Well, I guess that is the point of contention among the worlds clock keepers. Essentially people live by the solar day. We (mostly) get up in the morning, work during the daylight, and go to bed at night. Some people want our clocks to match that cycle. Others aren't worried as much about that as they are about keeping systems all over the world very precisely synchronized. And having to go in and tell all those systems that it is time to change is problematic. If they don't all get the word simultaneously then there could be confusion and loss of data. So I guess it is just that some people want to keep the old way, make the clock match the Sun, and some want the new way. Let the Sun go hang.
Now there are some problems with this. I have been working on a calendar program for my computer for the past 6 months. Some calendars are very much based on solar and lunar events such as solstices, equinoxes and moon phases. If we start letting the time drift it might make some problems in calculating the times. Of course there are already problems with that. Calculating those events requires correction for the variability in the length of the day over time. And the drift isn't linear, it is mostly random. It does drift in one direction all the time, but there are random variations because of changes in, among many other things, the shape of the Earth due to tectonic events.
Bill Gill
