Sure, I'll pick up after hours, but I start charging the moment it rings. You're not getting work for free.

A cube farm would be a luxury to what we get in Australia; when I started my current role, the norm was half-height walls between everyone, which you could just see over.

Shortly after that, a new manager of a team that we worked closely with decided it would be a wonderful idea to remove those walls so that the teams could work "even more closely together". I made it very clear that if they did that to me, I would not be hanging around.

Sadly, since then, all of those relatively large desks have been replaced with smaller desks, and a much shorter wall between them.

I can't remember the last time I saw a cube-farm anywhere in Australia.

This isn't employee needs, this is employer wants. Companies should stop thinking up bullshit "perks". Screw company cars (don't drive, don't want one), gym memberships (I can walk and run in the park for free), child care (for fuck's sake, bring up your own children). If it wasn't for the money, we wouldn't be there. I can think of far better things to do with my time than deal with the ridiculous compliance procedures that almost every job in the Western kills its employees' morale with now.

My point is, that inflation happens every year (save for those rare occasions of deflation), so you need to get a pay rise or equivalent every year, or you're going backwards. So for every year you don't get a pay rise, you need to get more and more days off that year.

So presumably that's extra vacation days every year (eg, 5 extra in year one, 10 extra in year two and so on...) until you reach the point where you don't work at all and they're still paying you the same salary they were in year zero?

Because if it isn't like that, you're getting screwed on inflation, without the raise.

Inflation is going to screw you.

Germany has very similar attitudes towards having a life outside work as France does.

...you could just replace buses with trams or trains, because people like those and will travel on them if they're built.

Everyone hates buses, because they are an inferior mode of transport compared to rail.

...the way pedestrians act in Boston and New York: total chaos. People wander across the street randomly, and drivers are very aware that this is going to happen, so they slow down. It made for a much more pedestrian-friendly environment there than on the west coast, where cars travel far too fast and pedestrians are timid and restrained.

Nearly got knocked over when crossing - legally - at a pedestrian crossing in Berkeley, and a driver refused to stop and I had to jump out of the way.

It could easily happen. You're effectively giving the entire Debian / Ubuntu / Redhat / SuSE development team root access on your servers.

The really bad thing about Chrome is the way it is impossible to stop extensions from automatically updating.

An extension can be perfectly good, when first installed, but if the author goes rogue, has a security breach or just sells the extension to a third party, there is no way to stop it from automatically updating.

It's crumbling because you don't pay enough tax. Stop being selfish, pay decent taxes (45-49% for high-earners would be a start) and then you can have decent facilities, transport and health-care.

K-mart in Australia is a downmarket piece of shit. They dumped something like 80% of their brand-name merchandise, around 5-6 years ago, and replaced it with it low-quality, in-house junk. I'm surprised that they even still sell video games at all.

Hi. Nice to meet you. I'm the person who will always take public transport in preference to a taxi, despite the fact that I can easily afford the taxi.

I don't care how much money I have, $15 for a trip from the centre of Melbourne to my inner city suburb is a complete rip-off.

That reason is Foxtel. It buys up the rights to everything at hugely inflated prices, and then charges an arm and a leg for consumers to get it.

Want Games of Thrones as it's released? Foxtel is the only legal game in town.

...the app. Only the website.