this post was submitted on 27 Oct 2026
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Showerthoughts

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A "Showerthought" is a simple term used to describe the thoughts that pop into your head while you're doing everyday things like taking a shower, driving, or just daydreaming. The most popular seem to be lighthearted clever little truths, hidden in daily life.

Here are some examples to inspire your own showerthoughts:

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Time Zones are unnecessary (lemmy.world)
submitted 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) by MrOtingocni@lemmy.world to c/showerthoughts@lemmy.world
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Edit: Today I learned that UTC is an actual real thing and not just a setting I scroll past on my computer 😅.

They also complicate things.

It made more sense back before we had electric lighting and when everyone lived by the rising and setting of the sun. Now it doesn't seem to really matter.

Obviously, the whole world deciding where to start the time would be nigh impossible but it could be like: starting at this date, on the first day of the year, what ever point is farthest away from the sun is 00:00 from henceforth.

And then people just adapted to what that meant for their particular area. Somebody's morning might be 13:00!

Imagine if the whole world was on some global time schedule.

Edit: From my comment below

Look at the earth from a top down perspective. It's a pie. With 12 or 24 slices depending on the granularity. A clock, basically. It would take the same amount of energy to learn which slice of earth is lined up towards the sun for each hour as would be to learn anything else in elementary school.

After which, for the rest of your life you'd have an intuitive grasp of where earth is in its rotation and what "time" it would be for any place in the world.

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[–] FriendOfDeSoto@startrek.website 2 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Imagine if the whole world was on some global time schedule.

UTC.

What's the fascination with this topic? Time zones are a major accomplishment because they allow us to schedule things further than our city limits. A train schedule leaving London and going to Paris, Cologne, Berlin, Warsaw, Kiev, Moscow, Yekaterinburg, Novosibirsk, etc. would be difficult to plan without them. Even this new time, let's call it BST, still needs time zones. Adjacent places need to agree on a common time. So we have accomplished nothing other than people having to learn their new 7am is 16:00. Which is counterintuitive.

The only country that clearly doesn't give a shit about time zones is PR China. And the only reason why you haven't heard many people thousands of miles west of Beijing having to live on Beijing time complain is the fact that it's the more sparsely populated areas, the more troubled, and the fact that criticising a decision by the communist party carries the danger of being sent to a reeducation camp even if you're neither a Uyghur nor a Tibetan.

Abolish DST and the few half hour zones and UTC will be just fine.

[–] buried_treasure@feddit.uk 3 points 1 week ago (1 children)

A train schedule leaving London and going to Paris, Cologne, Berlin, Warsaw, Kiev, Moscow, Yekaterinburg, Novosibirsk, etc. would be difficult to plan without [time zones]

I don't see that. If you know it takes the train 90 minutes to go between London and Paris, another 2 hours to Berlin, and a further 3 hours to Moscow, what difference does the presence or absence of time zones make in terms of scheduling that service?

[–] FriendOfDeSoto@startrek.website 0 points 1 week ago (1 children)

So if all these cities are their unique time zones different from each other, all you need to know is the travelling time between each city and the departure time from St Pancras. So that was maybe 12:05 London time. Arriving 2 hours later in Paris at 13:41 Paris time, another 191 minutes to Cologne where the train arrives at 14:47 local time, etc. You need to write a book with all these time conversions. Not just to book a trip on this imaginary train but also for the people operating the points along the way, many in different time zones than the stations it stops at. That train travels through Germany so it's bound to be delayed. Was the delay caused in a time zone in between Cologne and Berlin? It's a delay of 47 minutes but where exactly was the train when it happened? Because if I don't know that I don't know how to convert that local time to local Warsaw time. It's a heck of a lot easier if, say, Paris to Warsaw are in the same time zone. As a society, we arrived at time zones for a reason.

[–] Rhynoplaz@lemmy.world 3 points 1 week ago

Yeah. This is MUCH more complicated than Get on a train at noon. Ride West for 4 hours. Get off the train at 4pm.