Unqualified absolute statements (like this one!) are always wrong. It's not possible to make a generalized assertion about the correct way to deal with time. I

Unqualified absolute statements (like this one!) are always wrong. It's not possible to make a generalized assertion about the correct way to deal with time. If you're building a global distributed database, you probably want all your timestamps in UTC. If you're building a calendar application, not so much. Some systems also need to record the time the observation was made, introducing a 2nd dimension of time. This becomes important very quickly when trying to design a system with an immutable (append-only) data store.