[HN Gopher] National Engineering Handbook
___________________________________________________________________
National Engineering Handbook
Author : minroot
Score : 80 points
Date : 2023-12-19 16:32 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (directives.sc.egov.usda.gov)
(TXT) w3m dump (directives.sc.egov.usda.gov)
| wolverine876 wrote:
| Does anyone know what this publication is designed for and by
| whom, and why only certain chapters are published?
| teitoklien wrote:
| It's part of the USDA Directives system which is the online
| repository of all USDA Departmental Regulations, Notices,
| Manuals, Guidebooks, etc.
|
| A lot of US departments, publish books like this.
|
| I'm a non-American, but i still often read books published by
| your government :D , they are certainly very cool. I wish our
| government had something like this.
|
| An interesting sidenote i wanted to mention the US Military
| also publishes books on various combat skills and guides on
| making defensive weapons for your public citizen to defend
| their communities incase of an invasion or government
| collapse[1].
|
| I've come to realise that a good portion of your government
| sure as hell cares deeply about protecting your citizen's right
| to defend themselves whether by carrying arms, or publishing
| books on guerilla tactics, and home making arms to protect
| oneself in the event of a crisis
|
| I get the right to carry arms is controversial in your country,
| It's not allowed for common citizens here either unless they
| can prove a risk of life to themselves, but I always come
| across moments in history, where governments choose to genocide
| their own people [2] and it makes me think that maybe, what the
| american constitution creators thought of, which is now
| characterized as extreme civil liberty wasn't a bad idea after
| all. People sometimes forget how unstable our freedoms truly
| are, and how often governments across history and in each
| country have betrayed their own people.
|
| - [1](https://www.amazon.com/s?i=stripbooks&rh=p_27%3APentagon+
| U.S...)
|
| - [2](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambodian_genocide)
| wolverine876 wrote:
| Freedoms are also betrayed by other citizens, including those
| with guns. I'm not too concerned with a Cambodian genocide
| happening in the US. I am infinitely more concerned that I'll
| be shot.
| abfan1127 wrote:
| The Cambodians weren't concerned either.
| pdabbadabba wrote:
| This seems plausible, but is this just a throwaway
| statement or is it supported by historical evidence? It's
| actually a pretty interesting question, that has never
| occurred to me until now, how well people have
| historically been able to judge the safety and stability
| of their own political situations. Perhaps there's some
| literature out there on this?
| teitoklien wrote:
| Police are supposed to protect you from those problems, a
| society that takes care of its people wont have to worry
| about people causing a revolution or going around shooting
| people.
|
| The point of rules like this is usually to make the
| government very afraid of it's own people and to make sure
| they (the government) serve them (the people) well.
|
| There are a 110 ways to kill people, if someone wants to
| kill you on the streets, not having guns aren't what's
| holding them back. It's far easier to buy fetanyl in your
| streets, and just inject someone with a high dosage and
| leave.
|
| > I'm not too concerned with a Cambodian genocide happening
| in the US.
|
| I wouldn't cast the concern aside that freely if I were
| you, I don't think its productive to look down on
| Cambodians as less civilised or believe in a sort of
| American exceptionalism, where things like the Cambodian
| genocide is not a possibility.
|
| As an example, I'd like to show the time when the
| government of California, was actively sterilising
| perfectly healthy american citizens for "eugenics" purposes
| [1][2] (a precursor to what could constitute genocide if
| those policies were nationalised)
|
| This is however just one example, you could argue they are
| linked to racism and a race superiority complex from those
| times, but reasons and causes can change across different
| times, the communities targeted may also change, the
| outcome (the potential risk of a government turning its
| back on its own people) is always present.
|
| The great governance (in comparison to nations across the
| world) that america benefitted from in the last century,
| was earned and paid for in blood, ideas and sweat by you're
| previous generations of citizens, constitution designers,
| policymakers, independent organisations, and right groups
| (on both aisles).
|
| I would say the concerns of a gov fallout is always ever
| present and the duty of every citizen in any democracy
| across the world to keep an eye out for, and put in all
| sorts of protections against such fallout whenever
| possible.
|
| - [1](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bXn3IzQTDOg) -
| [2](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6zCpRVP1DgQ)
| ericfr11 wrote:
| Any armed militia (let alone a single citizen) would have
| no power to fight anything. A government army would crush
| them. Today, guns are mostly killing other law-abiding
| citizens: hence, they are the wrong approach to a 21st
| century society. 300 years ago, US people had to protect
| themselves (against all enemies, including their
| "government" of the time: the British army)
| teitoklien wrote:
| > Any armed militia (let alone a single citizen) would
| have no power to fight anything. A government army would
| crush them.
