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If you’re bored with the same old bodyweight exercises, you can pump them up with two simple objects. Sliders are slippery disks that go under your hands or feet. They challenge you to keep yourself stable, turning ordinary moves into serious workouts for stabilizing muscles.

In the photo above, allowing your feet to slide means you can use your abs to pull your legs toward you. It’s a move you may have done before on an exercise ball, but a pair of sliders is a lot more convenient to store.

Greatist has 30 more moves where this one came from, and the only equipment they require is a pair of sliders and a surface they can slide on. Some sliders are soft and are made for smooth floors, while others are smooth and are made for soft floors, like carpet. You can also improvise: a pair of folded dish towels works well on hardwood, or try two old frisbees or plastic dinner plates on carpet.

Photo by Greatist.

31 Bodyweight Exercises Using Sliders | Greatist

Standing desks have practically become a cliche of lifehacking, with some people swearing by their benefits and others reclining in apathy towards the productivity platforms. But do standing desks have real ergonomic benefits?

Here to help answer those outstanding questions is Jon Paulsen, MS, CPE, a certified ergonomist, engineer, and founder of The Human Solution and UPLIFT Desk. Jon has been designing ergonomic work environments for years and can offer some insights as to why some people really benefit from standing while working and the different types of desks you might want to try. Whether you’re on the fence, already a devotee, or are skeptical, Jon and his team will be here for the next hour so leave a question below.

Have an expert you’d like to see participate? Email us. Image by Henry Rivers via Getty.

Whether you’re in high school or college, you spend a lot of time taking notes. You have several excellent options for doing so, and which works best for you depends a lot on your note taking style. It’s best to pick software and stick to it so you don’t to worry about moving stuff around later. Here’s how to make the right choice from the outset.

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Evernote’s the Most Feature-Packed Notes App, Provided You Don’t Mind Paying

Evernote has long been the go-to for students, and while it’s not always obvious how you’d use it, once you get the hang of it, Evernote’s a great place to dump everything, which means notes, to-do lists, audio, images, and more.

Evernote does a lot. On top of the basics, like rich text formatted notes and images, it has in-app image annotation, OCR support for scanning paper or whiteboards, email integration, easy notes sharing, a web clipper, and tons of organization tools. You can keep to-do lists with assignments, then add due dates to those assignments before you share that list with people involved in a group project. Evernote is a behemoth and because of that, it has a consistently improving interface on Windows and Mac, and mobile apps on Android and iOS that are updated with new features often. Evernote’s meant as a catch-all filing cabinet for every thought, idea, and image you come across in your daily school life.

The everything-bucket nature of Evernote means it’s overwhelming for some people and it takes some effort to really master it. It also has so many different organizational methods that it’s easy to spend more time trying to decide where to put a note than it does to actually write it. It can also be a bit slow and cumbersome, especially if you’re trying to use the mobile apps on older devices.

The other big catch with Evernote comes in the form of a recent price increase. Now, free users are limited to accessing Evernote on just two devices, like your phone and your computer. If you want more than that, you’ll need to shell out for a premium plan. Thankfully, premium plans are currently 75% off for students for a full year (which should translate to about $18 for the year).

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OneNote Is Free and Works Even Better If You Use Microsoft Office

Microsoft’s OneNote has come a long way in recent years and it easily goes toe-to-toe with Evernote in features. Even though OneNote is part of Microsoft Office, it’s still entirely free, which makes it an excellent option for students. It’s even more appealing if you’re already using Microsoft Office for most of your schoolwork. OneNote is available as a desktop app and a web app, as well as for Android and iOS.

Like just about every other Office application, at a glance, OneNote’s a complicated app to work with. You’ll find it has tons of menus, tabs, and options. While it’s overwhelming to start, OneNote’s great for anyone who likes to really dig in and organize notes. You can create separate notebooks for every class, add rich text formatting to text, draw on notes, highlight text, and tons more.

If you’re actively using the rest of Microsoft Office, OneNote really shines because the whole ecosystem is hooked together. You can embed tables from Excel, pull clips from emails, or link research to Word. OneNote also does a lot of the magic tricks that Evernote does, including importing images into notes, drawing directly on notes with a stylus, recording audio to notes, and easily saving links from any browser. You can also share notes with other classmates easily.

