Free Republic

The film's team tells The Hollywood Reporter about studio tension, favorite improvised lines, residual checks, typecasting and the surprising path to classic status: "I don't know that there's a right way to market this movie."Office Space is celebrating its 25th anniversary following its delayed path to success, although hopefully no one would get their ass kicked for saying something like that. Released Feb. 19, 1999, director Mike Judge‘s enduring and endlessly quotable workplace satire follows computer programmer Peter Gibbons (Ron Livingston), who decides to stop caring about his day job and teams up with Initech co-workers Michael Bolton (David Herman)...

The 19.6% of office space that isn’t leased is the highest since at least 1979 ... America’s offices are emptier than at any point in at least four decades, reflecting years of overbuilding and shifting work habits that were accelerated by the pandemic. A staggering 19.6% of office space in major U.S. cities wasn’t leased as of the fourth quarter, according to Moody’s Analytics, up from 18.8% a year earlier. That is slightly above the previous records of 19.3% set in 1986 and 1991 and the highest number since at least 1979, which is as far back as Moody’s data...

Questions abound. Assume you can convert offices into homes, who wants to live in them? Is a tear-down cheaper?To ease the housing crisis, White House Opens $45 Billion in Federal Funds to Convert Offices Into HomesTaking aim at the nation’s housing crisis, the White House kicked off a multiagency push on Friday to help real-estate developers convert more office buildings emptied by the pandemic into affordable housing.The initiative aims to harness $35 billion in low-cost loans already available through the Transportation Department to fund housing developments near transit hubs, folding the initiative into the Biden administration’s clean-energy push.It also opens...

Following McCarthy's ouster, acting Speaker Patrick McHenry ordered Nancy Pelosi to leave the special hideaway office she didn't relinquish following her party's defeat in the 2022 mid-terms. The email notifying Pelosi's office of the order to get out got right to the point, noting that the office will be re-keyed if she doesn't leave. As one of his first acts as the acting speaker, Rep. Patrick McHenry ordered former Speaker Nancy Pelosi to vacate her Capitol hideaway office by Wednesday, according to an email sent to her office viewed by POLITICO. “Please vacate the space tomorrow, the room will be...

The Biden administration, the media, Democrats, and Republicans are all either willfully ignorant or blithely unaware of the looming economic crisis that's about to hit. Inflation is part of the problem, but we're going beyond job creation reports and the fallout from Silicon Valley Bank. It's a crisis that could cause all the dominoes to fall, and it doesn't help that we have a president who gets outright exhausted after a few days of work. A looming real estate crisis threatens to nuke the whole system. The bleeding has already begun, and it could take decades for some "superstar cities"...

Troubles of Brookfield DTLA show how some office-sector bets are starting to unravel ... A major Los Angeles office owner operated by Brookfield Asset Management is struggling to make mortgage payments as vacancies and rising interest rates disrupt the city’s commercial real-estate market. The company, known as Brookfield DTLA Fund Office Trust Investor Inc., owns six Los Angeles office buildings and a retail center. Five of the office buildings face the risk of foreclosure, according to its public filings, and at least two of its mortgages are in default. The company on April 21 filed to delist from the New...

The downtown office market in major cities continues to struggle after changes brought on by the pandemic, as another major investor has defaulted on loans for a pair of Downtown Los Angeles skyscrapers. According to an SEC filing, Brookfield DTLA Fund Office Trust Investor said that subsidiaries that owned the 52-story Gas Company Tower at 555 W. 5th St were in default on $465 million in loans related to the building. In addition, Brookfield DTLA has defaulted on $319 million in loans related to its 52-story building on S. Figueroa Street, the 777 Tower. In both cases, lenders for both...

He definitely has a case of the Mondays. A former Seattle software engineer has been charged with stealing more than $300,000 from the web site Zulily in a scheme inspired by the 1999 cult movie “Office Space.” Ermenildo Valdez Castro, 28, a former employee for the online shopping company, allegedly began siphoning off money from his employer this spring by making alterations to the company’s software, CNN reported. Castro installed three types of malicious code, which targeted a small portion of Zulily customers and diverted their shipping fees to a bank account he controlled, KIRO reported. Castro also double-charged some...

Is New York City's central business district finally recovering after Covid-19? The simple answer is no. Although residential rents in Manhattan were inflated to record highs, the rise of remote work quelled any recovery for the office space market in the borough. Bloomberg reported blocks of decades-old office buildings sitting partially empty are becoming a multibillion-dollar problem for building owners. Even though Goldman, Morgan Stanley, and other Wall Street firms have pushed for a return to the office after the Labor Day holiday, NYC's office-occupancy trends are still below half, according to card-swipe data provided by Kastle Systems. Office vacancy...

