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...
People in Seoul, South Korea finally got their taste of the iPhone on Saturday. Being a tech savvy society. About 65,000 people placed orders since Nov. 22, according to KT. Liked the headline on cnn.com that said "The iPhone's got Seoul". The reason why the iPhone took so long to debut in South Korea is because the government was trying to protect local manufacturers and carriers for several years. Since the announcement last week of the debut of the iPhone local manufacturer Samsung slashed the Price of it's iPhone like phone called Omnia2. There have been 40,000 pre-orders for the iPhone since the announcement if it being offered in Seoul. Local manufacturers Samsung and LG account for 90% of the cell phones sold in South Korea. KT Corp the carrier offering the iPhone said iPhones will sell fast as they are a status symbol in this tech-Savvy country. The iPhone is already changing the pricing of Smartphones in the country. As South Koreas are willing to spend heavi...