Like most of Microsoft apps, OneNote’s biggest downfall is its massive scope. It’s packed with menus, which means quickly scribbling down an idea is out of the question. It’s also not particularly pleasant to look at and between the awkwardly colored tabs and the vibrant purple color-scheme, a lot of people might be turned off by the design alone.

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Google Keep Is a Free Short Form Notes App

Google Keep is Google’s free note taking app that’s made to capture notes, lists, photos, and audio. On top of the web version, it’s available on both Android and iOS. We’re big fans of Google Keep because it sits in a middle ground between complex notes apps like OneNote or Evernote, and simple apps like Simplenote.

Google Keep does pretty much everything you expect of a notes app from Google. You can organize notes easily using a color coded system, look for anything with a powerful search engine, share notes with others, and everything is synced up to your Google account. Students will appreciate the simple voice recording options and the ability to scan images into text easily, which comes in handy when your teachers still give you handouts. Keep also has a clipping extension so you can add URLs to your notes, which should be a huge help when you’re researching different topics.

Unlike Evernote and OneNote, you don’t need to spend a significant amount of time learning how to use Keep. Just load it up and it immediately makes sense. It’s also well hooked into the Google ecosystem so do something like saving emails from Gmail work seamlessly, though there’s still no direct integration with Google Drive.

There are other downfalls that stem from that simplicity, like the fact you can’t format text, you can’t organize notes into different folders, and Keep doesn’t works great for larger blocks of text. Keep’s best for those who don’t mind using the search function to find notes and who aren’t too verbose with their note-taking in general.

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Simplenote Is Best If You Only Want to Store Text

Not everyone wants to take massive, complicated notes. Some people just like to write down a few sentences. For that, we’re fans of Simplenote. Simplenote is free on Windows, Mac, iOS, and Android.

Simplenote is basically a plain text editor with small organizational tools. You can only type text, with no formatting. You can’t add images, audio, or video. You can’t add web clippings or integrate emails. That said, you can organize notes with tags, and the simplicity of plain text means Simplenote’s search is robust and fast.

That’s it. That’s all Simplenote does. The scarcity of features is a feature in itself though, and if you’re taking classes where you’re just taking basic text notes, Simplenote is all you need.

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Plain text has long been a favorite here at Lifehacker, but over the years most people have moved… Read more Read more

Pen and Paper Are Still Great

Look, you’re probably spending an inordinate amount of time staring at your screen these days. You’re writing papers every other day, taking a couple of classes online, and when you’re not busy being crushed under a mountain of homework, you’re zoning out watching Netflix. Which is all to say, sometimes the best notes app is no app at all, it’s just a normal notebook.

Good old pen and paper can be useful for other reasons too. For one, if you’re easily distracted, a notebook has the benefit of not having access to the internet. Notebooks are also surprisingly customizable, with lots of different organization methods like Bullet Journal or line edges. Notebooks also allow you to take notes in any style you prefer for every subject, whether that’s creating columns, mind maps, or whatever else.

Pen and paper does have plenty of problems too. You can’t search through notes, easily share them with classmates, or access them from a variety of devices if you accidentally forget your papers at home. Many people can also type much faster than they can write, which means you’ll need to pay more attention to what you write to keep it short.

You’ll still need to pick out a good notebook and pen though. You have a ton of options here, but Moleskine’s are a popular favorite and come in a variety of sizes with different types of paper. Pens are perhaps less important to most people, but if you’re looking for a popular pick, Pilot pens are always a solid choice.

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In one of the biggest moments of of Hillary Clinton’s convention speech, the Democratic nominee promised that under her presidency, “Wall Street, corporations, and the super-rich are going to start paying their fair share of taxes.” The crowd went wild.

This idea, that the wealthiest Americans have been helped along financially by their ability to  shortchange the tax system, is a popular view at a time when the divide between the richest and everyone else continues to grow. According to a Gallup poll, 63 percent of Americans say the distribution of money and wealth is unfair, and just over half favor higher taxes on the rich.

It’s clear that many people believe that it’s time to lessen inequality. But what’s the best way to proceed?

