235. Infrastructure and Standards

As global warming taxes the structures supporting our towns and cities, the technical standards that define the operation of those structures will be tested…but who decides what those standards should be? Are they equal to the task?

-Links for the Curious-

What recent atmospheric rivers reveal about Bay Area's aging wastewater systems

[landspide]

They need a standard to make standards accessible to all.

[ViolentMonopoly]

Great video, appreciate topics grounded in real world issues where engineering and science meet theory and philosophy

[KohuGaly]

All standards that are required by law should be just as easily accessible as the law itself - ie. public and free. This may or may not apply to services required by those standards (audits, certifications, etc.). I think most people, countries and organizations are OK with not having a word in what the content of the standards will be. It's completely reasonable for that to be a paid privilege. I've never heard anyone being OK with the standard being behind paywall.

[michaelcherry]

Thank you for the trauma flashbacks from the ISO 9001 implementation that happened in my last job.😱
Fun fact: We were required to label all files with an "OBSOLETE" sticker if the material was no longer being used. I wore an OBSOLETE sticker on my shirt for two weeks and NO ONE commented.
Any standards that do not take into account the local conditions in which they are to be applied are either useless or dangerous. The concept of ISO is good. The implementation is terrible.
One way to improve this would be to make ISO standards freely available, if only so countries and organizations could have the chance to point out how badly they apply to their situations.
Eventually, this might lead to improvements in the standards that avoid the current problems. People being people, however, I'm sure there will be turf wars over who is responsible for what.

[ferulebezel]

There were a couple of cases from years ago that reflect on this.

Most U.S. jurisdictions adopt building codes as law from one publisher wholesale. The publisher made a bunch of money charging a lot for the books. Some builder, plumber or whatever was pissed and had one of those new fangled internet connections. He made the building code available for his jurisdiction available on line, for free. Then legal stuff happened. I don't know what the results were.

Another case was a company put together electronic case law references, on CD I believe. They included the indexing of the publisher of the most common paper books, West, since most judges insisted those numbers be used. West sued. I don't know how that was resolved either.

When I'm king any document that has the force of law will be public domain.

Anyway there may be case law making it accessible.

[alexdemoura]

YES... I fully agree with Matej Sloboda's comment: if it is required by the law, then it should be publicly available, period. But we should not limit such statements to ISO, ANSI, or DIN.
And IEEE? To do a simple floating-point operation - should we pay a high price for an 80s standard updated 30 years later?
And NEC/NFPA? It is about safety and is law in many states and municipalities, for God's sake. Should we download an older version of the book specifically for a state from the archive site for free just because it "was" a law two years ago? And pray that section we are reading had no change?
And IEC? For electrical safety and works. Getting the commissioning book(s) is almost impossible without leaving a lot of money to the organization.
I am also a technical guy, and I deal with different industries - from oil & gas to information technology in many countries with imperial and metric standards - I always had this kind of problem: no access to a mandatory standard... a real mess. A project led by a medium-sized company in a Third World country member of the IEC needs an old NEC/NFPA because it has no access to an updated IEC document.
AGA for gas standards and ASME for metallurgy - all together and all very well paid to make us follow the standards they write for a gas pipeline project under conditions they have never been submitted to.
Let NEMA be paid - they are specifically for profitable manufacturers - American and Japanese ones. Two certified organizations for shipping and shipbuilding only - one American, another from Norway - and now we have another set of standards for more safety - SOLAS (Safety on Land And Sea)... we can't buy a plain inexpensive power generator without some penalty.
Concerning the safety of the people and environment: of course, we all agree these standards should exist - but we are talking about access to them here.

[KynaTiona]

The idea of a universal standard that isn't universally available is mind-boggling to me. Like, what if you had to pay to know how long a centimeter was? Or how fast the speed of light is? These are the sorts of things everyone needs to know, and the standards just do not do their job if you can't google them. Maybe charging for standards would have made sense prior to the internet when managing and communicating standards was a far more intensive enterprise, but in a world that contains Wikipedia, it's such an unjustifiable hindrance that it honestly seems criminal.

[kraneiathedancingdryad]

Used to work for a fiber optic cable company that did ISO9000 stuff. Pain in the butt. They'd come through and quiz the employees. We weren't allowed to say we didn't know; if we really had no idea we said "let me check" and we'd go ask a supervisor.

[googleaccount]

Reminds me how corporations make decisions. To avoid being accountable for issues they buy published research that tells managers what to do. Then managers do whatever that publishers tells them, giving both a defense and permission to make unsound decisions. This creates national corporate trends where every manager in every corporation is reading the same recommendations, making the same decisions.

[anakimluke]

I need a backstory for the warrior duck.

[Autists-Guide]

Give me a framework over a standard any day.
I know, rebel, right?

[narutosaga]

Just reminds me of GoodHart's law lol

[uis]

I don't know how ISO that was created by UN became hellscape it now is.

[peterhooper]

From where I sit ISO9000 looks more like a grift than anything else.