In a video from Visit Iceland, a crew is seen working on making a horse-sized keyboard out of massive blocks of wood. The keyboard is then put outside against the gorgeous scenery for the typing horses to reply to emails. Unsurprisingly, the replies are nonsense, with examples listed as “bpnisi. // hihaihf＝. sf”. “OutHorse Your Email” is Iceland’s latest stunt (噱头) to promote tourism. Visitors can choose a trained horse to type responses to their work emails when they are on holiday.

Due to the pandemic, many workers have transitioned to remote working, finding that the lines between their work and personal lives have become blurred. A survey conducted by Visit Iceland revealed that 59% of people globally now feel as if their boss, colleagues, and customers expect them to reply when on holiday and 41% of people check their work emails between one and four times a day when on holiday. That’s why Iceland is assigning emails to its horses, asking them to make replies.

“When visitors travel to Iceland, we want them to fully experience everything our nation has to offer, from breathtaking surroundings to endless landscapes," said the head of Visit Iceland. "Our OutHorse Your Email service lets them do just that. With our world-first service, we hope to appeal to people to disconnect and take a well-deserved, uninterrupted break.”

Since “OutHorse Your Email” service was launched, it has got a lot of attention from the Internet. “Is it a ridiculous tourism stunt? Sure. But it indeed encourages me to enjoy my trip wholeheartedly,” said Thom Dunn, an online user from Canada. Hunter Boyce from the USA also made a comment, “The service sounds interesting, but I don’t want to drive my boss mad or be fired.”

At 9 pm, Li Zhigang was sitting in front of his fruit shop on a busy street in central Shanghai’s Xujiahui area, removing the thin plastic film from rotten pears and oranges. “This is so much trouble!” he complained while throwing the plastic into one garbage can and the fruit into another. In the past, Li simply threw away what could not be sold with the packaging on, but from July 1, 2019, he could be fined up to 200 yuan for doing so.

Like Li, many of the tens of millions of residents in Shanghai have been complaining recently that the introduction of compulsory household garbage sorting is making life difficult, but at the same time have been having to learn to do it.

Calls for garbage sorting have brought little progress in China in the past decade, but Shanghai is leading a fresh start for the world’s second-largest waste producer. “If we say China is now classifying its waste, then it’s Shanghai that is really doing it,” said Chen Liwen, an environmentalist who has devoted herself to waste classification for the past decade. “It’s starting late, compared with the US or Japan, but if it’s successful in such a big city with such a huge population, it will mean a lot for the world,” she said. While the measures force a change of habits for most people, they bring opportunities for some. Du Huanzheng, director of the Recycling Economy Institute at Tongji University, said waste sorting was important for China’s recycling industry. “Without proper classification, a lot of garbage that can be recycled is burned, and that’s a pity,” he said. “After being classified, things suitable to be stored and transported can now be recycled.” Besides, prices of small sortable garbage cans for home use have increased on e-commerce (电子商务) platforms, while garbage can makers are also developing smart models in response to new needs. What’s more, garbage sorting is also an important part of a country’s soft power. “For China, it is an opportunity to improve its international reputation. However, it is a long process that requires effort from government, enterprises and individuals (个人),” Du said.

Technology is supposed to make our lives easier, allowing us to do things more quickly and efficiently. But too often it seems to make things harder. This increase in complexity, often called "feature creep," costs consumers time, but it also costs business money. Product returns in the U.S. cost a hundred billion dollars a year, and a recent study by Elke den Ouden, of Philips Electronics, found that at least half of returned products have nothing wrong with them. Consumers just couldn't figure out how to use them. Companies now know a great deal about problems of usability and consumer behavior, so why is it that feature creep proves unstoppable?

In part, fieature creep is the product of the so-called internal-audience problem: the people who design and sell product are not the ones who buy and use them, and what engineers and marketers think is important is not necessarily what's best for consumers. The engineers tend not to notice when more options make a product less usable. And marketing and sales departments see each additional feature as a new selling point, and a new way to attract customers.

You might think, then, that companies could avoid fieature creep by just paying attention to what customers really want. But that's where the trouble begins, because although consumers find overloaded gadgets（ 配件）unmanageable, they also find them attractive. It turns out that when we look at a new product in a store we tend to think that the more features there are, the better. It is only once we get the product home and try to use it that we realize the virtues of simplicity.

It seems strange that we don't expect feature tiredness and thus avoid it. But, as numerous studies have shown, people are not, in general, good at predicting what will make them happy in the future. As a result, we will pay more for more features because we systematically overestimate how often we'll use them. We also overestimate our ability to figure out how a complicated product works.

The fact that buyers want bells and whistles but users want something clear and simple creates an unusual problem for companies. A product that doesn't have enough features may fail to catch our eye in the store. But a product with too many features is likely to annoy consumers.