@memeorandum@universeodon.com2026-06-04 18:30:58
Goon Squad Victims Sue Supervisor Over Remark About 'People That Raped and Doped Your Daughters' (Grace Marion/Mississippi Free Press)
https://www.mississippifreepress.org/goon-squad-victims-sue-supervisor-over-remark-about-people-that-raped-and-doped-your-daughters/
http://www.memeorandum.com/260604/p81#a260604p81
@burger_jaap@mastodon.social2026-07-03 19:47:58
@kurtsh@mastodon.social2026-07-03 16:08:36
Remember when Xbox tried to move away from physical media to reduce distribution costs during the 2013 Xbox One launch?
And Sony pissed all over Microsoft for it? 🤔
✅ Xbox One loses some disc-free play, family game-sharing plan with revised policies
https://www.
@adlerweb@social.adlerweb.info2026-07-04 07:28:36
(tldr: Transparenz in der Politik ist wichtig und soll bleiben)
Während an den meisten Stellen über die Krankschreibung diskutiert wird, bekommt das Thema IFG nur wenig Aufmerksamkeit, ist aber nicht weniger wichtig. Mit den angekündigten Änderungen soll dies massiv kastriert werden - Vereine und die Presse dürften gar keine Informationen mehr anfragen, bei privaten Anfragen sollen immer alle Namen geschwärzt und die Gebühren "angepasst" werden. Kommt es durch, können sich Po…
@arXiv_csGT_bot@mastoxiv.page2026-06-04 07:57:38
Welfare Maximization in Bilateral Trade: Improved Approximation Guarantees Beyond the Fixed Price Barrier
Shahar Dobzinski, Ariel Shaulker
https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.04890 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2606.04890 https://arxiv.org/html/2606.04890
arXiv:2606.04890v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: We study the setting of welfare maximization in bilateral trade, where the values of both the buyer and the seller are drawn from independent distributions. Our goal is to maximize social welfare. In this setting, fixed price mechanisms have been extensively studied. In a fixed price mechanism, there is a price $p$ that depends only on the distributions of the buyer and the seller. Trade occurs if and only if the buyer's value is at least $p$ and the seller's value is at most $p$. A long line of work has culminated in determining almost exactly the approximation ratios achievable by fixed price mechanisms: there exists a fixed price mechanism that obtains at least a $0.72$ fraction of the social welfare, but no fixed price mechanism can guarantee more than a $0.7381$ fraction of it [Cai and Wu, STOC'23; Liu, Ren, and Wang, STOC'23]. No other incentive-compatible mechanism is known to beat the performance of fixed-price mechanisms in this setting.
This paper shows how to achieve a larger fraction of the optimal welfare with other classes of mechanisms. Specifically, we study the buyer-offering mechanism with a reserve price. In this mechanism, the buyer observes its value and makes a take-it-or-leave-it offer to the seller, where the offer is at least the reserve price. Beyond its simplicity, this natural mechanism is attractive because the seller always has a dominant strategy: accept the offer if its value is at most the offer, and otherwise reject it. We show that there always exists a reserve price that guarantees a $0.746$ fraction of the social welfare. This not only improves upon the best previously known approximation guarantee for the problem, but also demonstrates that fixed-price mechanisms are not optimal in this setting.
toXiv_bot_toot
@cdarwin@c.im2026-08-03 20:20:46
Attorneys for a man detained in a California immigration detention center have released footage showing him holding up a bottle of water from inside the facility that appeared to be contaminated with worm-like creatures.
The footage came from a video call with Carlitos Ricardo Parias,
a Los Angeles man who has been detained for months at the
Adelanto Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) facility, north-east of LA.
Margaret Hellerstein, one of Parias’s attorneys, …
@ddrake@mathstodon.xyz2026-07-03 11:17:46
My 10-year-old daughter is making an ice cream truck out of cardboard, sized for one of her little stuffed animals. She is being very detailed, and has chosen the particular flavors of ice cream and sherbet the truck will have, and is making a menu sign.
Naturally she's putting prices on it. But she's not making numbers up, or asking us for a common price for a scoop of ice cream. (Which seems absurdly expensive these days -- I know, inflation, but, yikes.)
No, she's …
@doktrock@toad.social2026-09-01 23:21:39
@Techmeme@techhub.social2026-07-01 09:55:53
The US sentences Guo Wengui, a self-exiled billionaire Chinese tycoon who defrauded his online followers out of hundreds of millions, to 30 years in prison (Associated Press)
https://apnews.com/article/guo-wengui-chinese-businessman-fraud-3deb…
@cdarwin@c.im2026-08-04 14:39:47
Michigan is not the only state with primaries on Tuesday.
In Missouri, voters will weigh whether to nominate former US representative Cori Bush, who is running to return to the chamber against Wesley Bell in a race punctuated by the war in Gaza and outside spending by pro-Israel groups.
And in Washington state, voters will decide which two candidates to elevate in the third congressional district, where blue-dog Democratic representative Marie Gluesenkamp Perez is seeking re-elec…
