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