For a year and a half, New York City's communist mayor and the state's dumber-than-Fredo governor used covid to shove people around. They closed restaurants and forced people to wear masks. Crime rose as the Red Mayor promoted BLM lawlessness. And the Dumb Guv spread covid into nursing homes and killed 15,000 grannies.That's right. 1 in 20 (5%) of the covid deaths last year were due to Andrew Cuomo's order that nursing homes take in covid patients.The press hailed him as a hero.But there's a new governor and in a couple of months Gotham will have a new mayor. But...

It's all too common in corporate America: you're hanging out by the water cooler and you suddenly think to yourself, "Hey, wait a minute -- is that guy over there with the AK-47 part of a violent insurgent group internationally recognized as terrorists? I think he just might be!" Yep -- accidentally sharing office space with terrorists is a real problem. Make sure your building doesn't get leveled by a retaliatory airstrike by checking your office space for these eight signs that you might be sharing the building with terrorists: 1. You notice suicide vests hanging on the coat rack....

The virus pandemic has accelerated more flexible work options for employees, with many companies instructing employees to work remotely through 2021, or in some cases, permanently. As a result, according to a new survey, CEOs have said they will slash office space, a move that could ripple through commercial real estate markets, all the way down into local economies. In collaboration with Deloitte, Fortune surveyed 171 CEOs between Sept. 23 to 30, found 76% of respondents are expected to reduce office space size in the near term. About 28% of them said they would need "a lot less" corporate...

Mike Judge’s workplace satire “Office Space” was a bona fide box-office flop when it grossed a measly $10.8 million in 1999. But once the comedy was discovered on DVD and cable, “Office Space” became a cult sensation, spreading concepts like “flair” and “assclown” across pop culture. Servers at T.G.I. Friday’s might want to raise a glass to “Office Space,” because according to a 2004 New York Magazine interview with Judge, the restaurant not only got rid of its dorky striped shirts but also the mandatory flurry of pins and buttons — known as “flair” — a few years after the...

A civil servant in southern Spain failed to turn up at the office for six years but no-one noticed and he still collected his salary each month, it has emerged. The long-term absenteeism of Joaquín García, an engineer employed by the municipal water company in Cádiz, was only discovered when he was considered for an award for performing 20 years of loyal service. The case emerged this week after a court ordered him to pay a fine of €27,000 for his prolonged absence, a figure that amounted to less than one year of his annual €37,000 salary, the maximum that...

Simply put, this is the funniest political ad in history. Bar none. HILARIOUS Ted Cruz ad Nails Hillary With 'Office Space' Parody. Click to view the ad.

An April Congressional Research Service (CRS) report shows that the Government Services Administration (GSA), which is in charge of supporting federal disbursements, budgeted $950,000 for former president Bill Clinton in the 2014 budget. Clinton will collect a $201,000 pension in 2014, a figure four times larger than the median family income in the United States. The Clintons have received a total of $15,938,000 in federal money since 2001. Hillary Clinton recently described the poverty her family experienced upon exiting the White House while promoting her book. They were “dead broke,” Hillary said, adding that she and her husband “struggled to,...

Millions of Years of Evolution Equal Engineering? by Brian Thomas, M.S. * Increasing numbers of innovative researchers borrow from biology when they examine and incorporate living systems into man-made designs. We know how man-made designs originate— people design them. But what about living designs? Two recent biomimicry research programs let slip major logic errors when accounting for the origin of the creatures they copy: the seahorse and kangaroo. In a video posted online about a year ago, researchers led by the University of California's Joanna McKittrick were seen mimicking the seahorse tail's expert balance between flexibility and rigidity in their...

Last week’s disappointing unemployment report has refocused attention on the question of why, despite modest signs of economic recovery in recent months, American companies aren’t hiring. Indeed, some of the most puzzling stories to come out of the Great Recession are the many claims by employers that they cannot find qualified applicants to fill their jobs, despite the millions of unemployed who are seeking work. Beyond the anecdotes themselves is survey evidence, most recently from Manpower, which finds roughly half of employers reporting trouble filling their vacancies. The first thing that makes me wonder about the supposed “skill gap” is...

Investor's Business Daily reports that due to ObamaCare, Health and Human Services is on track to become "the first $1 trillion federal agency." This expansion of government leads to new hiring (e.g., 650 new employees to work in the Medicare/Medicaid Center for Consumer Information and Insurance Oversight), and these new federal employees need desks and cubicles. Thus it's not surprising to read in the Montgomery County Gazette: The federal government proved the savior for commercial real estate in the Maryland suburbs of Washington, D.C., last year and 2011 is shaping up the same way. That was the good news...

<p>ON CAPITOL HILL Valerie Wilson Testifies Rep. Henry Waxman (D-CA) chairs a House Oversight and Government Reform Ctme. hearing on the disclosure of CIA Agent Valerie Plame Wilson's identity. The hearing will look into whether White House officials followed appropriate procedures for safeguarding the identity of Ms. Wilson.</p>