Interesting Links for 06-01-2014

[andrewducker]

• One of Britain's best-known landlords has issued eviction notices to every tenant who is on welfare
  (tags: welfare uk housing )
• Where The Wild Things Are - Early DISNEY CG Animation Test
  (tags: animation disney 3d art video )
• Why we should give free money to everyone
  (tags: economics society poverty welfare GuaranteedIncome )
• Fantastic, well-

Comments

[xenophanean]

The landlord's decision does make financial sense, it may not even be the most immoral way of doing it, as they clearly wanted to highlight the situation rather than just slowly changing the situation to hedge out benefits claimants (It's still a pretty nasty thing to do though).

Housing Benefit pays to tenants, which means it's already hard enough for landlords to extract it. With the government getting ever keener on making sure that tenants don't get enough to pay their rent, it is likely to become simply impossible for many clients to pay their stated rent. The system looks less and less trustworthy to landlords, as the government tries to pull more and more punitive non-savings (homeless people are *expensive*) out of it.

It's an awful situation but it's caused by the government's ludicrous policies. I don't get why they are doing this, homeless families on the street, and children being put needlessly (and expensively) into care is an ugly outcome.

[a_pawson]

Is the housing benefit paid to the tenant nowadays? It's been about 15 years since I was unemployed, but back then housing benefit was paid directly from the DSS to the landlord, which presumably made it about as reliable source of income as a landlord could get.

[xenophanean]

No, Blair changed it, he thought that long term tenants getting used to not having to pay their rent bill wasn't good for their long-term chances of becoming responsible workers. He even introduced a scheme whereby Housing Benefit was flat-rate, so that claimants who could find cheap accommodation could get extra money for having done so (all since altered to the claimant's massive detriment, a shame as it was actually quite progressive).

From a landlord's perspective though, this was disastrous, it meant that many of their previously stable tenants were wont to hold on to the money for a while, or the worst of them, not pay at all.

[steer]

I wonder if this varied by council, changed about a lot or if my memory is flakey. I haven't claimed housing benefit since around about 1993 but I thought then it was paid to the tenant (me). I remember it didn't come close to covering all the rent.

[bart_calendar]

I'm dubious on those film stats. Remove Catching Fire and The Conjuring and you'd get very different results.

Also putting Star Trek 2 into the "fail" category is sort of dubious as well. Sure Uhura is talking about a man - but in the context of "how do will kill Khan" - which is pretty much what every male character is talking about as well. My understanding of the test is that we are to assume that the male characters are talking about something other than a man - and, really, everyone is just talking about the superterrorist.

[xenophanean]

I agree, it does look slightly shakey. Gravity technically fails, and they've decided to let it go, there are more Bechdel passing films than non-Bechdel ones. I think they have demonstrated their point, but it's not the best infographic to demonstrate that.

[spacelem]

I've always been slightly bothered by the edge cases, such as when there are only two characters, a man and a woman. You can't get much fairer than that, but it strictly fails. Also, if your film only has one person, it fails even if that one person is a woman. Admittedly I don't know any films where that's the case, but the possibility exists.

[andrewducker]

The point of the Bechdel Test was never, though, to be used as a judgement on individual films.

It was to point out that very few movies passed that requirement*, and make people think about this not being a good thing, overall.

So, yes, I agree that it has all sorts of edge cases - but focussing on it as a judgement of "goodness" is kinda beside the point.

*whereas the inverse (contains at least two men, who talk to each other about something other than a woman) is pretty ubiquitous.

[danieldwilliam]

As a tanget to first seeing this infographic on Facebook I spent quite a bit of time thinking about the Bechdel test, its utility as a predictor of sexism in any individual film, the difference between sexist films and films set in a sexist world and Dam Busters. The net result is that I have the outline of a script for a WWII film set in a fighter control room during the Battle of Britain where almost all the characters are women and the only men in it only talk about women.

[andrewducker]

I'd love to see the demographic of its potential viewers!

Actually, we have had a few dramas based around women in WWII haven't we? I'm think there was one set at Bletchley Park?

[erindubitably]

There's more and more, stuff like:

Bomb Girls
Land Girls
The Bletchley Circle
The Night Watch

and there were a couple in the 70s/80s as well (Tenko, Wish Me Luck, The Secret Army).

I'd totally watch danieldwilliam's script!

[andrewducker]

I suspect a fair number of people would - I think you get a bigger cross-section that way.