24 September, 2021

“We’ll see how that goes,” said Cook. After details of that meeting were published in the press, Cook sent a memo condemning employees who leak, saying that they “do not belong at Apple” — and that memo was then leaked to The Verge.

As the debate over remote work drags on, it’s added to other longstanding tensions at Apple around the company’s notoriously high-pressure culture — which employees are critiquing more candidly than before.

“We had a running joke where we had a ‘crying room’ at the office,” Parrish told Recode. “We are as a group happier, healthier, and just doing so much better than we ever were in the office. And that’s because we’re able to have our own spaces … we’re able to escape a little bit from some of the more toxic elements of work.”

Discussions about working from home have also been followed by more public discussions about other issues at the company, including pay disparity. Scarlett started a survey asking employees to self-report their salaries and demographic information, which was posted in the remote work advocacy channel and other channels.

That survey, first reported on by The Verge, ended up showing that out of the 2,400 people who responded, women earned about 6 percent less on average than men. The self-run study doesn’t necessarily represent a full picture of Apple’s workforce — respondents opted in and thus were a self-selecting group. But it did further suspicions among some employees that the company may not pay all men and women equally (which it has said it has done since 2016).

All this employee backlash at Apple over remote work is a testament to how important the issue is for knowledge workers across industries. For many, remote work during the pandemic made their lives better. Skipping a commute or being able to duck out in the middle of the day to run errands or shepherd children gave people a better sense of work-life balance. For those who felt left out from office camaraderie and extracurricular activities, the ability to work from home has been less isolating.

Recode spoke with a handful of other Apple employees who shared why they and some of their colleagues don’t want to return to the office. Their perspectives mirror that of many other white-collar workers, particularly those who used to work at corporate campuses in expensive urban areas like San Francisco, Seattle, and New York. One thing some cited, in addition to family and medical reasons, was the incredibly high cost of housing near Apple’s headquarters in Silicon Valley. For the first time, some workers were able to move farther away from the office to more affordable areas on the outskirts. For those who currently have no commute, it’s hard to imagine going back to driving a two- to four-hour round trip.

Parrish said that she is often on calls as early as 6 am and sometimes as late as 10:30 pm. She finds it much easier to take those calls from home.

“For a lot of people, remote work allowed them a kind of work-life balance that was absolutely impossible in the office,” said Parrish, who said she also has health concerns about returning to the office because her partner is immunocompromised. “I’m able to have a life outside my job again, and I’m not willing to give that up.”

Parrish isn’t alone, and her concerns aren’t unique to Apple. Workers of all kinds — regardless of whether their job or industry is suitable to it — overwhelmingly want the ability to work from home, at least some of the time, according to data from Boston Consulting Group. For the remote jobs on its platforms, LinkedIn says it sees two and a half times more applications than it does for non-remote jobs.

Meanwhile, US employers are desperately in need of workers of all types to fill millions of jobs, both white collar and blue collar. But workers, for a variety of reasons, aren’t taking those jobs, as many of them hold out for better options — especially ones that offer remote work. White-collar workers, particularly tech workers, are much more likely to get this kind of work since their jobs are more easily done at home and since their skills are considered less replaceable than those of their blue-collar counterparts. Nearly half of jobs on the tech job platform Hired now allow full-time remote, while remote job listings on a more general job site, LinkedIn, are at 16 percent.

Apple’s retail employees have also started pushing for more remote flexibility, particularly for customer support and sales roles that can be performed partly or totally online. That’s prompted Apple’s retail and corporate employees to connect in a new way. The discussion between retail and corporate employees has also turned to larger issues like alleged harassment, discrimination, and general mistreatment within Apple Stores’ work culture.

Scarlett and several other corporate employee activists started a Discord subgroup and website called #AppleToo to discuss their grievances and coalesce workers. The group also has a Medium blog where Parrish is publishing some of the most jarring anecdotes that workers, including those in retail, have submitted.

While it’s unlikely that Apple’s retail employees will be able to work from home, the fact that they are continuing to communicate and organize with corporate staff may be a sign of broader worker activism Apple will have to confront in its future.

Why Apple is fighting remote work

One of the most critical reasons Apple is fighting to get people back in the office is that its leaders think being in the office is good for business.

“Innovation isn’t always a planned activity,” Cook told People magazine this spring. “It’s bumping into each other over the course of the day and advancing an idea that you just had. And you really need to be together to do that.”

