Image is from this SCMP article.

Much of the analysis below is sourced from Michael Roberts' great website.


Japan's ruling parliamentary coalition, consisting of the LDP (purple) and it's junior coalition partner Komeito (in light pink) have lost their ruling majority. They have ruled post-war Japan for almost its entire history. The LDP is currently led by Shigeru Ishiba after Kishida stood down due to a corruption scandal, and ties to the Unification Church.

While geopolitical factors (over the cold war between the US and China, etc) may have played a role, by far the biggest reason for this result in the poor economic conditions over the past few years. Inflation has risen and real wages have fallen, with little relief for the working class via things like tax reductions. While inequality in Japan is not as extreme as in America, it is still profound, with the top 10% possessing 60% of the wealth, while the bottom 50% possess just 5%.

Shinzo Abe previously tried to boost economic performance through monetary easing and fiscal deficits, while Kishida ran on a "new capitalism" which rejected Abe's neoliberalism and promised to reduce inequality. Nothing substantial has resulted from all this, however, other than increasing corporate wealth. Innovation continues to fall, and domestic profitability is low, resulting in decreasing investment at home by Japanese corporations. Labour productivity growth has only slightly picked up since the mid-2000s and is falling again. The rate of profit has fallen by half since the 1960s, and Japan has been in a manufacturing recession - or very close to it - since late 2022. In essence: there is no choice but between stagnation or decline.


Please check out the HexAtlas!

The bulletins site is here!
The RSS feed is here.
Last week's thread is here.

Israel-Palestine Conflict

If you have evidence of Israeli crimes and atrocities that you wish to preserve, there is a thread here in which to do so.

Sources on the fighting in Palestine against Israel. In general, CW for footage of battles, explosions, dead people, and so on:

UNRWA reports on Israel's destruction and siege of Gaza and the West Bank.

English-language Palestinian Marxist-Leninist twitter account. Alt here.
English-language twitter account that collates news.
Arab-language twitter account with videos and images of fighting.
English-language (with some Arab retweets) Twitter account based in Lebanon. - Telegram is @IbnRiad.
English-language Palestinian Twitter account which reports on news from the Resistance Axis. - Telegram is @EyesOnSouth.
English-language Twitter account in the same group as the previous two. - Telegram here.

English-language PalestineResist telegram channel.
More telegram channels here for those interested.

Russia-Ukraine Conflict

Examples of Ukrainian Nazis and fascists
Examples of racism/euro-centrism during the Russia-Ukraine conflict

Sources:

Defense Politics Asia's youtube channel and their map. Their youtube channel has substantially diminished in quality but the map is still useful.
Moon of Alabama, which tends to have interesting analysis. Avoid the comment section.
Understanding War and the Saker: reactionary sources that have occasional insights on the war.
Alexander Mercouris, who does daily videos on the conflict. While he is a reactionary and surrounds himself with likeminded people, his daily update videos are relatively brainworm-free and good if you don't want to follow Russian telegram channels to get news. He also co-hosts The Duran, which is more explicitly conservative, racist, sexist, transphobic, anti-communist, etc when guests are invited on, but is just about tolerable when it's just the two of them if you want a little more analysis.
Simplicius, who publishes on Substack. Like others, his political analysis should be soundly ignored, but his knowledge of weaponry and military strategy is generally quite good.
On the ground: Patrick Lancaster, an independent and very good journalist reporting in the warzone on the separatists' side.

Unedited videos of Russian/Ukrainian press conferences and speeches.

Pro-Russian Telegram Channels:

Again, CW for anti-LGBT and racist, sexist, etc speech, as well as combat footage.

