For those unaware, the major parties have declined to participate in the by-election triggered by Farage's resignation seeing the whole thing as a farce. As a result Farage will likely face only Count Binface, a space warrior from Sigma Six. He'd get my vote purely on the basis that he's promised to bring back Ceefax, and build at least one affordable house.

No. Not everybody. I prefer accurate time, and all the complaints I've heard hold little water.

My servers need to timesync forwards and back all the time, eg timedrift. They need to jump to new times, or slowly drift, depending.

VMs can be hypervisor starved, or need to move to a new host.

Servers also need to handle missing time. Any daemon or program which cannot handle this is buggy, broken, and needs to deal.

Leap seconds are just part of all of this, and present no new issues compared to normal time change. I question the capabilities of any engineer who singles out time second as difficult to deal with, time is constantly changing on servers. Constantly.

So back to the start, no... everybody doesn't agree. Google isn't "everybody".

My best guess would be it's somehow related to water distribution? More water going into the atmosphere? Glaciers growing (unlikely)? Did multiple huge water reservoirs go into service and get filled up over the summer months?

In the real world their scheme is doomed as it would strip the atmosphere off of the Earth, but since they were planning to leave the solar system the atmosphere was going to freeze to a solid anyway so maybe it didn't really matter. To be honest I thought the entire scheme was an extremely elaborate cover for the fact the lead ship was the actual ark and everyone else was just plain doomed. This would have mirrored one of the themes in the 3 Body Problem where interstellar space travel is strictly forbidden until everybody can participate at once. The "launch the Earth as a spaceship" concept was so poorly thought out I thought it had to be a fraud in the story, and our somewhat dense protagonists just didn't catch on.

[Spoiler]

They are good reasons. Conspiracy theorists are able to persuade almost everybody that the reasons were bullshit, an excuse to seize power or something, and so the few who still insist this was necessary and mustn't stop are executed. Almost immediately after those executions, Mother Nature proves them right. So that leaves everybody: Guilty of having murdered their saviours and with no choice but to carry on with the very plan they had insisted was bogus...

There is a Chinese movie but I'm kinda surprised no Hollywood studio got themselves a rights deal and made a US-friendly movie where the Sun conveniently blows up slightly earlier and our heroes are vindicated and everybody agrees they were right all along.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intercalation_(timekeeping)

Um, because it's the prime meridian and that's how UTC is defined?

> It's nearly impossible to have your local time match your local solar noon.

Which is why I specified on the prime meridian, which is the particular local meridian that UTC is defined as corresponding to.

> solar noon varies from day to day by 10-20 seconds.

Which is why I was careful to specify mean solar noon.

I'm not quite sure what your issue is. Yes, we have time zones tied to specific meridians, and the actual sun's speed in the sky varies (which I mentioned in my post, so I'm not sure why you seem to think I'm unaware of it) so in most places local time by the clock doesn't match local time by the sun. Yes, a leap second adjustment to UTC is quite a bit smaller, taken in isolation, than the annual variation in actual solar time vs. mean solar time.

But over time, if we didn't have leap seconds, the difference would accumulate. The accumulated difference now between UTC and TAI is 37 seconds--which is almost twice the maximum variation in actual solar noon from mean solar noon that you refer to. We humans have collectively decided that we don't want that, and that it's better to do the adjustments a little at a time rather than in bigger lumps.

I believe in the US this error correction has been discontinued in the East and in Texas, but is still done in the West for some kind of non-clock "inadvertent interchange" reasons I don't understand.

The notable differences are that

1) the leap second happens at the same time globally (23:59:60 UTC), while leap days start at 00:00 local time

2) leap seconds happen at irregular intervals

3) leap seconds are nearly universally implemented wrong, because the ability to show :60 on a second display for for one second at most twice per year is just not worth the implementation complexity

You could argue about 1, but the alternative would lead to much more complicated timezone math (time zones can be an additional one second apart from each other depending on whether the leap second is already applied) for very limited benefit. Number 2 seems unavoidable, and 3 is entirely unintended, just the way things have worked out in real life