked. Your government wants to fuck you, Verizon wants to fuck you,
All Gore wants to fuck you. Trump wants to fuck you. HILLARY wants to fuck you. Chipoltle wants to fuck you. CNN , Fox, MSNBC and ABC also want to fuck you. You have a very desirable ass. It is best just to allow yourself to be fucked for the good of society. If you don't you will be labeled a homophobic racist child molesting homosexual terrorist.
Is the imbecile who sent the fine won't be fired.
Right. You are NOT a lawyer, but you are free to represent yourself. It is only practicing law if you do things for a client.
You can be an engineer without practicing engineering. You can be a Doctor without practicing medicine. A title doesn't mean anything when it comes to practicing a trade.
You don't need to be an engineer to measure slashdot advertisements now cover a full third of the screen while stories load and now 1/3 of the horizontal space which means the comment density requires much more scrolling.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
I'm all for restricting the use of credentials - like 'Doctor', for instance - to people certified by the state to use them. However, that restriction should only come into play when they're using those credentials professionally or to lend authority to a fraudulent claim, which this man was not.
He was speaking the truth, arguably for the public good, and he IS an engineer, just not one registered to work professionally in the state. His background does make his study and its findings somewhat more credible to those incapable of understanding it themselves... but he's RIGHT, so he's not trying to use that title to defraud anyone.
I hope he wins his lawsuit.
If he wins the suit, there's nothing to stop people from claiming to be medical doctors and doing all sorts of (more) harm to society.
Just present the facts without claiming to be an engineer.
The thing is, he WAS an engineer, the fine was for practicing in the state without a license, even though that necessitates a transaction of some sort. They basically fined him for stating his education level in an e-mail as an excuse to punish him for disagreeing with them.
He IS an engineer, he is not practicing in the state of Oregon. Practicing is the part that requires registration, so this falls somewhere between a quick cash grab and wanting to shut him up.
As an industry trained engineer, I've been doing engineering for a few decades. From designing computers and electronics in the 80's to performing and presenting current scientific research, it's just been a part of my life, but previously, I could only refer to myself as an "Amateur Engineer". It's not that I'm not trained, I just wasn't trained in a university. Back in the 80's when I learned to design computers ( as an autodidact ) there simply wasn't a university path open for me as I was in high school at the time, and I was taken in by an R&D lab before I could study further and quickly gained skills and experience beyond what the universities were teaching at the time so never went back to university.
Still, not being able to refer to myself as an engineer caused many problem, especially when registering for government projects or work - where are best I could only call myself a "technician" despite having working in many roles where I was the lead engineer and managed other engineers. It made it pretty difficult finding new work at times also.
Now the Australian government has finally recognized that if you work as an engineer, doing the kind of work that an engineer would normally be expected to do, for a period of five cumulative years, you've proven your point and are recognized not only as an experienced engineer, but as a professional engineer.
Anyone might still be able to claim to be an engineer in Australia, but at least those who have spent years actually doing engineering as a career and were trained on-the-job have finally gained formal recognition as providers of professional services now, whether trained in a university or otherwise. And it's in legislation.
Enjoy science fiction? "Turing Evolved" - AI, Mecha, Androids and rail-gun battles. What more could you want?
Several textbook fallacies there:
*appeal to accomplishment
*holier than thou
*appeal to ridicule
*ad hominem(s)
All to support censorship based on an allusion to ("think of the children") perceived harm of someone not so ordained into this clergy you mention misinforming the masses by whistleblowing on the system while not having a certain piece of paper stating he has officially been indoctrinated into a certain groupthink category.
Along with "pumping your own damn gas".
The question isn't whether you refer to someone as an engineer, the question is whether they put themselves out as an engineer. You can call yourself "doctor" all you want while you're hanging out at a bar with your buddies, and no one could or would fine you. But don't try to send a letter to the state health department claiming to be a medical doctor, if you're not one.
Oregon hasn't been controlled by Republicans in 30 years. This is Democrats doing this shit.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
The Oregon statute also defines what practicing engineering means under the law. The statutory definition, while overbroad, covers *working* as as engineer, not *saying* you're an engineer.
https://www.oregonlaws.org/ors...
1) "Practice of engineering" or "practice of professional engineering" means doing any of the following: ...
(a) Performing any professional service or creative work requiring engineering education, training and experience.
(b) Applying special knowledge of the mathematical, physical and engineering sciences to such *professional services* or creative work as consultation, investigation, testimony, evaluation, planning, design and services during construction
To any Oregon bureacrats who happen to be reading this:
I'm an engineer. I'm also a train conductor. And a unicorn. Fuck you, Oregon.
Knowing how citizens of the left coast tend to think, they'll decide that the solution to this abuse of an overbroad regulation by power-hungry bureaucrats is to create more regulations, to be wielded by more power-hungry bureacrats.
