[LEAPSECS] Reliability

[Daniel R. Tobias]

On 6 Jan 2009 at 10:12, Tony Finch wrote:


> Note that there's no need for global co-ordination. Each country (or

> county) can change when it is convenient for them. The effect would

> probably be a shifting of timezone boundaries in lumps and bumps that

> averages out to the overall DUT1 drift.


...thus ending up with a time zone map even more chaotic and 
convoluted and ever-changing than the current one, something I 
wouldn't have thought to be possible.

And after a few millennia, UTC will actually be a complete day or 
more removed from the local civil time in any place.  This will be 
very confusing in places like Wikipedia comment signature datestamps, 
which use UTC.  (Wikipedia edit histories also use UTC by default, 
but can be configured by users to display in their preferred time 
zone.)

Also in a few millennia, when the need to alter the Gregorian 
calendar to correct for alignment with the seasons comes up, that 
will open the question of whether such calendar alterations apply to 
UTC, to local time systems, or both.  The keepers of UTC as a strict 
atomic time standard will undoubtedly oppose any alteration to its 
calendar rules, but if the local time zones are still officially 
based on it (even if shifted by an offset of multiple days by then) 
then it wouldn't make sense to change the calendar rules for them but 
not UTC, so another big fight on whatever the equivalent of Internet 
mailing lists is in that era will be anticipated.

-- 
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