Unix Time and a Modest Proposal

This is an excellent idea! It would probably make the most sense to perform these adjustments on April 1.

Wish I'd known about Swift's 'A Modest Proposal' first - I came expecting practical Unix time insights, but found an attempt at satire in need of both editing and purpose.

The title refers to a 1729 Jonathan Swift essay, "A Modest Proposal for Preventing the Children of Poor People from Being a Burthen to Their Parents or Country, and for Making Them Beneficial to the Publick"[1].

As with the subject article, Swift's work begins reasonably enough, and contains much great discussion before veering off wildly at the end.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Modest_Proposal

we could fix timezones too, by rearranging the continents (and the civilizations within them) into a narrow longitudinal strip

The simplest solution is to uplift a polite portion of the Earth's mass into an orbital habitation ring, and use a feedback controller to regulate the amounts being launched, to keep the rotational period stabilized (in accordance with conservation of angular momentum) at an integer ratio to the sidereal year.

And for the other challenge, to stabilize the variation of the the sidereal year (i.e. the gravities of Jupiter &c. pulling the orbit slightly faster or slower), we simply schedule the launches at either the fore- (morning) or aft- (evening) ends.

To anyone sympathetic to my ideology, please consider using "fore", "aft", "port", and "starboard" to refer to the morning, evening, day, and night quadrants of the clock.