Date: Fri, 21 Apr 2023 15:47:29 -0400 From: Dave Cantor via tz <tz@iana.org> Message-ID: <6442E851.5805.24513469@Dave.DaveCantor.us> | When the internet was young and I first saw the use of negative | numbers for western offsets, I was sure it was a mistake. I | still think so. Neither is right or wrong, you can consider the offset to be the number you add to UTC times to get the local time, or the number you add to local time to get a UTC time. One of those is obviously going to be positive, and the other negative. Which is used in the notation which describes a zone is (or was, it is settled now) arbitrary (and was most likely done differently by different people). Then consider the number of countries who send representatives to ISO which are located west of Greenwich, compared to the number which are located east of Greenwich, and guess which group has the voting power to have their offsets (as written in the notation) the positive ones? kre