Going one step further, in the pdf you shared, people’s self-reported happiness generally goes up with income but happiness levels off while income does not — at the time of the survey, there simply was not a lot of increase in happiness after $75k income. I note that this lines up pretty well with the 4th quintile in the table above — people spend a lower percentage of their income in charity up until about $75k/year, and then they start spending a higher percentage (not much in percentage terms, but much more in absolute terms). One interpretation could be that when people start getting less marginal value of keeping the next dollar themselves after $75k, they start giving a little more away on the marginal dollar.

It could also be said that the poorest, who self-report the least happiness, try to buy some through their charity. Of course, it may simply be that they identify with the plights of others more quickly, and give out of that empathy.

http://wws.princeton.edu/news/Income_Happiness/Happiness_Money_Summary.pdf

Empirically, people are happier with more money up to a certain household income, at which point their happiness begins to decrease. Imagine a bell curve where the peak is the amount of income needed to live comfortably.

I believe that graciousness and generosity are huge causes for happiness, and it’s possible that the people in the study you’re citing who give more are happier for it, even if it’s a larger percentage of their disposable income.

I’m not giving an empirical argument here — just making a claim that I believe is correct :).

I know that this is a somewhat unorthodox way to get in touch with you, but I didn’t see any other contact information posted on your blog.

I work with Urban Research at the USDA Forest Service. We’re currently in the process of creating several short “briefing papers” on various topics related to urban forestry (i.e. environmental justice, sustainability, stormwater treatment, etc.). When I was searching for images to help illustrate our “Urban Wildlife” briefing paper on Google, I came across your incredible photo of a great blue heron overlooking the city (published here: http://www.arcanius.silverfir.net/blog/great-blue-heron). Would you consider granting us permission to use this photo for the briefing paper? It will be published on the USDA Forest Service website and will be distributed widely to cities/agencies/organizations interested in our work. If you’re willing to grant us permission, please contact me so that I can send you the permission slip we need to you sign.

Thanks so much!
-Hannah Safford
USDA Forest Service

1/ No page up or page down without an external keyboard
2/ Control and Command keys being different was pretty annoying in terminals
3/ I never found a terminal application I liked nearly as much as PuTTy
4/ The maximization concept in mac is deeply flawed compared to window’s version
5/ Multi-screens on macs suck because the menu bar is always on the primary screen, regardless of where the application window is
6/ The menu bar is always there, wasting precious screen real estate
7/ It’s hard to tell which window in the the foreground on large screens (the visual queues are too subtle)

8/ Finally, the straw that broke the camel’s back was really a fusion of numbers 5 and 7: The mac application design guidelines tell developers that when clicking on a non-foreground window, the app should be brought into focus, but the click should not interact with the application (eg, click on a link on a the background window of a browser). This is pretty widely followed, but it’s not universal: Safari (built by Apple!) ignores it when you click on it’s in-window menu area, for example (!), but obeys it when clicking on a link which is maddening — especially when that window is fully visible on another screen and it’s hard to tell it’s in the background. Also, Adobe flash player ignores this (or at least, it did when I made the switch).

So, while I love mac hardware (except their keyboards), the software is deeply flawed for what I want to do, and is therefore, in my experience, unusable.

Jim

Prefix the 33 in all cases above with backslash zero.

This is what I had to do to my screenrc to get it working without your trick:

bindkey “\33[5D” prev
bindkey “\33[5C” next
bindkey “\33[2D” prev
bindkey “\33[2C” next

bindkey “33[5D” prev
bindkey “33[5C” next
bindkey “33[2D” prev
bindkey “33[2C” next