“I don’t think [management] is entirely wrong,” one Apple engineer, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of Apple’s policy against employees speaking to the press without authorization, told Recode. “I think there are hallway conversations that I miss. But I think they overstate the value of it.”

There isn’t hard evidence that spontaneous in-person meetings in the office, like what Cook describes, boost innovation for a company. But generally, having more connections with coworkers outside your team correlates to higher performance and creativity, according to research cited by Brandy Aven, an associate professor of organizational theory at Carnegie Mellon University. And you’re likely to bump into people outside your team if they’re physically nearby, so maybe Cook is onto something.

At many offices, particularly at a giant tech campus like Apple’s headquarters, there’s a sort of formula for encouraging workers to talk to each other, even if they don’t work in the same department or on the same project. Through architecture and design, which Apple has invested in heavily, management can channel workers into the same space with communal kitchens, centrally located bathrooms, and atriums.

That’s harder to recreate in the virtual world of Zoom calls, Slack, and email.

Aven, however, thinks companies could use technology to come up with creative solutions and replacements for this situation rather than relying on requiring workers to be present in the office.

“I think we could engineer serendipitous encounters over the web. Organizations just have to update and be a little bit more innovative,” Aven told Recode. “If we can put men in space, we can figure this problem out.”

For now, despite a year and a half forced experiment of working from home, we don’t know how remote work will affect things like innovation and collaboration in the long term. Companies are still trying to quantify the full impacts of remote work and trying different approaches to make it better. It’s an ongoing challenge, and how Apple responds — either by trying to bring its creativity to bear on remote work or by rejecting it outright — could have lasting influence on what remote work ends up looking like for everyone else.

One thing that sets Apple apart is that unlike other Silicon Valley giants such as Google and Facebook, it is primarily a hardware — not a software — company. That means it needs to test, tinker, and develop physical products in person.

The company’s success also depends, in part, on how tightly it can keep from its competition its plans to develop the latest iPhone or yet-to-be-announced gadget. If engineers and other staff working on sensitive products are allowed to do so at home, the thinking is, it may be easier for competitors to get access to confidential information.

For all these reasons, Apple management is holding its ground. But due to the delta variant, the company’s return-to-office plan has been put on pause. Apple pushed back its office reopening until at least January due to health concerns. The announcement came only a day after the second employee petition on the matter.

Several organizers Recode spoke with said they had no evidence that the petitions influenced Apple’s decision — but for now, the delta variant has essentially kicked the can down the road.

The ripple effects of Apple’s hard line on remote work

Even if everyone who signed the petitions at Apple were to quit, they would represent less than 1 percent of its workforce. In the short term, Apple will continue to be just fine regardless of what it decides about remote work.

“Apple is probably an aberration since they’re the largest company by market cap and they have such a great tradition of innovation, and you can’t go wrong with a career at Apple,” Dice CEO Zeile said. “But there are thousands of other companies that are still going to be rigid, potentially, in their hiring practices. They’re the ones that are going to lose.”

In other words, companies that aren’t like Apple will face more challenges if they choose to emulate the tech giant’s remote work policies.

“There’s an absolute war on for talent in tech,” Julia Pollak, a labor economist at ZipRecruiter, told Recode. She says there have been very few software engineer applications per vacancy. “Where companies have said, ‘We want you back in the office,’ or, ‘We want you in the office three days a week,’ it looks as though all of those positions are softening pretty quickly. And they’re being pushed into a corner by competitors, who are saying, ‘Hey, we don’t care if you’re fully remote all day long and working out of Hawaii.’”

Some other companies may choose to react strategically, rather than following suit, if Apple continues to reject employees’ calls for full-time remote work. That would create an opening for them to offer remote work to punch above their weight and attract more applicants.

It’s notable that even the finance industry, where leaders have been vocal about their opposition to remote work, is becoming more open to it. Companies like Citibank and Jefferies Group are using this as a way to poach talent from their stricter peers like JPMorgan and Goldman Sachs.

And Twitter, which announced in May 2020 that its employees could work from anywhere forever, is already using remote work to poach talent from tech companies that are more strict about when and where people can work.

“We definitely think it gives us a competitive advantage,” Jennifer Christie, Twitter’s head of HR, told Recode. The company, she says, is telling prospective employees, “‘If you don’t want to wait and see what happens with your company’s work-from-home policy, come work for us.’ It’s a selling point for people who don’t want to be in limbo.”

