You can argue that attaching a time zone to a `%s` doesn't make sense, but a lot of people do it, and more importantly: it doesn't hurt. If you do `Time.strpti

You can argue that attaching a time zone to a `%s` doesn't make sense, but a lot of people do it, and more importantly: it doesn't hurt. If you do `Time.strptime('0 +0100', '%s %z').to_i` you get the correct result: "0". That is: the number of seconds since the epoch is correctly parsed. The time zone is extra information that doesn't affect `%s` in any way. In other words: it's orthogonal.