The Elevator, Silence of the Lambs

People forget it, but this is the entirety of the film. Clarice is running scared through a maze of men who couldn't give less of a shit about her skills, her opinions, or even her flesh itself. pic.twitter.com/8mrKL4dSL1

— Gretchen Felker-Martin (@scumbelievable) July 28, 2018

Great scene, and one of my favorite shots from any movie. Says so much while doing so little. Excellent photography and directing.

Other than writing and communication abilities, I think one of the reasons I am successful in IT is that I often know half a dozen ways or more to do the same thing. Most IT people know one, maybe two.

For instance, I was just trying to copy a directory structure but not the files, and then move the entire structure somewhere else that is (supposedly) firewall-restricted and has no copy and paste ability. The first few things I tried did not work. This is where most IT people would’ve been halted. But I pulled out some IT jiu jitsu from the 1980s and got the dir struct copied and then ferried off to where it needed to be. This structure would be impossible to recreate by hand, as it involves a few thousand nested directories.

I know that anyone can learn IT, and I understand how the mythology of “I’ve been doing this my whole life” can harm women and others, but at the same time there is definitely some difference when you’e been doing this shit since you were four years old.

The problem with the “economist hat” is that it makes otherwise smart people very, very stupid.

If I put my economist’s hat on, there is an incentive problem with the basic income plans, unless one is very very careful. And that incentive problem is that for many people the basic income looks better than working in low-pay jobs or perhaps in any jobs.

Yes, that is the whole point! UBI is effectively a price floor, in economic terms, as I am sure she knows since she is in fact an economist. A binding price floor imposed by UBI would definitely change the labor market, though economists are ideologically restricted from understanding the full scope of changes over time — just that minimum wage is bad, mmmkay?

Economics causes brain damage, alas. Avoiding technical jargon for now because I don’t have time to make a million links to Wikipedia, but over time the entire labor market will shift. The same jobs (will mostly) still get done, effective redistribution will occur, and the real consequence is that the very rich and some of the petite bourgeoisie will be somewhat less rich.

This is why economic ideology doesn’t wish to allow for UBI, etc.

The Australian minimum wage is currently $18.93 an hour and yet office buildings still get cleaned, they still have fast food restaurants, and somehow work still gets done.

(If you don’t get my point, a min. wage and UBI are both similar price floors. But a UBI could be the floor below the floor.)

I am not sure that UBI is the right solution. A job guarantee would probably be better, with a combination of the Marshall Plan focused internally with the best parts of the space race because we’re going to need all that and more to combat climate change.

But I do know that modern economics is capable of telling us very little useful about any of this.

I got some sort of lemon cake flavor ice cream. I don’t think it’s ever seen a real lemon as it tastes like lemon cleaner smells.

But I also kind of liked it. I guess that means I like eating lemon cleaner. I will probably eat more of it — the ice cream, not actual lemon cleaner.