Take this as your reminder to participate in lobbying against leap seconds. They serve no useful purpose: The drift between civil noon and solar time they prev

Take this as your reminder to participate in lobbying against leap seconds. They serve no useful purpose: The drift between civil noon and solar time they prevent would take thousands of years to reach even 1 hour. The thing leap seconds are tracking "mean solar time" is not something that exists, it's a mathematical abstraction; actual solar time differs substantially from mean solar time depending on your location and the time of year. Applications that care about solar time are usually frustrated by leapseconds in any case; since they result in unpredictable discontinuities in the difference between solar time and civil time; and most systems provide no way to report the history of leap seconds to applications. If people still care about solar noon matching civil noon 4000 years from now they simply need shift the timezones by an hour. This is a much safer and more reasonable change which could be planned a hundred years in advance and wouldnt require a constant feed of unpredictable "trusted" leap seconds. Systems already handle mixed timezones well and will continue to do so since computers exist worldwide. As more distributed systems become sensitive to second-scale timing and the cost of reliable oscillators that can keep time autonomously continues to decline the cost of leap-seconds will continue to increase; but the value they provide (primarily political bragging rights about Greenwich being part of the definition of civil time) will remain at practically zero for almost everyone. Workarounds like leap-smear are just that-- workarounds, and add more possible failure modes to leap-second handling and will cause different failure modes for applications that care about time in different ways, e.g. caring about frequency vs time; or just from having even more ways to handle the leap second. Moreover, the discontinuation of leapseconds is simple and nearly costless. Announce that no more will be issued; then don't issue anymore of them.