Happiness hacks

Happiness hacks are appealing as they're usually simple ways to wring more happiness out of life without having to really lose out in other ways.​ Dan Ariely addresses two common situations in this column in the WSJ:

• Should you pay to park in a garage or spend time driving around looking for a street spot? 
• How should you​ split dinner bills?

In Chinese culture, it's common to fight other diners to pick up the tab for dinner, and Ariely gives some psychological​ grounding for the logic of doing so.

The third approach, my favorite, is to have one person pay for everyone and to alternate the designated payer with each meal. If you go out to eat with a group relatively regularly, it winds up being a much better solution. Why? (A) Getting a free meal is a special feeling. (B) The person paying for everyone does not suffer as much as his or her friends would if they paid individually. And (C) the person buying may even benefit from the joy of giving.

Even before reading this Ariely column, we'd implemented something like this at work, primarily to minimize the psychic pain of transactional hassles like calculating bills, signing credit card bills, making change, etc.. When we were working out of a house in Menlo Park, we'd all go out to lunch together each day. Instead of splitting every bill, one person would always pick up the tab, and Nick, one of our developers, would snap a photo of the receipt and keep a running tally of who owed who. This made meals more pleasant for all of us. An ancillary benefit is that picking up bills accelerates the forming of tighter bonds between the people sharing the meal. Small financial commitments are a simple gateway drug for higher level covenants.

Another simple hack that some restaurants have put into place is pre-paying for meals. HIgh end restaurants like Next Restaurant (and now Grant Achatz's other restaurant Alinea)​ charge you for the meal when you score your reservation, often months in advance of the meal itself. This is beneficial for the restaurant since a single cancellation can kill a high end restaurant's margin for the night. But it's also good for the diner. The most unpleasant part of a fine dining meal is getting a staggering bill dropped on your lap while you're still trying to digest dessert. By pulling that pain up ahead so far, the meal can end more pleasantly. You get up with whatever they've given you as a takeaway gift, and often you can't even remember what you paid for the meal in the first place. The sacrifice for the diner is a bit of free choice on the food and beverages, but most fine dining restaurants have a fixed tasting menu anyhow, and choosing the wine is more taxing than empowering for most diners.

Riding with Uber​ offers a bit of this benefit since they have your credit card on file and you don't have to pay or calculate a tip when you get out of the vehicle. During the journey, there is no visible meter running so you can't stress the ever increasing bill you're due to pay ticking upwards in bright red numbers. The downside is that soon after your ride concludes​, you get an email with the bill which often is your last memory of the ride. For all but the ultra wealthy, it's not the ideal way to end that transaction.

I would not be surprised to see Uber implement some type of discount for a pre-pay account where consumers might deposit $50 or some other amount at the start of the month and just deduct from it as you use the service during the month. Offering riders a discount for choosing this option makes sense. For one thing, pre-paying probably makes you more likely to choose Uber over a taxi since you want to use up your stored balance, especially if unused balances roll forward each month. More habitual usage then provides a greater volume of usage data for Uber to help drivers predict demand and routes ahead of time. Lastly, prepaid funds can provide some short float to Uber.

Companies in cities where Uber operates could be signed up for a corporate perks program in which the company could deposit a monthly stipend into each employee's Uber account​. That would be a great way for Uber to introduce themselves to and acquire lots of new users en masse, in addition to being a great perk in a city like San Francisco, where I can never seem to find a cab when I really need one.

You do not fear death

[Spoiler alerts for The Dark Knight Rises contained within]

I couldn't read Sarah Lacy's The Acqui-hire Scourge: Whatever Happened to Failure in Silicon Valley?​ without thinking of that prison scene from The Dark Knight Rises when, after a few failed attempts by Bruce Wayne at climbing out of that prison, that blind guy explains to Wayne why he keeps failing to make the leap to that final ledge near the top:

Blind guy: You do not fear death.

Bruce Wayne: I do fear death. I fear dying in here while my city burns. 

Blind guy: Then make the climb. 

Bruce Wayne: How? 

Blind guy: As the child did. Without the rope. Then fear will find you again. 

Bruce Wayne: You couldn't have told me that before I jumped and missed a few times and nearly snapped by back in half at the end of that rope?

[Okay, I made that last line up. Also, there was room to get a running start to jump and catch the other ledge, how come everyone seemed content to just try to do a standing jump? Oh, never mind.]​

In The Dark Knight Rises, Bruce Wayne, flush with wealth from Wayne Enterprises, spends hundreds of millions of dollars trying to develop a clean energy source, then goes bankrupt when Bane takes his fingerprints and makes some crazy options trades (a la Mat Honan with GMail, apparently Wayne had not turned on two-factor authentication on his ETrade account).

In real life, Elon Musk, who had plenty of money from PayPal, nearly bankrupted himself launching and financing an electric car company. Most people who obtain a lot of wealth walk away from the blackjack table, but Musk put all of his chips back out in play, and not on sure things. Building cars is inherently a high capital, high risk enterprise, and building electric cars are even more so. But that wasn't enough risk for Musk so he also started a space exploration company. There are entrepreneurs, and then there are Entrepreneurs, and then there are entrepreneurs' Entrepreneurs, and Musk is the latter. If his parents had been gunned down in an alley by a criminal while he was just a child, Mustk might be spending his evenings in a batsuit, fighting crime in the Tenderloin in San Francisco.

My backpack of choice

BBP is having a 50% off sale on their Hamptons Hybrid Messenger Backpack. It's a great deal at half off, or $49.96 rather than it's usual $99.95. If you walk and carry a laptop in your bag regularly​, you can use the coupon code 50HAMPTONS through next Monday night, Labor Day weekend. ​I don't earn any commission if you purchase one of these, I'm just a fan, and this is a great deal.

