Trump needs a prolonged diversion from his growing roster of scandals, some of which are actually starting to stick. What better, then, than the invasion of an unsuspecting banana republic? (I mean, other than his own, which he is also doing, spawning yet more scandals). Americans love a good war, or the chatter about one, even after having their noses fruitlessly bloodied for 20 years in Iraq and Afghanistan.

There is not a more fertile target for some good ol’-fashioned sabre-rattling than a largely defenceless tin-pot communist petro-state. Spinning the globe, our finger inevitably lands upon Venezuela. It has all the great hallmarks: a whiff of communism, a fantastically weird dictatorship, lots of money sloshing around thanks to petroleum exports, an international pariah subject to crippling sanctions and even more crippling national debt.

Its military has some modern hardware, with ships sourced from Europe and Su-30 fighters supplied by Russia, and a mechanized infantry that includes ~100 armoured vehicles from China. Despite those fighters and modern fighting ships in limited quantities, air and naval assets are likely to be in some state of disrepair. And with a military hampered by extremely limited funding for maintenance and training, Venezuela could probably be dominated in the air and sea by a single US carrier group (and, given its proximity to Florida, the CG would not need to operate without USAF support).

Trump has been playing chicken with Maduro and Venezuela since his first term. It’s an easy game to win. Mostly this has just amounted to a bunch of feathers flying and name-calling. But since Trump’s domestic problems have been mounting, so has the chicken game begun to escalate. US Marines have begun to mass, afloat near the coast of Venezuela.

This task force (including two LPDs and an LHD) is capable of landing a bit more than 2 battalions worth of US Marines, and roughly 50-60 fighting vehicles (including Humvees). The presence of a Ticonderoga-class Cruiser would imply the offensive use of land-attack missiles, and the three Arleigh Burkes would quite adequately defend the fleet against air and sea threats. Conspicuous by their absence, though, is a US carrier battle group.

The US carrier fleet right now is stretched thin (by US standards) and it’s no surprise there isn’t a carrier battle group yet tasked to the region. I’m not privy to any more information than you, so it’s possible there’s a group coming on/off rotation from the Atlantic Fleet that could be tasked to contribute to the theatrics of this with a sail-past. But I would suggest if a carrier group does arrive and actually lingers in the region, which is doubtful, then this will have become more than just another of Trump’s melodramas.

In the unlikely event that some sort of Marine landing is to be attempted, the task force detailed above (which could potentially deploy as many as 2,800 Marines) is really not enough to do more than capture the beaches near Caracas, and attempt to depose Maduro before making a hasty retreat. Venezuela can muster some 220,000 to 300,000 troops of varied levels of training in its defence. And a longer ground war targeting substantial regime change would need a very high commitment of US forces over a protracted period. While this likely sounds like music to Trump’s ears (think: distraction), I’d like to think that cooler heads would prevail to prevent such an ill-conceived excursion.

If the Marines were indeed dispatched to remove Maduro from Caracas, even that limited mission would prove difficult. While Caracas is near the coast, it’s fortified by a 7,200ft high mountain range. Beaching their gear would be very doable, but moving 3,000 Marines and their armour to the capital would expose them to huge risk of ambush and counterattack by a mechanized infantry of comparable size.

So. until I see 30,000 or more Marines massing, and a Nimitz-class carrier group stalking the Venezuelan Coastline, I’m going to call this what it is: more Trump bluster.

Meanwhile, I’m going to re-watch Wag The Dog.

This week, the Conservative Party of Canada – Parti conservateur du Canada have been all over Mark Carney’s fully-costed election platform: this means a set of policies and promises for which Carney and his team have literally done the math, determining how to pay for them. He published this less than 40 days after winning the leadership race for his party.

… and of course, these are all fair game for criticism.

Here’s the problem: It’s impossible to levy the same sort of criticism toward Mr. Poilievre. Despite having been the leader of his own party for more than two years, Poilievre has NOT published a costed platform of any sort in his bid for Prime Minister. In fact, they have offered no budgetary figures to underpin their campaign promises at all.

