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...
With all the predictions that abounded in regards to the iPad. No one guessed that the iPad could grow to become a Netbook killer. Netbooks known for their affordability and easy net access combined with the ability to easily work on Word and Spreadsheets seemed that they could not be touched. The iPad on the other hand is fine if you want to sit and catch up on email in between sharing photos with your friends and watching a TV show. The Netbook was more for work and the iPad seemed more for after work. But this is all set to change. With it's ability to run only one application at a time and all it's drawbacks the iPad is taking over or at least this is what is seen from graphs released by Morgan Stanley analyst Katy Huberty. It seems that the iPad is doing to the Netbook what the Netbook did to the laptop. The iPad is easy to carry around especially for business travelers and if your work involves mainly catching up on email then this is the preferred device. Check out the...