NavList:

Sean,

The "Leap Seconds Mailing List" is an exquisite example of the "old internet" doing what it did best: talking, talking, talking, and accomplishing nothing -- a coffee klatsch gone virtual, and a temple of irrelevance. Most of us wish we could get back some of that side of the old internet, and NavList discussions are maybe a piece of that. But those Leap Seconds discussions recycled the same crap ad nauseam. It was a virtual stadium of highly intelligent people (most of them severely under-appreciated by civilization) without a single intellectual among them. All knowledge, no insight. 

You cited an example:
"In this context, there is a major disadvantage to the leap minute/hour proposals, and even to just embargoing leap seconds for a century: they would result in needing to handle a leap when no one has experienced a leap for decades. What are the chances of getting that right?"

Oh my gaawd!! And that's just freaking stupid. Right here in River City, right in the beating heart of capitalism and just down the road from Silicon Valley, each and every year we flip our clocks ahead by an hour and then drop them back by an hour more than six months later. Folks complain about the inconvenience and the sleep disruption but clearly the process is no threat otherwise, and it has been managed without incident for decades. And regions regularly shift their time zones by an hour or even an oddball thirty-minute adjustment. These are known procedures. What are the chances of getting that right if we feel the need for an adjustment in a century?? I would say pretty damn close to one-hundred percent. Let UTC roll. Stop screwing it up with leap seconds. And if civil time needs a bump to stay a bit more Sun-focused, do it with time zones. They already work.

And the individual you quoted continued:
"If we're going to have leaps at all, it seems better to keep leaps reasonably frequent, and even to insert gratuitous leaps to make them more frequent than at present (see the "leap second every month" proposal). This way we would have a fair chance of making the leap-handling systems actually work."

Classic hyper-nerd thinking. That's the "Leap Seconds Mailing List" all right. I can smell the burning wires from here...

Frank Reed