In the near future, most of Apple’s employees seem like they’re willing to accept being in limbo. No matter what Apple decides, it can afford to take a hard line against employees pushing for full-time remote work. But in the long term, this battle over flexible work has created an opening for other issues and tensions to rise to the surface at the company. Its workers are organizing in ways they haven’t before, and they’re standing up to management in mostly unprecedented ways. That’s a challenge that Apple may need to deal with long after the debate over working from home is settled.

A group of 18 scientists, including the two FDA officials who stepped down, outlined their position in a letter published last week in The Lancet.

“COVID-19 vaccines continue to be effective against severe disease, including that caused by the delta variant,” they wrote. “Current evidence does not, therefore, appear to show a need for boosting in the general population.”

Other experts I spoke to shared that assessment of the evidence. There may be some waning effectiveness against any symptomatic disease, but for most people, the vaccines continue to do an excellent job of preventing hospitalizations and deaths.

“The science right now tells us that for most people, boosters probably aren’t needed to protect against severe disease or death,” Angela Rasmussen, a research scientist at the Vaccine and Infectious Disease Organization, told me over email.

Many experts believe boosters do make sense for at least some individuals, and federal officials appear to agree. The debate has been whether they should be prioritized for every vaccinated person — as Biden announced last month — or whether they should be limited to certain vulnerable populations. Should the US focus its vaccine supply on boosting all of its citizens or should it be doing more to share vaccines with the developing world, where vaccination rates remain much lower than in the United States and Europe?

With evidence so far, booster shots may make sense for some more than others

The vast majority of hospitalizations and deaths in the current wave have been concentrated among unvaccinated people. But the number of “breakthrough” infections among the vaccinated population has also been rising.

That is to be expected when three out of four US adults have received at least one dose of a Covid-19 vaccine. There are simply more vaccinated people out there than unvaccinated, and while the vaccines provide strong protection against infection, they are not perfect. Sometimes, the virus slips through, though vaccinated people remain much less likely to be hospitalized with Covid-19 or die from it.

But how often does that happen? Is vaccine effectiveness starting to decline, especially with the delta variant now dominant? The answers to those questions influence the debate over booster shots. And we are starting to get some clearer evidence of how well the vaccines are holding up in the real world.

One recent CDC study tracked new Covid-19 cases and hospitalizations from early May to late July in New York state. The study period covers the transition from the “alpha” variant to delta, which became dominant by the start of July, but only includes part of the recent surge in reported cases.

The Covid-19 vaccines became somewhat less effective in preventing any illness as the delta variant took over, the CDC researchers concluded. Back in May, vaccines had an estimated 90 percent effectiveness at preventing new infections. But by mid-July, the estimated effectiveness had dropped to just under 80 percent. By that point, vaccinated people were more likely to get infected and feel sick.

But the study found that the vaccines remained resilient against the most severe symptoms, with the estimated effectiveness against hospitalization holding steady around 95 percent from the start to the end of the study period.

Another CDC study through July examined national data on whether the Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna vaccines are becoming less effective at stopping severe illness over time. Like the New York study, it found vaccines are extremely good at their most important job — about 90 percent effective in preventing hospitalization due to Covid-19. They did not find a meaningful decline almost six months after patients received a second dose of the vaccine. A newer CDC study found some divergence between Moderna and Pfizer in preventing severe illness over time, with the former performing better than the latter, but overall effectiveness for both vaccines remained high.

Recent research out of the United Kingdom reached generally the same conclusions: modest waning in effectiveness against any symptomatic illness but little (if any) against severe outcomes for most people.

The exceptions to those broad findings have been for people who have serious medical conditions, people who are otherwise immunocompromised, and seniors.

People who received the Johnson & Johnson vaccine, which was shown to be less effective at stopping symptomatic illness, may also warrant boosters, though long-range data on that vaccine’s effectiveness is still coming in. Studies so far indicate that the vaccine still offers good protection against hospitalization, but that it may not be quite as robust against the delta variant as it was against prior iterations of the virus. The newer CDC research found that vaccine was 71 percent effective in preventing hospitalizations from March to August 2021, significantly lower than Moderna or Pfizer.

A CDC study evaluated vaccine effectiveness for nursing home residents, a population particularly vulnerable to Covid-19 and one of the first groups to get vaccinated at the beginning of this year. That study did find a significant decline in vaccine effectiveness over time against any illness for those Americans, from 75 percent pre-delta to about 50 percent post-delta. So they enjoyed less protection than younger people did from the start, and that protection did decline much more than in their younger counterparts.

