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You Can Look Forward To 8 More Years of Leap Second Problems (cio.com)
itwbennett writes: As previously discussed here, the World Radiocommunication Conference (WRC) met "for nearly the entire month of November, and one of the hot-button issues [was] what to do about the leap second." But, as they did at the 2012 conference, the WRC voted to postpone the decision — not just until the next WRC in 2019, but until the one after, in 2023, while the International Telecommunication Union conducts further studies into the impact of tinkering with the definition of Coordinated Universal Time.
Leap seconds are an artifact of our timekeeping system, and actual physical properties of our orbit.
The latter we are stuck with but the former is something humanity has the power to change. There are basically three choices.
1: Disconnect the civil time second from the SI second. Allow the civil time second to vary slightly to match the mean solar day.
2: Allow civil time to drift relative to solar time
3: Make periodic adjustments to civil time to keep it close to solar time.
Each choice hurts different people. Choice 1 hurts anyone who needs to convert between civil time and "atom time". Choice 2 hurts people who rely on civil time as a navigational aid and future historians. Choice 3 puts a rarely excersised special case into computer systems leading to systematic failures.
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register