[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..