Likewise, the new UK study found that the most significant drop in the vaccine’s effectiveness against hospitalization was among people 80 years and older, from about 95 percent two to nine weeks after becoming fully vaccinated to about 70 percent more than 20 weeks after. For younger age groups, that protection against severe illness stayed above 90 percent over the study period.

With that in mind, “I think you can make the argument that people who are high risk for severe Covid-19 would benefit from a booster given at least six months after completion of their initial vaccine regimen,” Rasmussen said.

What are the risks of approving too many booster shots too soon?

The case for immediately giving everybody a vaccine six or eight months after their second dose, however, is less clear.

Data from Israel suggests that people who receive a third dose have substantially more antibodies than people who have received “only” two doses. But the human immune system is complex. The number of antibodies a person has may not tell you everything about their level of immunity against Covid-19.

“Memory responses and cell-mediated immunity … are generally longer lived” than antibody responses, the authors of the Lancet letter noted, and any drop in antibodies does not necessarily indicate a drop in efficacy against hospitalization or death.

We may end up in a world where everybody eventually receives a third shot, as more data rolls in suggesting that a longer interval between doses does lead to more robust protection. In that case, giving people that third dose could “lock in” long-term immunity, Rasmussen said.

But the question is where the current vaccination drive should be: Should it be focused on third shots? Or should it be directed at unvaccinated people or sending more vaccines to poorer parts of the world where vaccination rates remain much lower than they are in the US or Europe? The WHO has specifically urged wealthy countries not to authorize booster shots until more people in the developing world receive their initial vaccine regimen.

The Lancet letter’s authors argue that vaccinating those who are unvaccinated would help stave off future variants that may prove more elusive to the existing vaccines.

“Even if some gain can ultimately be obtained from boosting, it will not outweigh the benefits of providing initial protection to the unvaccinated,” they wrote. “If vaccines are deployed where they would do the most good, they could hasten the end of the pandemic by inhibiting further evolution of variants.”

There are questions about how much America’s internal vaccine decisions would actually influence global supply. And the Biden administration, perhaps anticipating these concerns, is reportedly planning to purchase and distribute hundreds of millions of doses of the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine for other countries around the world.

One in four people in the United States have not been vaccinated, and the push is still on to get shots in their arms. It remains to be seen what effect the Biden White House’s new rules requiring employers to mandate vaccines or regular testing for their employees will have on vaccination rates. Cities and states are introducing more vaccine mandates of their own. The FDA is also expected to consider approval for vaccinating children ages 5 to 12 in the coming weeks, with approval for younger kids possible later this year.

“I’d argue that it’s more important to get vaccines to unvaccinated populations and offer boosters to high-risk people for now than it is to get a third booster six months out for all,” said Rasmussen.

Polling suggests vaccinated people are more concerned about Covid-19 than the unvaccinated. It’s understandable that they would worry about breakthrough cases and see booster shots as important protection to avoid getting infected at all. But there is no foolproof protection against Covid-19.

“Vaccines don’t create magical virus-proof force fields around you,” Rasmussen said, “and they aren’t 100 percent perfect.”

Update, September 24, 6 am: This article was updated with news of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s booster shot recommendation and details of a CDC study comparing vaccine effectiveness.

Which is to say: While Bezos and other billionaires are aiding conservation and signaling that their efforts will support a historically underfunded group of people, they’re doing little to limit the forces that make conservation necessary in the first place and that made them rich.

The age of billionaire biodiversity

Bezos’s announcement is just one of several recent pledges that have poured in from prominent billionaires — in support of biodiversity efforts like 30 by 30, which aims to protect 30 percent of all global land and oceans by 2030.

“Protecting at least 30 percent of our planet by 2030 is not a luxury but a vital measure to preserve the Earth’s health and well-being,” said Lisbet Rausing and Peter Baldwin, who run the UK-based Arcadia Fund, which is among nine philanthropy groups, including Bezos’s Earth Fund, that pledged the $5 billion to conservation this week.

Other tech moguls have also thrown their weight behind conservation in recent years, from Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff, who’s gone all-in on tree-planting, to Swiss billionaire Hansjörg Wyss, whose foundation put $1 billion into the 30 by 30 campaign. (The Wyss Foundation is also among the nine organizations that contributed to the $5 billion pledge.)

“We’re seeing a lot of [conservation funding] from billionaires, who are becoming increasingly conscious of the global cataclysm upon us,” said David Kaimowitz, a forestry director at the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, who spent more than a decade at the Ford Foundation.