As for his track record? Mr. Poilievre has served in Parliament for more than 20 years without authoring or whipping a single piece of legislation. And his undergraduate degree from the University of Calgary? That required no thesis or defence. Those are literally the only two entries on his curriculum vitae.

Mr. Poilievre promises change, of that vague sort that doesn’t seem to connect to specific legislative or policy initiatives that he might entertain, and if you believe that this is what he represents then you are making a clear leap of faith. But let’s not pretend that this party is following the practises and conventions of an apples-to-apples contest of policies.

In my view, Mr. Poilievre wants to be Prime Minister far more than he wants to put in the work and thought that is required for that job. Instead, he thinks that simply by assembling a creche of malcontents he can skate his way into office.

… only unlike Mark Carney, Pierre Poilievre can’t actually skate.

In response to 9/11, we in the west ceded our moral high ground by lashing out and invading multiple countries, thus clearing any legitimate moral objection we might pose toward the invasion of Ukraine, and indeed the possible future invasion of Taiwan.

We flaunted international law, committed countless human rights violations, and expended our own blood and treasure in great quantities, ultimately accomplishing nothing in the name of global order — in fact giving rise to far worse and larger terrorist organizations like ISIL.

Amid the tragedy of this week’s open conflict in Israel and Gaza, Benjamin Netanyahu and his cabinet will prove to have learned nothing from their decades of conflict. Untold civilian tragedies will occur at the hands of both Hamas and Israel. Hamas will gain credibility and power among Palestinians in Israel and abroad, garnering deeper financial and logistical support from global forces of destabilization.

Because their foe cannot temper their response, Hamas will emerge stronger from this conflict, while sacrificing thousands of their own citizens. Israel will be bloodied and their global reputation further sullied. Israelis will remain divided on issues like apartheid and West Bank occupation.

Peace will not prevail. Violence will achieve no tangible results.

Before you lend your unequivocal support to Israel during this crisis, think back to how that same unequivocal support for George W Bush and his cabinet on September 12, 2001 unleashed 21 years of war, death, and needless destruction.

Let’s support Israel, and Israelis affected by this violence. Let’s also lend a thought toward the millions of Palestinians who, despite decades of oppression, didn’t ask for this attack by Hamas — but who will largely bear its consequences.

For my part I choose to support Israelis, but not the Israeli government. I choose to support the Palestinian cause, but not Hamas.

Reprinted here without permission, my father Dennis Bell‘s 1972 article (impossible to find online in its unabridged form) which was heralded as Canadian Press’ Story of the Year in 1972, and was the source of some controversy. Dad spent a lot of time in Canada’s north exploring and looking for stories, was embroiled in the creation of the Sour Toe Cocktail, and became inexorably tied to the story of Polly the Foul-Mouthed Parrot. In a less-lauded follow-up, Dennis reported that Polly died in November 1972, not long after my dad’s article had been reprinted in hundreds of newspapers all over the world and journalists and tourists began to flock to the Caribou Hotel — this led to speculation that the story was contrived, but my father and the hotel’s proprietors insisted it was 100% (okay, mostly) true. Dad went “viral” decades before that would become a thing. But as with most of his adventures, the story about the story is practically more interesting than the story itself.

Parrot Reformed but Hates Everyone

By Dennis Bell – October 20, 1972

The world famous Carcross Parrot is probably the oldest, meanest, ugliest, dirtiest bird north of the 60th parallel—but he remains as this Yukon community’s one claim to international fame.

He hates everybody. Which is understandable, because the damned old buzzard has resided within spitting distance of a beer parlour since 1919 and has had to endure 64 years of beer fumes, drunks who mash soggy crackers through the bars of his cage, and phantom feather pluckers.

The Carcross Parrot seems to have been in the Yukon ever since the Klondike Gold Rush of 1898. He is at least 125 years old and has lived in the Caribou Hotel since 1919. He has survived a fire that flattened the premises, fall frost and ferocious winter blizzards and has outlived everyone who ever owned the tiny 22-room hotel. And that’s quite a few people.

The Carcross Parrot gets fan mail. People from as far away as California have heard about him and some have travelled all the way to the Yukon after hearing about him from parents and grandparents.

