Not anymore forever. We’re just not adding one for this year. We might need one next year, we might not. It all depends on the Earth’s rotation and orbit

There's an opportunity to insert or remove a leap second twice a year. They only decide about 6 months in advance of each opportunity what to do (leap second, skipped second, or do nothing).

It's a mix of french and english... so it's german.

Probably from the "Content-Language: de" header

The only better thing is the organization being called "International Earth Rotation Service"

Sounds like something out of a Douglas Adams novel.

They should call themselves Time Lords

Leap seconds are not added on a regular schedule like leap days, they depend on physical measurements of Earth. So high reliability systems with comprehensive timekeeping would not be perturbed by these choices, I would think.

It’s a huge problem. The most common approach to address it is called smearing; the duration of each second for a 24 hour period ahead of the “leap” is adjusted. For strict ordering systems this works as each device maintains time sync with the global clock, the duration of a clock cycle is just slightly different. I think this was in the original Spanner paper, actually.

Some rare systems use monotonic oscillator seconds and ignore the earth rotation second, but if you ever have to translate those to real time, you get an accumulating disaster over time and it’s generally regarded as not a good idea.

really, my I just don't have the time to keep up with this.

Leap days, February 29th, are not at the level of time zones. Different time zones do not disagree as to when March 1st will occurs immediately after February 28th.

god that would be awful. Can you imagine time zones being one second off from each other. Or two or three? ah yes, india is GMT+4:30:03, where europe is GMT+0:59:58

The changes in Earth's rotational speed that leap seconds help account for affect the whole globe. Why shouldn't the effects be noted in the global time standard?

Lol. Exactly!

> I also don’t understand the reference to 2017.

My guess is that is when they last changed the offset, so the -37s has been in effect since then.

Apparently December 2016 was the last time a leap second was inserted, at least that's what Wikipedia says:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leap_second

Since I was checking the Wikipedia article anyway (for when the last leap second was inserted), it also has an answer for this:

"Because the Earth's rotational speed varies in response to climatic and geological events, UTC leap seconds are irregularly spaced and not precisely predictable."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leap_second

Yes. Geological activity, movement in the outer core, atmosphere, oceanic currents, melting ice, earthquakes, to name a few.

Earths rotation has been unusually fast lately. So there is not enough drift to warrant a leap second.

Yes, all of those and more. Our measurement precision is much better than the year-to-year first and second derivatives of day length. https://datacenter.iers.org/singlePlot.php?plotname=Bulletin... has the most relevant plot to this; the vertical jumps reflect leap seconds. (IERS has other plots for other dimensions of rotation, but I like this one.)