I also don't believe that when everything was adopted, that people realized how big a deal it would become for software, and systems driven by software.
Every leap second, factories shut down. Just in case. Every leap second we face the possibility of a large chunk of the Internet going dark like happened in 2012. Computer programmers spend millions of dollars per year in aggregate dealing with the possibility of leap seconds.
All for something that, over thousands of years, won't lead to as big a discrepancy between the Sun and the clock as what we voluntarily do 2x per year for daylight savings time.
Does it make any sense to continue this insanity? Why?
> Computer programmers spend millions of dollars per year in aggregate dealing with the possibility of leap seconds.
Millions of dollars in aggregate per year? Assuming that’s just the US, with ~4 million working programmers with a median pay of ~$86,000/yr or about $43/hr assuming about 2,000 working hours per year, that’s, if I’m not messing up the math, on the rough order of 1 minute per programmer per year, on the order of a couple hours per programmer per year if you bumped it to hundreds of millions. In either case, its a neglible share of programmer-hours.
Accuracy of what? For 12:00 to be at noon on average? That's what timezones are for and they also already change. Just add leap seconds to the timezone offset instead.
Meanwhile leap seconds decrease accuracy when measuring long time periods unless you explicityly remove them again.
