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...
Google has released a new product that it has begun rolling out to all users. If you do not have it already you certainly will over the next few days. To explain this new concept briefly it would be: Google has now integrated Google+ much more deeply in its search results. So when you now perform your regular search on Google. You will be shown results from Google+ and people you are connected to. So when you search for say images of elephants. You will be surprised to see pictures of elephants either which you or your friends have shared on the web. Especially shared on Google+ and Picasa. This means a lot of the recommended search results from Google will have a personal touch to it. This personal touch is not theirs but yours. People you are connected to on Google+ will become a part of your search results. So when you search, results will incorporate pages, post, images and videos shared by people you already know. This is 'Search Plus Your world. In addition when you search fo...