[inopinatus]

Alas, no. It's because ActiveSupport's duration arithmetic is not distributive under conversion.

The expression on the left hand side advances time (as a domain object) by exactly a month, then converts the result to integer unix time. The expression on the right adds 2629746¹ to the current unix time.

The conversion becomes dangerously magical in the presence of shared code that accepts both object and integer representations of time & duration. A consumer from one part of a system can inadvertently obtain different results to another unless they use identical calling conventions.

[1] this is 1/12 of the mean length of a gregorian year²

[2] 365.2425 days i.e. 31,556,952 seconds

[neurostimulant]

Oh wow. This is totally make sense when you think about it, but something that'll never cross my mind when casually checking the code. I guess this is why python's timedelta doesn't have month unit as the length of a month is highly context dependent.