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...
Real-Time Search Directories With the release of Twitter's user lists which by the way is user generated it opens up for us something that in the last decade was taken over by machines. Storing and indexing of web sites has been religated to the management of machines with less and less human intervention. Yahoo one of the earliest directories on the web experimented for a while with human based search directory additions but gave up on the effort. Well things on the interenet has come full circle. True it might be run by machines but man is winning. Human intellignece and brotherhood. That is what is standing tall. Twitter's users create lists and share them with friends. This is what I follow and recommend. And so we go to our friends and see what they recommend. Search engines work well but how well. Aren't we most of the time hit by spammy sites. But we do trust our friends and know they will not deceive us but directing us to scammy accounts. Twitter's list have op...