Free Republic

The debate around the value of flexible work for government workers has intensified, not only at the federal level but also in state government, with certain legislators adamant about mandating a return to traditional office settings. In Wisconsin, this has come to a head, with Gov. Tony Evers (D) threatening to veto any state budget that contains return-to-office mandates for state employees. Using Wisconsin as a lens, it is evident that pushing government employees back into the office en masse is not only counterproductive but also short-sighted, ignoring the realities of modern work dynamics and evidence supporting flexible arrangements. Wisconsin’s...

The federal workforce is the equivalent of the Soviet Nomenklatura. The big difference between the Soviet bureaucracy and the US federal bureaucracy is that a much larger percentage of the federal workforce gets the special benefits that were reserved for top Communist Party members in the Soviet Union. The Daily Wire's invaluable reporter, Luke Rosiak, reports on the sorry state of the federal workforce and on the Department of Government Efficiency's determination to reform a broken system. 94% of feds are still working from home--the EPA had poisonous water *in its own headquarters* because it was sitting in the pipes...

The FBI has released the first photos of the AR-15 rifle that Thomas Matthew Crooks used in his attempt to kill former President Donald Trump in Butler, Pennsylvania last month. The images show that Crooks — a 20-year-old gun nut — broke down the semi-automatic DPMS DR-15 rifle into two pieces and stowed it in a black SwissGear backpack as he made his way through the Butler, Pa. rally crowd. A closer look at the weapon reveals an approximately three-inch chunk missing from the gun’s buttstock, which could be where the police sniper’s bullet struck before the Secret Service sniper...

It seems to be the controversial topic of the ages...only it has worsened since post-pandemic. It's the great remote work divide...also dubbed "The Great Return" and "The Great Office Return" by others. Although in theory, remote work has essentially been in existence for decades, it has only become a hot topic of late, and become aggravated even more, with the recent headline-grabbing strides of big-name employers who dared to mandate employees to return to office-based work (affectionately known as RTO)—or risk losing their jobs.

Homework clubThe pandemic turned the world upside down. People stockpiled toilet paper, did yoga over Zoom, baked banana bread, bought Pelotons, went crazy for online shopping, and anyone who was even thinking about buying a pool went and got one. Pretty much all of those trends have since returned to normal, but a major one has remained: working from home.According to new data published in the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ Time Use Survey for 2023, ~35% of all employed persons in the US spent the average working day doing at least some of their work from home — up from...

“Disappointed, frustrated and angry.” That is how New York City’s Public Schools chancellor David Banks described how he felt after the “remote-learning test” the bureaucrats decided they would impose on children in place of giving them a snow day off on Tuesday. “Disappointed, frustrated and angry,” is surely how millions of public school children felt too, when they were informed they would be “remote-learning,” instead of going to the park to build snowmen when they saw the forecast.

New York City public schools are going remote Tuesday due to a winter storm that is forecast to dump as much as 8 inches of snow on the Big Apple, Mayor Eric Adams said. “We’re expecting winter weather overnight tonight which could lead to 5-8 inches of snow with locally higher amounts by the morning,” Hizzoner tweeted Monday. We're expecting winter weather overnight tonight which could lead to 5-8 inches of snow with locally higher amounts by the morning. As a result, all @NYCSchools will move to remote learning tomorrow.

A Brooklyn high school principal lashed out at parents who ripped her decision to boot students out of the classroom the day after 2,000 migrants moved in for a night. “How dare someone say that I don’t care about kids,” roared James Madison High School principal Jodie Cohen on a Zoom call Tuesday at parents seething that she “sold the kids out” by having them go remote the day after the migrants were evacuated from Floyd Bennett Field because of a torrential rain storm.

The remote Zorro Ranch where Jeffrey Epstein’s sex slave has claimed she was flown as a teenager to meet Prince Andrew alone has finally been sold. None of the late paedophile’s victims will benefit from the multi-millionaire dollar sale. However, shockingly, his partner in crime, Ghislaine Maxwell, could get some of the money. Last night, one of Epstein’s victims branded the possibility “beyond deplorable”. The now 35-year-old, who was abused by the financier when she was a schoolgirl, told Daily Express US: "Is there no depth Ghislaine will stoop to? Not happy with inflicting abuse on young girls with Jeffrey,...

