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...
Twitter announced a new service - well actually the original name of Twitter was twttr. Twttr will be launched again and this time they will be charging $5 if you would like to use vowels. Y however will still be free to use. This is going to be called a two-tiered service. if you want full use of the site you would need to pony up $5, if not use the service without the vowels. Twitter says that by doing this will be actually be enhancing the service and provide a more efficient site. Youngsters already omit a lot of the vowels and so.... it makes sense. Please see a mockup of the most Retweeted Tweet in Twitter history and how it appears without the the of 'AEIOU". Twttr will be rolling out shortly and initially to a small percentage of users - 10% to be exact. Now before you start feeling all depressed consider that you have only 140 characters to play around with. Now with vowels gone you will have more room and more space and your tweets will now look prettier. if you wou...