On Wed, 23 Sept 2026 at 19:41, Guy Harris via tz <[email protected]> wrote:
> But not *shortest* for Pacific Time, which would be just PT, but I guess > that could be interpreted as "Pacific Time as adjusted for daylight saving > time" (I think two-letter abbreviations have been used in in print in the > US, for example a TV show starting at "9 ET, 8 CT"). Very common in Canada, too, for much the same reason. I am just as interested in how that usage may evolve in the coming weeks as almost anything else. But yes, "PT" always would have been ambiguous even in the best case, and of course for our purposes POSIX requires a minimum of 3 characters. Anecdotally, I loosely follow a couple Vancouver-based content creators who offer various synchronous events. When announcing times, one usually just writes "Pacific" in emails, while another routinely says the letters "P.S.T." on a podcast (even at times of year when they've clearly meant PDT). I will be interested to see whether they or other creators become aware enough to consciously adapt their language ahead of the change, or whether a number of Vancouverites might be frustrated by folks from eastern Canada and the US showing up an hour late to their events for a while. It does bring up an interesting psychological quirk — the thing that is changing is that BC (and others) *are no longer changing* — so why would the average person in those areas perceive that *they* need to adjust their nomenclature in November? This certainly is at least contributing to a decent amount of confusion on social media as far as I've seen, particularly in response to some (largely) correct maps of the mess of expected North American offsets come November, like the one attached (though it elides some border regions and some earlier versions I saw lacked the NWT change). Nestled among the various comments have been plenty of replies incorrectly asserting that the map must be wrong because they think BC will be on the same time as the western States in November. In some cases, this appears to be a misunderstanding or miscalculation; in others, it seems to be based on a mistaken assumption that the US has similarly abolished seasonal changes when, so far, it has not. I *like* PCT, although, to be fair, not everybody's close to the coast. It looks like I'd had the same idea back in June 2019 when a lot of this was first being proposed, and it was expected to include the coastal US states as well… https://lists.iana.org/hyperkitty/list/[email protected]/message/S5MT7GXVQMYXJUMSJXNMYE54442J7KDB/ I sincerely doubt, though, that anyone in the BC Government was referring to that email when coming up with their preferred nomenclature. On Wed, 23 Sept 2026 at 20:32, James Bellaire via tz <[email protected]> wrote: > The US law is very clear. For the sake of clarity, HR 139 is still a bill, not a law. ;) And at this point it seems fairly likely to stay that way — at least as likely as anything can be — since the Senate Commerce Committee did not take up the bill in it's 16 September meeting, and no further meetings are presently scheduled before the Senate rises for its Election recess on 2 October. But it's worth remembering that different bills have also been proposed in the US over the years that would handle the attendant redefinitions differently. -- Tim Parenti
