[anileated]

> My point is either way you need to memorize some info in the first couple of interactions and it really doesn't make sense to go through all of this change to just memorize a different thing.

It's at least to make time management in systems much less error-prone and complex, among other things.

> if my flight to China lands at 9p local time, I immediately know that it's going to be night

What does that imply? If you mean "it's going to be dark", not really (you need to have more context to assume it's going to be dark at 9pm, there are places where in summer it's still very much light at 10pm). If you mean something like "buses are going to be running and McDonalds will be open", not really (you'll need to check the schedules anyway).

[nickorlow]

> It's at least to make time management in systems much less error-prone and complex, among other things.

I'm sure people deal w/ more complex issues, but 90% of it is covered by storing everything as UTC and doing the conversion on the frontend.

> What does that imply? If you mean "it's going to be dark", not really (you need to have more context to assume it's going to be dark at 9pm, there are places where in summer it's still very much light at 10pm). If you mean "buses are going to be running and McDonalds will be open", not really (you'll need to check the schedules anyway).

It implies a lot, including that less things are likely to be open, it's likely to be dark, and that I'll probably want to get to bed within a couple of hours to wake up for whatever I'm doing the next day at a reasonable time in the morning (i.e. how to adjust to the daylight cycle there).

[anileated]

Things you will have in context when traveling: "it's going to be cold", "it's likely to rain", "it's going to be government conference so there will be extra delays with transport", "it's going to be %holiday% so everything's going to be closed all week", etc.

You're so used to it you don't even question that, and if you add to that "@x is when sunset usually happens"... somehow I think the world will not come crashing down.