On Thursday, Donald Trump will walk into the Great Hall of the People in Beijing, shake Xi Jinping's hand, and declare it a great meeting. There will be announcements. There will be numbers — billions of dollars in Chinese purchase commitments, a new bilateral mechanism with an important-sounding name, possibly a joint statement on Iran. Trump will post on Truth Social. Markets will rally briefly. Pundits will argue about who won. None of that will tell you what actually happened. What is actually happening in Beijing this week is something more consequential and more uncomfortable than the summit theatre will reveal: two leaders of two deeply mutually dependent superpowers, both of whom need this meeting to succeed for entirely different reasons, sitting across a table in a world that has already moved past the assumptions that defined their last nine months of negotiations. The Iran war changed the equations. The rare earth gambit changed the power balance. Taiwan is sitting in...
For people who have been around long enough on the internet, you would remember chat. People would go to web apps like 'ICQ' and chat with random strangers. All that died out some time ago but Facebook wants to recreate that magic with their latest App 'Rooms'. This App comes from Facebook creative labs and seeks to create the early ethos of the web. That of web communities and random chats with strangers from anywhere in the world. The iPhone app is ready for download and use right now. You can choose any username you want and it will not use your Facebook profile. You can read more at their blog post here and download the App here.
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