I'll be happy to take it down if it is going to cause too many addon questions. I don't want it to be used as a justification for too many more!

Ah.. I thought that the original questioner had longer than that.

I'll be more judicious with throwing out questions on the edges of our scope.

How coniving :3

I dunno though, that kinda sounds like sabotage ha ha

@GlenH7 Ha ha ha

I like the work around of being able to close as duplicate. That is an interesting way to handle topics like that.

The only difference is that whenever we have had projects like that, the owner either pays us to update them, or there haven't been issues.

That is where it veers into the actual question. We have had projects built years later. My field doesn't have permits.... just codes that are updated every year.

Yeah. I would really like to get opinions on lots of bad things that can happen, but they would really be "poll" questions.

Mechanical and electrical have lots of permits and inspectors, the structural more relies on one person putting their name on an entire building/bridge.

If something bad happens, it is that `one person

who is responsible.

Somewhat. The contractor has responsibility to do it to plans, but as you get into the actual work there is a surprising amount of gray area.

Exactly. Those are the areas that I really want other questions on, but they quickly get into trouble. Legal liabilities could be an issue too. You never want to admit that you might have done something that wasn't quite right.

or that you weren't sure of.

And that is why the various engineers are notorious for "adding just a little more factor of safety."

And that has caused its own issues on projects... but I REALLY don't want to go there.

@hazzey I read your question as strictly a legal one, not ethical at all. Liability is not an ethical concept.

@Air The ethics sort of come in at the end with the engineer knowing that it was being built.

It was sort of buried though.

And that is where the two get tied together so much. The only thing that is enforcing ethics is the law.

The law doesn't exist to enforce ethics, though.

The law exists to safeguard the public welfare.

Not solely, but it is a means to an end.

Well, IMO the ideal tags for that question would be one relating to building/construction codes and one relating to law/liability.

True.

There are plenty of situations where I would say someone is liable for the consequences of ethical behavior

And even more where someone is not liable for unethical behavior

@GlenH7 Ah, that's interesting.

Leave it to Canada.

Sorry... #notsorry

Or like the "Good Samaritan" laws that say that you can't be held liable for trying to help save a life.

See, I want to point out that we're having a discussion here that contains within it some potentially great Q&As

Their natural scope is just less intuitive

@Air I'm not sure that any of these questions could be narrowed down enough to have a "correct" answer as the site requires.

@hazzey Ah, but the site doesn't require answers to be objectively correct.

now we are really talking about a slippery slope.

The help center don't ask page describes "good subjective"

What answers need to be is rankable

Exactly!

Relevant: meta.communitybuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/48/…

> We sometimes get overly worried about things with a "right answer". We hate things that are truly just unrankable preferences (Favorite Movie!), but Parenting is a great example of a community that's really good at questions that don't have purely "right" answers. What they do have is rankable answers, where one of the top couple almost certainly will be very useful, even on topics where experienced users fall into one of a couple of philosophical positions. – Jaydles♦ Jul 30 '14 at 16:38

Now, we have more in common with the trilogy sites than we do with Parenting, but we don't have to model ourselves strictly after SO

@GlenH7 I should bookmark it, I use it a lot.

Yeah, to a degree, but they tend to be older ones

Because of the Programmers split

@GlenH7 Methinks I know why ;)

I feel like this beta is going at a nice pace.

But part of that might be due to having missed the private phase due to A51 wonkiness :(

@GlenH7 I'm talking about the loneliest bug report

12 views... sigh. I hope the new funding is going to let SE finally release Area 52, or whatever they're going to call it.

I'm not really concerned with that badge

And it's a minor bug

Either.

There are so many badges.

I can't possibly catch 'em all.

Eh, they're population-level expectations. At worst, I'm not representative of an imaginary mean community member.

Too late. I am The One. Prepare to have the office building of your mind flown into by the attack helicopter of my awkward metaphors.

Man, if I was Neo... He's supposed to be this hacker nerd, why the hell he ain't throw a single hadouken in the whole series?

Stop bullets, ooh, wow. Visualize code like it was a shareware screensaver, la-de-dah.

You're in a virtual world that you just realized you and only you can bend completely to your will, and you don't even snikt? Not once?

@Air Konami code it up Neo

Related: i.imgur.com/Rz7xP1f.gifv

@Air cheers for the answer on the hackspace tags question - good read that blog-post. I was going to put that as an add-on to the other question about reaching out to hackspaces, but decided last minute to make it a separate question, glad I did.

btw I just edited this question to rescue it from being closed: engineering.stackexchange.com/q/625/95 - can someone tell me if such edits are a step too far? or a good thing?

@jhabbott I think it's a good thing, simply because it's been made more clear

Yeah, but I'm reading a lot into where I think he was coming from.. will that alienate new users or help them to ask better questions?

@jhabbott I'm not sure, you could invite him to a chat room and discuss it with him maybe

Not that bothered. :D Just hoping the site has more good/answerable questions than bad and trying to make it so;

I'm not sure that question is worth saving, TBH.

You've gone about as far as you can reasonably go without OP stepping in to help, and it's still "I have an idea I want to discuss"

well I don't know the answer myself, but I figure the way it is now it can be either yes, your premise is sound, go ahead and start researching, or no, one or more is flawed because of xyz.

meh - well if it's still rubbish I guess it'll get downvoted or ignored/left.

glad we've got some people like @GlenH7 and @Air who seem to know a fair deal about being good moderators as well as their relative engineering expertises :D

the discussion on meta seems to be quite good/healthy... seems like 90% of questions have already been thought and answered in previous SE sites, blogs, etc.

Seeing the 200-odd questions we've gotten so far has really underscored how little engineering expertise I truly have. :)

There's some good ones eh :)

trouble is I keep getting bugger all done each day as I read fascinating questions/answers about really cool interesting things that have nothing to do with what I need to know/do in my life right now!

and I keep watching the Area51 stats as our questions per day average goes down and wondering if the initial great momentum we created in the private beta is waning

Woo, convention badge