Unix time is bad and needs replacement, not UTC
This is a good article, it&#x27;s worth reading in full. It touches on the different use cases for different types of time&#x2F;date storage but doesn&#x27;t make it explicit enough that the is no &quot;one size fits all&quot; solution. It&#x27;s true that internally a TIA timestamp is cleaner for storing a moment in time, but that is only half the issue.<p>I like to think of it as a difference between physical time and human time.<p>For engineering, science, precise measurement, simulation and such using TAI is clearly the cleaner, most robust solution. But as soon as you have a humans <i>&quot;perception&quot;</i> of time as part of the system a timezone aware timestamp is required. But even then, the most common version of that ISO 8601 is flawed.<p>ISO 8601 only has a fixed offset, it has no concept of timezones or geolocation. Borders between timezones move, DST windows change or disappear, it has no way to account for that. What we need is an extended ISO 8601 that includes a location rather than offset. Human time is tied to a geographic location in time. I think we need something like this:<p><pre><code>  2022-11-23T08:52:02!Europe&#x2F;London
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using the names from the TZ database: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;List_of_tz_database_time_zones" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;List_of_tz_database_time_zones</a><p>or even coordinates:<p><pre><code>  2022-11-23T08:52:02!51.509865&#x2F;-0.118092
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we probably even want planetary body:<p><pre><code>  1969-07-20T20:17:00!Moon&#x2F;0.67416&#x2F;23.47314
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This is the only way to store &quot;human time&quot; in a future proof way.<p>Physical moment in time = TAI timestamp<p>Human perception of a moment in time = Geolocated timestamp