I don't think it's true that "changing time zones is something we already know how to do easily". At least not with the word "easily" in there. Time zones cause

I don't think it's true that "changing time zones is something we already know how to do easily". At least not with the word "easily" in there. Time zones cause a lot of problems, which is why we don't change them constantly. And it would be nice to have a future in which time zones are changed even more infrequently rather than one in which they have to be changed to things like UTC-37:00 because they are specified in terms of a UTC that has become unmoored from the diurnal cycle of day and night. 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.)