When I moved to Norway for a few years I was a bit annoyed as pretty much everything was closed on a Sunday.

At first you get caught out without the right ingredients for lunch or wine. Or maybe just want to go get stuff. But after about a year I really came to value this. A day where everyone was off and you couldn't go shopping or get distracted with a bunch of consumer stuff that doesn't matter so much.

I doubt it ever will, but if like to see Sunday or Saturday trading halted again. It's good to have a day off.

We're experiencing this change now in Poland with a new law passed that will eventually make all Sundays off days.

The results are mixed. Our highly overworked society only has time for shopping during the weekends, so slashing half of that caused a great deal of chaos.

On the other hand the next day traffic is minimal, so it's a great opportunity to visit friends who live further than public transport can efficiently take you.

As a kid in Bangladesh, where random power outages were a regular occurrence, I’d never have imagined people in the west actually seriously proposing to adopt what was for us a poverty-driven behavior.

I remember when AT&T made arguments against splitting up Ma Bell because the new system wouldn't have "five 9s" reliability.

It turns out the optimal reliability/cost tradeoff, from the consumers' points of view, isn't necessarily what the entrenched incumbent producers want to provide.

Note that telephone service today sucks compared to the gold-plated Ma Bell network. It’s nearly unusable, especially VoIP.

As a vegetarian from the west, I have sometimes encountered similar incredulity from people in developing countries about my dietary choice.

Development is a ratchet, but there's diminishing returns. Eventually costs can seem to outweigh benefits in specific areas.

I was assuming that hydro, nuclear and such would keep the led lights on while people sat under a blanket and read a good book in their well insulated homes until they could turn industry back up and start charging their cars again. Living in harmony with nature would not really be that different from heating your water at night with offpeak electricity. If it gave us cheap clean power bills I think people would like it. Not turning the planet uninhabitable might be considered a perk too.

You mean like Christmas?

Yes, though randomly spaced when the weather dictated, like spontaneous mass official duvet days or bank holidays. A 95% renewable availability might give two weeks of them a year. Turn renewables lack of 100% availability in to a positive for society.

Now if only Christmas in the modern society were about rest rather than peak consumption…