TAG :分享

I was at the supermarket recently when I took note of something my eyes had passed thousands of times before. The cans of my favorite sodas were 12 ounces, while the bottles were 2 liters.

It caught my eye because the units of measurement for the same product weren't the same. The can was in US customary units, while the bottle was in metric units.
Today, the American public remains mostly on the side of US customary units. Polling from 2016 found that only 32% of Americans wanted to go metric.
This may seem like a small thing, but, as I learned in this week's episode of my podcast Margins of Error, the unwillingness of America to take up the metric system speaks to a far larger issue: American exceptionalism.

The fact that the mega rich go to great lengths to customize their private planes to fit their lifestyles is not new.
And we're not just talking about your average business jet. For decades, world leaders, royalty and billionaires have been fitting out the types of planes most of us fly in commercially, made by the likes of Airbus and Boeing.
But the options on the table are getting increasingly wild.
Among the leaders in the customization game is Germany's Lufthansa Technik, which recently developed a cabin concept that takes inspiration from another must-have item for the wealthy -- the superyacht.
According to the company, the EXPLORER wide-body VIP cabin concept fulfills two wishes for plane owners: to take their planes almost anywhere at any time, while also serving as a base camp when they travel -- a place to sleep and also enjoy leisure activities and excursions.
Just like a superyacht.

While the seductive approach is a fresh tactic, trash cans with voices are not a new addition to Sweden's third-largest city. In 2017, the city council bought 18 talking cans, though today only two still speak, according to CNN affiliate Expressen.
During the pandemic, they thanked depositors for adhering to social distancing regulations, but a new era calls for a new method, the city road department's section chief believes.
"The sentences are part of the campaign's intention to get more people to talk about the dirtiest thing there is: littering," said Marie Persson, according to The Local, quoting Swedish newspaper Sydsvenskan.
"So please go ahead and feed the bins with more rubbish...yes, just like that."