|
| If this were true, then America wouldn't have failed so
| badly in Afghanistan, guerilla tactics work. The
| objective isnt to defeat the military in a war, if that
| were possible it would lead to instability and random
| groups of americans from taking over the government
| anytime. The objective is to give enough capabilities to
| everyday citizens to atleast be able to setup a
| resistance severe enough that no government would
| consider such an action. For those abilities I think the
| liberties provided are helpful enough. But I agree with
| you, there are far more dangerous instruments being used
| against common citizens now, that it makes people
| protecting themselves with guns a bad joke. That calls
| for more policies to allow citizens to defend themselves,
| whether that's a more robust education system to help
| citizens catch lying politicians, or a more robust system
| to bring in control the massive polarization spreading
| across all democracies, and defences against gutting out
| of the middle class that's taking place. But all of them
| call for more protections to be added, not existing ones
| to be removed
| antod wrote:
| _> If this were true, then America wouldn't have failed
| so badly in Afghanistan, guerilla tactics work._
|
| There is quite a gulf between making a democracy give up
| on occupying you (especially when the reasons for that
| occupation become kinda nebulous), and an internal
| rebellion or civil war.
|
| Guerilla tactics are often successful in the former case.
| The latter situation is much more prevalent, and in most
| cases just devolves into long term suffering.
| teitoklien wrote:
| There will be no internal rebellion or civil war, if
| government actually works for its own people and serves
| them diligently.
|
| More effort should be placed in helping people improve
| their lives, get access to healthcare, education, food,
| clean water, protect them from isolation and mental
| health issues, improve the civil discourse so people are
| kinder and gentler, more civil to each other.
|
| The answer might not be present in taking people's guns
| away or remove methods for people to protect themselves.
|
| America has had a century of prosperity, while having the
| liberties to carry arms. You're right a lot of
| democracies are right now at risk of an internal
| rebellion and civil war, including america. But the
| question is what caused it and how can we reverse the
| trend ? The answer surely cannot lie in removing
| something (gun rights) that was present even in years of
| prosperity.
|
| The risk of foreign governments initiating civil war is
| real, and america itself has done this to other countries
| that once used to be democracies, civilians not having
| guns certainly didn't prevent those civil wars, it's not
| that difficult for nations to pump in guns to rebels and
| terrorists to cause instability in a nation. None of
| those countries had gun rights like america did, yet they
| all fell to civil wars.
|
| The answer lies in government serving the people, and
| being afraid of the public.
|
| Not in making gov fearless, and thus less concerned about
| working for the masses.
|
| Think about it for a moment, you and I are worried about
| a civil war breaking out. Why ? Because the recent
| government on both party sides haven't been too honest
| and diligent in working for the public.
|
| Whether that's in deteriorating public education,
| prospects of high tech jobs, destruction of good blue
| collar jobs for people to improve their lives without
| obscene college debt, bad healthcare policies.
|
| These situations can only happen from an apathetic
| government structure that cares 0 about the masses.
|
| How do you think, it'll make those same governments more
| caring towards the public, by removing the first and
| second amendments ?
|
| Don't get me wrong, I don't think gun rights are
| necessary or some messiah that'll save mankind, I just
| don't understand the obsession with trying to remove
| them.
| antod wrote:
| I wasn't talking about what governments should and
| shouldn't do, or how they should behave. Or even anything
| US specific - I'm not American. I was just addressing the
| statement that guerilla tactics work and Afghanistan was
| the example cited. And I don't think Afghanistan is a
| good example in this case.
|
| Guerillas fighting an occupier (especially a democratic
| one) have had a reasonable track record of success.
| Guerillas fighting their own government much less so -
| the world has been and still is littered with those
| conflicts. There's a big difference in what is at stake
| from someone who can just go home, and someone who is
| fighting for their own home/survival.
| DeepSeaTortoise wrote:
| The point of armed citizens is not them winning a civil
| war, but making the restrictions politicians have to
| subject themselves to, to remain safe, sufficiently
| inconvenient.
|
| No more cinema, golf, theater, water park, mountain
| hiking or yachting.
|
| Not being able to take a walk within half a mile of your
| property's border, always waiting for security to check
| the cars you are about to use, often having them tell you
| that you cannot go to xyz, because they lack manpower (or
| whatever reason) to secure the routes.