“I think it is high time for the U.S. to push up the top tax rate,” Emmanuel Saez, a Berkeley professor who is one of the country’s top experts on wealth accumulation, told me. After all, the top tax rate right now, 39.6 percent, is much lower than the 70 percent rate that existed through much of the period between the 1930s and 1970s, when wealth was more evenly distributed in the United States. This might suggest that if economic equality is truly the goal, perhaps tweaking the tax rate might help.

The trouble is, taxation remains one of the most contested issues in modern political conversation. There are plenty of people who would argue that raising taxes may do more harm than good to the economy. If the rich are taxed more, they may become even more motivated to move their money offshore or to accounts where it can’t be tracked. That could mean less revenue for the government and government services in the end. And if the wealthy aren’t making, or keeping as much money—some say—the result could be a reduction in economic activity, with less capital available for entrepreneurship, leading to lower rates of business formation and fewer jobs. If true, that would be bad for the entire economy, especially low-wage earners.

But there is historical evidence that suggests these fears may not be more conjecture than actual threat. The U.S. economy is becoming less entrepreneurial over time, suggesting that the wealthy aren’t creating new businesses with all that extra money that used to go to taxes. And in the past, raising top tax rates hasn’t actually depressed economic activity or caused people to stash more money offshore. History also suggests that increasing top tax rates reduces inequality.

Compare, for example, taxation in the United States and Denmark in the periods 1975 to 1979 and 2004 to 2008, as Thomas Piketty, Emmanuel Saez, and Stefanie Stantcheva did in a 2011 paper. In the United States of the 1970s, the top bracket was taxed at a rate of 70 percent, compared to 39.6 percent today. During the latter half of the 1970s, the top 1 percent of earners accounted for around 8 percent of Americans’ total income. Denmark taxed its top earnings similarly, at around 65 percent, and the top 1 percent of earners accounted for about 4 percent of total income. Fast-forward to the 2004 to 2008 period, when the tax rate of top earners in the U.S fell to 35 percent. The share of income accrued by the top 1 percent reached 18 percent. Denmark, which went through a similar period of economic activity and development, according to researchers, kept the tax rate of its highest earners at a comparatively high rate of nearly 60 percent. The result was that the top 1 percent of earners in Denmark still took in around 4 percent of total income by the year 2008.

Denmark isn’t the only evidence of this phenomenon. Among OECD members, as tax rates on upper-income earners fell—mostly in English speaking countries like the U.S. or Britain—the share of income accruing to the top 1 percent grew. Keeping tax rates high didn’t harm a country’s GDP either, the authors found, suggesting that high taxes didn’t lead productive earners to flee, and low tax rates didn’t motivate them to produce more. According to the paper, while there isn’t a lot of proof that high taxes result in economic slack, there’s a compelling link between low taxation and a growth in inequality. “No country experiences a significant increase in top income shares without implementing significant top rate tax cuts,” the authors write.

Besides the obvious fact that tax cuts put more money into high earners’ pockets, there are a number of reasons that lower tax rates result in more income becoming concentrated at the top, Saez told me. High tax rates make it harder for top executives to make the case for astronomical salaries; if a huge share of their pay is just going to go to taxes, corporate boards will be less likely to pay out high sums that are ultimately funneled back to the government. And when taxes are high, the wealthy can’t put as much into savings since so much of their income goes to the government.

Things haven’t always been the way they are now. Wealth concentration was high in the beginning of the 20th century, but then dropped from 1929 to around 1978, according to a recent paper by Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman of Berkeley. It’s risen steadily since then.

Still, despite evidence that raising the top rates would lower inequality, it would be politically difficult to do so, especially in the current climate. But it’s been done before, says Marshall Steinbaum, a visiting fellow at the Roosevelt Institute who has studied the history of taxing the rich. In the 19th century, the United States was governed by the same type of free-market paradigm that rules the country today: Leave it to the market to sort everything out. But over the late 19th century and early 20th, the progressive movement gained steam, and there emerged a political argument that the laissez-faire attitude of the government was allowing too much inequality to grow. Enter the economist Edwin Seligman, a scion of a New York banking family, who published a paper in 1910 advocating for the introduction of an income tax in order to finance government functions. The Sixteenth Amendment, which allowed for an income tax to be levied, passed in 1913. Over time, an idea that had been advocated by mostly left-wing economists became mainstream, Steinbaum told me.