https://t.me/aleksandr_skif ~ DPR's former Defense Minister and Colonel in the DPR's forces. Russian language.
https://t.me/Slavyangrad ~ A few different pro-Russian people gather frequent content for this channel (~100 posts per day), some socialist, but all socially reactionary. If you can only tolerate using one Russian telegram channel, I would recommend this one.
https://t.me/s/levigodman ~ Does daily update posts.
https://t.me/patricklancasternewstoday ~ Patrick Lancaster's telegram channel.
https://t.me/gonzowarr ~ A big Russian commentator.
https://t.me/rybar ~ One of, if not the, biggest Russian telegram channels focussing on the war out there. Actually quite balanced, maybe even pessimistic about Russia. Produces interesting and useful maps.
https://t.me/epoddubny ~ Russian language.
https://t.me/boris_rozhin ~ Russian language.
https://t.me/mod_russia_en ~ Russian Ministry of Defense. Does daily, if rather bland updates on the number of Ukrainians killed, etc. The figures appear to be approximately accurate; if you want, reduce all numbers by 25% as a 'propaganda tax', if you don't believe them. Does not cover everything, for obvious reasons, and virtually never details Russian losses.
https://t.me/UkraineHumanRightsAbuses ~ Pro-Russian, documents abuses that Ukraine commits.

Pro-Ukraine Telegram Channels:

Almost every Western media outlet.
https://discord.gg/projectowl ~ Pro-Ukrainian OSINT Discord.
https://t.me/ice_inii ~ Alleged Ukrainian account with a rather cynical take on the entire thing.


  • What_Religion_R_They [none/use name]
    ·
    4 days ago

    Posting here because I don't think my target audience lurks in the general megathread...

    Any fans of "cybernetics", or any mechanical or electrical engineers who have suffered through control theory/systems courses? I am fascinated by it, but I have only seriously studied it (in the sense of going into the details and implementation) in the lectures. From what little history the lectures explore, it seems to focus on American contributions, but I know that the field was developed and perfected in the USSR for industrial (and economic?) control. The question is... where do I actually learn about the economical aspects of control systems? Who are the leaders in economic control currently? I guess I am imagining something like Cyberstride/Cybersyn (because this field definitely didn't die in Chile 1973).

    My rudimentary searches on Russian Wikipedia lead me to the page on Cybernetics, but it dedicates the first half to misquoting articles by Soviet scientists ridiculing "cybernetics" which makes me skeptical of finding anything useful there (if you read the actual article they quote the author basically shits on the idea circulating in the western press that cybernetic machines are equivalent to the human brain, literally a rehashing of the ChatGPT struggle session but in 1952).

    • Barx [none/use name]
      ·
      4 days ago

      Control Theory is mostly just dynamical systems math using linear algebra to represent the system behavior. It becomes control-y by adding one thing into the mix: the controller itself that acts in the system in response to what it can observe. This is fleshed out for different considerations, like what properties you want the controller to have, what tradeoffs to make (e.g. faster but less accurate, the reverse, etc), whether the system is continuous or discrete, whether there are delays and how they are reoresented, how fancy you are being in terms of modeling observations vs. estimated internal state (e.g. a Kalman filter).

      If you're interested in getting into the theory, the main places to start are linear algebra and differential equations. These are often coupled together in colleges because of their relevance to representing dynamic systems and concepts like "Jacobian" only make sense if you know both. I would recommend learning differential equations first because linear algebra texts might assume knowledge of them.

    • BobDole [none/use name]
      ·
      4 days ago

      Stafford Beer, sometimes called the father of cybernetics, was a Brit who was a major part of the design of Allende’s Chile’s Project Cybersyn. Unfortunately, I don’t have much else to say about this, but check out his work.

    • Sebrof [comrade/them, he/him]
      ·
      2 days ago

      I would love to talk about this stuff with anyone who is interested. I've learned some (linear) production theory along the lines of Sraffa, Pasinetti, Ian Wright etc - essentially representing production relations as a network. If you feel comfortable with some Linear Algebra you can start there. And I have been working on a way to model this production network, but I sometimes spin my wheels and get stuck on tangents. I am thinking of a model along the lines of what Ian Wright has worked on, and either doing a macro model (modeling the explicit emergent relations) or micro model (model the micro interactions and letting the macro structure emerge). Wright has papers for both types of models. The later would be more along the lines of complexity science. The former is closer to diff eqs, and would be easier for applying ideas of control theory to. I think.

      There are a series of papers from Political Economists from the new school arguing about whether to start models from the individual interactions, vs the emergent macro conditions (which is more in line with classical political economy).

