Week One Blog One

My name is Mike Scarpitta. I am a transfer student from Los Angeles California. This is my first semester at ASU. My major is urban and metropolitan studies. I am twenty five years old. I have three older brothers. I love to go camping, fishing and traveling. I just spent the last four month in Alaska traveling around. That was an amazing experience! I just moved to Tempe last week. I have to say that Tempe and Phoenix are really great! It amazes me to see the difference from Los Angeles. Everything is so clean! Both cities are modernly renovated. I am not used to a city that has it's act together. I am used to paying extremely high taxes, and still having graffiti on every sign and billboard. Pot holes on every street. Not to mention  the traffic and the mass number of vacant and abandoned commercial buildings and stores. Their seems to be more shopping and places to eat than anyone could ever want here. They seem to be thriving. In California I worked for a geotechnical soil engineer for the past five years. In which I was involved in a range of regulatory policies. Such as in forcing OSHA codes, and other local city codes. I also own a carpet cleaning company in California. I am excited to learn from this class. Professor Lucio seems great! I am excited to see how this class unfolds.  

The first day of class seemed to be very exciting. On more than one occasion  some pretty heated debates broke out! I can't imagine how things will go when people actually get to know one another. This class seems to be filled with a mix of opinionated people. This should make for some interesting discussions. This makes me wish that this class met more than once a week. On second thought maybe it is best that we only meet once a week. I don't want people to get to fired up at one another. A six day break is probably best to keep peace. 

I am fairly new to the whole idea of policies, and policy making. I am some what familiar with the macro view of the major polices and why they are made. While reading Public PolicyMaking a section really stood out to me. The idea that "all laws incorporate biases that benefit some groups and disadvantage other groups. Which is an intrinsic feature of public polices. Rarely does a public policy make everyone better off"(Anderson pg 8). This put in my head a whole new outlook on policy and policy making. The entire process of making policies seems some what skewed. I feel like policies are nothing but an on going cycle. Each one acting as a change or and addition to current and existing polices. Don't get me wrong though! I still believe that polices created for distributive , regulatory, self-regulatory and redistributive are all important.