[tz] Unfortunate time zone names in the United States

Fred Gleason fredg at paravelsystems.com
Thu Mar 17 20:07:58 UTC 2022


On Mar 17, 2022, at 15:13, John Levine via tz <tz at iana.org> wrote:

> The bill passed by the Senate deletes 260a, and updates 261 to change
> each of the numbers by an hour, 4 changes to 3, 5 to 4, and so forth
> 11 changes to 10 and the final 10 changes to 11.
> 
> But it does *not* change section 263.  This means that the official
> US names of the time zones change, which is really stupid.  Since
> Hawaii, Samoa, and Guam do not use daylight time, Hawaii will now be in
> Alaska standard time, Samoa in Hawaii-Aleutian standard time,
> and Guam in a time zone with no name.

Hmm. That’s not how I'm reading this. *If* I’m understanding it properly (heh, heh), the names themselves are not changing; rather, it’s the *meaning* of the names that are changing, viz-a-viz:

Atlantic standard time: 	UTC-4 => UTC-3
eastern standard time: 	UTC-5 => UTC-4
central standard time: 	UTC-6 => UTC-5
mountain standard time:	UTC-7 => UTC-6
Pacific standard time: 	UTC-8 => UTC-7
Alaska standard time:	UTC-9 => UTC-8
Hawaii-Aleutian standard time:	UTC-10 => UTC-9
Samoa standard time:	UTC-11 => UTC-10
Chamorro standard time:	UTC+10 => UTC+9

So, despite all of the talk in the mainstream press about “permanent Daylight Saving Time”, this is actually a redefinition of *standard* time to one hour earlier than before, along with the *abolishment* of Daylight Saving Time.

Cheers!


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| Frederick F. Gleason, Jr. |             Chief Developer             |
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