【推荐1】What Really Drives You Crazy About Waiting in Line

Have you ever noticed the two main lines you encounter in daily life? Some businesses have many parallel lines that consumers have to choose from. Others have one long, serpentine line that everyone waits in, and when you reach the front of the line you are served by the next available register.

The systems each have advantages and disadvantages. The biggest obstacle to adopting the serpentine line is that you need floor space where the line can form, meaning it doesn’t work in all store designs. Often, the lines will snake around the entire store, blocking customers’ access to the shelves. Special line manager or automatic system is required for organization.

What about the time each line takes? According to Larson, the wait time is about the same. However, the variance is larger for the parallel line system than for the single serpentine line.

In practice, the system of many parallel lines also gives rise to inefficiencies — like when customers don’t notice that one checkout counter is open — which slows down service. “So, the many-line system can never have a mean queue time less than that of a single-line system,” Larson says.

Researchers argue that the serpentine line has more advantages. Namely, it seems socially fairer, because customers who arrive first are always served first. Because people waiting in line often value fairness more than efficiency, studies have shown that serpentine lines make customers happier than parallel lines, regardless of the wait time.

That guarantee of fairness eliminates a lot of stress and anxiety. You might not think about it much, but a system of many parallel lines, like at a grocery store checkout or toll booths, can be very anxiety provoking. There’s the stress of choosing the shortest line, and then there’s the possibility that, for unforeseen reasons, your line will grind to a halt. You can analyze the contents of people’s carts all you want, but the person in front of you may still pull out an envelope stuffed with coupons or a giant bag of pennies.

These lines are what Larson calls “slips and skips”, where people who enter the line first watch those who arrived later overtake them. He says these generate anxiety and uncertainty, and “the victim experiences more psychological loss than the perpetrator (犯罪者) enjoys benefit.”

When people later were given a choice of which line to repeat, a significant majority chose the latter one. Even though it lasted for a longer duration and clearly included more pain overall than the first one, people preferred it because it had a relatively better ending. So we can conclude that the duration of the experience doesn’t matter that much to people — what matters is the discomfort at the worst and final moments.

【推荐1】On October 24, 1929 — “Black Thursday” — a wave of panic selling of stocks (股票) swept the New York Stock Exchange. The Great Depression began. By 1932, thousands of banks and businesses had failed. Industrial production was cut in half, farm income had fallen by more than half, wages had decreased 60 percent, new investment was down 90 percent and one out of every four workers was unemployed.

The Republican president, Herbert Hoover was unable to take measures to deal with the economic collapse. So in the 1932 election, he was defeated by Democrat Franklin D. Roosevelt, who promised “a New Deal for the American people”.

Within the “Hundred Days”, Roosevelt rushed through Congress a number of laws to aid the recovery of the economy. The Civilian Conservation Corps put young men to work in reforestation (重新造林) and flood.

The Federal Emergency Relief Administration aided state and local relief funds. The Agricultural Adjustment Administration paid farmers to reduce production, thus raising crop prices. The Tennessee Valley Authority built a network of dams in the Tennessee River area to generate electricity and control floods. The National Recovery Administration regulated fair competition among businesses and minimum wages for workers.

The Work Progress Administration (WPA) was one of the most effective of the New Deal measures. Financed by taxes collected by the federal government, the WPA created millions of jobs by undertaking the construction of roads, bridges, airports and other public buildings. It kept workers in the job, thus preserving their skills and their self-respect. The New Deal programs did not end the Depression. But the economy improved as a result of this program of government intervention (介入).

【推荐3】BEIJING Oct.16 (Friday) (Xinhua)—The Chinese government will enact (将……制成法律) more support policies to lift the country’s 70 million poor people above the poverty line by 2020, President Xi Jinping pledged (保证) on Friday ahead of the 23rd International Day for the Eradication (根除) of Poverty.

Addressing the Global Poverty Reduction and Development Forum (论坛) in Beijing, Xi said China will work to fight the hard battle against poverty. In his speech, Xi drew on his personal experience in the 1960s working as a farmer in a small village in northwestern Shaanxi Province, where he was struck by the poor living conditions in rural China. But over the past several decades, China has made remarkable progress in poverty relief.

China has lifted more than 600 million people out of poverty in the past 30 years, accounting for about 70 percent of those brought out of poverty worldwide. It was the first developing country to meet the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) target of reducing the population living in poverty by half ahead of the 2015 deadline. “Despite the achievements, China remains the world’s biggest developing country, and narrowing the urban-rural gap remains a big challenge for us,” Xi said.

