Agreed, and we’re gonna need a really big database for all those names…
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There are a lot of cops who routinely do the “right” thing, or at least the legal thing, too. The thin blue line describes the fact that they all try to prevent the ones who don’t from facing consequences, which is exact what happened here. It’s not a statement that all bureaucrats are evil, it’s pointing out that people in institutional power structures have a strong inclination to protect their own.
Oh
My
God
I didn’t know North Korea also had a state called Oregon. The more you know…
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It delights me that the article describes everybody involved in the paper as having been party to a traffic light ticket they consider unfair. If only we could all be in a position to rewrite the rules when we feel unfairly punished!
Not when we feel unfairly punished. When we can can prove unfairness with objective facts.
And being able to write and re-write the rules is what democracy is all about.
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A friend’s teen daughter was (as is usual) protesting his crackdown on her activities, and when he noted (as all Dads do) that his Dad status conveyed the authority to do so, she very calmly pulled a well-folded square of paper out of her wallet which had the following printed: “Kathy has the authority to do whatever she feels is reasonable”.
It was such a perfectly timed move that he had to concede that round.*
*YMMV
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Is Kathy the daughter or the mom?
Cause I can see a scenario where the parent roles are reversed and I give this note to my son and he pulls it out in front of mom…
This scenario ends badly for me of course…
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Just as an informational hygiene warning: folks should be aware that there is an ongoing program of Koch-funded propaganda against professional licensing bodies of all kinds, and stories like this have a good chance of being directly or indirectly driven by that agenda.
I can’t imagine that the $500 fine is defensible, but it might be cherry-picked and/or slanted.
The Koch Brother orders us to hate licensing regimes because they’re closed shops. And that’s true – they have a union-like aspect that makes them targets for the right. (And which might be unnecessary, if it weren’t for crushing student debt and gutted labor protections).
But apart from that, in liability-prone fields like engineering, medicine or architecture, protected titles serve a genuine public interest. Doctors and engineers can’t be perfect, and they can’t do the job asked of them unless they can collectively define how close to perfect we can expect them to get. If you have to sign off on a bridge, and you’ve done a standards-compliant job of it, but some high-school math teacher has a theory for why you’re wrong, well… ideally you’d hear them out, but bridges have to get built at some point. It doesn’t mean you know better than that random crank, it just means that even if they turn out to be right, you shouldn’t necessarily be fired / sued / imprisoned for negligence.
Obviously this board in Oregon could have handled it better, if only by ignoring the guy’s letter. But it sounds like he did make this into a story, and he did make some kind of claim about his engineering credentials, otherwise why would the local news and the Reg (prominently) mention it? My guess would be that someone got pissed off by what they saw as an unwarranted effort to get them in trouble with their political bosses, and overreacted with this fine business.
NB. after writing this post, I geegle the Institute for Justice and lo, it is a Koch Brothers joint.
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Here is the ruling against the Oregon State Board with the names of the folks who thought they owned the word ‘engineer’.
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Sometimes you are being unfairly punished.
"After 14 years, San Mateo is pulling the plug on its controversial red-light cameras after it was discovered that a yellow light was too short, an error that is forcing the city to refund or dismiss nearly 1,000 tickets
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Certainly sounds like poor planning. For drops in speed limit more than 10mph, they are supposed to have a lot of signage pointing out the big drops, including one 1000 feet ahead to warn you. And to drop from 55 to 35 must be showing strange zoning in process. Also sounds like the lights are not set up to optimize flow, or possibly set to only allow good flow for specific streets.
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I thought that name sounded familiar. Broken clocks and all that, I guess. Too bad so much of what the Kochs have been up to has turned out to be destructive.
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That’s exactly what this was
https://reason.com/2019/01/02/judge-confirms-that-oregon-engineer-has/"
In a ruling issued Friday, U.S. Magistrate Judge Stacie F. Beckerman issued a permanent injunction against the board’s enforcement of the relevant rules, which had included trying to fine Järlström $500 for describing himself as an engineer in a non-professional context."
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I dunno if I’d call it a “broken clocks” situation. This single anecdote, cherry-picked by Beelzebub, is literally the only thing I have ever heard about the Oregon State Board of Examiners for Engineering and Land Surveying. I’d be wary of assuming the whole enterprise is rotten to the core.
When Evil picks a stalking horse, it knows exactly how to appeal to our prejudices. 90% of us believe we could do a better job programming traffic lights – 10% of us are probably even right – so if this is all we ever hear about the OSBoEEaLS, we’ll naturally side against them.
But that’s not the whole picture. The job of civil engineers is to be thorough and systematic and think of all the details you don’t care about, and the system is presumably working fine on that front. Do we want them to drop what they’re doing whenever someone pops up on the news and says “I fixed radios as a teenager, and I say we should reprogram all traffic lights so my wife doesn’t get tickets any more”?
Plus, the engineering hegemony obviously does process new ideas – via the Institute mentioned in the OP – which presumably consists of qualified engineers who are paid to do that, as opposed to ones who are paid to make sure crossings in Bumwad, OR are wheelchair-accessible and other such boring socialist details.
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Oregon was wrong here in that he wasn’t practicing Engineering with a capital E and therefore didn’t need a PE. Are you familiar with how the PE system works? Keeping non-PEs from doing PE work isn’t a bad thing.
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The Oregon board may have had problems talking about the pronunciation of Järlström’s name because of the umlauts.
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They have literally 1 sign alot of the time in PA. I got a speeding ticket once just because I wasn’t paying attention. It went from like 70 to 55 and I missed the sign. During a monotonous commute, you lose focus on the side of the road and pay attention to traffic, conditions, and getting home. Being out in rednecklandia, you don’t often encounter state troopers. Unfortunately when you do encounter them, they could care less about your life, reasons for breaking the law, etc. Also the police in the US are extra-judicial which pretty much means they can do whatever they want in their interpretation of what enforcing the law looks like and have unlimited legal protections. B/c you know the previous generations were naive and/or f’n stupid but, that’s a discussion for another day.
in another universe I might be able to show some jumps and lay-bys
but this is just like crack and snacks
WTF kind of shit state is Oregon?
I know it’s a white supremacist haven, but didn’t realize their government agencies have the right to fine you for asking questions.
The thing about engineers, is that if there is a more efficient solution, they have an obligation to consider it. The ITE organization that is comprised of all sorts of transportation professionals, including but not limited to academics and corporate executives, fosters this kind of innovation, whereas the Oregon board that is charged with protecting public safety, needs to err on the side of being conservative. But they clearly overstepped their role by issuing a fine. If this alleged renegade engineer had actually contracted with a municipality and prepared specifications and schematics to have the municipality implement this solution while representing himself as a traffic engineer without the professional license, then this act is within the jurisdiction of the board. But from what I have read, it seems he was simply sharing his insight and ideas in a collaborative, advisory capacity and not doing actual work. And that is all right by me.
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