The court decision itself is worth reading for a revealing look behind the curtain. [0]

>> In Slack communications dated November 16, 2021, the Apple employees crafting the warning screen for Project Michigan discussed how best to frame its language. Mr. Onak suggested the warning screen should include the language: “By continuing on the web, you will leave the app and be taken to an external website” because “‘external website’ sounds scary, so execs will love it.” [...] One employee further wrote, “to make your version even worse you could add the developer name rather than the app name.” To that, another responded “ooh - keep going.”

[0] https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cand.36...

Can thermal stations be kept running without any laod?

Interestingly it seems that the black start drill is considering a smaller zone of impact than what has happened here.

Also I suspect there is far more renewables on the grid now than in 2016.

This is potentially the first real black start of a grid with high renewable (solar/wind) penetration that I am aware of. Black starts with grids like this I imagine are much more technically challenging because you have generation coming on the grid (or not coming on) that you don't expect and you have to hope all the equipment is working correctly on "(semi)-distributed" generation assets which probably don't have the same level of technical oversight that a major gas/coal/nuclear/hydro plant does.

I put in another comment about the 2019 outage which was happened because a trip on a 400kV line caused a giant offshore wind farm to trip because its voltage regulator detected a problem it shouldn't have tripped the entire wind output over.

Eg: if you are doing a black start and then suddenly a bunch of smallish ~10MW solar farms start producing and feeding back in "automatically", you could then cause another trip because there isn't enough load for that. Same with rooftop solar.

I think theres a CIA base in the desert right?

The Canberra dish is super easy to visit. Source: I live here, and have. :-)

So how much was it? It would take time some time to look that up (find the story, find that part of the story...) when you know it anyway and can thus allow me to be lazy.

Miles to km, yes. As another European, I know that because it's relevant to understand when they talk about speed limits, top speeds of cars, etc.

Pounds to kg... If it's written media, I just paste it to Google and get the conversion. If it's movies or shows, honestly I don't think I have found an instance while it actually matters at all. If a movie character says "Oh, no, I've gained 10 pounds in a month, I need to go on a diet" you know that they're sad because that's a non-negligible amount of weight, and knowing how much it exactly is doesn't affect understanding of the movie at all.

It's a similar situation to old novels talking about money... When you read a novel from 200 years ago talking about dollars, pounds or whatever, do you look at the historic inflation rate to check today's equivalence? You might, if you're a perfectionist, but the truth is that you can perfectly understand such novels without knowing that just by the context in which they mention money.

Electricity transmission is a bit like water pressure and distribution. You're not going to get the same electrons (or water molecules) that you subscribed to from various producers in the distribution network put in, the flow causality and the physical embodiments of production are different though related things.