Officials in California are facing fierce scrutiny over increasing crime as some federal employees are being told to work from home over fears surrounding public safety. Independent journalist Erica Sandberg described what she called utter "mayhem" in San Francisco during "Fox & Friends" as state workers were reportedly told to work remotely. "What we're seeing right now is a matter of just mayhem with not enough police officers on the beat... not empowering stores to do what they need to do in order to stop this," she told Ainsley Earhardt Tuesday. "You shouldn't let people into the store who are...

The explosion of remote work in recent years may come with a physical toll. Three years after the arrival of COVID-19 triggered a mass exodus from offices, about 22 million Americans were still working fully remotely as of March 2023, according to Pew Research Center data. The shift to remote work has been life-changing for many working adults, like those who have disabilities or are caregivers to family members, and surveys show Americans as a whole love working from home.

Just got a roku TV with a used camper trailer Simple Remote is dead, batteries are fine. I cannot believe that the on-set buttons are useless. I have reset the entire box and am stuck at the language menu. No way to select or enter from the buttons on the side. Can anyone help.

In the aftermath of the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank (SVB), the 16th biggest bank in the country, many are left wondering what went wrong. Both current and former employees have stated that the bank’s support of remote work is a contributing factor. Axios reports that current and former employees of Silicon Valley bank have mentioned the bank’s support of remote work as a contributing factor to its recent collapse. SVB stood out in the banking sector for its commitment to remote work. “If our time working remotely has taught us anything, it’s that we can trust our employees to...

Remote work may boost marriage rates and encourage women who are already parents to have more children, a new paper found. Economist Adam Ozimek and demographer Lyman Stone, analyzing the survey data of 3,000 American women between the ages of 18-44 from the Demographic Intelligence Family Survey, hypothesize that “remote work during COVID made a positive contribution to the U.S. and potentially other developed countries’ fertility rates.” The findings come after the U.S. reported the lowest fertility rate on record in 2020.

SIDNEY, MT — The quiet town of Sidney, Montana made headlines recently after a transdimensional portal appeared in the home of Bob and Cynthia Allen. Sources say the wife accidentally opened the time-tunneling tesseract while trying to find the power button on the remote. The cat was sucked into the otherworldly vortex before the couple realized what was happening. "I just pushed all the colored buttons, hoping one of them turned it off!" screamed Cynthia while clutching the kitchen table with her husband and watching her favorite bowl disappear into the otherworldly schism. "This is why I just let you...

A growing number of office landlords are defaulting on loan payments as the rise of remote work causes more corporate tenants to rethink long-term leases... The delinquency rate on office loans increased by a quarter percentage point to 1.83% last month .. While the number is still relatively low, the increase was the sharpest of its kind since December 2021. ... The shift away from traditional offices has impacted major firms. Brookfield Asset Management recently disclosed a default on more than $70 million in debt on two office towers in Los Angeles. In Manhattan, real estate firm RXR is reportedly...

The pandemic may be winding down, but the work-from-home revolution marches on. Nearly 30 percent of all work happened at home in January, six times the rate in 2019, according to WFH Research, a data-collection project. In Washington and other large urban centers, the share of remote work is closer to half. In the nation’s biggest cities, entire office buildings sit empty. The COVID-19 pandemic transformed the American workplace. The share of all work performed at home rose from 4.7 percent in January 2019 to 61 percent in May 2020. Some economists consider the remote-work boom the greatest change to...

A new report has put a price on exactly what the "work from home" trend has cost the office-laden city of Manhattan: a stunning $12 billion per year. Working at home means that office workers who would normally be out and about are spending $12 billion less than what they spent before the pandemic, according to a new Bloomberg News study.The average worker is spending about 30% less time in the office, meaning that spending on food and entertainment has fallen by about $4,700 per person, data from Stanford University shows.On a per-person basis, the figure is higher than anywhere...

Andrea Vuleta-Jensen of Jordan, Minn., jumped at the chance to take a full-time remote position in February 2021 as a project manager with MSP Communications in Minneapolis, a content marketer behind Mpls.St. Paul Magazine and Twin Cities Business. “They sold the role by saying if your kid doesn’t sleep at night, you can work in the afternoon, take a nap with him. Your child is your number-one responsibility. I just thought this would be a great role for this time in my life,” Vuleta-Jensen said. “This is me going back into the workforce and one of the hardest times going...

The coronavirus pandemic solidified the idea people don’t have to show up at an office to get work done. That fresh reality has led to a growing number of people relocating to more affordable cities across the country. But while the development is beneficial to remote — or so-called Zoom — workers, it is leading to rent increases in areas where newcomers are settling in. And in some cases forcing low-income residents to leave the neighborhood.