alt Hacker NewsWe've on track to do something different before the end of 2035: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leap_second#Phase-out_and_futu...
Shifting to a leap-minute feels close-enough to me: We might get one every 50 or 100 years. A lot of us reading this today will never live to see a leap-minute, but it's close enough that we'll still have it collectively in-mind when it it needs to happen. (And if we screw it up at that time, the outliers will only be off by a minute. Not so bad.)
A leap-hour, meanwhile: That kicks the can so far down the road that we'll probably lose track of it completely. ~6,000 years is a very long time; society will be a very different thing by then. Leap-hours seem to me to be moral equivalent to the "fuck it, let's just give up" option.
edit: accidentally a word, and fixed an off-by-an-order-of-magnitude error on the approximate years required for a leap hour
> 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.