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It said that it was 1/2 their production output for one quarter. Is that really possible for an instantaneous power outage?


If at that instant they have half there quarter’s product in various stages of processing (and there are hundreds of such stages, in hundreds of parallel pipelines) when all of those stages shit the bed, obviously yes.


That's the point. The only way that's possible is if things sit in a process that takes many months.


or that the restart procedure after a power failure is going to take a few weeks...

I can imagine that if the factory is entirely automated and a full-restart has never been attempted. Every single machine will probably be in some bad state with unknown chemicals settled into unknown pipes in the machine, requiring custom flush processes to be designed, and in some cases machines might have to be replaced, which in a human-free clean room isn't easy...


Yes, that's exactly what's going on here. The processes last quite a long time.

Similarly, a drought that doesn't last that long (relative to the life of a big tree) can nevertheless kill that tree even though said tree has been growing for centuries.

In other words, there need be no correlation between how little time it takes to ruin something that takes a very long time to make.


If you understand that that’s the way the process works, then why are you asking if it’s possible




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