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A point on the globe has a timezone. "Distance from London in feet" does not.



That is true, but a timestamp is intended to specify a particular time, and a simple temporal interval fails to do that just as a simple spatial interval fails to specify a location; both are incomplete (the former on account of a missing starting point, and your counter-example on account of a missing azimuth.)

On the other hand Unix (POSIX) time does not have leap-seconds, while UTC does not, so it is no longer "in" UTC.


POSIX time isn’t “in UTC” regardless of that. UTC is just one of many timezones you can use when specifying which point in time timestamp 0 refers to. You could just as well use EST or anything else.


You are right - through this discussion, I have come to see that unless a value expresses a specific time (as opposed to interval) in a form that includes hours and minutes, then timezone is not an applicable concept. POSIX time does not do this.


So the analogy is "Distance from London in feet" to "Time since epoch in seconds"? Ok, but "epoch" has a timezone, which is UTC, so measurements relative to that have the same timezone.


This should be files under "falsehoods programmers believe about timezones".




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