Tootfinder

Questions remain about how leaders at the Los Angeles fire department responded to a fire that leveled entire communities,
and who within the agency knew about concerns the fire could still pose a threat.
A former LA city councilor says the aftermath and recovery effort should serve as a Pearl Harbor moment for the city,
which should never again be in a position with flames encroaching on all sides.
The LA Times has published a series of bombshell revelationsabout th…

Strategic Pricing and Ranking in Recommendation Systems with Seller Competition
Tushar Shankar Walunj, Veeraruna Kavitha, Jayakrishnan Nair, Priyank Agarwal
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.13462

Strategic Pricing and Ranking in Recommendation Systems with Seller Competition
We study a recommendation system where sellers compete for visibility by strategically offering commissions to a platform that optimally curates a ranked menu of items and their respective prices for each customer. Customers interact sequentially with the menu following a cascade click model, and their purchase decisions are influenced by price sensitivity and positions of various items in the menu. We model the seller-platform interaction as a Stackelberg game with sellers as leaders and consi…

Study warns climate leadership falling short in New Zealand #NewZealand

Study warns climate leadership falling short in New Zealand
New Zealand leaders favor small, incremental changes in response to escalating climate impacts rather than the bold changes needed to make a real difference, according to research by University of Auckland academic Dr. Sasha Maher and Professor Brad Jackson (University of Waikato).

Oh hey, good things do happen even in the darkest times. Yarvin is taking about fleeing the country.
The thinks that Trump's fascism is failing (which it is) and tha Trump is incapable of doing what it takes to actually hold power. He's afraid of vengeance, which is honestly unlikely given how completely useless the democrats actually are. But I'm glad he's afraid. I hope he runs away to Russia, gets drafted and deployed to Ukraine, and eats a drone.
I also hope he can somehow convince Thiel to be afraid, but I think that's unlikely.
The fact is that if Trump fails, which I think he will (and Yarvin thinks it could be soon), it won't be because of Democratic leadership. It will be because of antifascist organizing and community resistence. We will have, once again, kept ourselves safe while the DNC argued over how much of their values they should abandon and how much of the left to sacrifice to "get votes."
#USPol

Metropolitana 🔶
城 🔶
📷 Pentax MX
🎞️ Ilford Pan 100
#filmphotography #Photography #blackandwhite

The U.S. Department of Education recently sent MIT and eight other institutions
a proposed
“Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education,"
along with a letter asking that MIT review the document.
After considerable thought and consultation with leaders from across MIT,
today I sent the following reply to U.S. Education Secretary Linda McMahon.
Sincerely,
Sally Kornbluth,
MIT president
--
The document also includes princi…

UN sees world's emissions falling 10% by 2035, far short of 60% goal #environment

UN sees world's emissions falling 10% by 2035, far short of 60% goal
Global emissions of planet-warming greenhouse gases are expected to fall by about 10% by 2035, compared with 1990 levels, representing the first decline ever forecast by the United Nations. But the world remains well off course to keeping global warming below the 1.5 C leaders committed to when they signed the Paris Agreement a decade ago.

Every year, as I come up on my birthday, I start to think a lot more about the shooting. The intensity was a bit lower after Trump left office the first time, but October of 2024 was pretty intense.
As I've been processing through all this, I thought about the cards and letters folks sent to me in the hospital. I have a box of them in the US and sometimes I think about asking for them to be sent here. But things have a tenancy to get lost in the mail on the way here.
There's a little bit of a trapped and incomplete feeling, that Trump's chaos makes feel even more intense.
So I decided to write a bit about that box, and the hospital, and death.
CW: body horror, death
#Writing

A year out from the 2026 midterms, with Republicans feeling the blows from a string of losses in this week’s elections,
Donald Trump and his allies are mounting a multipronged attack on almost every aspect of voting in the United States
and raising what experts say are troubling questions about the future of one of the world’s oldest democracies.
While Democratic leaders continue to invest their hopes in a “blue wave” to overturn Republican majorities in the House and Senat…

Increasingly combative tactics used by federal immigration agents are sparking violence and fueling neighborhood tensionsin the nation’s third-largest city.
“They are the ones that are making it a war zone,” Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker said Sunday on CNN.
“They fire tear gas and smoke grenades, and they make it look like it’s a war zone.”
U.S. citizens, immigrants with legal status and children have been among those detained
in increasingly brazen and aggressive encounter…

Immigration agents use increasingly aggressive tactics in Chicago, alarming activists and residents
Activists, residents and elected leaders say increasingly combative tactics used by federal immigration agents are sparking violence and fueling neighborhood tensions in the nation’s third-largest city. That includes storming an apartment complex by helicopter as families slept and deploying chemical agents near a public school. About 1,000 immigrants have been arrested since an immigration crackdown started last month in the Chicago area. But U.S. citizens, immigrants with legal status and c…