One of my favorite bits of Vinge's A Deepness in the Sky is the use of base-10 time: ksec, Msec, etc. There is a nice time log scale with Earth time to base-10 time conversions.
Yes! It is as a direct result of that book that I now know without having to look it up that a ksec is about a quarter hour and a Msec is on the order of a fortnight, which comes in handy when doing back-of-envelope estimation more often than you'd expect. (I'd already known that a Gsec was about a third of a century thanks to Tom Duff's observation.[0]) I don't see us moving to such a system anytime soon in general (tying to the circadian cycle is just too convenient) but I'm a little surprised I don't see it more often in discussions of humans in space.
[0] "How many seconds are there in a year? If I tell you there are 3.155 x 10^7, you won't even try to remember it. On the other hand, who could forget that, to within half a percent, pi seconds is a nanocentury." --Tom Duff
The Emergent "utopia" is both horrifying and eerily believable. I've known some grad students and some tech workers who are way too close already.
But it's reallly strange to try to map the Emergent political structure onto any modern political axis. It's not "liberal progressive" or "traditional conservative" or "libertarian". Or any other popular political ideology. It's certainly authoritarian, but uniquely so. It's almost a dystopia run by project managers and exploiting specialists.
Also a fun bit: The traders in the book count base their epoch on the first moon landing, but if you pay attention, the lowest levels of software count from a different epoch.
They merely got confused... thousands of years from now, they assume unix epoch time is based on the moon landing. And it's only a few months off anyway. Not much is left of Earth as far as they know, to be able to properly understand that those were two different events.
The Emergents are what they are, because they are, at the most fundamental level, busybodies who want to control others. Sometime in their own history, they found an excuse (the Emergency) to do that, and they never stopped doing it even after the crisis was over. In this way they map to most other authoritarian regimes in reality, but especially to the leftist authoritarian regimes. They hate "peddlers" after all, who sell things to others at fair prices and of their own free will. Not unlike the mutterings you see all over social media concerning capitalism.
[0] "How many seconds are there in a year? If I tell you there are 3.155 x 10^7, you won't even try to remember it. On the other hand, who could forget that, to within half a percent, pi seconds is a nanocentury." --Tom Duff