Moving day

So we're moving to a another blog. It's a bit more unique, so visitors can perhaps find it more easily (As it turns out, there are already several academics in exile blogging away).

Other than that, business as usual.

We're at  The Makeshift Academic now, so all of my readers (both of you) can update your links.

My blog is dead. Long live my blog!

Ignorance is bliss: How Americans' low political knowledge may help "Obamacare" work better

For those of you nervous about the success the health-care exchanges, take a look at this letter:

It's a boring HR letter. That's actually the point. 

(Photo by Patrick O'Mahen)

It comes from the benefits office of my most recent employer, the University of Michigan, with which I am still nominally affiliated. The letter describes coming options under the Affordable Care Act. It indicates that UM offers many employees health care benefits that meet standards for the ACA, and indicates that other employees can go get health insurance on the exchanges.

Polls suggest that Americans don’t particularly love the ACA. Most polls also suggest that they don’t understand it. With uncertain roll-out and the loud and well-funded campaign encouraging people not to sign up on the exchanges, many of the law’s backers (including me) are a bit nervous. But it’s reassuring that a letter like this that will be many Americans’ first contact with the health care law. 

Follow me below the fold for my reasoning.

"The Sound of Freedom"

When Texas Gov. Rick Perry officially marked the opening of the Katy Freeway expansion in 2008, he declared that the roar of traffic in the background was "the sound of freedom."

Freedom:

 
10 mph, thousands of unnecessary of tons of carbon emissions and particulate pollution, thousands of wasted hours sitting in traffic. Freedom, indeed. Didn't George Orwell write a few things about this?

Sure, technically that's is the Southwest Freeway I snapped walking home a few days ago, but I guarantee that I-10 looked the same or worse. And yes, that bumper-to-bumper center lane is the HOV toll lane. At least the toll-authority was collecting $4.75 for every non-HOV vehicle to recoup some of the costs for ramming this monstrosity through a residential neighborhood. (The rich white neighborhoods got expensive trenching and soundproofing -- African American communities didn't make out so well in highway construction.)

Thank God I can walk home -- it's faster.

And thank God that (some parts of)] this region has finally started to get serious about transportation planning over the last decade -- because if 13- and 18-lane freeways can't handle the volume, I doubt that it's cost effective or desirable to build any road that can.

The University Light Rail Line can't get here fast enough.