[shadowgovt]

Offsets can very easily be the wrong answer (though the author is quite correct that it depends on what you're trying to do). If your user intends to use one of the timezones that has a daylight savings calculation, the offset changes as the year goes on. Offsets can also change if the definition of the timezone itself changes (Russia ceased to use daylight savings in 2014).

Offsets can be useful if one is attempting to record a historical incident, where the timezone had a particular-defined offset at the point in time the incident occurred (though for my money, I'd just convert that time to UTC on storage).