Electricity prices in Europe are around 2x what Americans pay. In Japan it is even higher. Each 9 added to uptime has a cost, and Americans have apparently decided they don't want to pay.

I doubt that seriously. The big Iberian Peninsula outage already mentioned happened because a "reliable" power source was not decoupling correctly from the grid. France right now runs into electricity problems because its "reliable" nuclear reactors have to be shut down because of excessive heat making the cooling of the reactors problematic.

Your "reliable" power sources are not reliable, they are inert. This is not the same, and if conditions change quickly, or aren't within specifications, they fail in a big way.

Yeah, there's two main problems:

1) People entering the wrong fields. For example, medicine really needs workers, at all levels, but not enough people are going into it.

2) Certain manual labour fields, like field work and home construction, because... well, I think we all know why there's a shortage of workers in those fields.

Exactly. But you have to keep the original BSD license intact. You can modify the files, but you have to acknowledge, that you got them from FreeBSD. That's why many commercial companies like to base their systems on FreeBSD.

Well, this particular discussion is about a (not yet enacted) law concerning DST in the United States, and none of the states are in the topics except Hawaii, which does not use DST.

The sun does not reach its zenith at 12:00.

If you defined noon as the time of the sun reaching its zenith, days would no longer be the same length. Days in northern hemisphere winter would be slightly longer than 24 hours, and days in northern hemisphere summer would be shorter, due to the difference between sidereal time and solar time.

When the daylight hours are short in winter, you have to pick some time in which it's darkness. If it's light during the morning commute, it will be dark during the evening commute.

This depends on how far north you are, of course.

"Permanent Daylight Savings Time" is a misnomer.

What it actually is, is that the standard time in every location in the US is shifted one time zone to the west, and the clocks stay on standard time all year.

Unless I'm misreading the map, on the East coast, the EST time zone is pretty much centered on where it should be, with New York very slightly east and Washington DC very slightly west of center. The main problem with EST is that it extends west to the city limits of Chicago, while it should change to CST around Toledo.

If anything, most of the population in the US is slightly to the western edge of the time zones, not the east.

Which might be true for the Southern U.S. states, true.

On the other hand, we tried this in the 1970ies already, and it was abolished immediately after the first winter, after traffic accidents during morning rush hour had risen sharply, and school children had to wait for the school bus in the coldest time of the day (and the school bus took longer because of all the icy roads anyway).

That is not true. Left without clocks, humans in median latitudes tend to sleep longer in winter than in the summer. A standard schedule throughout the year is not healthy, except you live close to the equator, where the day length does not vary much during the year.

It's not only that. It's more that then, the very short daylight is concentrated in the evening, because you get up an hour early, during the coldest period of the whole day, and then you are wasting the daylight in the afternoon, when it is too cold anyway to have any outdoor activities which could profiteer from the light.

Not having DST, especially in regions away from the equator, is also dumb. You have to deal with the fact, that the Sun rises in the summer much early than in the winter, and getting up in total darkness and not having any daylight until late in the workday like DST in the winter is as annoying as trying to go to bed when it's still bright outside.

So either you abolish a strict day schedule and adopt during the year, which is not only two switch days a year, but multiple times, or you have some kind of switch between Summer time and Winter time.

If the Netherlands did this, they would reverse it immediately after the first winter. Not getting any sunlight until past 10.00 AM is so annoying, and the cost of road maintenance because rush hours is when everywhere, there is still ice on the roads, will be prohibitive.

People complaining have simply no clue how it is to have DST in the winter, and can't imagine.

We expected them 20 years ago, when all people working in the field knew already that SS7 needs security safeguards, not to sit on their hands and do nothing.