Spotted the Redflex employee!
Uh. What does Trump have to do with this?
This started in 2014 and finished up on 12 January 2017. Now, correct me if I'm wrong, but Trump didn't swear in until the 20th.
So the entirety of this sad debacle in the suppression of freedom of speech happened on Obama's watch.
Not that it was necessarily Obama's fault either. But, by your brain-dead "logic" it is...
This is about a collusion between state government agencies to shut someone up who is attempting to alert the public to one or more agencies' shady practices at the expense of said public.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
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.
Twenty years ago in Phoenix, an electrical engineer solved a problem with a freeway interchange that the civil engineers said was impossible and was going to cost the city millions of dollars.
This is a travesty*, the shameful, traditional closing ranks of an organization to protect their own. He is lodging a complaint with the board about a potential safety issue. Even if his analysis was entirely without merit it deserves a more respectful response.
For the record: I am a licensed civil engineer (PE). I am no longer a practicing engineer (retired/inactive).
*I do think he should have gotten a note warning him about the legal ramifications of using the term "engineer". Most people don't know it requires licensing. Having a foreign engineering degree means he doesn't have any background with US licensing standards.
Even then it's stupid. Most of the engineers in the world are unlicensed. You only need a couple of PEs in most cases.
Of course these days the term is already worn as thin as kleenex and no stronger than jello. IMHO we (professional engineers) lost all claims of governance over the term "engineer" the day the engineering license boards didn't wage war over "sanitation engineer".
I've been on slashdot so long I'm starting to get out of touch with the cool stuff if it ain't on slashdot.
Thought experiment. Let's suppose you're a CIVIL engineer -- the type of engineer the regulations are intended to target. You're on vacation in Oregon, and you notice a serious structural fault in a bridge which means that it is in imminent danger of collapse.
Under this interpretation of the term "practice engineering" you wouldn't be able to tell anyone because you're not licensed to practice engineering in Oregon. In fact anyone who found an obvious fault -- say, a crack in the bridge -- would be forbidden to warn people not to use it until it had been looked at.
Which is ridiculous. Having and expressing an opinion, even a professionally informed opinion, isn't "practicing engineering". Practicing engineering means getting paid -- possibly in some form other than money. At the very least it means performing the kind of services for which engineers are normally paid.
A law which prevented people from expressing opinions wouldn't pass constitutional muster unless it was "narrowly tailored to serve a compelling public interest" -- that's the phrase the constitutional lawyers use when talking about laws regulating constitutionally protected activities. In this case the public interest is safety, which would be served by a law which prevented unqualified people from falsely convincing people that a structure was safe. But there is no compelling interest in preventing an engineer from warning the public about something he thinks is dangerous or even improper.
So if the law means what they claim it to mean, it's very likely unconstitutional.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
The governor of Oregon is a Democrat. The Democrats control both House and Senate.
Contribute to civilization: ari.aynrand.org/donate
2 cash grabs. He writes to complain about short yellow traps and ends up falling into the unregistered engineer trap. Well played, Oregon.
If you are educated as an engineer and passed all exams, you're an engineer, no matter what a state board says.
But they can regulate the conditions under which you are allowed to practice your trade as an engineer.
Regarding this particular case it's all legal skullduggery in order to shut him up instead of taking his complaint serious.
To me this tells it all. Are you going to help them with that?
"Trump!!", the new Godwin.
Most states have some protection around advertising yourself as a "Professional Engineer" (PE) or similar term that implies you are licensed by the state to provide engineering services to the public. Only a few states apply this sort of orthodoxy to the general term "engineer", and the enforcement tends to be pretty lax.
Check on LinkedIn, there are several million people listing themselves as some form of Engineer--while most of them have an engineering degree from an accredited university, the vast majority of them do not have any PE licensure, for the simple reason that in many engineering fields there's just no reason get a state license.
Intel is in Oregon--and they employ thousands of degreed engineers and they definitely aren't PEs. Those job postings are advertised as "engineers" and the employees use the term "engineer" on their business cards and LinkedIn profiles.
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.
I am a professional engineer licensed in Oregon. This is very typical for OSBEELS to do. The term "engineer" has very specific legal meaning, and in most states it implies registration and license as a professional engineer. The reason that Oregon and other states vigorously pursue people who claim to be engineers without licensure is to protect the public from those who claim to be engineers but do not have the education or experience to be admitted to the profession. Oregon happens to pursue these types of issues more vigorously than other states I have been licensed in, but this is nothing new. The claim that his first amendment rights are being violated is laughable (but IANAL). He is free to make his case, but he cannot call himself an "engineer" without being licensed.
Politics have nothing to do with this. This is just plain stupid Americans doing plain stupid American shit.