You conveniently forgot to mention that the military is still being paid.

You could save a fortune if you defunded them and brought them all home.

I'm a contractor. If you want me to work eighty hours a week, you will be paying me for eighty hours a week.

Would be nice if employers adhered to this mantra, too. But no, they make people work in demeaning open-plan offices, require them to attend purile team building sessions and generally treat their workforce like children. It's no wonder employees have contempt for them.

Yeah, I was wondering that myself. I think they mean "preventing outside researchers from getting in to research the outbreak".

...is not middle fucking class.

That'll be an England of several hundred years ago. Anyone who has been to England in the last thirty years will know that the general population is far from puritan.

...would you work weekends without getting paid?

Employers don't say to computer manufacturers, "We want seven PCs, but we're only going to pay you for five", so why would you let them do this with your labour?

Weekends are your free time. You never get this back. If your employer wants you to work on a weekend, tell them to pay you.

Why would anyone want a "start" button that completely changes their context and covers up what they were doing?

Windows is barely functional enough as it is for getting real work done, with its insane raise-on-focus making it almost impossible to look at two applications simultaneously (try reading from one large window while typing into another one, without two screens) - but Metro makes it fucking unusable. Nobody asked for it, and clearly, from the sales, nobody wants it.

...the Escape key is in the right position now. I avoided Thinkpads for years, simply because the Escape key was on the line /above/ the function keys. The moment they released the Thinkpad Edge series, with Esc in the correct position, I bought one.

We still don't call them cookies, no matter how much American baked-goods vendors try to shove the term down our throats.

Alternatively, it is the salary of a high-level programmer who is willing to take a pay-cut in order to avoid daily commuting, pair-programming, stand-up meetings, team-building weekends, unpaid overtime, Six Sigma, and all the other bullshit that comes with high-paying jobs in the corporate world.

I don't think there's anything wrong with mocking propaganda. Propaganda deserves to be mocked, it is often the best way of dealing with it (even in Western countries).

Yes, the situation in North Korea is terrible, but remember many Asian countries like to maintain "face" (a thoroughly ridiculous concept) and embarrassing dictatorships like this can be particularly effective.

Why would they do that? They don't expect tips.

No-one tips me in my day-to-day job, why are wait-staff so special?

You could just make sure that employers pay their staff properly, and get rid of the stupid custom of tipping.

I'm so glad I live in a country where I don't ever need to do that.

Free education.