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I'm' baffled by the section about GLONASS. Russia surely has the ability to decide whether they add or remove future leap seconds?

• friend_and_foe 4y ago
  Of course they do. But government bodies and other institutional bodies incarnated these standards organizations in order to better coordinate with one another, and decided and committed to defering to them a long time ago. Russia is a sovereign state, they can make any decision they want to, but they decided and agreed at some point to defer to this organization for a reason.
  • helsinkiandrew 4y ago
    > Russia is a sovereign state, they can make any decision they want to, but they decided and agreed at some point to defer to this organization for a reason. I think the commenter means that there isn’t a technical reason that GLONASS can’t be changed to not add leap seconds not that Russia doesn’t have to defer to an international body.
• nullc 4y ago
  In prior advocacy for the elimination of leap seconds, I found that many of the officials appointed to talk about this stuff are fairly clueless about the engineering. I wouldn't be too shocked if they asked "what uses leap seconds", got an answer, and are advocating on that basis ("We have systems that use leap seconds!"), without having actually asked better questions like "What would require expensive changes if no more leap seconds were issued?"