Very

If you have seen the Hu Jintao video, understand that the international media had just been allowed into a closed portion of the meeting. That bit of theater was designed to be witnessed abroad.

Signalling his puppet masters ey?

Gives a whole new perspective on the Manchurian candidate I suppose

Moment of silence for Angela Lansbury?

If Fatih Birol had been recruited as a long term, deep cover agent by Saudi Arabia (perhaps while working in Vienna) a la Günter Guillaume, Anthony Blunt or Eleanor Iselin, what would the Saudis have him doing differently to sabotage western energy production as potential competition of OPEC+?

I'm sorry this is dumb, Xi is doing more for china than any of our dumb leaders are doing for us in the West.

Xi has consistently year over year increased the standard of living for all Chinese in all wealth classes. He has consolidated his power based on results for the Chinese people.

I do agree, except in Hong Kong; that should have remained British or, like Singapore (another British colony), should have been made a sovereign country.

Then we have the issue of the uyghur muslims. Western leaders are hollow. Rishi is a puppet, Biden a fool, Macron is perhaps one of the only reasonable ones. Although he did not care about immigration across the English Channel and caused the death of many unsuccessful migrants coming from France.

If gopher27 had been recruited as a long term, deep cover agent by the Skaven, what would the Council of Thirteen have him doing differently to sabotage vDip as a potential competitor of the Under-Empire?

ridiculous, ridiculous
slander, slander
yes, yes

gopher has much deeper motivations I expect.

Deeper than the Under-Empire? I've said too much.

Gophers are after all much better burrowers than the Thaggoraki.

Gopher's thesis of the day for this Forum thread:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A5A5Eu0ra3I

I thought I would add a couple of semi-informed comments to offer a bit of context.

Reasons to be skeptical:
* The first thing that jumps out at me is that the underlying paper is from a school of public policy. A general hierarchy of prestige for economists would be an economist in an Economics Department, an economist in a Business School, an economist in a Public Policy School and then an economist in a government agency.
* While the Journal of Political Economy is one of the top five high prestige journals in economics, it is the big journal based at the University of Chicago, and despite everything built into all of the review processes, there are clear biases rooted in interpersonal politics at even the big journals that line up to a degree with whether scholars are based in or aligned with their institutional homes.
* The underlying methodology (cross-country, econometric analyses of time series data) for this kind of macroeconomic analysis had certainly fallen out of favor by the time that I entered grad school because of strong critiques of some of the very inconsistent results produced during the early-to-mid-1990s.

Reasons to not be casually dismissive:
* One of the secondary authors is Xavier Sala-i-Martin, who besides being practically worshiped by my Catalan office mate from my first year of grad school is one of the founding fathers of this methodology.
* I am originally from Texas and worked as a commodities broker before quitting and going to grad school. When I changed life paths, one of my cousins was the corporate counsel for one of the global super-major integrated oil companies. He was the lawyer who attended the official quarterly meetings of their Board of Directors. Back in the 2000s, every time that I talked to him at holiday gatherings, he wanted to almost obsessively talk about electricity generation and consumption in China, because they were clearly following this time series closely and finding its growth to be inconsistent with the official GDP figures. My cousin repeatedly asked me to opine on research being done by their in-house economist and her team and whether I found it convincing (whether I supported my cousin's personal interpretations as a non-"expert"). Obviously, hundred billion dollar, multi-decade investment decisions were being made at the time on the basis of how believable Chinese GDP figures were and to what degree this massive energy company should deflate the official numbers. So breakdowns in expected relationships connecting 2008 nighttime luminescence ==> 2008 electricity consumption ==> 2008 GDP figures was being questioned and commented upon at the time by serious and well-informed people.

(The untimely death of Macrocat is obviously an international tragedy felt around the world.)

Does that mean gopher you're pro or anti Catalan independence?

I am in favor of Catalan irredentism and complete subjugation of the Castilians, Basque and Galicians under the banner of a Greater Catalunya, which may or may not extend across the Pyrenees or the Strait of Gibraltar. :oP

Barça is going bankrupt more times than Felipe II before Catalunya will get its indipendence.

"which may or may not extend across the Pyrenees"

Oo boy is your friend going to give you a lecture!

I just work under the presumption that the "true and rightful" boundaries of irredentist, chauvinistic, Greater Nations have a tendency to expand in response to political, diplomatic or military successes.

What the YouTube video fails to take into account though, is that all Chinese leaders since Mao have had children, which is a pretty clear indicator that a nation is growing and rising, turning boring numbers up and down doesn’t really change this fact.

https://twitter.com/simongerman600/status/1590088023064154113

The absence of a negative indicator is not a positive indicator. Germany and much of continental Europe being led exclusively by childless technocrats across multiple generations is a clear sign of decay and decline....an alienation from life. Leaders with children is a neutral sign rather like not having cancer.

Additionally, I believe that you are incorrect GOD. My impression is that both Wang Huning and Li Xi are sans princeling.

Societies that culturally make no place for the future will find that the future makes no place for them. Demographic is destiny. German birthrates relative to French birthrates explains much of the late 19th and early 20th Century.

Checking the interwebs, I was incorrect. Wang Huning has recently had his first child. He is in his late 60s.

China saved, nice.