Especially because `Time.now - SOME_TIME` is actually a relatively expensive operation. IIRC, it is faster to have SOME_TIME converted to an int once and to do Time.now.to_i.. or if your timing needs are less precise (such as in this case) you can get an even bigger speedup using a tiny cext: https://github.com/aaronblohowiak/fasttime shameless plug)

However, I ultimately disagree that the filesystem is where you want to store the log level setting but I understand that this is just an example for the blog post :D