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Comment by TeMPOraL | Hacker News Reader

Reminds me of a story a certain physics PhD told me about certain very known university in Poland.

One day some years ago, the university administration thought, "why are we wasting money keeping power on, running lights and aircon and God knows what, when the buildings are vacant?". They soon turned that thought into action, and when a long holiday break came, they just shut off the power to the buildings as soon as everyone left for the day. About a week later, the PhD I mentioned and his co-workers came back to the lab, saw some droplets on the glass, and almost had a heart attack.

Turns out, after a week of being without aircon to dry and warm it, the air was just about to cross the dew point threshold, and if it did, it would kill the optics on a million-dollar research laser they recently got installed.

I hear that since then, they're a little bit less pound-foolish.

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Your story now reminds me of our new plant manager back in the days of the last financial crisis.

He was newly appointed as the supreme leader at this automotive plant. Uncertainty was high, this being 2007, so people were let go, and costs reduced with any means possible. So he went into production and one day decided that it is too cold in the storage area. He orders his people to increase the temperature with a few degrees since that would save tons of money. People protest, he hears only "blaa-blaa", and his request is implemented.

A few days later, it turns out that barrels upon barrels of chemicals in the storage area needed to be kept under a certain temperature. So the stuff solidified and it was now only good for the dump site. Out to garbage the chemicals went, new stuff was ordered, production was stopped until the new stuff arrived and temperature was restored back to normal after that.

Seems like an exemplary case for "Chesterton's fence":

https://www.chesterton.org/taking-a-fence-down/

Often the most important comments in a codebase are signs on such fences, preserving hard-won knowledge of pitfalls in software and human processes.

The required storage temperature for chemicals being stored is a pretty obvious thing to document clearly. It's also not a wild idea to have adjustments to the storage conditions follow some sort of review process.

Chesterton's fence is sort of about understanding something that isn't necessarily obvious, changing storage conditions in an industrial environment without checking requirements is neglect rather than ignorance.

> neglect rather than ignorance

Reasonably avoidable ignorance of essential knowledge is a manner in which neglect creates disaster; ignorance and neglect are not opposed concepts.

I suppose I am arguing that this is far more obvious than 'reasonably avoidable ignorance'.

I suppose I am also arguing that there is a mechanistic requirement of the role 'plant manager', where they shouldn't make changes without understanding the impacts. That's somewhat different than ignorance, because it's pretty much their job to do what it takes to act correctly, avoiding assumption and the like.

Before I heard of Chesterton's Fence, I had read of the Hurrican Lantern Effect. Pretty similar

http://quichemoraine.com/2009/06/the-hurricane-lantern-effec...

I genuinely like your argument: although I've seen a few too many managers that exemplified the Peter Principle it's not unreasonable to hope that a "plant manager" is aware that a web of process exists, even if they can't immediately cite it.

To be fair, this particular power outage in California isn't to save money. It's to prevent forest fires. Also, how important can these experiments be (in CA) if they don't have sufficient backup power at a university??

Edit: If a Uni has a multi-million dollar laser, it should have a few thousand dollar backup generator!

> if they don't have sufficient backup power at a university??

This. If you've got a multi-million dollar experiment, gee I dunno make sure you're in a building with a generator?

"hey Mr. Government, I know you gave us that multi-million dollar DARPA reserach grant, but uh, someone hit a telephone pole drink driving on the weekend and, uh, power was out for several hours and uh yeah, that 2 years of research, uh, we gotta start all over can we have some more funds please?"

The lack of maintenance and system improvement that makes the shutdown a necessary step to mitigate fire risk is about saving money.

I mean..it's a bit of A and B. From the outside (i.e. from a non-CA resident), PG&E appears pretty incompetent and/or insolvent and can't properly manage it's infrastructure. Is their main driver still really about saving money?

I think it's to prevent liability from forest fires. The difference is subtle but important.

No, it's to prevent forest fires, which is why the policy was blessed by the federal judge overseeing their felony sentence and probation for the crimes they were convicted of in the 2010 San Bruno gas explosion (who is involved in the fire safety issue because PG&E’s role in last year's fires was charged as a parole violation), even though he noted that the reason it was necessary is because PG&E underfunded safety maintenance while issuing massive dividends.

May be off-topic, but...

What exactly is the usefulness of a felony as applied to a corporation?

