What I don't understand is the fact that rear foglamps aren't required in the US (not sure about Canada). They're mandatory here and the original owner of my car had to have one fitted.

To be honest, I do not see that much use for them. Yes, they may help to make the car visible for a bit longer distance, but already with regular tail light that is already far beyond the general visibility in a given fog, so it only makes "drivers" to feel like they can see further than they really can see and consequently drive insanely fast for the condition, smashing into something that does not have lights, like pedestrians and so on.
And where they are really counterproductive is at dark: There they just create a red wall blocking any remaining bits of visibility ahead of the car in front of you that has them on.

But what I do see as a problem is, the "daylight running lights" do not turn the tail lights with them. Consequence is, many drivers forget to turn the main headlights on (mainly in brightly lit cities, or generally because even just the DRL are providing quite sufficient front illumination for slower speeds) and so many cars then drive at night without any tail lights on.
And along the fact that headlights do not have any signal light on the dash whatsoever, it is becoming a problem in the rain - mainly with automatic headlights you have no idea if the main headlights did turn ON or did not. If the tail lights were on also with the DRL, neither of these problems would be problem at all, as if the visibility is good for the driver (that is for his personal judgement and exact conditions), for others it does not matter at all, whether the car has main headlights, or just DRL on at the front... And it would not require anything more complex nor sophisticated in the car automation...
The argument "It is to save power/gas/CO2 emission" is really a BS, with the tail lights consuming barely 2..3W with the LEDs (or even the 10..20W with older incandescents makes no difference at all)

The Irish have the best language!, I named my eldest daughter Siobhan, and she says nearly everyone new she meets usually asks her how to pronounce it!  , most get it wrong saying ‘Shivon’, but we say it as ‘Shuvorn’.
I’ve always loved Irish names  , I think the Irish have some of the most beautiful female names in the world!

Irish singer Enya’s full name is Eithne Pádraigín Ní Bhraonáin!, and Enya herself once said that the Irish pronunciation of Eithne, (that I first mistakenly pronounced as Eethnee), is actually said in Ireland as Enya! 

 AH , General Motors and their wonderful battery killer ideas!

Going out and about in public with no electronic devices on my person. (My watch is not battery powered.)

Thanks for your input, arcblue. Honestly, I could've just retrofitted this to incandescent or SBMV in the field. SMH lol.

Truth be told my car is angled up towards the rear windshield, seeing out there is bad and I don't have a backup camera. The reverse lights are thus mostly useless for me. Fortunately my year of back in parking at my high school has made me a master of using my mirrors and doing the old prop your arm behind the passenger seat and looking back trick.

Oddly enough, Europe also has manual reset starters made by Osram. They are known as the “Deos” starters. Additionally, some electronic fluorescent pulsestarters also do a decent job at protecting magnetic ballasts from failure by only attempting to start lamps with only one try.

This is an awesome movie (though it makes me sad) - thanks for sharing the link!

Yikes. One really shouldn't ignore any light that is not operating properly (goes for LEDs too!), but I think often the incandescent mentality is still present, that if a light is "burned out" and not lit, that it's not drawing any power and is OK to be left alone until someone is ready to fix it. Of course, in the case of a stuck starter, it visibly IS drawing power, but maybe people still think it's fine to leave it like that.

The manual reset starters are not easy to find, but they would help minimize the chance of a stuck starter and stressed ballast. They could still fail, but usually the starters fail after a lamp has been blinking for days or weeks and that won't happen with the manual reset starter. I use those on fixtures that I might run unattended. Maybe adding inline fuses at the ballasts would also help - I have done that on a few vintage fixtures that don't have thermal protectors to avoid fires if there's excessive current draw in the ballast for some reason.

I had an ITT wall pack fixture that used a ballast with the two-wire ignitor; when I realized I couldn't use one of the standard 3-wire ignitors (which I have some spares of) to repair it when it failed, I changed out the entire ballast. I'm not so good at repairing electronics on the component level, but admittedly, the open style ignitors like this would be fairly simple to repair even if one's soldering skills aren't so good. Just have to find and order the correct component. Makes sense the capacitor would be the most likely failure point.

My DR-70H actually was a DR-70M originally, with the HPS ballast taken from a later model Electripak medium-base HPS version, so it has a standard ignitor. I'm very fond of those deluxe yard lights.

I've never encountered a choke in an HPS ballast that had problems...but have changed out many failed or failing ignitors. But there certainly are other possibilities, such as broken solder joints, broken ballast wire connections, broken weld or connection within the lamp itself. The field test for a 55V HPS fixture is to try an incandescent lamp in the socket, as mentioned previously in this thread.