BBP stands for "bum back pack" and refers to the way the bag rides, low on your back. The double straps distribute weight evenly across both shoulders, like Izzo's dual straps did for golf bags, and the low hanging position of the bag reduces strain on your shoulders and back. I've been carrying a laptop for as long as I can remember, and I've tried a variety of solutions: conventional backpacks, bike messenger bags, and laptop briefcases. Comfort was always a problem. Messenger bags and laptop briefcases put the bag on one side, and eventually that leads to asymmetrical strain on your shoulder, neck, and/or hip. Backpacks often caused me to lean forward to counterbalance the weight.

The Hamptons Hybrid solved my comfort and ergonomic issues and has been my primary laptop bag for over 7 years now. There are only two disadvantages. One is that it looks a bit strange to have your bag hanging so low, but when it comes to my back fashion is a lesser concern, and you can disconnect the double strap in the middle with one click and wear it messenger bag style or grab the fabric handle at the top and carry it like a briefcase. The other minor drawback is that the bag has a lot of padding built in and is heavier in its base configuration than, say, a messenger bag. But I appreciate the extra padding surrounding the laptop compartment. It feels very safe, especially when jamming it under an airplane seat.  With a lighter solution like a messenger bag I'd still purchase a padded sleeve to hold my laptop, bringing the naked walkaround weight up quite a bit.

As laptops grow lighter, or as some people transition to using tablets for travel, perhaps the need for a bag to distribute heavier weights diminishes. I think we're still a ways off from that day, though, and when I travel I still find the sum total of my laptop, chargers, and miscellaneous ​knickknacks to be uncomfortable to carry for long periods. I've had the same large Hamptons Hybrid for years now, and it's a testament to the enduring utility of the design that it hasn't changed one bit, as far as I can tell. Now that I no longer carry a 17" laptop, I'm grabbing the smaller and lighter medium size at this sale price.

Man on the Moon

The first speech uttered from the surface of another celestial body turned out to be an absurdity. The task fell to Armstrong as he descended the stairs of the lunar module: ‘That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.’ But ‘man’ and ‘mankind’ amounted to much the same thing; if there was to be any point in the First Sentence, it would derive from an implied contrast between what a particular individual did and its significance for the whole of humanity. After a few weeks, Nasa could no longer withstand repeated observations that the First Sentence was vacuous. Armstrong said that he was ‘misquoted’ in the official transcript and an official spokesman announced that ‘static’ obscured a missing ‘a’: ‘That’s one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind.’ ‘I rehearsed it that way,’ Armstrong later said. ‘I meant it that way. And I’m sure I said it that way.’ The claim, however, smacks literally of l’esprit de l’escalier, and you can judge its accuracy for yourself by listening to the recording at www.hq.nasa.gov/office/pao/History/alsj/a11/a11.step.html. There is no evident ‘static’ and it’s clear enough that Armstrong said what everybody heard him say at the time. In the event, he eventually gave up the pretence: ‘Damn, I really did it. I blew the first words on the Moon, didn’t I?’

From a review of Moondust: In Search of the Men Who Fell to Earth by Andrew Smith in the London Review of Books.​ Lots of great anecdotes (in the review, and, I'm sure, in the book itself).

Behind the scenes was enough drama for an HBO reality show:

Despite the vast attention paid to the astronauts’ psychological profiles and their ability to work in teams, the Apollo 11 crew verged on the dysfunctional. While Armstrong and Aldrin didn’t quite match Stoppard’s Scott and Oates, there was a fierce behind-the-scenes battle between them to be first to set foot on the Moon. Early plans were for Aldrin, as module pilot, to step out first, but one version reported by Smith has it that Armstrong, as mission commander, lobbied more vigorously than Aldrin, and Nasa backed him up because he would be ‘better equipped to handle the clamour when he got back’ and, more mundanely, because his seat in the lunar module was closer to the door. Aldrin paid Armstrong back by taking no photographs of him on the Moon: the only manually taken lunar image of the First Man on the Moon is in one of many pictures Armstrong snapped of Aldrin, showing himself reflected in the visor of Aldrin’s spacesuit. Asked about this omission later, Aldrin lamely replied: ‘My fault, perhaps, but we had never simulated this in training.’ Later, Aldrin put it about that Armstrong’s First Sentence might have been a bureaucratic concoction.

The Need for Kool-Aid

From EvoAnth (short for Evolutionary Anthropology), a post on possible evolutionary​ explanations for the rise of religion. The hypothesis among anthropologists was that rising social and economic complexity gave rise to correspondingly complex religious beliefs which helped to foster the necessary social cooperation.

So they went out and gathered data (albeit from other researchers) on 178 different cultures, comparing their source of food, group size, social complexity and type of religious belief. When analysed this information almost exactly matched their predictions. Amongst foragers – who can easily gather enough food with minimal co-operation between individuals – 88% had either no “high” god or a “high” god which did not bestow morals and did not interact with the world. At the other extreme of the scale, ~40% of groups dependent on intensive agriculture had a “high” god who interfered with the world and gave morals to the group.

​Do companies that succeed even as they grow in size likewise foster stronger internal mythologies to try and maintain a consistent culture across a much larger, more distributed workforce?

Many companies have attempted to structure themselves in a way that preserves certain operational values even as they grow much larger, but perhaps religion-making is a necessary companion endeavor.​ Perhaps companies have something to learn from organized religion in the way they recruit and indoctrinate.