Do any of you adults know WTF you're doing?

I think I've got the adulting stuff down ok. Finances are good, not great, but that's largely because my wife and I have agreed to let her work part-time. Our new house is a big step up from the last one with much more room to grow, but it's been hammering our savings rate with weekly home improvement projects - and we haven't even done the big expensive ones yet. Makes me wonder if I would've been better off to get an extra $30k in my home loan at 3% to pay for these projects. 

Retirements are ok. Not great, but good. We've both been contributing to retirement plans for going on 10 years now (since we were both in our twenties), but you can't help but wonder if in order to live a good retired life or retire early if we should both be working $100k jobs and still living the "GRM" mentality lifestyle. 

Our debt load is nothing outside of the house. We've got a bunch of older cars (including the $700 Prius) and I really just use my Amazon credit card for the 2% cashback and pay it off immediately. 

Savings is good, and many would consider it too large a sum to be a savings account, but with how shakey the markets have been I'm glad it's been there, earning a small amount of interest consistently. 

I think the thing that makes me ache is the time. Time just rockets away from you. You sit there and you say "man, I could be living cheap, exploring new places, meeting new people, or just flat-out relaxing on a beach somewhere", but here I am trying to fix an outdated home, picking up kids from daycare, hoping my wife's chronic pain from a serious fracture two years ago will someday go away. Hoping that the next 16 years of my kid's life are more interesting than this....and mine too. 

Wally (Forum Supporter) said:

I am quickly learning that I shouldn't be unsupervised. I've bought way too many T-shirts the past few weeks.

I discovered 6dollarshirts.com right before this all started. 

I've now made two orders to get the discount...............10 shirts get's a $10 discount, so 10 shirts for $50 + tax and shipping.

z31maniac said:

Wally (Forum Supporter) said:

I am quickly learning that I shouldn't be unsupervised. I've bought way too many T-shirts the past few weeks.

I discovered 6dollarshirts.com right before this all started. 

I've now made two orders to get the discount...............10 shirts get's a $10 discount, so 10 shirts for $50 + tax and shipping.

And now I have learned about this.  They have 100% cotton shirts too.  This is great news.

z31maniac said:

I've now made two orders to get the discount...............10 shirts get's a $10 discount, so 10 shirts for $50 + tax and shipping.

Never heard about it. Thanks to you, own 10 more shirts now, that I didn't need. 

Wife hates these kinds shirts, so glad they are on the cheap.  I must order 10

I found the place after seeing Terry Fair post a pic of a shirt he was wearing on BookFace. 

So I searched out the text on the shirt and this place popped up. This was the shirt in question:

I've been averaging a shirt a week from short track racers all over the country and occasionally BlipShift. Pretty much anytime a cool shirt pops up on Facebook in my size I get one. I've got a Richie Evans reproduction one on today,

z31maniac said:

I found the place after seeing Terry Fair post a pic of a shirt he was wearing on BookFace. 

I need this

In reply to ProDarwin :

There is one at 6dollarshirts, I have, but instead it's Chutulu.

z31maniac said:

I found the place after seeing Terry Fair post a pic of a shirt he was wearing on BookFace. 

So I searched out the text on the shirt and this place popped up. This was the shirt in question:

 

 

We bought 10 science shirts. 3 for me. 3 for wife. 4 for kids. 

cyow5 said:

too many people have been taught to fear numbers rather than embrace the fact that they represent literally everything. 

 

In my paradigm, math doesn't represent things, rather, things are what they are because of what math dictates.

RX Reven' said:

cyow5 said:

too many people have been taught to fear numbers rather than embrace the fact that they represent literally everything. 

 

In my paradigm, math doesn't represent things, rather, things are what they are because of what math dictates.

Then how did anything exist before math? Math is our attempt to digest phenomena around us. Just look at Newton's F=ma. It adequately describes what we see, but then it falls apart at the quantum level and is not actually accurate as it is written. But we still use it because it's error is on the order of about a billionth of a billionth. 

In reply to cyow5 :

IIRC and to be specific and pedantic, F=MA is only a good approximation in the order of things we normally use. As you say, when you approach the really really small and the really really big, the error increases. 

It's the straight line that approximates a large curve over a short set of points. 

cyow5 said:

RX Reven' said:

cyow5 said:

too many people have been taught to fear numbers rather than embrace the fact that they represent literally everything. 

 

In my paradigm, math doesn't represent things, rather, things are what they are because of what math dictates.

Then how did anything exist before math? Math is our attempt to digest phenomena around us. Just look at Newton's F=ma. It adequately describes what we see, but then it falls apart at the quantum level and is not actually accurate as it is written. But we still use it because it's error is on the order of about a billionth of a billionth. 

If you want to watch a good brawl, ask a bunch of mathematicians if math is a human construct born of convenience or an innate entity independent of conscious thought.  I believe it's the later...I see math as the framework (ether as Newton put it since you brought him up) that mass and energy operate within.

FWIW, I'm convinced that mass and energy are nothing but an illusion...the only real thing in the universe is information (so, a particle may behave as though it has mass for one reason only...its underlying information tells it to).  Further, the information is constrained by a set of rules and we call those rules math.  Therefore:  No math = no information = no mass or energy = no universe.        

In reply to RX Reven' :

Math is the purist expression of the world.  If ever we encounter intelligent life we'll be able to recognize it as such through math.

a^2 + b^2 = c^2 no matter what you use for a, b, or c.

Mr_Asa said:

In reply to RX Reven' :

Math is the purist expression of the world.  If ever we encounter intelligent life we'll be able to recognize it as such through math.

a^2 + b^2 = c^2 no matter what you use for a, b, or c.

Agreed, and statistics will allow us to recognize that intelligence.  We may not be able to interpret a signal but we'll be able to prove that it is of intelligent origin by using probability theory.  The technique has been used for decades by code breakers (the five highest frequency characters are going to be the vowels A,E,I,O,U)...random noise signals won't contain high and low frequency characters.  Another example is that animal behaviorist assess intelligence by calculating the amount of deviation from randomness in animal communications...its actually a little more complicated than this as repetition (i.e. Shannon Information) needs to be factored out, blah, blah, blah.  We haven't learned how to speak whale yet but through probability theory, we know whales aren't just repeating a standard message (I'm from the Alaskan tribe or my name is Bob) instead, they're saying (plenty of fish over here or I think it's time to migrate). 

I thought I had the adulting thing figured out then I had a kid...