>The middle for the day, on our time keeping devices, being light outside goes all the way back to the first sundials over 3,000 years ago.

Most of the world is perfectly fine with 12:00 not being synchronized with high noon [0]. And some jurisdictions still semiannually f*k with it further using DST. Generously assuming the current time keeping system will survive for ~6k years (looking at the leap seconds accumulation rate for the last 50 years) we can just shift timezones by one hour.

[0]: https://64.media.tumblr.com/4a9a4613f057d3b5f17ec548e6ac06d1...

You clearly do not know how much havoc and complexity leap seconds introduce into various systems. This is why leap seconds are likely to be phased-out [0]. It's effectively an admission that use of leap seconds in the "base" time was a mistake.

>We convert timestamps to and from date+times all the time.

If you do not account for time zones during this conversion, then you are not qualified to implement such conversions.

It's fine to use 86400 seconds for durations (e.g. "this computation will finish in 1d 8h 20m 34s"), but it's absolutely not fine to use it while dealing with datetimes.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leap_second#Phase-out_and_futu...

Computer systems (most importantly, UNIX) should've been using TAI [0] from the beginning. Human-readable time in turn should be computed from it using periodically updated time zones database which would include offset between TAI and UTC. By eliminating leap seconds we effectively re-invented TAI with a weird offset. While I am in favor of eliminating leap seconds as a hacky way to fix the current mess, it's sad to see that we added yet another quirk to the already complicated system of datetime keeping.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Atomic_Time

>Contrast that with China and Russia

The linked map is outdated regarding Russia. Here is an up to date map: https://64.media.tumblr.com/4a9a4613f057d3b5f17ec548e6ac06d1...

>The article is adamant that "this is not printing money," and then gives very technical explanations that are honestly difficult to untangle.

Because it's BS. In the modern fiat system the most basic form of money printing is expansion of the central bank's balance sheet. It creates the "base money". Sure, technically the government issues debt to "borrow" the new money, but everyone familiar with the system understands the the debt will never be paid out in the classical sense and it will be just re-financed by future expansion of the central bank's balance sheet. So the end effect is the same: new units of the base money enter circulation contributing to inflation.

But there are other forms of "money printing" as well. Every time a bank issues a credit, in a certain sense, it also "prints money". As long as the bank system functions as usual, it's indistinguishable from the printing done by the government+central bank. This is why bank de-regulation can have the same effects as the classical money printing, but with additional risks of potential credit contraction caused by bad loans (though they are minimized by central banks more often than not...).