|
| Citizens having access to weapons is a deal with the
| politicians that their daily lifes will only be as great
| as those of their subjects.
| antod wrote:
| As a non American, the expectation that your democracy
| only survives because your elected dictators-in-waiting
| are too scared to take the mask off is such a weird
| concept.
|
| There are no (or very few) other democracies with that
| culture. From the outside, it seems that culture and
| those attitudes are more likely to erode your democracy
| than protect it. A tiny minority viewpoint could create
| that fear, get that protection enabled, and then you've
| lost that leverage over the politicians you're touting.
|
| As democracies go, US politicians are already the most
| removed from contact with their citizens - it already
| seems like you're in a vicious circle here. Politicians
| fearing their citizens doesn't seem like a good basis to
| form a healthy democracy on.
| hef19898 wrote:
| That, and one could make the case than countries with
| strict gub laws, and thus a theoretically less afraid
| government, actually serve their citizens better than US
| when it comes to stuff like education, health care,
| social security, housing and infrastructure. So I am not
| really sure the theory of an armed citizenry resulting in
| better government for the people actually holds water.
| lukas099 wrote:
| Yeah it's interesting that this is debated because we
| actually have real-world data on this. It's not like no
| country with relatively high indices of freedom and
| prosperity has ever instituted strict gun control.
| sickofparadox wrote:
| It has been said many times before but tanks and planes
| cannot enforce a no-gathering order, they cannot stand on
| street corners enforcing curfews. Tanks and planes cannot
| defend the incredibly fragile (to attackers) US energy
| grid, which is too spread out and vulnerable to be
| defended by boots on the ground anyway. There's also the
| fact that a large amount of the US military would desert
| or defect from their posts if tasked with killing
| American citizens. Organized rebel groups would receive
| aid from our geopolitical adversaries, and the highways
| would be destroyed within weeks or months of the anarchy
| setting in. If the US ever suffered a civil war today, it
| would end as a country overnight, possibly permanently.
| dudul wrote:
| I dont know, I've been told by the media that on January
| 6th we were one hair away from being overtaken by a
| fascist regime.
|
| If there's one thing we've learned over the past century
| is that conventional armies are terrible at winning
| guerilla wars against population.
| bozhark wrote:
| Police are not required to protect anyone
| majormajor wrote:
| > Police are supposed to protect you from those problems,
| a society that takes care of its people wont have to
| worry about people causing a revolution or going around
| shooting people.
|
| > The point of rules like this is usually to make the
| government very afraid of it's own people and to make
| sure they (the government) serve them (the people) well.
|
| Does the existence of the problems not demonstate that
| that _idea_ has failed in practice?
|
| It's _supposed_ to do that, but it ain 't.
|
| Iterate.
| teitoklien wrote:
| No, it doesn't mean it has failed, it just means it alone
| is not sufficient. Just like how a century of american
| prosperity wasn't solely due to gun rights.
|
| Like many other laws and policies, 2nd amendment alone is
| not sufficient.
|
| The better question to find the answer to your query is.
|
| Is removing the 2nd amendment and gun rights going to
| magically save america and stop its marching decline?
|
| I don't think so.
| lukas099 wrote:
| > I don't think its productive to look down on Cambodians
| as less civilised or believe in a sort of American
| exceptionalism, where things like the Cambodian genocide
| is not a possibility.
|
| I think it's silly to pretend that different countries'
| institutions are all equivalent. Some have much more
| robust systems of checks and balances, justice systems,
| levels of corruption, etc. And no, it's not that
| Americans are 'more civilized' than Cambodians, it's just
| a byproduct of the circumstances of history that led to
| this point.
| anonu wrote:
| The right to bear arms in the USA is often most appreciated
| by citizens of foreign lands where life is lived on the
| precipice between democracy and tyranny. Gun deaths and mass
| shootings are horrible but the solution is not to abolish the
| 2nd amendment.
| eppp wrote:
| Then what IS the solution?
| Wojtkie wrote:
| Accessible healthcare, social services for the
| impovershed, accessible education, really anything that
| lifts people out of the despair or anger that drives them
| to committing crime.
| cbsmith wrote:
| On the other hand, the issue is of grave concern vis-a-vis
| being on the precipice between democracy & tyranny... Maybe
| it's not the solution said people think it is.
| lolinder wrote:
| I found this document [0] which includes a bit more information
| about the audience and the structure of the handbook. The
| target audience is specifically engineers working for the
| Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS).
