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...
Dan Ariely, the author of Predictably Irrational , Googled, "how can I get my boyfriend to..." and Google responded with a list of popular searches. The search engine's first suggestion? Propose. He then changed the query to "how can I get my girlfriend to..." The most popular query? "Sleep with me." You can actually try this for yourself and see how things change over time. Instead of 'How can i get my girlfriend/Boyfriend. Try Googling 'How can I get my wife/husband to' and see the changes in queries. You will be surprised oh how things change. This is what Chris Matyszczyk of cnet had to say after his further research. While Ariely's discoveries are, well, predictably rational, I decided to take things a step further and discover how these relationships change, once the girlfriend has learned how to get the boyfriend to propose. So I went for the "How can I get my wife/husband to..." paradigm. The last time I enjoyed th...