[dboreham]

Having done some time in the trenches with calendar code, I would like the politicians and bureaucrats who define the rules to have some notion of the cost they inflict. Then perhaps we wouldn't have "let's change the DST dates this year (only) as an experiment" and we certainly wouldn't have leap seconds..

[jakub_g]

Politicians couldn't care less about the leap seconds IMO. It's the other geeks (non-programmers) who enforce its existence. In fact the leap seconds predate the modern computing era. I guess they didn't have such a big impact in 1970s. In fact I didn't learn about them until 2012 when many systems crashed after leap second.

Having said that, politicians changing DST rules with a few weeks notice (like Turkey last autumn) are nuts. The impact of such decisions is huge and worldwide (emergency patches etc.)

[dboreham]

Politicians of some sort are in charge of whether leap seconds exist or not. afaik it is mostly a particular kind of religion (belief that human time must be in all ways bound to the heavens) that drove the political push for leap seconds. Like you I only discovered they existed when my kernels locked up..