That's not the issue, the issue is putting the complexity in the right place. There is immense value in having a simple, unambiguous measure of absolute time an

That's not the issue, the issue is putting the complexity in the right place. There is immense value in having a simple, unambiguous measure of absolute time and date but because a few powerful scientists and engineers decided that very silly anal retentive issues were more important than fundamental ones we can't have that. Creating a map between absolute time and local dates and relative times is much easier than scattering the diffs relative to local time through every part of the system.