Bird of Ill Repute

Time was when the Carcross Parrot had a reputation as one of the most formidable drinkers in the North. Tipsy miners used to stagger out of the adjoining beer parlour and slip him a short beer or a scotch neat.

“The parrot used to be quite a drunk,” said Dorothy Hopcott, who has owned the hotel since 1959. “People would come in and give him a few belts. He’d get so drunk he’d fall off his perch and lie on the bottom of the cage with his feet sticking in the air.”

But the parrot got religion. A few owners ago, the hotel was run by a man of piety who toned down the Carcross Parrot’s purple prose and cut off his booze ration. According to the locals, the former owner patiently taught the bird several choruses of Onward Christian Soldier and eventually eliminated the somewhat racy sea chanties from his reportoire.

There’s nothing worse than a reformed drunk, so the saying goes, and the Carcross Parrot is no exception. Somewhere in the dark recesses of his tiny brain, the Parrot associates all adults with his days of ribaldry. 

Squawks at Guests

Nowadays, anyone who comes out of the little six-table pub gets squawked at. Then he turns sullen. Won’t say a word. Polly want a cracker?

“Go to hell,” is the Parrot’s stock answer.
“He can’t stand drunks,” sighed Mrs. Hopcott. “He can smell beer fumes and he gets mad.”

The Parrot’s disposition changes abruptly whenever children are nearby.

Somehow he’s figured out that kids don’t drink. On Sunday mornings when the pub is closed and the restaurant is open, he likes to strike up long involved conversations with children which make absolutely no sense at all.

“He gets down in the corner of his cage and mumbles away to himself,” said Mrs. Hopcott. “A lot of the time we can’t understand him. He’s picked up a lot of strange words and strange accents over the years.”

Nobody is too sure how the bird got to the Yukon, but the first recorded owner was a Captain Alexander, who operated the Engineer Mine near here during the First World War.

The good captain and his lady left the Parrot at the hotel to make a trip to Vancouver in the winter of 1918. They went down with the Princess Sophia, a CPR steamship that sank in the Lynn Canal off Skagway, Alaska, with the loss of all aboard.

The Parrot has lived in the hotel ever since. [END ARTICLE]

Epitaph: Polly is buried in the Carcross Cemetary after a crowded funeral, with a modest plaque.

At 5 feet 2 inches tall, this diminutive lady has over the past week dramatically swung world events against Vladimir Putin. She was uniquely prepared for this crisis, and has almost single-handedly led the world in bringing Putin to his knees.

But let me rewind: Chrystia Freeland hails from the unlikely political hotbed of Red Deer, Alberta. Her dad was, from all interpretations, the son of a cowboy and a lawyer. Her mother Halyna Chomiak, who was Ukrainian by birth, was born a refugee in a displaced persons camp right after the Second World War in Bavaria, after her family fled the ongoing famine and Stalin’s takeover of Ukraine. Halyna became a lawyer and federal NDP candidate in Canada; and after moving to Ukraine in the early 1990s, was an author of Ukraine’s democratic constitution.

Ms. Freeland has a bachelors’ degree from Harvard in Russian History and Literature, and a master’s degree from Oxford in Slavonic studies. As a student, she spent several semesters in Kyiv studying and engaging with local activists seeking Ukrainian independence. There she acquired the KGB codename “Frida” and was actively tracked, engaged, and threatened by Soviet agents. The KGB, where Putin was building his power at the time, expressed concerns that she was doing material damage to the communist party as an activist, and used her as a case study. They had no idea what was coming.

After graduating she worked as a freelance journalist and eventually an editor for news outlets like the Economist, Financial Times, Globe and Mail, Washington Post and Associated Press over 20 years. Despite having been denied re-entry to the USSR in 1990, she eventually returned to and lived in Moscow as bureau chief for FT. Here she befriended Bill Browder and Igor Magnitsky and began to vocally report on the misdeeds of Putin and the Oligarchs. Insodoing, she became an existential enemy.

She returned to Canada in 2013 and entered politics, and has been at the right hand of the Prime Minister since 2015, originally as Minister of Trade and then Finance Minister. In 2014, she was one of 13 Canadians banned for life from visiting Russia by Putin himself — a list she declared herself proud to be on.

