Exactly, but that is my point: usually my data is not intended to reflect the time it is in New York. Being tied to a (semi-)arbitrary city changes the actual meaning of the zone slightly. If every city was represented and I could choose "Boston" then that would make sense (for data is intended to reflect the time it is in Boston) but of course that's not entirely practical.

(I'll note that I agree with the general wisdom to store data in UTC; here when I talk about zones I'm either talking about user local machine time or display)