Leap seconds make no sense and we should just permanently stop doing them.
It really doesn't matter if UTC drifts away from solar time by an hour every few thousand years.
It really doesn't matter if UTC drifts away from solar time by an hour every few thousand years.
You could even align it with a DST transition in countries that have those where you simply skip one to apply the change.
https://www.itu.int/dms_pub/itu-r/opb/rep/R-REP-TF.2511-2022...
There will be no more leap seconds after 2035, AFAIK.
The complications are around clocks, UNIX timestamp and NTP, where a steadily and monotonously increasing number would make the most sense, and that's not UTC.
https://gavinhoward.com/2023/02/make-the-leap-second-first-c...
Did you ask the person above to explain why they aren't useful?
Since leap seconds don't help for subjective human needs, and they _also_ don't help for computers, science, engineering etc. (if you care deeply about solar noon for some technical reason you should use something that tracks it more precisely than UTC anyway), I can't think of anything they _are_ useful for, except for saving our descendants thousands of years from now from having to change time zones when it drifts far enough to matter, which I think is a speculative and not very compelling reason.
I'd happily change my opinion if I heard a good reason for keeping them, so I object to claiming that this is "hubris".
Just wanted to say I didn't downvote the original comment, I was only trying to guess about how others were perceiving it.
According to the 20. amendment the term of an US president starts at Noon, 20 Januar. Simply noon. The USA seems to interpret it as 12:00 ET and makes it ceremonial inauguration for that time, possibly also the transfer of powers. But solar noon on the steps of the Capitol seems to be at 12:18 ET, I researched back at the last inauguration.
This discrepancy seems to be a great premise for a legal thriller, a political thriller, or sadly for a conspiracy theory. The latter definitely has some fertile ground.
The americans should start using the Washington Monument as a solar clock for this ceremony, imo.
Anyway, that's an explanation of my opinion. Many people will disagree with it.
Why not? Time zones change constantly. Dealing with changing time zones is something we already know how to do easily.
But probably the main argument against getting rid of leap seconds from UTC is that we already have TAI for anyone who wants something like UTC but without the leap seconds. In fact we already have two things that are like UTC but without the leap seconds: there's TAI and there's also GPS time, offset from TAI by 19 seconds. If that's what you want, use TAI. Or use GPS. What's the points of adding a third kind of time that is just like those two but offset by yet another small constant offset?
I tend to think that there's a real use for something like UTC that stays in sync with the Earth's rotation (and thus with the diurnal cycle of day and night) and that if some coterie of bureaucrats turns UTC into another version of TAI/GPS then probably someone else will at some point have to invent another thing to replace UTC and then we'll be roughly back where we started just with extra confusing complexity.
Imagine you want to specify the date and time of an international online meeting. Today you'd probably use UTC for that. But if most of the world were more than 24 hours offset from UTC then using UTC would mean specifying the "wrong" date for the meeting. You probably wouldn't want to do that so instead you'd use whatever new thing has been invented to replace UTC, something that has leap seconds or leap minutes or leap hours (or leap days?) or some other way of staying in sync with the calendar. Leap seconds seems to me like the right granularity: they're small enough to be ignored for most everyday purposes, and frequent enough that programmers can't just pretend they don't happen.
(Sorry for the waffle ... I didn't intend to write that much. I should definitely care less about this seeing as whatever happens I'll be dead long before the shit hits the fan.)
Your example of getting so far off that we have to change _days_ would take several times longer than the distance between the invention of agriculture and now. Honestly, I would be extremely surprised if human civilization survives that long, but even if it does, our descendants can just deal with the problem then. There's no reason to make our lives more difficult _now_ just to deal with this very niche hypothetical scenario.
Downvoting is meant for text that detracts from the conversation. Not as a tool for suppressing well made arguments one disagrees with.
That has to be justified before scrapping something we don't necessarily understand and a lot of programmers are just grateful we have libraries to handle this complexity for us.
Because one cannot ignore nature?
I suspect the vast majority of those programmers who have problems with leap seconds should really be using (and are unaware of) TAI.
Sure we can, in computing make abstractions that ignore nature all the time. As long as there's no issue (or no big issue) with them being out of sync, we're fine.
Besides there are few things natural about how we handle time, those are already big towers of abstractions on top of the movement of celestial bodies that simplify and sidestep a lot of subtleties.
Programmers simply deal with the world as it exists. Every single country uses UTC therefore that is how time must be represented. It is easier to remove leap seconds from UTC than it is to make all countries adopt TAI at the same instant.
The concept of leap seconds can of course be preserved by defining a new time standard that isn’t called “UTC”.
Because leap seconds cause weird gaps or overlaps (depending on how they are happening).
This doesn’t matter for pretty much anyone who doesn’t track/log/act every second all the time in a way where if a second ‘disappears’ or happens twice or takes longer on one day than on another it’s noticeable.
When monitoring or tracking large scale systems, it’s a really irritating problem, which is why TAI is nice and exists in computer land. Also why it’s nice for many scientist types.
For everyone else, something like UTC layered on top is more than good enough. Leap seconds are fine enough there. Same with most timezones, and PDT/PST, etc.
1)daylight savings should be completely abolished. It just causes confusion.
2)timezones should be completely abolished. They also cause confusion. If you live in California, instead of getting up at say 8am you get up at say 3pm. There is never any confusion with anyone globally about scheduling anything.
3)Months should be the same length. Instead of 12 months of 30, 31, 28 or sometimes 29 days, with a varying number of weeks in each month depending on the year, you have exactly 13 months of 4 weeks each (28 days). 13*28=364 which gives you an extra day "New years day" or "Christmas day" or whatever but that isn't a day of the week. If it's a leap year the day after that Christmas day is "Leap day" and it also isn't a day of the week. Then a particular date is always the same day of the week, months are all 4 weeks, quarters are exactly 3 months and 1 week each and have the same end dates every year etc. Tons of benefits.
Literally the only downside people come up with when I mention it is "yeah but imagine if your birthday is now a Monday, that would SUCK!"
But, err, "am" and "pm" refer to where the sun is in the sky. That's their literal meaning. It's useful information. Timezones are (obviously) a physical thing. Abolishing them to aide the comparatively tiny number of people worldwide who need to schedule a phone call with someone in another country is pretty bonkers IMO.
Furthermore, I don't want to be booking a flight home from Australia to the UK, pick a 9am departure from SYD only to discover it's in the evening.
[1] Notionally. Obviously the sun is not often in the sky in London.
For example I literally have 3 emails in my inbox at the moment that arrived overnight from people in California saying some variation on "I saw a slot in your calendar for xpm PST, is that too late for you in London?".
That's why I support getting rid of leap seconds, but not getting rid of time zones: the number of people who leap seconds helps is very small (possibly zero) since their effect on everyday life is microscopic.
Good luck selling a large swaithe of humanity that Tuesday will turn into Wednesday at some point during their working day.