Even prior to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Freeland became Canada’s point person in response to the clear threat Putin posed to the country. On Tuesday Feb 22nd, days before the invasion, Chrystia began reaching out to her peers abroad and floated a number of sanctions that could and should be imposed against a belligerent Russian state. Among her proposals was the idea of cutting off Russia’s Central Bank — freezing the country’s overseas assets, prohibiting them from further borrowing, and nixing their so-called “rainy day fund” that was intended to be used as an economic buffer throughout this unprovoked war. She pitched this to the world’s governments and central bankers and quickly persuaded them to act after the invasion commenced.

The collapse of the Moscow Stock Exchange and the Russian Ruble, among other consequences, are a direct result of this action. Their economy is now in free-fall, by some estimates smaller than many African nations, and both Putin and his country are now flat broke. And she’s not stopping: our government is now, under her leadership, going after Russian assets in Canada — and encouraging other countries to do the same. She’s chasing the oligarchs right down into their financial rabbit holes.

The KGB was right about Ms. Freeland: but they picked on the wrong young lady, way back in 1989. This is her moment, and never has a person been so prepared for such consequential action. Among other résumé highlights, soon she may be able to add toppling a dictator.

Here, she is interviewed in 2000 about Russia’s bumpy and vastly unequal transition to capitalism:

I’ve been watching with interest as the Basecamp creators have waged war against the Apple App Store over the principle of app approval. Basecamp’s corporate entity 37 Signals is rolling out a marginally interesting platform called HEY, a premium-priced email hosting service with some smart filters and UX improvements. This obviously requires client applications on iOS and Android, and thus these were created and submitted to their respective app stores for approval.

Apple has a very specific policy, though, when it comes to apps which do signup and payment for hosted services. In essence, Apple thinks that if you’re acquiring customers on their devices and paying for their service via your own app functioning within their mobile app framework, you oughtta pay them 30%. This has worked favourably for mobile games and some other types of entertainment products which lean on in-app purchases for revenue, and for whom the 30% is worth it to focus their funnel on the app ecosystem almost entirely, and wash their hands of transaction management — leaving all of that up to Apple.

Where you have to build this anyway, however, for the web and for the management of subscriptions to a service, the economics of handing 30% to Apple vs. 2% to a payment processor start to look punitive.

I have surfed this reef for more than a decade, and the workarounds are generally well-understood. Netflix and many others offer subscription services, yet you can’t sign up via the iOS app. Slack might allow you to sign up / sign into a group as a user, but the flow quickly exits the app and continues via email if you start creating a new group. Is this ideal? No. Does it allow Apple to suck and blow at the same time, allowing app developers to serve their users on Apple devices while still escaping usury at the hands of Phil Schiller? Yes.

The creators of Hey, for their own reasons, chose not to use any of these workarounds — workarounds they clearly have made use of in the past for their core SaaS business. I’m not here to point out the merits or pain associated with Apple’s 30% policy. I’m here to speculate on the reason for the crusade undertaken by DHH and Hey in picking this fight simultaneous with the launch of their app.

First, a rewind: in 1984, Nike was roundly criticized for signing an unproven basketball player to a $250,000.00 endorsement contract and designing a special basketball shoe — just for him. That player was Michael Jordan, and the first shoe out of the factory was the Jordan 1. You can read more about the history here, but because of the shoe’s controversial appearance it was banned by the NBA. Initially, they fined Michael Jordan (Nike paid the fines) and then banned the shoe outright for breaking “uniform rules”. This could have been a disaster for Nike. Instead, they used it to propel a marketing campaign positioning Nike as a countercultural revolutionary. This pitted the black, urban fan base that the NBA was attempting to cultivate at the time against them, and positioned Nike as sympathetic to the issue of race inequality at the hands of powerful corporations. The NBA gave Nike a huge gift with the ban: previously, basketball shoes were just leather and foam and stitching; but the NBA gifted the Jordan 1 with symbolism.

