Your Lazy Coworkers Are Happier Than You Are

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A NEW STUDY FINDS WHAT WE ALL SUSPECTED. THERE IS NO GOD. AND SOME PEOPLE ARE SKATING BY AND LOVING IT.

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I knew a guy once, and maybe you did, too. He came in late. He left early. His output was consistently lousy, and when the chips were down, he was never the guy tapped to stay late.

But boy, did he smile a lot.

According to new research, there’s a good chance that guy really was lazier and happier than me (and you). Leadership IQ examined 207 companies that had kept very close tabs on employee performance and engagement. And what they found was that in 42% of companies, the underachieving actually do skate by. As Leadership IQ’s CEO explained to the WSJ:

‘Low performers often end up with the easiest jobs because managers don’t ask much of them,’ he said, so they’re under less stress and they’re more satisfied with their daily work lives. 

Meanwhile, dedicated and conscientious workers end up staying at the office late, correcting the work of the low performers, and making sure clients or customers are satisfied. This pattern breeds frustration and disengagement in the high performers—and perhaps ultimately drives them to seek work elsewhere. 'They feel stressed and undervalued, and it starts to undermine the high performers’ confidence that the organization is a meritocracy,' said Mr. Murphy.

Interestingly enough, the study suggests that low performers may actually be oblivious to their own inadequacy (or at least, they’re smart enough to pretend). And on the plus side, at least they weren’t whining all day like the employees who stayed late, again. I mean, c’mon people. I got all my work done already, and I came in at noon!

remember when the teacher dragged a tv on wheels like this kind of thing

and you knew it was gonna be an awesome day

You obviously don’t remember correctly.

You had to push it, not drag it, or this would have happened:

How the maker of TurboTax fought free, simple tax filing

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By Liz Day, ProPublica

This story was co-produced with NPR.

Imagine filing your income taxes in five minutes — and for free. You'd open up a pre-filled return, see what the government thinks you owe, make any needed changes and be done. The miserable annual IRS shuffle, gone.

It's already a reality in Denmark, Sweden and Spain. The government-prepared return would estimate your taxes using information your employer and bank already send it. Advocates say tens of millions of taxpayers could use such a system each year, saving them a collective $2 billion and 225 million hours in prep costs and time, according to one estimate.

The idea, known as "return-free filing," would be a voluntary alternative to hiring a tax preparer or using commercial tax software. The concept has been around for decades and has been endorsed by both President Ronald Reagan and a campaigning President Obama.

"This is not some pie-in-the-sky that's never been done before," said William Gale, co-director of the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center. "It's doable, feasible, implementable, and at a relatively low cost."

So why hasn't it become a reality?

Well, for one thing, it doesn't help that it's been opposed for years by the company behind the most popular consumer tax software — Intuit, maker of TurboTax. Conservative tax activist Grover Norquist and an influentialcomputer industry group also have fought return-free filing.

Intuit has spent about $11.5 million on federal lobbying in the past five years — more than Apple or Amazon. Although the lobbying spans a range of issues, Intuit's disclosures pointedly note that the company "opposes IRS government tax preparation."

The disclosures show that Intuit as recently as 2011 lobbied on two bills, both of which died, that would have allowed many taxpayers to file pre-filled returns for free. The company also lobbied on bills in 2007 and 2011 that would have barred the Treasury Department, which includes the IRS, from initiating return-free filing.

Intuit argues that allowing the IRS to act as a tax preparer could result in taxpayers paying more money. It is also a member of the Computer & Communications Industry Association (CCIA), which sponsors a "STOP IRS TAKEOVER" campaign and a website calling return-free filing a "massive expansion of the U.S. government through a big government program."

In an emailed statement, Intuit spokeswoman Julie Miller said, "Like many other companies, Intuit actively participates in the political process." Return-free programs curtail citizen participation in the tax process, she said, and also have "implications for accuracy and fairness in taxation." (Here is Intuit's full statement.)

