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Comment by VieElm | Hacker News Reader

Too bad leap seconds will not be abolished before this happens, abolishing leap seconds is up for consideration in November 2015 at the World Radio Conference:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leap_second#Proposal_to_abolis...

I wish they had a call for public comments.

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"In May 2014, David Willetts, the ex-UK Minister State for Universities and Science,[38] described as a non-scientist with a degree from the London School of Economics and Political Science,[39] expressed opposition to the abolition of leap seconds. He indicated that as a layman, he wanted to keep "the link between time and people's everyday experience of day and night." He also wanted to keep Greenwich Mean Time in Britain, and "warned" that it would drift towards the United States.[40] An article in the Times science section suggested that the abolition of leap seconds would mean the demise of Britain's role in timekeeping.[41]"

Just gah.

UK: please realize you are a medium-sized EU country, not a global super power. :)

Sincerely, the rest of Europe

Gah. The ignorance, it burns.

It will take thousands of years for the drift to even amount to one hour.

If people care about it then, ... they can switch timezones (e.g. like DST causes twice a year in most places) to compensate for it.

I agree. This bullshit temporal nationalism was also used as an argument for stopping Britain from changing to the European time zone (it makes way more sense). Apparently we can't do that because GMT is British. Ugh.

> it makes way more sense

I never understood this argument. The whole point of having a 24-hour clock is so that 12:00 is midday and 00:00 is midnight.

If you break that link then there seems little point in even having time zones, but it is useful to understand that "09:00" is in the morning, in whatever arbitrary location that time is observed.

The instant failure of "Swatch internet time" showed that the current system is still working.

12:00 is almost never midday. Even in equator, "midday" drifts by several minutes as the year goes by. Sunrise and sunset times vary a lot by latitude, so 5:00 in one location might mean sunrise, where in another location the sun won't come up for a couple of hours. Ditto for sunset. Even DST can't compensate if the sun is rising at 6:00 and setting at 22:00.

Midday doesn't have to be that precise, and you centre your day around it rather than move the day around sunrise and sunset. It may be that Swatch Internet Time was rather _before_ its time rather than something that will never catch on, but the current system works really well for pretty much everyone.

You don't want to know what time the sun's highest in the sky in various places around the world, though - you want to know what time people are likely to get to work, when people will be heading off for lunch, and when they'll be back. And that isn't as simple as knowing when it's 9am or 12 noon everywhere, because cultural assumptions about working hours and lunch hours are as variable as the alignment of timezones to actual astronomical noon. What you actually need is to keep an eye on people's Skype presence indicators.

No, we can't do it because it would involve me getting out of bed an hour earlier.

Tell you what: i'll allow a switch to European time if we move the start of the working day to 11:00. Deal?

I think the real reason is that it gives us an advantage in attracting American businesses. If you're an American company and need to open a European office, you're going to open it in the place where people can talk to your New York office for more of the working day, so you go to London rather than to Paris or Frankfurt.

UK-born/resident person here, couldn't agree more. Sorry for all the British people who still think we have an empire and all that nonsense. It's what's behind all this anti-EU crap that's going around here too. Hate it all.

Yes, the UK has questionable politicians. A quick survey suggests this isn't limited to either the UK, English speaking countries, medium sized countries (by landmass or otherwise), or the EU.

Anyway, the UK is realistically still a global great power (the US being the only acknowledged super power):

  6th by GDP (nominal)
  8-10th by GDP (PPP)
  Permanent member of UN Security Council
  Declared nuclear weapon state
  6th by military expenditure
  3rd biggest European country by populace (excluding Russia)
  4th biggest importer and exporter in the world 
  7th biggest R&D spending

The only European countries to consistently be ahead of the UK are the French, and most of the time the Germans.

    Most pervasive cyber-surveillance state
    Most self-righteous has-been in denial. 
    Most politically jaded western democracy
    Most disturbingly enthralled celebrity culture.
    Worlds smallest media attention-span.
    Worlds best dogging hotspots.

> Most self-righteous has-been in denial.

You sure that's not the French?

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