Jordans were not just taken up by urban kids aspiring to dunk in the Big League; they became objets within a hodgepodge of American, and indeed global, misfits and countercultural types. Everyone from skaters to grunge rockers to oddball intellectuals donned Jordans as a sign of rebellion. Thanks to campaigns and contributions from the likes of Spike Lee, the shoes became a symbol of the rise of black culture (and hip-hop along with it) that wonderfully infected global culture for the next three decades, and which continues today. While that unproven basketball player clearly delivered on the court and in the community Air Jordans attained a cultural prestige that grew far, far beyond the NBA. As the story goes: the NBA eventually relented, the deal with Michael eventually became worth tens of billions of dollars to Nike, and Jordan became an enduring symbol of freedom, athleticism, aspiration, and more.

This was an early example of conflict marketing. It turns out people generally side with Davids, not Goliaths.

As a founder of Basecamp and creator of Ruby on Rails, David Heinemeier Hansson is notorious for picking fights on Twitter. Like a certain orange-tinged President, DHH has learned that by being controversial he can garner attention. Attention is a currency he can then bestow upon his programming language, his project management software, his books, or whatever else he seeks to promote. This has worked pretty well. Basecamp is worth >$100Bn according to estimates.

With the launch of Hey, DHH and his partners have taken this conflict-centred marketing technique a step further: they picked a fight with Apple.

What’s most conspicuous about this, leading me to conclude that the conflict was deliberate, is that prior to launch the Hey crew submitted a fully-featured app to the App Store, sans signup/payment, for approval. Once this was cleared, available for release, and the launch had commenced, however, they uploaded a newer version which explicitly conflicts with Apple’s policy. This leaves the working app in the store, available for download. — while they are free to carry out their campaign against Apple to reform that policy.

They have now taken the guise of the revolutionary, positioning Apple as the big bad corporation, hiding behind its greed, old-world-thinking, and ideological zeal. They have become Jordan, and Apple is the NBA.

Email hosting is notoriously difficult to market, and even once users do sign up for a service it’s very difficult to onboard them. Who wants to change their email address? Who wants to abandon an online inbox filled with gigabytes of mail? Who wants to pay for an email service when they can use Gmail, Hotmail, etc. for free? How many people know how to move their personal domain from one email host to another, manipulating DNS and configuring SPF and DKIM? The audience narrows rather quickly.

As a result true innovation around email has been very slow, though we can all admit it’s very needed. Very few companies have launched that represent new ideas in the past ten years, let alone the past 20. And on the surface, “better email” is a bit of a yawn compared to, say, free music available instantly from the entire pantheon of recorded music.

So it makes sense, if you’ve spent a ridiculous amount of money (my guess is the hey.com domain name cost ~$2M), to juice the marketing at launch in any way you can. Most developers will see this fight as a worthy one, so their desire to amplify someone punching up at what they see as the schoolyard bully shaking them down for lunch money is strong. There has been resounding support in the several days since this has emerged. And the story of Hey’s launch, which did garner some attention because of who was launching it, has now been vastly overshadowed by the story about this fight. The natural early audience for Hey being a technical one, this also represents very good targeting.

Still, Apple maintains these policies for a reason, and the technique driving this controversial launch may in fact be backfiring. Hey could in fact find themselves with no access whatsoever to the Mac or iOS app stores, if they stick to their guns and let this controversy rage, which I assume they will.

Still, this mission could ultimately prove quixotic.

Michael Jordan has spent his entire adult life recognizing the need to fulfill his role as an inspiring and uncontroversial professional athlete in service of his brand. Along with Kaepernick, Woods, Gretzky, and other greats he has successfully cultivated a public image as a David smashing goliaths with sheer determination and some degree of moral righteousness.

Hansson and Fried, on the other hand, have used their pulpit to pick on Venture Capitalists, justify excluding employees from equity ownership in startups, and taken on other questionable debates. Nowadays there is no great shortage of programmers with messiah complexes, and one of this pairing may in fact be the patient zero of that phenomenon. In other words, DHH and Fried are far from puritanical when it comes to their business ethics, and this may ultimately blunt their assault on Apple, though they very clearly have delivered one or two slam dunks.

