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...
Recently Mafia Wars went out of their way to explain robbing. This was incited by a players letter to the Mafia Wars team that stirred them into action to explain what robbing is and what is the thought process that went into creating this feature on Mafia Wars. It also seeks to answer and clear questions that players may have about robbing. This letter also explains what features of robbing are going to stay and features that are going to be added. Please find a copy of the letter below Dear Mafia Wars Player, First of all, I want to thank you for this thoughtful, well articulated letter. I always like hearing feedback from our most passionate players. Your wants and desires for this game are tremendously important to us here at Mafia Wars, and we hope that every feature we create will delight you. In fact, we hope that our features will delight all of our customers, and therein, I fear, lies much of your angst. For you see, robbing was not primarily designed for the hard core player,...