"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."
No, the 10-15 seconds I mentioned is the daily variation in solar noon.
From the link I posted, in NYC, solar noon on 2026-01-01 is at 11:59am. On 2026-01-31, solar noon is at 12:09pm. In one month, it has drifted 10 minutes. That's much greater than the 37 leap seconds we have added in 60 years.
"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."
Yet we just reversed that decision. No more leap seconds after 2035. After trying it, we decided it was terrible.
"In other words, we want UTC noon to be within a second of mean solar noon on the prime meridian."
Why?
If I travel 1 mile east or west of the prime meridian, my solar noon now comes 2-3 seconds earlier/later. It's nearly impossible to have your local time match your local solar noon. For most of the population, solar noon is, on average, 30 minutes off of 12:00 noon.
"Commercial Use" is only one part of the four prongs of the fair use test. For example, commercial Parody is generally considered Fair Use. Look at Space Balls, which is a direct transformation from Star Wars.
This is all new territory. We don't have court-settled law yet.
Paper ballots are a must. Vote on a touchscreen, then have the terminal print out a voter-verifiable paper ballot that can also be machine counted.
Make the ballot printout layout a standard format. Then machines from multiple vendors can verify the counts on a subset of the ballots. And as a last resort, the ballots can be hand counted as well.
Yet high noon at my current location comes at 12:03 (1:03 with DST). It's three minutes off. If I lived further west in my timezone, noon would come much
later.
How can people manage with noon off by minutes, yet want leap-second accuracy every 6 months?
Leap Seconds need to be abolished. The only people who need it are Astronomers. They could just use an offset. Implementing leap seconds correctly is a huge burden, for no gain.
Where I live, high noon today occurs at 1:03 PM. No one is complaining that it is 3 minutes (or 63 minutes) off. It's a non-issue for 99.9% of the population.
If it is a "free tier", Amazon should halt the application when it exceeds quota. Moving the account to a paid tier and charging $100k is not the right thing to do.