Plenty of good comes from big pledges like these: They draw attention to the biodiversity crisis — which is often overshadowed by other environmental concerns — and the fact that we can’t fight climate change without also protecting nature. The Earth Fund, after all, was set up to advance climate solutions.

Bezos’s pledge is “a really important gesture that we cannot solve the climate crisis without addressing biodiversity and conservation,” said Rachael Petersen, principal and founder of Earthrise Services, a consulting firm that advises high net-worth individuals and foundations on environmental philanthropy. “I think this will usher in climate donors who realize the importance of conservation as a climate strategy.”

It’s also meaningful that much of the recent funding from billionaires will, according to the donors, go toward supporting Indigenous people and local communities. “Five years ago, such a commitment would be unthinkable,” Kaimowitz said. “There has been a sea change in the global recognition of the central role of Indigenous peoples and local communities” in conservation, he said.

Some experts like Kaimowitz are cautiously optimistic about what billionaire fortunes will bring. But others say that while it’s easy to pledge support for Indigenous-led conservation, these statements fail to capture the deeper commitments necessary for actually stemming biodiversity loss.

Can the mega-rich stop species from dying out?

There’s an idea floating around the conservation community: Once the ultrarich wake up to the extinction crisis, we might be able to solve it, said Jessica Dempsey, a political ecologist at the University of British Columbia.

But if losing nature was a problem of just money — or lack thereof — we probably wouldn’t be seeing such drastic declines of the world’s ecosystems today, said Pamela McElwee, an associate professor at Rutgers who was involved in a flagship 2019 biodiversity report, which raised the alarm about extinction threats. “If just throwing money at the problem solved the problem, we’d be farther along than where we are,” she said.

The bulk of recent pledges tend to favor somewhat traditional models of conservation, Dempsey said, such as building networks of protected areas or planting trees, which we’ve been doing for decades.

These kinds of initiatives are convenient because they work within established political and economic systems, Dempsey said — the very ones that allow billionaires to thrive. “Protected areas obviously can be extremely important,” she said. “But they don’t challenge existing concentrations of power and wealth.” A parallel might be fossil fuel companies investing in technologies that capture carbon: While those investments could reduce the greenhouse gases that are trapping heat in the atmosphere, they do nothing to disrupt the industries that spew climate-warming emissions.

Protected and conserved areas don’t, for example, address the issue of tax evasion, which limits the money that governments can spend on public conservation, Dempsey said. Bezos, like so many of the world’s ultrarich, pays barely any taxes relative to his wealth, which amounts to nearly $200 billion. “This works very well for someone like Bezos because he’s been a beneficiary of the structuring of our economy, which doesn’t tax wealth,” she said.

Traditional conservation funding also does nothing to lessen the waste created by corporations like Amazon, or the policies that enable them. The company’s carbon footprint has risen each year since 2018; last year, Amazon’s carbon emissions grew 19 percent, while global emissions fell roughly 7 percent, as Heilweil reported. What’s $1 billion — or even $5 billion — compared to the ecological harm that philanthropists’ companies have caused?

Another example of this uncomfortable juxtaposition comes from Norway, McElwee said. Much of the country’s enormous wealth stems from oil and gas production, yet Norway is also one of the world’s largest funders of forest conservation and clean energy. “Can we use capitalism to save the world from capitalism?” McElwee said.

Not in its current state, Dempsey said — unless the money from billionaires is spent on reining in their own power and influence, which is arguably antithetical to the very idea of capitalism. “You cannot have democratic approaches to any of these problems when you have that amount of concentrated wealth,” she said.

Where four experts would put $1 billion for conservation

Dempsey recommends a “two-step” approach: Protect the environment, for example by creating more reserves or conserved areas (step one), while also fostering the political, economic, or social conditions for conservation strategies to succeed (step two).

On the conservation side, experts call for more investments in communities that already know and care for the land. “A very large percentage of the biodiversity left in the world is in areas managed by Indigenous peoples and local communities,” Kaimowitz said. “They’ve been able to manage these areas and protect these resources as well as — and, in many cases, better than — non-Indigenous protected areas.”

Specifically, Kaimowitz suggests spending money on granting Indigenous people land rights, paying them for the services provided by the ecosystems they manage, and supporting initiatives focused on agroforestry — that is, natural forests that grow food or other resources. A lot of local communities have also been hit hard by the pandemic, McElwee said, and need an injection of funds now more than ever.

Bezos hasn’t yet detailed where, exactly, the billion dollars will go, but the Earth Fund says it will “give emphasis to the central role of local communities and Indigenous peoples in conservation efforts” — which is undoubtedly a step in the right direction.

