My personal opinion is that leap seconds have no place in civil timekeeping. I love them as geeky trivia but in practical terms they are a disaster. They do sol

My personal opinion is that leap seconds have no place in civil timekeeping. I love them as geeky trivia but in practical terms they are a disaster. They do solve a real problem of keeping solar time roughly in sync with atomic time due to the slowing rotation of the Earth, but in today's computer-dominated and interconnected world inflicting a one-second discontinuity every few years on millions of systems individually rather than handling it in a central place is a bad idea. It's like a mini-Y2K several times a decade. The core issue is we have two different needs: a hyper-accurate count of elapsed SI seconds, and a day-to-day date/time system that roughly tracks the position of the sun in the sky. UTC tries to combine these into the same thing, when they would best be left separate. For the former, we already have a pure atomic timescale -- TAI -- to handle this. I would go a step further and not even present TAI as a date and time, but rather a raw count of seconds like unix time. This is to enforce that TAI is not civil time, but rather a standard to benchmark and calibrate against. For the latter, I propose a new time standard that is a transformation function applied to TAI. The IERS, instead of decreeing leap seconds like they do now, would instead declare an offset and skew rate that smears the leap second out over a longer period. Something like: at date X, civil time will be Y seconds ahead of TAI, and will tick Z% faster/slower until further notice, where Z is expressed in a simple unit like parts-per-billion or milliseconds per day. Instead of leap seconds every 18 months or so, with this scheme the IERS could probably get away with making adjustments once every five years, and still stay within the 0.9s of true solar time as mandated by UTC. Any modern microprocessor could handle this transformation trivially. Most would not even need to as the internal clock resonators in 99.9% of the world's computers and clocks are less accurate than the skew rate Z. They need to periodically resync with a master clock anyway and the drift would be indistinguishable from noise. To be clear, no one would be changing the length of the second. An SI second is and always will be an SI second, and high-precision computing and science will be done with reference to SI seconds. But the elapsed time between consecutive seconds of civil time will be not quite an SI second, and will differ by an amount so small that for the purposes of day-to-day timekeeping is in effect indistinguishable.