As of the end of 2014, China still had 70.17 million people in the countryside living below the country’s poverty line of 2,300 yuan (376 U. S. dollars) in annual income by 2010 price standards. The president said poverty alleviation will be a major part of China’s post-2015 agenda. While striving to reduce poverty at home, China has also actively supported the cause in other developing countries. Over the past 60 years, China has provided 166 countries and international organizations with nearly 400 billion yuan in assistance.

China has also announced seven times it would exempt (免除), without any conditions, the matured inter-governmental interest free loans owned by heavily-indebted poor countries and least developed countries. At a United Nations summit last month the goal of eliminating poverty in 15 years was laid out and China pledged an initial 2 billion U.S. dollars to establish an assistance fund to help developing nations fight poverty.

In a video message for Friday’s Forum, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon (潘基文) praised China’s remarkable achievements in poverty alleviation, saying the UN welcomes those significant and generous proposals from President Xi and looks forward to further progress with an indispensable partnership with China.

Saturday also marks China’s second National Poverty Relief Day.

【推荐1】A couple, Jake Williams and Charlotte Sinclair, were absolutely done with the long isolation (隔离), following a few years of COVID-19, and then they decided to launch (发起) a community plan. They started Talk the Walk and managed to make people get together, explore London on foot, and get to know each other.

The number one mission was to have fun — even if only a few people showed up for the free events. That’s what they expected when they started on Meetup.com. Suddenly they were getting hundreds of people responding with excitement.

200-300 people of various ages now regularly attend each event, which opens with the playing of icebreaker games. The couple designed the games to be easy for shy people, too, with “fun questions” breaking the nervousness. They picked interesting places to visit. Attendees were even surprised with an offer of chocolate.

“I’ve done some crazy things in my time working from home to stop loneliness, like dog sitting for people and joining gyms just so I can have more conversations with people,” Jake said.

“I think that it’s hugely impactful for people who have been affected by COVID-19, by being forced to work from home and having that isolation,” he continued.

They’ve seen older people talking with younger people, and people becoming friends — so much so that the strangers are now meeting on their own after becoming familiar.

Talk the Walk organised their last event last year, but said they’ll be back once it starts to warm up again.

Nearly 2,000 members in their Meetup community and followers on their Facebook Page are waiting for that day, but at the same time, this young couple might serve as your very own inspiration to connect people in your own communities.

【推荐2】Russia's first and only police corgi(柯基犬) has announced his retirement from the force, ending his career of one of Russia's smallest officers. Officer Ryzhiy ("Ginger" in English), 9, worked with the Nizhny Novgorod transport police for seven and a half years, sniffing out illegal drugs, weapons and substances that are able or likely to cause an explosion.

Recently, the short-legged corgi made its name and became a local star after his trainers created a social media account for him last summer. He now has more than 15,000 followers. His resignation was submitted to the local Interior Ministry over the last weekend. "Now, my friends, I am a real pensioner!" reads a post announcing his retirement. The account will now update Ryzhiy's followers on "the everyday life of a retired police dog" as well as the work of his former dog colleagues. "I plan to play sports as often as I did before. And maybe I will even try to learn new things, for example, dancing," the dog's account wrote. Ryzhiy's partner, a Belgian Sheepdog named Ziger, will soon be joined by a new four-legged companion.

Ryzhiy initially joined the police force by accident. His owner, also a police officer, brought him to work one day when the traffic police didn't have enough dogs on hand. He quickly adapted to the task and earned a full-time job as a result.

Corgis are well suited to working as police sniffing dogs but are too expensive for most police budgets, said a Russian corgi trainer. As a result, it remains unlikely that Russia will see any other corgi officers joining the ranks of its police.

【推荐3】Want to help fight global warming? Take off your tie, says the Italian health ministry. It has urged employers to let their staff dress casually at work in the summer so that the air conditioning can be turned down.

“Taking your tie off immediately lowers the body temperature by 2 or 3 degrees centigrade,” the ministry said in a statement. “Allowing a more sensible use of air conditioning brings about electricity savings and protects the environment.”

It called on all public and private offices to let employees wear no tie during heatwaves like the one that has brought Africa-like temperatures to many parts of Italy this week.

The move reacts to a similar action from Italy’s biggest oil group, ENI, which told its staff earlier this month they need not wear a tie at work. The tie makers, however, were left hot under the collar.

“Italy confirms (证实) that it is a strange country,” Flavio Cima said angrily in a letter to financial daily IL Sole~24ORE under the headline: “I, tie maker, am responsible for global warming.”

“We can now happily continue with our lifestyle, using cars, consuming fuel, heating and cooling our homes at leisure. On one condition: we should not wear a tie while we do so,” he wrote.

“I should have listened to my friends and become an oil producer instead.”

Italy is one of the European Union’s worst performers on the pollution front and is among the EU countries expected to exceed (超出) their greenhouse gas emission (排放) targets.