[tz] Hard copy of TZdata2023?

[Paul Eggert]

On 2023-10-22 03:35, Alexandre Petrescu via tz wrote:
> These timezone changes seem regular in recent years.  I think they are 
> even accelerating.

Yes and no. In some sense there were no "timezone changes" in the 18th 
century, since time zones did not exist yet. So, yes, things have 
accelerated since 1800.

However, the advent of computer-based timekeeping, starting roughly 
around 1970, has increased the priority of nailing all this stuff down. 
70 years ago it was routine for relatively small locations to have 
separate rules from their neighbors and to change their rules whenever 
they felt like it. Nowadays this is generally too much hassle since 
people's cell phones don't easily track less-formal rule changes like 
that, which means people have to manually set their cell phones, which 
is enough hassle that politicians are less likely to change the rules, 
and even when they try to change the rules they sometimes fail. Recent 
examples of such failures include Metlakatla in 2019 and Lebanon this 
year. Even successful changes sometimes require multiple attempts to get 
it right (such as Mexico last year).

Although there are still places and occasions where the hassle of 
changing the rules appears to be less than the hassle of dealing with 
clock times that you don't like, I think this is rarer now than it was 
in the 1960s and 1970s, and it's not clear to me that the tempo is 
accelerating even if we restrict our attention to the last decade.