As applied to an individual, it is capable of ruining your life through privation of constitutional rights (firearm ownership, right to vote, permanent mark on background checks make it increasingly unlikely you'll ever hold any sensitive position, etc...)

What does it mean for a corporation to be a felon? It sure seems like the concept is discontinuous in terms of scale. Obviously, there's an extra layer of court oversight that's been mandated, so some autonomy is lost. Still doesn't seem though like the the punishment for a corporation is concommittant with the general treatment of an individual having committed the same relative severity of infraction.

In fact, I'm surprised that anyone even wants to do business with anyone involved with the company during the period the felony was handed dowm.

The more I think about it, it seems like all the "felon" label does is act as a signpost for discrimination being okay.

Anyway. Brain dropping. My apologies for the tangent.

> It's to prevent forest fires.

> Also, how important can these experiments be (in CA) if they don't have sufficient backup power at a university??

How important can freedom from fires be if they don't dig trenches for power lines in critical areas?

> if they don't have sufficient backup power

They have backup power which can get them through any expected power outage. They don't have unlimited backup power that would be able to get them through a "apocalypse" or major terrorism scenario where the world is ending and power will be out for more than a week. Preparing to survive an apocalypse or major terrorism incident is possible. Build all facilities a mile underground with a self enclosed ecosystem. Might cost trillions, but can be done.

PG&E has intentionally deployed, at short and inadequate notice, what is equivalent to a terrorist attack on west coast infrastructure. No one prepared for or expected that scenario. Past events have shown that PG&E management are sociopaths who intentionally engaged in mass criminal negligence which resulted in dozens of deaths and billions of dollars of property damage. Even under the oversight of a captured court, they continue with their games.

If there is any sanity left in California, the USDOJ would bring the executives who deployed this plan and the judge who signed off on it under terrorism charges. If any deaths occur as a result of these antics, it should be capital charges.

You almost lost me at the apocalypse metaphor but I catch your drift. Weeks at a time of no power aren't easy to be prepared for, but I feel like this event should be one more reason we need more distributed power generation in the US. Less single points of failure.

Yeah sorry I didn't mean to suggest a religious apocalypse, but any civilization-ending event which apocalypse also means: whether cooling and global glaciation, warming and ocean inundation, all-out global nuclear exchange between superpowers, the eruption of the Yellowstone caldera, large meteor impact, "inevitable" Carrington event, 1 in 1000 year worldwide tsunami, etc. But it can be local too and without outside support is the same as world ending if you can't get out. If you have power loss for weeks in an area that is totally power dependent you start to see civilization meltdown. The situation in Puerto Rico recently was an example, another is the Haiti earthquake before that. Neither has recovered years later.

You make a good point about distributed distribution. Would have to be very local to avoid this wildfire problem as PG&E is doing (shut off power instead of deal with actual issue). The wildfire problem is one that is decades in the making and coupled with poor open areas management by government policy in general and not just the power company, in particular not allowing periodic fires to burn out underbrush. I had this huge pile of brush in my backyard. When it burned it was very dangerous. Now I make sure to do more regular smaller burns as giant burns are not easily manageable.

I like the solution of small Hitachi style safe nuclear reactors that service neighborhoods of around 2000-10000 people, can't meltdown or breech, are useless to terrorists, and require no maintenance. Doubt we'll go that way though.

note: it's not as simple as that (part of the fire problem is due to deferred maintainence; AKA we could have spent money 10 years ago to address this).

However when you have a laser system it's not as simple as having a backup generator. When the entire building power is affected, the AC system stops working, and all your nicely aligned optics become unaligned. If you fix them at that time, then when the AC restores, you have to realign them.

There are hundreds of externalities that affect productive state of the art research.

It almost always comes down to a lack of communication. People act without first communicating their thoughts.

Pride. "I'm the boss, so I know best". A proud person doesn't listen.

But, they can come up with great solutions to problems you don’t have, and create more problems with their solution.

why can't we do ... is easily the scariest thing any non-technical manager can say.

My manager used it quite a bit.

Why can't we do a help page as good as company X?

Well, we can but it might take 3 FTE for 3 months

Why can't we can't we have feature W?

We can but we have features X,Y and Z to deliver to customers and nobody is asking for feature W

and so on

Reasoning is a tool we as humans use to justify our beliefs and actions (and not an internal process which shapes belief as often depicted). Communication is naturally enviable to help strengthen that reasoning. Communication <-> reasoning -> belief+action is not natural and should not be the expected process from one's future self or other from humans.

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