I don't think this approach will really work, and could cause a significant amount of issues on an implementation level. While it may work in theory, changing a

I don't think this approach will really work, and could cause a significant amount of issues on an implementation level. While it may work in theory, changing all the software would be a huge pain and it would be more difficult to mentally model. 1. I probably make the mental conversion between UTC, and EST, EDT, PST, etc several thousand times a year, which is very strait forward to do with an hour offset. However, doing these mental conversions with 4 hours and 3 seconds (think after a few changes) or 3 hours, 59 minutes, and 57 seconds will make mental alignment of data in different offsets massively more difficult. While I'm a huge proponent of representing all our systems in UTC time, it's just not a reality that exists today. Also, I see many peers fail this conversion often enough, that adding complexity here would be costly. 2. Some of the protocols used for transmitting time offset from UTC are only capable of a resolution of 15 minutes. If I remember correctly, all current 3GPP standards do this, as the wireless protocols for cellular are highly optimized for small message sizes, they do not currently encode a higher resolution than 15 minutes. This means that today, a cellular network cannot send your phone a time offset from UTC more precise than 15 minutes, and to do so would require a change in standards. This also means, that likely no phone on the market today would be capable of reflecting these time differences. While I don't have a perfect alternative, I did like the idea of abolishing the concept of a leap second itself. Meaning, that it is more important that time count forward at a steady rate, from a computation perspective, and that adjustments to re-synchronize with the slight changes in the earths rotation should not be taken at all. I can't think of any downsides with this approach off hand or from previous readings, but I'm sure it creates it's own problems in certain problem spaces I'm not familiar with.