[bhk]

Leap seconds have nothing to do with precision time. It's a non-periodic alteration to the definition of UTC. Those niche applications that require second-accurate knowledge of Earth's rotational accuracy don't need to rely on leap second changes to UTC; they could get that information out of band, and will need to anyway when they need sub-second accuracy. The 99.999% of other applications that don't need to know Earth's rotation orientation relative to the sun within a second -- but do have to calculate time differences between two UTC times -- would be much better off not having to deal with leap seconds. Leap seconds were a terribly misguided idea.

[zokier]

> Leap seconds were a terribly misguided idea.

I prefer dropping leap seconds, but I wouldn't call them misguided. UTC and leap seconds come from maritime celestial navigation, where tracking rotation is actually important. Civil time then just piggybacked on that, which at the time probably was perfectly reasonable solution.

[sla29970]

A detailed look at the negotiations that led to leap seconds shows that they were not for maritime celestial navigation. During the process several different times the celestial navigation folks set a limit on how far radio broadcast time signals could deviate from astronomical time, and every one of those limits was violated as the negotiations proceeded. By the time the draft recommendation was given to 12th Plenary Assembly of the CCIR it allowed for leaps of multiple seconds, and that draft was amended on the floor to leaps of only one second before they voted to approve.