We are people of the desk. The corporate culture here puts a strong emphasis on showing your work ethic by spending as much of your work day as possible chained to your desk; it's part of the Calvinist-style work ethic going on here. People rarely go out for lunch and only occasionally head down to the cafeteria to eat lunch. Mostly it's working through lunch at one's desk, eating while typing away or on the phone. There are two break rooms on each floor in the building, and they each have two vending machines: one for soda, bottled water, and other drinks and the other for candy, chips, and a few healthier options like granola bars. A candy bar like a Snickers or Twix goes for 85 while a bottle of Pepsi goes for $1.25. There are also coffee makers that brew regular and decaf, and that's free (although I do not drink coffee myself).
Sometimes people bring in leftovers they're trying to get rid of, or one of the hunters will bring in their homemade deer jerky and leave it in the break room. Occasionally, someone leaves leftover bagels they brought for an early-morning meeting.
While remaining chained to one's desk even through lunch is best practice at my normal work site, apparently the other campus had a rodent infestation awhile back, so eating at one's desk became frowned upon there. I did not realize this until I was moteling there one day and brought a couple of granola bars to munch on for breakfast; needless to say, I got a couple of dirty looks, including from a manager of another team whose office was nearby, and later someone mentioned the mouse infestation that was cleared out only a few weeks before. Still, even though people are more encouraged to go down to the cafeteria there, I still don't think there's much of a culture of going out for lunch or lingering more than 15-20 minutes for lunch. The whole Puritanical culture really ramped up higher after the recession hit a few years ago and has not receded since.
I'll take a shot at this one. First let's look at a couple of etymologies. For 'corporation', think of 'corpse' or 'body', which is the Latin meaning; for 'capital', think 'head', again from the Latin. Think of then a business in capitalism, or a corporation, as an organic body composed of individuals. Capital is the head, the brains that think, plan, and create. The rest of the body is labor: the arms, legs, and strong trunk that build at the behest of the head that commands.
What happens when the body is flush with arrogance and decides to form unions and starts getting radical ideas: that it does not need its own head, for example? Communism is the body's notion that it can chop off its head and then organize itself into a headless "collective" that can think by combining the cells of its arms and strong torso, yet muscle cells and are not brain cells, so tyranny is inevitable.
It isn't novelty per se but external/sensory stimulation, which novelty can be a form of. In Eysenck's theory, everyone has an optimal level of arousal; they feel overwhelmed and anxious if it is passed and bored if it isn't met. Extraverts' brains seem to be optimized to take in, process, and respond to information coming in from the environment while introverts' brains are optimized for a slower response with more time spent on "deep processing" in the prefrontal cortex. This biological difference is thought to underpin the higher-order differences seen between extraverts and introverts: sociability, activity level/pace, assertiveness, and positive affect.
Besides novelty (i.e., perception of change in the environment), other forms of stimulation can be sheer intensity (think extreme sports and rock concerts), competition, and viscerally rewarding experiences like food and sex. Ironically, many of the sociable, outgoing extraverts seem to be quite happy with the status quo and relatively incurious; but then again, openness to experience is a separate dimension of personality in many models, and it is that dimension that captures people's tendencies to engage in intellectual pursuits, experience different cultures or more of their own culture, and try new things or question their beliefs.
If you think the system is working, ask someone who's waiting for a prompt.