In its latest annual report filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission, however, Intuit also says that free government tax preparation presents a risk to its business.

Roughly 25 million Americans used TurboTax last year, and a recent GAO analysis said the software accounted for more than half of individual returns filed electronically. TurboTax products and services made up 35 percent of Intuit's $4.2 billion in total revenues last year. Versions of TurboTax for individuals and small businesses range in price from free to $150.

(H&R Block, whose tax filing product H&R Block At Home competes with TurboTax, declined to discuss return-free filing with ProPublica. The company's disclosure forms state that it also has lobbied on at least one bill related to return-free filing.)

* * *

When Will Cars Go Extinct?

Last week on The Atlantic Cities, Emily Badger had a fascinating piece on “socio-technological transitions,”a term that refers to long-term shifts in technology. In it, she talks to Maurie Cohen, an academic who studies how societies transition from one technology to the next. Cohen explains that these paradigm shifts happen so slowly, over so many decades, that it’s hard for us to recognize the transition while it’s happening. He also suggests that “we’re probably closer to the end of the automobility era than we are to its beginning":

'There’s not going to be a cataclysmic moment,' Cohen says of what’s coming for the car. 'Like any other technology that outlives its usefulness, it just sort of disappears into the background and we slowly forget about it.' The landline telephone is undergoing that process right now. Your grandmother probably still has one. But did you even bother to call the phone company the last time you moved into a new home? 'It’s not as if we all wake up one morning and decide we’re going to get rid of our landlines,' Cohen says, 'but they just kind of decay away.'

According to Cohen and Badger, this process is already occurring, thanks to rising gas prices, cultural shifts, and “insurgent niches” of car-share programs and environmental advocacy groups. It’s a fascinating read, simply because it requires us to recalibrate the time scale upon which we think about technology. Rather than year to year, it’s century to century--something humans of the moment aren’t particularly adept at:

He worries that in the U.S., we’ve lost our 'cultural capacity to envision alternative futures,' to envision the Futurama of the next century. More often, when we do picture the future, it looks either like a reproduced version of the present or like some apocalyptic landscape. 

In a way, the pace at which new technology emerges these days is exactly what’s inhibiting our ability to think holistically about long-term trends. If you’re constantly focused on the next product launch, it becomes difficult to recognize patterns in the larger scheme of things. In other words, we’re missing the forest for the gadgets.

Infographic: Hackers Create An Amazing, Illegal Portrait Of The Internet

SOMEONE HACKED ALMOST HALF A MILLION DEVICES AROUND THE WORLD. WHY? THEY WANTED TO SEE WHAT THE INTERNET LOOKED LIKE.

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It wasn’t malicious. The file itself was the size of a small jpeg. It was given the absolute lowest priority. And it was set to self-destruct if anything went wrong. But this small file allowed one single hacker to measure the internet activity of nearly half a million connected devices around the world, then share the results with everyone.

I saw the chance to really work on an Internet scale, command hundred thousands of devices with a click of my mouse, portscan and map the whole Internet in a way nobody had done before, basically have fun with computers and the Internet in a way very few people ever will. I decided it would be worth my time.

How was this even possible? The "hacker" barely hacked anything. In reality, they gained access to all these systems because each had the default "root" set as a password. (Note: Always change the password on your router!) With this access in hand, they ran several tests focusing on internet structure and activity. And what they created from all this data is a spectacular map that captures a day in the life of the internet (and all of its users).

The red represents peak traffic and the blue represents base traffic. The creator points out that night affects the US and Europe less than other areas, due to the amount of omnipresent internet connections (mostly routers and set top boxes). Another interesting anomaly is that Europeans seem to reach peek usage right before the sun goes down, as if they’re cramming in a lot of work (or casual browsing) at the end of the work day.

No doubt, the general ethics of the study will likely turn some of you off. But given that most people who hack computes on this scale are filling it with devastating malware, I think we can let this anonymous data spelunker slide.