[sudhirj]

Local time is very idiosyncratic - the hands of the clock on your wall move forwards, backwards, repeat the same hours, skip hours and dance at the will of your people and politicians.

Needless to say, this may cause issues in computers. The only clocks that stay consistent and dependable are the ones in UTC land.

So the people mirror the clocks of their local government, but computers mirror the UTC clocks.

[dragonwriter]

> The only clocks that stay consistent and dependable are the ones in UTC land.

UTC is closer to “consistent and dependable” than local time, but still has leap second issues. TAI is where you go for consistent and dependable.

[baq]

Leap seconds would have a word with you. The only time that's fixed is GPS time, or so I heard.

[tripzilch]

Legend has it there's a secret order of monks that have been going "one mississippi, ..." since 1970. They say it's the only way they can be really sure.

But nobody knows how, when or why they came to be 23 minutes off ...

[sudhirj]

Re leap seconds, smearing seems to have solved that rather effectively. The last leap second was a non event thanks to it.

[welterde]

If people do leap second smearing anyway, I wonder if it were possible to just directly use UT1 instead of UTC (the leapseconds are just there to keep UTC synchronized to UT1 to within one second).