Beyond that, McElwee said, it’s important that donors target the underlying causes of biodiversity loss. Here’s where nature-based philanthropy gets complicated because these efforts might not look like conservation.

They could, for example, include supporting industries that sell plant-based meats (cattle farming is a major driver of deforestation) or cleaning up corporate supply chains, instead of setting up a reserve for a rare species. “It’s easier to say, ‘We’re going to conserve X hectares of land,’” McElwee said, rather than try to fix a complex supply chain — and the companies that control it — that threatens a particular ecosystem.

Dempsey, meanwhile, would put money toward limiting the government policies that enable extractive industries, such as oil and gas, to become powerful. It should be more costly for banks and other financial institutions to lend to corporations that harm the environment, such as agribusinesses, she says. “We need to be thinking about how to rein in those flows in ways that don’t rely on voluntary measures or weak market disclosures,” she said.

We also need to fund politicians and policies that support Indigenous sovereignty, she said. There’s a limit to the impact of billionaires like Bezos if a country like Brazil — home to 60 percent of the actual Amazon, i.e. the world’s largest rainforest — doesn’t want Indigenous peoples to have autonomy and sovereignty over their resources, she said. It’s more complicated than simply saying that conservation efforts must be Indigenous-led, she added.

Similarly, McElwee wants to see more efforts directed at eliminating government incentives that benefit the oil and gas sector and other industries that harm the environment. “I would love to see a conservation organization have its mission be eliminating subsidies,” she said. “That is a perpetual issue that never seems to get solved. Maybe that will make it in your article and Bezos will read it and be, like, ‘Oh, I’m going to fund that.’”

From The Hindu: Sports

From The Hindu: National News

From BBC: Europe

From Ars Technica

From Jokes Subreddit

Working on an offshore oil rig. -

So the new guy is being shown around the offshore oil rig. And while being fascinated by the ship and machinery, he nervously asks the old-timer, “We’re going to be out here for over month, and I don’t see any women. Not one. What do we when we get horny?”

The old timer nods knowingly and says, “Well son, see that barrel over there in the corner? When the urge strikes you and you really can’t contain yourself, walk on over there, put your dick in hole on the side of the barrel: the barrel will take care of the rest. No shame here on the oil rig when it comes to the barrel. Just remember, you can use the barrel any day but Sunday.”

The new guy laughs and doesn’t think about the barrel again that morning. A day goes by on the oil rig, then another, and the new guy is starting to get a little randy, Well, that afternoon he’s over scrubbing and cleaning by the barrel. He starts to feel a little blood flow, looks around to see no one is about, and says ‘why not?’ to himself.

Down goes the zipper of his coveralls and he pops his dick into the hole on the barrel. The barrel starts giving him the best blowjob he’s ever had and he’s in bliss as his eyes roll back into his head.

An hour later he runs back to the barrel for round two.

That evening in the galley, the new guy excitedly sits down next to the old-timer, “I used the barrel twice and it was great! I’m going to use it every day now! No more frustrations on this old oil rig!” and smiles to himself.

The old-timer looks over his plate of food at the new guy and sternly lectures, “You mean every day except Sunday.”

“Why cant I use it on Sundays?” asks the new guy.

The old-timer looks the new guy straight in the eye and gives him a wink. “Sunday is your turn to sit in the barrel.”

submitted by /u/Dan_inKuwait
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A gay couple is traveling on a plane. -

Let’s call them Steve and Bill.

“What if we had sex?” asks Steve.

“Are you crazy? Here, on the plane? It would be awkward, everyone would watch us doing it…”

“Nobody is even paying attention to anything. Look!”

Steve stands up and asks loudly: “Could I have a pencil, please?”

Nobody gives a damn. Everyone is sleeping, reading, looking out the window, etc.

“They really wouldn’t care then, would they?” says Bill.

So Steve and Bill have wild sex on the plane. Later, when the plane arrives to the airport and the people are leaving, the stewardess sees an old man who threw up all over his shirt, even his pants are soaking in the filth.

“Sir, you should’ve asked for a bag!”

“I didn’t dare” whispers the old man. “A few rows ahead I saw a man asking for a pencil and he got fucked in the ass…”

submitted by /u/la_pomme_de_terre
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Friends is a Racist and Homophobic show -

Okay now that I have your attention, we’ve been trying to reach you about your cars extended warranty.

Daily-Dose

Contents

From New Yorker

From Vox

Inside the fight at Apple