[DSMan195276]

> A leap-hour, meanwhile: That kicks the can so far down the road that we'll probably lose track of it completely. 600 years is a very long time; society will be a very thing by then. Leap-hours seem to me to be moral equivalent to the "fuck it, let's just give up" option.

Something to consider: The use of timezones in mostly 1-hour increments over inconsistently placed areas means that the vast majority of people are already living many minutes off from the "actual" time at their precise location, in some cases even more than an hour. "Giving-up" implies that this is something important worth maintaining, where-as for the vast majority of people they gain nothing from leap seconds or even leap minutes. The most important thing for people is simply that everybody agrees on what time it is, which is easier when leap-Xs aren't done.

That said it's also probably true that a leap-hour would never actually happen, but that's not some big issue. By the time we got to the point that a leap-hour would make sense people would have already adjusted their habits and it probably wouldn't be worth it.

[schoen]

An extreme example is Xinjiang, where solar time can be more than three hours off from civil time (due to the PRC policy of having only one time zone for all of China).

[crote]

Xinjiang is well-known for effectively operating in two timezones at once, with part of the population mostly operating on +6 and part on +8.

[ssl-3]

Indeed. On a long-enough timeline, people will adjust to whatever it is that the sun is doing regardless of what the clock on the wall says. That's the way it has always been.

So when we're talking about one second every once in awhile, I'm not sure that [effectively] giving up by adopting leap hours instead of leap seconds isn't the right option -- as long as we agree to do it uniformly.