>the fact that it has a time zone, but actually doesn't have a time zone is absolutely crazytown.
It's always seemed reasonable to me. Sure, "TIMESTAMP WITH UTC OFFSET" would be even clearer -- but, as has been pointed out already, there are 2 valid ways you might want to handle time addition/subtraction, and only one of those ways enables addition to be done without pure speculation on what decisions will be made by political entities in the future, and PostgreSQL does it that way.
But I'm not critizing the behavior. I'm critizing the name.
And it's not even a timestamp with a UTC offset! It's just a Unix timestamp.
If you think the current naming is "reasonable," then we are likely living in two different planes of existence. And no amount of back-and-forth over the Internet is going to help. This is a level of dissonance that requires an in-person discussion in the pub to resolve.
It's always seemed reasonable to me. Sure, "TIMESTAMP WITH UTC OFFSET" would be even clearer -- but, as has been pointed out already, there are 2 valid ways you might want to handle time addition/subtraction, and only one of those ways enables addition to be done without pure speculation on what decisions will be made by political entities in the future, and PostgreSQL does it that way.