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Comment by danielweber | Hacker News Reader

People think they are being more precise by saying "EST," but, quick, are we in daylight savings time now, or out of it?

It turns out we are, and I don't meant to suggest that GP didn't know this. But what if we weren't in daylight savings time, and GP said "EST"? Would we have to change an hour?

I highly recommend just saying "Eastern Time."

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Or better yet, UTC or GMT since probably more people in the world know their offset relative to that, than EST.

True. We know our current offset from UTC (or legacy 'GMT'). I always use the real offset at that time. Thus, I just inform my clock saying UTC-3 (or UTC-2 when we are in daylight savings time).

I agree, wrong timezone (DST or not?) is as bad as no timezone. I have gotten in the habit of using Olson timezone names, US/Eastern for example, because I have seen CT used to refer to both US and European Central time.

Crap, I was wrong. "S" doesn't stand for "Savings," it stands for "Standard." We really are in EDT.

All the more reason to never specify it! :)

Welcome the world of pain that is timezones and DST... As someone who has had to write an extensive amount of deal with these two concepts they are the worst things ever. We should just abolish timezones, DST, and move to the International Fixed Calendar. Time sucks. I'm even in favor of moving to a seconds-based time unit like kiloseconds, miliseconds, etc instead of minutes/hours/days/weeks/months/years/etc. "Metric Time" if you will...

>We should just abolish timezones, DST, and move to the International Fixed Calendar.

You may find these links interesting:

- "So you want to abolish time zones" (http://qntm.org/abolish)

- "You advocate a ________ approach to calendar reform" (http://qntm.org/calendar)

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