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...
Thanks to Appleinsider we learned that on a visit to T ennessee's Trevecca Nazarene University for a meeting of the Nashville Technology Council, Ballmer Microsoft's Chief executive was approached by a long-haired youth who politely asked him to autograph his MacBook Pro. While meeting with a group of students , one of them asked the multi-billionaire: "Mr. Ballmer, would you sign my laptop?" The inquiry earned laughs from the group, as well as as the Microsoft executive. "It's got Windows on it," the student said, "I promise." "Oh yeah," Ballmer said sarcastically, before taking the MacBook Pro and signing it with a marker. The autograph came with a note: "Need a new one?" "It's all yours," Ballmer said as he handed the Apple machine back to the student. An original post by Sociolatte