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John D. Howard, you wrote:
"Did not the sovereign people of the world give the small number of burocrates the power volintary?"

All of them?!? Ha ha ha. :) Actually I was just kidding with Geoffrey. I thought that my "see what I did there" comment would be recognizable as a sign of an inside joke. My comment was actually an analogy with Brexit (down with euro-crats, power to the sovereign people!) since Geoffrey was expressing his concern for those folks 500 years from now, and since he had voiced his support for Brexit back in June. It was very much "tongue-in-cheek". Just for fun, in other words.

You added:
"I don't rember the Time Wars."

Aha! Of course, you don't... because that memory was erased from your mind by those of us who control time, myself and the other Time Lords. You see, I am actually one of those who control time and leap seconds! And if you visit my personal bio page here, you will see a photo of me with the very keepers of the leap second as well as the inventors of them. Seriously, those folks in the photo include the people who decide on leap second insertions as well as the people who created the system (plus me and also famous science popularizer, Neil deGrasse Tyson and a few other folks with less direct connections to the subject).

You also wrote:
"If you accept the need for a world-wide standard for measurmernts then make a treaty with the rest of the world then a small number of bureaucrats will have power."

The international SI second is, in fact, the standard that we should enforce rather than making the world safe for those few folks who supposedly have a need for "earth-orientation time". I'm all in favor of that hard-core, physics-based approach to time, just so long as it doesn't mess with any time-based concerns in the wider arena of human culture.

And you concluded:
"You may disagree with the way they carry out their job - like leap seconds - but WE gave them that power.  Do you think the USA should pull out of the treaty and keep time based on our own USNO?"

What we're talking about here is keeping the same time system that we have now, but simply dropping arbitrary leap seconds. And when that's done, the great shroud of time will roll on as it rolled five billion years ago. We're not talking about altering time or altering time-keeping. It's just the accounting. We don't need to label a second as number 61 in some weird minute every couple of years. The system is un-necessary, and it is a lingering source of errors and confusion. There are network breakdowns at each and every leap second insertion. By the way, I should add that this idea of dropping leap seconds is off the table for ten years or so, if I remember correctly, but we have to plant the seeds now if reason is to prevail in the long haul. Software and apps developed now should be written with leap seconds options incorporated, but we should retire the system that requires it so that this rarely used code does not have to pass or fail at a mission-critical moment.

To reiterate, my comments about bureaucracy and sovereign power were intentionally tongue-in-cheek. :)

Frank Reed
ReedNavigation.com
Conanicut Island USA