My first thought was spies… because they are already on someone else’s payroll.
Also, bootlickers and extremely desperate people that would take on any job.

Ok, boomer Agreed, dark ager.

Hmm. Interesting, indeed. Now please excuse me while I, once again, sacrifice my own bodily fluids on the modern-age altar of fertility which has been optimized over ages and ages into the convenient shape of a… sock.

I remember ice-skating every winter as a kid. Rivers were frozen over solid, too. Sometimes, there were two separate layers of ice on top of each other, each being several cm thick. It kind of went away in the late 90s. I guess everybody just thought the ice and snow would return someday. Now even snow has gotten really, really rare where I live.