List of Contributions

Mr. William Bala, P.E., S.E., M.ASCE

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Mr. William Bala, P.E., S.E., M.ASCE


My Content

1 to 20 of 23 total

RE: Is DE&I non-essential?

Posted By William Bala 05-31-2023 07:59 AM
Found In Egroup: Professional and Career Topics \ view thread
It isn't that DEI does or doesn't involve discriminatory practices, it's a tool to make certain skills are accessible to people willing to put in the effort. Cool. It's when HR tries to put themselves above critique and even exact penalties on staff or managers that voice opposition to their policies ...

RE: Is DE&I non-essential?

Posted By William Bala 05-22-2023 06:32 PM
Found In Egroup: Professional and Career Topics \ view thread
Are they in fact "drying up" compared to availability of positions being filled? Are they not open positions as much as a pledged "DE&I position"? What I am seeing is firms utilizing overseas operations as a cost cutting measure and claiming it boosts diversity. My sense is filling positions has ...

RE: What's the one tool you can't live without when doing your day-to-day job?

Posted By William Bala 04-03-2023 11:15 AM
Found In Egroup: Professional and Career Topics \ view thread
One software tool I use extensively is Blue Beam (Revu). It allows multiple users to mark-up and review documents and whole projects, you can view who made what comments when, and who hasn't made any yet. An impressive set of mark-up tools and .pdf handling. Second one is the ability to utilize laser ...

RE: Structural Engineering Mentor

Posted By William Bala 10-10-2022 10:58 AM
Found In Egroup: Professional and Career Topics \ view thread
Alex, The Area of steel for your design is 1570.8mm2 versus the 1206.3mm2 for the roof of the first floor. About 23%. It may have more to do with the concrete mix and how fast it is curing, maybe without being kept wet for the first 7 days or no curing compound applied. If the cracks are not getting ...

RE: Buckminster Fuller's Engineering Contributions

Posted By William Bala 08-08-2022 11:54 AM
Found In Egroup: Professional and Career Topics \ view thread
He had the motivation of a body of general knowledge and the daring, just lacked an engineering staff. The car Buckminster designed and built was representative of a lot of his work. A taildragger, like most of the general aviation at the time, the Dymaxion car, had the low speed ground maneuverability ...

RE: Unlicensed engineers working for licensure exemption organizations

Posted By William Bala 07-27-2022 10:46 AM
Found In Egroup: Professional and Career Topics \ view thread
Who has to have a PE and why? Review the statutes and Board rules in the states in question. It's pretty explicit as to who and why. A review of disciplinary proceedings by individual boards can be illustrative about this as well. At some point you may have to say no to a client or his attorney. ...

RE: What's Your Favorite or Most Used Idiom from the World of Engineering?

Posted By William Bala 07-27-2022 10:46 AM
Found In Egroup: Professional and Career Topics \ view thread
"The laws of physics are not negotiable" and "When in doubt, make it stout" ------------------------------ William Bala P.E., S.E., M.ASCE Owner Hawkins TX ------------------------------

RE: Employee Performance Ratings

Posted By William Bala 07-18-2022 10:02 AM
Found In Egroup: Professional and Career Topics \ view thread
The bell curve is used for the company's benefit, not the employee's. The bell curve will be employed when the company decides to open an engineering office in India in order to drive their unit rates down and contribute to the decline of their own economy. The bell curve was used to justify engineering ...

RE: Should ASCE Maintain a More Neutral Political Tone?

Posted By William Bala 07-05-2022 10:18 AM
Found In Egroup: Professional and Career Topics \ view thread
The discussion has wandered through a lot to do with CO2 emissions. Interesting since CO2 never made it into the status of a semi regulated pollutant until 2011. And then there was this: "The U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that the Environmental Protection Agency does not have the authority to set limits ...

RE: Toll Roads, When they should become public property

Posted By William Bala 06-29-2022 10:01 AM
Found In Egroup: Horizontal/Subsurface Infrastructure & Transportation \ view thread
"Paid for" as opposed to "Paid off" simply refers to when the collection of tolls ceases. The premise of toll roads being publicly owned is not so confusing as their administration is confounding. The Dallas-Fort Worth Turnpike eventually stopped collecting tolls and became a portion of I-30. Obviously ...