I’ve actually reversed my earlier position — I think that now is the time for regulators to step in and enshrine the tenets of Net Neutrality that have helped the internet to flourish as the fastest growing communications technology in human history.

Here’s the PPT Slide Deck (better in its original Keynote form below):

… and better yet, here’s video of the event:

… as always, a huge influence on my approach to the internet, and communications technology in general, is David Isenberg… in particular his paper “Rise of the Stupid Network“.

I also gave an interview to the Vancouver Sun in 2017 underpinning the same argument: that is, that if carriers are permitted to prioritize traffic commercially, the result would be immediately chilling for early-stage ventures who can’t afford to pay the vig.

Also, some funny stories from Silicon Valley bubble 1.0

I’ve uploaded the slide deck here.  Of course, delivery is always better when given by the deck’s creator.  For the students, I promised to post some of my favourite startup pitch deck breakdowns: here, here, here, and here.

Famed UCLA Basketball Coach John Wooden once said, “Sports do not build character. They reveal it.” A considerable body of social science research has explored the positive impacts of athletics, in particular team sports, from youth into adulthood. Playing sports can be a tremendously positive influencer on us physically, emotionally, socially and ethically.

I’ve certainly bought into this idea: I play hockey on several teams three or four times a week. I’ve also invested years of time and money into building RosterBot, a service designed to increase the accessibility and enjoyment of team sports for youth and adult athletes of every skill level.

But when I set out to hire a team to help me carry the company up the hill to future success, and I decided that each of our staff should be a team athlete, my intent was rather more direct. The thinking was that as athletes—and particularly team athletes—each of the crew would be bringing a useful set of perspectives from their own daily experiences with their teams and apply those to building the product. In short, by hiring team athletes, we would be assured they’d be eating their own dog food.

This is largely true. But I actually ignored the rather more significant set of benefits to hiring and working with a crew that is truly inured in team athletics. And since then, I’ve learned a valuable lesson, one I will carry with me as we continue building our team in this company and on to the next venture.

Here’s an interesting study result: the multi-decade U.S. National Longitudinal Study of the High School Class of 1972 found that men at age 31 who played high school sports were paid 12% more at their jobs than those who did not. That’s compellingly outside the margin of error for such a large sample size.

But hey, money isn’t everything. Multiple studies have shown that sports participation can help build character, encourage emotional growth, and teach players the value of honesty, respect, teamwork, dedication and commitment. Call me crazy, but these are attributes I value in a co-worker.

One of the more frustrating aspects of my time spent working in Silicon Valley during the 1990s technology bubble was working with people who were in it purely for themselves. They were mercenaries and were on board with the plan for as long as it seemed clear that things were moving forward unobstructed. Whenever their startup encountered choppy waters, employees would simply hop over to the next venture-backed vehicle, rather than sticking with it and doggedly facing the opposition.

This job-hopping happens quite often in the current froth in Silicon Valley, too. A friend recently shared with me an unconfirmed but totally believable rumour that the most senior software developer working at Twitter these days has been there only two years. There isn’t even any shame in having a string of 10-month-long employment engagements spanning half-a-dozen companies in Silicon Valley anymore; it’s just par for the course.

I think this is a really big problem. As an employer, and as the captain of an ambitious startup plying the choppy waters of a volatile sea, I’m not interested in mercenaries. I’m interested in people who wake up each morning thinking about how they can build better tools for people just like themselves. I’m interested in co-workers who understand accountability to their teammates, to their coaches, and to their investors and customers. I’m interested in people who will inspire the people around them as well as empower (and enrich) themselves. I’m interested in grinders, playmakers and snipers who work to fill whatever role(s) they can in helping advance the team.

In short, I am now resolved to exclusively hire people who have the emotional makeup to join us for the long haul because they grew up playing, and with luck still play, team sports–whether it’s a business dedicated to sports, or any other.

Startups are hard. You need to be working with a team you’d gladly go to war with. I want to look at everyone around me and know that if we’re under fire, they’ll have me covered. I expect them to hold me to the same account.

For more than a year, this approach has been paying daily dividends in my day-to-day dealings. I suspect that it could lead to long-term success for all of us. In the interim, it’s also helped us to field a pretty good company hockey team.