|
| It looks like the gaps are because they're progressively
| updating the handbook, so "Sections" are chapters that have yet
| to be updated and "Parts" are chapters that have been updated:
|
| > Many technical references are available to help NRCS
| engineers prepare conservation designs, e.g. industry design
| references, professional publications, academic textbooks, and
| market literature. NRCS design engineers with accumulated
| empirical experience have worked with academia, industry, and
| other government agencies to develop technical references and
| procedures that are specific to conservation work. This
| knowledge base is housed in the National Engineering Handbook
| Series, Technical Releases, and Technical Notes:
|
| > General Manual, Title 210 - Engineering, Parts 600-659 are
| grouped together to form the National Engineering Handbook
| (NEH) Series. These Parts can be found at
| http://directives.sc.egov.usda.gov/ under the browser search
| column as "Handbooks - Title 210 Engineering."
|
| > The filing system for National Engineering Handbook Series
| was updated in 1998. As a result, old NEH Sections are posted
| with the new NEH Parts. As the old NEH Sections are updated,
| they will be filed as Parts under the new NEH Series.
|
| [0]
| https://www.nrcs.usda.gov/sites/default/files/2023-03/ND%20S...
| gustavus wrote:
| So I know there's going to be someone coming in to complain that
| Software Engineers aren't "real engineers" and we need "real
| engineering" and real "certifications" so we can be "real
| engineers"
|
| First off I love Jeff Atwood's take on it
| https://blog.codinghorror.com/do-certifications-matter.
|
| But I recently just passed my CISSP, had to for work, and it was
| one of the most obnoxious and pointless exercises I ever engaged.
| Most of the test involved questions about information that is
| hopelessly out of date, or incredibly pointless whose only value
| is for ivory tower PhDs to argue about in white papers whose only
| actual security experience is putting in their password to their
| laptop.
|
| I used to be sympathetic to an extent about the value of having a
| professional certifying body for software engineers, or something
| like that. Especially after having to debug JS by "full stack
| developers" who had just become "software engineers in 6 weeks".
| But after the CISSP racket I am enduring, I've realized a
| certfying body won't make software developers any more capable,
| it will only allow those who are the least qualified, to force
| arbitrary and capricious requirements onto people who actually
| care about the craft and are capble.
|
| /rant over.
| dudul wrote:
| Is it the way it is for plumbers, electricians, physicians,
| lawyers, etc? I'm seriously asking and ready to accept a "yes",
| but the reality is a lot of other professions have
| certifications and controlling bodies. I wonder if, when being
| interviewed, plumbers have to jump through the same idiotic
| hoops developers have to suffer.
|
| My wife used to work as a nurse, her interviews were usually:
| do you have your certification paperwork? When can you start?
| No white boarding, no " tell me about a time you had to deal
| with a very difficult patient".
|
| Yeah yeah jobs are different but ffs, if I had a freaking paper
| to show that would save me 4 rounds of interviews I would be so
| happy.
|
| And yes, "innovation" may suffer. That's the usual argument, to
| which I say: good. I think we've reached a point in the history
| of technology where we need to chill out, take a deep breath
| and untangle the f ing mess we've created over the past decade.
| lukas099 wrote:
| > if I had a freaking paper to show that would save me 4
| rounds of interviews I would be so happy.
|
| That's if you already had the paper. You are discounting the
| cost of getting the paper in the first place.
| dudul wrote:
| I'm not discounting it, it's an hypothetical paper so I
| don't know. Some poor souls already spend tens of thousands
| of dollars to go to college and don't even get this said
| paper.
| EastBayGuy wrote:
| Well, the license doesn't cost much beyond the cost of the
| degree. A few hundred in fees, and possibly a, very
| optional, grand on courses for exam prep.
| lolinder wrote:
| The cost of getting a license in the licensed professions
| is usually very standardized and reliable. You get the
| degree, you get your field experience, you pay a nominal
| fee, you pass the test, you get the piece of paper. If
| establishing a clear process like that would do away with
| the quagmire of poorly-designed and subjective interview
| processes that we currently deal with, I'd take it in a
| heartbeat.
| panzagl wrote:
| The problem with CISSP and similar is that the US government
| wants certifications, the 'software industry' is totally
| disinterested in such a thing, so the 'certification
| professionals' have moved in and set up shop. It's hardly the
| same level as a Professional Engineer or similar accreditation
| that is required before you're allowed to sign off on 'real
| engineering' projects.
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