Yes, you're absolutely right (oh wait, you were being sarcastic?).
Owning a car is a real pain that I would prefer not to do. It costs a lot of buy and then a lot to insure and then a lot to maintain and repair. I'm willing to pay for that at the moment for the convenience it adds to my lifestyle. A shared resource spreads all those costs and will probably be even more convenient. I won't need to worry about how to get my car home in the evening if I want to have a drink after work since I won't have taken it to work in the morning - that's freedom right there. I wouldn't be tied to my car. I don't need to worry about finding parking in the city. That frees up a lot of time, searching for a spot and walking from and back to the car park. That's freedom.
Also I don't need to worry about where to park it at night, I could convert my driveway to be a place that I can enjoy the use of. All those city streets packed with on road parking would be freed up - imagine how pleasant streets could be if they were jam packed with parked cars, more dedicated cycle lanes, more room for kids to play and more room for leafy trees.
There is no good solution to this, and I think it's good that you've thought about this (sincerely), we need more people to be looking at these problems and thinking about them without ideological blinkers. My view is that I don't think it would work quite as well as you think. The arguments I've heard against this is that for government "employer of last resort" type work you:
1) get rid of any current low paid work covered by government - for example street cleaning and rubbish collection, since you don't need to employ people to do that work any more since you're getting the unemployed to do it - unfortunately probably the people who were until recently doing the street cleaning and rubbish collection, but now are unemployed. Worse they are taking home less money than they were before, are more dependent on welfare programmes and additionally are stigmatised for being unemployed.
2) (most of) the work they would do is useless - otherwise it would have been being done before. The people doing these "make work" are likely unskilled, so you can't get them to do anything requiring skills, and they probably don't want to do it (they are essentially being coerced to do the job) and will do the minimum they can get away with - for example look at community service sentences for offenders who have to pick up litter to "pay back to their community", they do an extremely poor job of it and need constant attention from an supervisor (who could do all the work on their own more quickly and more effectively).
It's not as simple as just being unproductive though, not only do you need someone to supervise that the unemployed person is actually doing something to "earn" their $10/hour, you need to keep records. So it results in a net loss of productivity - you are taking a productive person and now putting them on an unproductive task and you are employing bureaucrats to administer the system. If the cost of the bureaucracy is more than the worth of the work then it's a net loss - you might as well just pay people to sit at home and it would cost less no matter how galling it feels to pay someone for doing nothing.
3) Finally, there is the issue that if companies can get away will paying less per hour then they will do. It will mean that more people end up needing welfare support and overall it just ends up costing the government more in welfare and companies giving more profit to their shareholders - who if it was all fair and equitable would end up being the ones who pay the additional taxes so that the government has the additional money to pay for the additional welfare. We all know that that is not how the tax burden would be distributed though, it will be the middle classes who suffer under that additional burden. Ultimately, the cost of the bureaucracy of the welfare programmes can be more than the that of administering the minimum wage and the loss of potential increase in productivity through having those additional jobs from work that is currently unproductive at the minimum wage level and so ends up as a net loss to the nations wealth.
It's a fine balancing act and as I said originally there is no good solution that can solve all the issues. We just have to try and find the best balanced solution - some level of minimum wage and some safety net programmes - without allowing ideology cloud our judgement (on either side).
Mr. Powers said
Now that is a wonderful example of nominative determinism.
I think we'll see the 'ownership' issue disappear over time.
In the aircraft market, airlines no-longer own their engines, they buy 'thrust' through programmes such as Rolls-Royce's 'power by the hour'. I see this type of model moving into the consumer area increasingly. Why own a battery when you can pay a small monthly fee for provision of energy?
I'm not sure about US, but in UK we're already seeing people essentially give up ownership of their cars and move to a constant finance model with Personal Contract Purchase (PCP) payments. They pretty much never own the car, instead they have it for 3 years and hand it back in return for a new car and new PCP. This is changing the way that many people think about car ownership, it's only a small leap to move to a system where you pay for your car through usage and the service company ensures that you have a vehicle with a charged battery when you need it.
We're already seeing it in the music market, people are happy to pay for a music service rather than own CDs.
The plan is to build six of these lagoons. They expect to gets these built and operational *before* the new nuclear power station is completed. When the six are built they will generate a similar amount of power to that nuclear power station at a similar price per MWh. The lagoons have an expected life of 120 years, whereas the nuclear power station has a significantly shorter one, plus there are no major decommissioning costs.
By building both nuclear and tidal (and other forms of generator), we spread our risks.
Not to mention the nuclear plant is a joint Chinese and French operation with the profits flowing out of the country. The tidal power station is a British one, meaning that the profits stay in the UK economy.
I would agree with you if each book was a stand alone. However, he's writing the story as a series of books. A writer who doesn't finish the story is not a good writer. I think ultimately we'll be able to decide whether the series as a whole is good is only when the series is finished.
Looking at the individual books, the first few we excellent and why the series has the good reputation that it has, but they had something in common, they each had a beginning, middle and end within the context of the overall arc. Where I think things have gone downhill is that he hasn't yet finished the book that started in Feast and continued in Dance. Originally this was intended as one book. First he split it into into Feast and Dance, and then when the TV series was launched, he had to deliver Dance so that it could be published that summer. He hadn't finished it in time, so had to leave off the ending deferring it to The Winds of Winter. So one could argue that he's not actually published a finished book in the series for fifteen years and counting.
Real Programmers don't write in FORTRAN. FORTRAN is for pipe stress freaks and crystallography weenies. FORTRAN is for wimp engineers who wear white socks.