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Comment by tbarbugli | Hacker News Reader

What if Arizona decides to adopt DST?

You could simply set the TZ variable to a fixed offset:

    $ TZ='<UTC-7>+7' date -R
    Sat, 16 Jul 2016 11:04:52 -0700

Or use Sonora in Mexico:

    $ TZ=:America/Hermosillo date -R
    Sat, 16 Jul 2016 11:05:39 -0700

Another option is Pitcairn Island, which is -0800 all year.

    $ TZ=:Pacific/Pitcairn date -R
    Sat, 16 Jul 2016 10:06:23 -0800

though the standard abbreviation, PST, is probably confusing.

It's unlikely to. Residents of a state where summer temperatures get well over 100° regularly don't want summer days to be even longer. The few attempts to do so (for no good reason) have always failed spectacularly, and most Arizona residents are very pleased with it the way it is.

DST had no effect on day length. It has an effect on which actual hours of the day are outside of conventional working hours.

Exactly, and my point still stands. Arizonans want the sun to set sooner after work so they can enjoy a cooler evening and have the hot hours over earlier relative to getting out of work.

What if UTC adopts DST? What if the sun explodes?

UTC won't adopt daylight savings, but Arizona might. This is a foreseeable event which you can mitigate against, unlike the sun exploding.

In the extraordinarily unlikely event that both Arizona and Sonora adopt DST, you can just put an entry in your /usr/share/zoneinfo for Fakeville, US, an imaginary town that honors the time that Arizona and Sonora used to.

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