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Happy Solar Pessimism Chart Update Day to all who celebrate

You also don’t walk out of college or university expecting to buy a new 4 bedroom house, two cars, boats, skidoos, etc. The reason you struggle is because you aren’t willing to wait and make do like we did. Your entitlement is causing you to struggle.

40k used to be a vast universe full of Your Dudes. Your Dudes wouldn't kill Abbadon, they wouldn't drive off the Nids from our galaxy or destroy the C'Tan. They wouldn't move "the narrative" forward. But Your Dudes had victories and losses through playing the game that felt personal to you. And Your Friends Dudes did as well. And Their Friends Dudes did too. This all connected up. This all made the universe feel vast without endless corporate lore dumps and marketing videos. This collective universe of fanon through engaging with the wargame via modelling and playing felt more real than reading about Rowboat having a fight with Mortarion and winning the indomitus crusade. Because Your Dudes didn't do that. And Rowboat doing it means Your Dudes, the custom army you made, the fanon lore you created, none of it really mattered. Because really the main character of 40k isn't Your Dudes anymore. It's the official characters. And Your Dudes will never be allowed to have a spotlight in your own games again. This shrinks the universe from the collective imagination of the fans to whatever GW make and approve of themselves. And this is poison to any Wargame. No game lorelets will never understand that 40k was once a wargame with supplimental material. If you weren't playing 40k you weren't engaging with the universe. But now GW caters to those people and will die after they are abandoned.

Humans were never meant to live in Phoenix and it's an abomination that we built a city in that hellfire

A lot of the anti-DEM gerrymander folks keep saying that the proposed VA congressional map would be the most extreme gerrymander in the country. So let's put that to the test using actual political science. The efficiency gap was the standard developed by political scientists during Rucho v. Common Cause (2019). It's not an entirely perfect measurement, as noted in Keena et al., "Gerrymandering the States," because it would technically rate the 2010s Maryland gerrymander as a fair map, for example (though it does show the 2010s Wisconsin gerrymander as an egregious gerrymander!). Keena et al. argue that the mean/median difference is sometimes a better practice; however, for example, it shows the VA gerrymander as a fair map. My standard for measuring how extreme a gerrymander is, or whether a map is gerrymandered at all, is pretty much one standard or the other, depending on which makes sense. In this case, the efficiency gap is the best standard. Using the 2024 presidential results, we can see in DRA 2020 what the efficiency gap is in the enacted/proposed congressional gerrymanders across the country. The closer to 0, the fairer the map using efficiency gaps. Negative favors DEMs, positive favors GOP. Let's take a look. VA: -24.02% NC: 22.55% MO: 17.65% OH: 15.34% CA: -14.92% IL: -14.60% TX: 14.05% NM: -13.98% FL: 11.79% So yes, the proposed VA DEM gerrymander would be the most extreme gerrymander in the country. In fact, it would be more extreme than the 2010s WI Gerrymander that Rucho was all about, which has a 19-point efficiency gap. Only North Carolina comes close to being an egregious gerrymander.

This project in Oakland is a pretty good model of the future of homeownership in urban California. In 10 years time, you're going to see condo buildings like these all over Los Angeles.

I would like to immediately know where this is

Heartbreak, if we let it, can be a deeply profound gift. The art of receiving the gift, initially, does not lie in trying to fix the heartbreak. The art is to hold the heartbreak as a koan. A koan is a tool used in Zen Buddhism where a paradoxical statement is meditated upon to help us transcend the conceptual prisons we inhabit. Heartbreak can serve this function more powerfully than almost anything in a regular person's life. This is because heartbreak is one of the closest experiences to death we can experience whilst still alive. There are often very real parts of our psyche that truly believe that the objects of their fascination are of life and death importance. They can feel that they literally *need* a specific person / thing / experience to survive and thrive. So when we experience permanent separation from that person / thing / experience, those parts can feel like the conditions for their survival are being severed. This is where the sense of paradox emerges. The part feels that the conditions for their survival have been terminated, and yet here they are, alive and surviving. Dwelling in that paradox is where the gift of heartbreak emerges. If we let it, it can help those parts within us to begin their journey towards awakening to the fact that we are always already entirely good, whole and worthy. That our basic nature is fundamentally good and no external object is required to complete it. Heartbreak serves as a forcing function for this journey, because if the heartbreak is sufficiently deep and thorough, there is simply no way to resolve it without coming to this awakening. In this way, heartbreak is always pointing us towards our deepest wisdom in one of the strongest, most emotionally compelling ways possible. I would go as far as to say that it is an obstacle to someone's spiritual growth if they somehow always get all the things they think they need to be happy. It robs them of one of life's great spiritual teachers. Often they will have to wait until they have sufficient exposure to more literal death, disease, and signs of mortality to learn the lesson heartbreak offers. Of course it would be glib to suggest that heartbreak's lessons are easy lesson to learn. They can be some of the most painful lessons going. But anyone who can hold the paradoxes of their heartbreak in painful, patient awareness without trying to fix them will eventually unwrap a gift of unspeakable preciousness.