No, dates are harder than that. Humans use time to coordinate; the representation of time is fundamentally about communication. Only timestamps of events in the physical world are easy (ish). But that's not always, or perhaps mostly, what people are interested in.
When people receive a time, they may (usually) want it in their own time zone, but they might instead want it in the time zone of the entity they're getting the time from, if they're subsequently going to talk to that entity about the time. When they talk about meeting someone else, when they convey the time of the meeting, they usually mean whatever that time means in the place where they meet, which might be different from the current location of either. It might even be different due to political changes around time zones and daylight saving if the meeting is far enough in the future.
Re:0.999...= 1
by throwaway894345 on Tuesday April 28, 2020 @01:21PM
(#23009323)
You say "no, dates are harder than that", but it sounds like you agree with me exactly based on the rest of your post. Time is hard because human representations of it are varied, complicated, and often arbitrary--not because there's anything fundamentally hard about the math of time (again, relativity notwithstanding). Contrast that with numbers which are inherently difficult to intuit about apart from issues of representation.
Yet the way we represent numbers is also a human construct. 1 = .999... is hard for people to understand because we think and write in base 10 rather than base 3. There's nothing that is fundamentally hard to reason about here.
Re:0.999...= 1
by throwaway894345 on Tuesday April 28, 2020 @03:48PM
(#23011030)
Oof, I meant to write "numbers are fundamentally hard to reason about", not "numerals". Missed the edit window. The point I was trying to make is that numbers are very often fundamentally counterintuitive irrespective of notation. E.g., is the set of natural numbers larger than the set of decimal numbers? Or the other way around? Or equal? The complexities of time are almost exclusively inferring and converting between (often ambiguous) representations.
I think the numerals and numbers issue is more complex because numerals are fundamentally hard to reason about. Even the question "what is a number?" is deceivingly deep.