I think you are misinterpreting what you are seeing. time.mktime returns
seconds since the Epoch, in UTC, when passed broken-down local time. So
that the result is the same as time.time() doesn't mean that time.time()
returns "local unix seconds" (there is no such thing), but it means that
both time.time() and time.mktime() return seconds since the Epoch, in UTC.

Closing as invalid.