I'd rather use old cells than shady new cells. New cells are the dangerous ones- manufacturing defects can make it through QA, but everything gets found after a few years of use.
I'm not sure how relevant it is as an appeal to authority measure, but in the US there is a Professional Engineer license. It's mostly relevant when you have to sign off on designs for regulatory bodies.
>the only person (in most states) who can legally call himself an Engineer
Someone must have a PE to sign off on certain things when dealing with regulators and so forth. Which makes getting a PE in certain situations important. But not having a PE is hardly equivalent to calling yourself a lawyer if you haven't passed the bar in a state.
That’s not true for any of the United States. You can’t call yourself a Professional Engineer without being licensed, but anyone can call themselves an engineer. Train engineer, growth engineer, happiness engineer, and software engineer are all perfectly valid titles without a P.E. license.
The funny thing about that is, at least when I worked in the oil business, I'm not sure I've seen another industry that threw around the "engineer" with more abandon for technicians of all stripes.
I'd note that's a case where a business is representing themselves as an engineering firm and, and in some situations, it would be reasonable to expect that meant they employed licensed engineers. (The specific case is pretty silly though so is calling themselves engineers.) But individuals certainly call themselves and are called engineers all the time who aren't licensed in Texas and everyplace else.
Professional Engineer. There's an Engineer in Training certification first, typically gained by passing a Fundamentals of Engineering exam in college. Then you work for a few years under a PE and take an exam to become a PE yourself.
What area do you work in?