Raising the top brackets back to what they were in the periods of less inequality may still be seen as left-wing today. But that could evolve. There is precedence for the top rates being raised significantly, especially at times when public opinions about wealth were very similar to Americans’ today. I talked to David Zalewski, a professor of finance at Providence College who has studied the Revenue Act of 1932, under which the marginal tax rate jumped from 25 percent to 63 percent for top earners. Of course, 1932 was a very different time economically: Most importantly, the United States was on the gold standard and its economy was running a big budget deficit, so those in business were concerned that the country would start printing money to close the gap. This would devalue the dollar significantly, harming their ability to trade and buy and sell in dollars.

So President Hoover floated the idea of significantly raising taxes on the rich to close the budget hole instead. The wealthy didn’t hate the idea, Zalewski said. Paying higher taxes was better for them than having the dollar devalued so significantly that they couldn’t trade it for anything. “An unbalanced budget was the worst thing you could do in national policy during the gold standard era,” Zalewski told me. The Revenue Act of 1932 more than doubled tax rates on the rich—the largest peacetime tax increase in American history. And aside from big increases on the rich, the act included consumption taxes on gasoline and electricity, according to the Tax History Project, a collection of essays about financial history from the non-partisan nonprofit Tax Analysts.

The following year, Franklin Delano Roosevelt took office. He took the country off the gold standard, but saw no reason to lower tax rates since he had a laundry list of social programs he wanted to fund. Instead, he passed the Revenue Act of 1935, which actually raised the top tax rate even higher, to 79 percent. Critics derided this as a “soak the rich” tax. But the country seemed to content to keep the trend going. Between 1935 and 1982, the top tax rate did not dip below 70 percent. Part of this was due to a belief among those in charge that the government had a role in combating extreme wealth. Roosevelt said this in a speech about raising taxes:

People know that vast personal incomes come not only through the effort or ability or luck of those who receive them, but also because of the opportunities for advantage which Government itself contributes. Therefore, the duty rests upon the Government to restrict such incomes by very high taxes.

And that wasn’t an extreme view. For a long time, says Saez, the idea that earning a ton of money was, in some ways vulgar or unfair dictated policy. During World War II, the government even controlled pay increases in the private sector. Even when those controls were lifted, income inequality stayed constant at low inequality. This is a period of income equality referred to by economists as the Great Compression.

It wasn’t until the Reagan era that the politicians in power started to talk up the benefits of wealth accumulation once again. Top tax rates fell, from 70 percent to 50 percent, in 1982, and then to 38.5 percent in 1987. At the same time, the top 0.1 percent of earners’ share of wealth has risen from 7 percent in 1978 to 22 percent in 2012, a level almost as high as in 1929, according to a May paper by Saez and Zucman that tracks wealth inequality in the United States since 1913.

The gap between the wealthiest and everyone else has grown so large that economic experts around the world have listed the issue of one of the main concerns facing the global economy. To reverse the extreme concentration of wealth that has characterized the last few decades, Saez says, changes to the top tax rates would have to be relatively large—bigger than the changes in the Clinton era, which saw the top tax rate grow from 31 percent to 39.6 percent, or those in the Obama era, which saw the top tax rate grow from 35 percent to 39.6 percent. And increases in the top tax rate would have to be accompanied by concrete changes in the tax system so that it’s not as easy for the rich to avoid paying taxes. Saez’s colleague Zucman estimates that 8 percent of the world’s financial wealth is held offshore, costing the US alone $36 billion a year.

Fixing a problem of that magnitude seems like a stretch. But it’s possible to prevent as much hiding of offshore wealth, Saez says, if governments want to work together to punish countries that allow capital to be hidden in their banks. The Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act, passed in 2010, is a good start, he said. It required American expats to report assets held in foreign banks, and also required foreign banks to report significant assets held by Americans. A next step, Zucman suggests, could be slapping tariffs on goods imported from tax havens. Adding a 30 percent tariff to Swiss goods, for instance, would end up costing Switzerland more than the country earns for being a tax haven, which could be motivation for the country to comply with stricter reporting requirements.  

“This is really a choice—if all the big countries, the U.S., countries in Europe—really wanted it to be done, they could do it,” Saez told me. This is the same for raising top tax rates, it seems. History suggests that doing so could help reduce income inequality and wealth concentration at the very top. But the U.S. must really want it to be done.