History of Do we need Timezones

Since this link was posted I've had ((Reliance on timezone data|some further thoughts about this))

Discontinue leap seconds

Now that is a different matter altogether. Just because some idiot decided that since time was based on seconds then we should count time from some arbitrary point was the mistake here. I've said before that I work with 'days' as the base unit and time is then fraction of a day ( {{DATESTAMP on Firebird}} ). If one day just happens to be a second longer I can observe or ignore that fact. My own historic data only needs to align with midday Greenwich hunderds of years ago.  

Now that is a different matter altogether. Just because some idiot decided that since time was based on seconds then we should count time from some arbitrary point was the mistake here. I've said before that I work with 'days' as the base unit and time is then fraction of a day ( ((TIMESTAMP on Firebird)) ). If one day just happens to be a second longer I can observe or ignore that fact. My own historic data only needs to align with midday Greenwich hunderds of years ago.  

We only need the tz database because we are working with a fixed clock. What that clock is locked to is nominally noon over Greenwich and because the rotation of the earth around the sun is not a constant, it's only an approximation anyway. That the approximation currently used only drifts a second every so often is probably testament to the achievements of the clock-makers of the past, and do we really know how today accurate that will be in 1000 years time? Just as we have leap years for dates, we need leap some-things for time and for the next 100 years seconds are as good as anything? It's only now we have a stable time source that we see the problem ... and that is perhaps because someone got the duration of a second wrong anyway? Adding a few more cycles to the definition of a second would be the sensible fix?