RE: Unlicensed engineers working for licensure exemption organizations

Posted By William Bala 06-27-2022 05:57 PM
Found In Egroup: Professional and Career Topics \ view thread
What I don't like about the concept of licensure exemption is if it inhibits a PE from overrulling, or being made responsible for, changes made by fabricators like what happened on the Hyatt skyway collapse in Kansas City that killed 114 people, or anything remotely like it. The bonfire collapse at Texas ...

RE: Should ASCE Maintain a More Neutral Political Tone?

Posted By William Bala 06-27-2022 05:56 PM
Found In Egroup: Professional and Career Topics \ view thread
Should ASCE Maintain a More Neutral Tone??? No, silence from people who are generally considered intelligent can't possibly be golden. I'd look for sources if I were to investigate a failure, a fatality, a culture of poor safety practices. Engineers speaking out is absolutely vital. I would venture that ...

Toll Roads, When they should become public property

Posted By William Bala 06-27-2022 05:54 PM
Found In Egroup: Horizontal/Subsurface Infrastructure & Transportation \ view thread
Toll collection as financing has helped sprout an array of new routes and planning initiatives in the US in the last two decades. The complaint heard most often is "when is this thing paid for?" followed by "Why did they pick that route?". Texas, in particular has seen the rise of Regional Mobility Authorities ...

RE: Rearranging the deck chairs while the ship sinks

Posted By William Bala 06-26-2022 12:20 PM
Found In Egroup: Professional and Career Topics \ view thread
Politics is competition, hopefully so. Communism is the end of competition and politics, no more debate. The central committee ends all arguments. If it had been different anywhere it was practiced, you couldn't say that. Facts say otherwise. ------------------------------ William Bala P.E., S.E., ...

RE: Rearranging the deck chairs while the ship sinks

Posted By William Bala 06-24-2022 04:08 PM
Found In Egroup: Professional and Career Topics \ view thread
What I have seen in Communist countries couldn't be characterized as competition with anybody. Imperialism, for sure. The Party's way or no way. Corruption, if not from the outset, soon there after. Makes me think of the "Peoples Cube", all sides of the Rubik's cube the same color so as not to intimidate ...

RE: Rearranging the deck chairs while the ship sinks

Posted By William Bala 06-07-2022 11:22 PM
Found In Egroup: Professional and Career Topics \ view thread
The thread seems to be drifting a bit off of the original premise. Cheap anything, not just cell phones, but the array of goods made outside the US that fill the ports and container ships anchored offshore are simply evidence of how we are being seduced into not providing for ourselves. This involves ...

RE: Rearranging the deck chairs while the ship sinks

Posted By William Bala 06-02-2022 10:19 AM
Found In Egroup: Professional and Career Topics \ view thread
No one wants jobs to go out of existence because employers are busy contracting them abroad for higher short term gains. We will continue to see shortages and other symptoms when we eliminate a skilled workforce in favor of a cheap one abroad where safety and human rights issues have a dubious present ...

RE: Rearranging the deck chairs while the ship sinks

Posted By William Bala 05-31-2022 08:01 AM
Found In Egroup: Professional and Career Topics \ view thread
Ah yes FFA, Future Farmer's, we know we need them, so maybe all the doom and gloom about farming as a future needs to be dealt with. effectively. Good points. The high school I went to had an avid FFA program, still lots of farms in the area. I wonder if the FFA program is still going, or as strong as ...

RE: Analysis of rounabout by simulation model (PTV Vissim).

Posted By William Bala 05-26-2022 10:07 AM
Found In Egroup: Horizontal/Subsurface Infrastructure & Transportation \ view thread
Muhammad, Excellent work. How can we get a copy of your thesis? Thanks ------------------------------ William Bala P.E., S.E., M.ASCE Owner Hawkins TX ------------------------------

RE: Rearranging the deck chairs while the ship sinks

Posted By William Bala 05-24-2022 03:24 PM
Found In Egroup: Professional and Career Topics \ view thread
A world view is absolutely essential, granted, suspicion of education slipping into indoctrination is a problem, but a world view is what management definitely needs and hopefully a majority of executives in engineering firms are not purely financial or legal majors because this barge is listing pretty ...