      Later one could add financial networks, etc. to such a model.

      But if you're familiar with linear algebra, diff eqs, and control theory, then you may find the authors above interesting. If anyone wants to brainstorm let me know. I think this stuff is interesting and would love to know more, but I also have to work to pay bills lol

    • PorkrollPosadist [he/him, they/them]
      ·
      edit-2
      4 days ago

      any mechanical or electrical engineers who have suffered through control theory/systems courses?

      I am technically none of these things, but I am a CNC programmer who knows what a PID loop is and how servomechanisms work. So basically dealing with control systems at a more fundamental level in production (robotics).

      I imagine systems like PID control could theoretically be applied on the accounting side of things, e.g. where you choose a target and tweak the porportion / integral / derivative values based on inventory to establish a steady supply. It probably isn't a direct one to one, but these systems are designed to keep robotic systems from machine tools to aircraft autopilots trained on a setpoint while quickly adapting to unexpected external forces (like a gust of wind, or the transition from cutting through air to cutting through steel).

      Theoretically, production planning could adapt to sudden changes (like a factory outage, or a sudden increase in demand for a particular integrated circuit) in a much more calculated manner, instead of the rubber-banding of scarcity driving price gouging, high profitability driving overproduction, overproduction cratering profitability, and low profitability leading back to scarcity that we see today.

    • WilsonWilson [comrade/them, he/him]
      ·
      4 days ago

      I learned it thru EE but I’ve always been aware that it is a much larger field of study. Its so pervasive it seems like it reveals something fundamental about the nature of reality kind of like how probability theory permeates all of the important scientific advances of the 20th century. I’m gonna have to do a deep dive on cybernetics now.

      So in EE signals and system analysis you have a system with an input and an output. You smack it with an impulse input and you get an output response. The output can be separated into a transient response and a steady state response. The transient goes away and the ss response remains. You use this info to get characteristic equation of system which can then be used to determine the response of the system to other inputs, determine stability and other useful stuff.

      I think about system control every time someone mentions communism doesn’t take human nature into consideration. So your saying in order to control humans greedy resource hoarding nature you are going to control it with a greedy system? Good luck with that positive feedback.

      Positive feedback? Ha ha thanks for the compliment bud your lookin pretty good yourself.

      No not that kind of positive feedback it means literal positive and negative. If your input to the system is blowing up positive you need to feedback a negative portion of the output back into the input thereby bringing the input to the system down and stabilizing the output or vice versa.

      I’m also thinking about systems where the USA is a linear(maybe) system and the inputs are natural and man made events and the American system has a characteristic equation and response to these events. At least since 9/11 the response is to print trillions of $$$ and distribute it top down to the half way point effectively paying half of Americans to murder the other half. 15 trillion print on 9/11, 8 trillion print in 2008 bank crash and recently 8 trillion print for covid and things like BLM, masking or anti-masking etc being the transient response and war in Ukraine and Middle East as part of USA’s characteristic response. I dunno I'm just rambling now none of this answers your question about using control systems for economics I'm gonna have to do some research.

      • meth_dragon [none/use name]
        ·
        edit-2
        3 days ago

        im at the point where i feel like we should be looking for characteristic equations of 'human nature' or capital itself (assumption being that it is higher order and highly coupled to extant systems). developing appropriate constraints for a given historical or future context seems to be the biggest issue though, will take an immense amount of work to go through and quantify initial and boundary conditions for a particular scenario and then youd probably have to solve some fucking weird diamat super/substructural closure problem to account for historical turbulence as well...

        monkey-typewriter

    • Kieselguhr [none/use name]
      ·
      3 days ago

      Have you read Red Plenty?

      There are many Soviet books on Cybernetics, but I think they are only available in Eastern bloc languages (for example I have a book version of a Soviet cybernetics conference, but I'm pretty sure it's not available in English... but it's not that interesting to be fair, only a curiosity, there's nothing in it that couldn't be gleaned from Western sources like Ashby et al)

      Pekelis's book is available on the internet archive

      Alexander Lerner was also a Soviet Cyberneticist, but he became an Israeli settler cringe