Re: [exim] European Time Zones

Always Learning wrote:
> CEDT (Central European Daytime Time) is a American invention which
> includes night time in Europe unless the Americans also want to give us
> Europeans CENT (Central European Night Time), CENTIS (Central European
> Night Time in Summer) and CENTOS (Central European Night Time over
> Summer). CENT, CEDT, GMT+2 are known to others as CEST.
>
> I prefer MESZ – Mitteleuroäische Sommerzeit (German) - or even MEST
> (Dutch) which also sounds in Dutch like compost or farm 'muck' and think
> now is an ideal opportunity for the 27 member state EU to give the
> entire 47 states of Europe a universally recognised series of time
> zones.
>
> Its wrong to leave these things to the Americans all the time :-)
>
> After all, we Europeans never ever interfere in the American's Pacific
> time, Mountain time, Eastern Standard Time etc.
>
> To everyone outside Europe, Europeans synchronise our switch to and from
> summer time (+1:00). The Americans change to their summer time at a date
> different to Europe.
>
> I think GMT +02:00 is more simple to understand. It also avoids
> confusion.
>

LOL!

It is a tad more complex than that - but I'd not want to see it taken too
seriously - we don't.

Y'see - while the US Federal Government is empowered to establish time standards
(along with other weights and measures), for use in 'interstate commerce'
neither Federal nor State government have the authority to compel *use* of any
specific time zone for anyone but their own staff and office hours [1]. They can
only mandate that those who DO use them may not be discriminated against - and
again, only in interstate commerce.

I'm not sure the EU/EC are all that different in that regard. The French Franc
is after all still in daily use.

So some US counties or cities go on or off 'Daylight Savings' at schedules of
their own choosing. Or not at all.

Standardizing servers on UTC - as has been a Unix tradition of long standing -
then leaving the offsets to user's MUA has merit.

Bill Hacker

[1] JFWIW as an example - The US Federal Gummint mandated the Metric system as a
standard in 1866. But not the sole standard. That's beyond their remit. Even in
the US.

Even so - items using 'Arshin' measurement are still traded interstate.

WTH - as at the end of the 1960's each branch of the US Military still had a
different way of writing the date and time as well as a mix of US and metric
measure. All of them different from the Month-Day-year US 'civilian' dating that
irritates the rest of the world.

Pragmatic Anarchy. y'gotta love it!

Keeps the government staff too busy to go out and screw up the important stuff.

;-)