Heavy Doses

Heavy Doses

Heavy Doses is the name of Portfolio.com's new blog on health care. Portfolio was a magazine from Conde Nast that shut down recently-it was best described as an "Esquire for business"-it was slick, but had some great writing, and deep, informative articles, and it was the first place I saw any reporting on the enormous derivative crisis that nearly killed us all.

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Route 1 in Princeton, NJ is a disaster. If you're going to let a big company build a large hotel in your town, you have to widen the roads near it. You HAVE TO. That's just what you do.

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Kevin Youkilis and Rick Porcello are both suspended 5 games for the brouhaha last night.

This introduces several flaws in justice, baseball style.

1) Porcello is a starting pitcher. If he had done his normal work last night, he wouldn't have pitched for 4 of those games anyway. If you're going to suspend a starting pitcher, you need to do it differently from a position player.

2) 20 years ago, teams took care of this on the field. You hit my guy, I hit your guy, we move on with our lives.

3) If pitchers get warned about potentially hitting batters, it fundamentally changes the game. If pitchers are afraid to come inside, they can't then effectively utilise the outside corner, and the hitters just lean over the plate and it's bombs away.

4) On the other hand, you can't have headhunting going on.

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Jason Calacanis is a entrepreneur and general all around smart guy. He has stopped blogging, but offers an email list for his occasional thoughts on technology and things in general. It's worth your time. Just go to tinyurl.com/jasonslist to sign up.

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On The Media (onthemedia.org) had an interesting point about the health care protests, pointing out that the astroturf ralliers are simply taking a page out of the old lefty Saul Alinsky's textbook-thus pointing out that it is hypocritical to complain when your own tactics are used against you.

That's true.

But Alinsky wanted to challenge power in order to help the powerless. The astroturf protesters are challenging the government (which they elected) on behalf of the powerful.

I have less respect for that.