arch_8ngel

Before you exceed 10% contribution (or their match level, whichever is higher) to an employer-provided 401k , you should seriously consider taking advantage of your Roth IRA contribution space every year, up to the $6,000-per-individual maximum. (so $12k, right now between you and a spouse) There is an enormous amount of flexibility that Roth-type acounts provide that you don't get with traditional-pre-tax plans (not to mention the flexibility of choice you get with IRAs versus employer plans in the first place where some employer plans have relatively high fees and relatively few investment choices). Always get your employer match, because that is part of your salary that you're otherwise passing up. But, personally, I think maxing out the Roth IRA space every year is the single most valuable long-term contribution you can make, due to the tax-free growth and the fact that the accounts don't have RMDs, making them the single best vehicle for future inheritances for kids/grandkids.

Another icon of an era.

They have been pretty good about restocking their fastest selling specialty sets like this one. (for instance, just picked up Buccaneer Bay on back order and it shipped a couple weeks earlier than originally expected) I'm expecting them to restock this one, for sure, especially if it is going to help them sell their other Mario set for the cross-functionality.

Spoken like somebody who hasn't convinced their kid to keep eating dinner because it was made of "dinosaur meat"

So an interesting wrinkle to any discussion of "cost" is that it is completely unknowable what Space X's cost SHOULD BE, because they have a work culture of truly abusive levels of unpaid overtime from their salary staff.

Seems a bit disingenuous to claim it was done in 6 years, since they started the crew program in 2012, and the only reference to <$1B I can find is an interview with the COO of SpaceX from 2014. There is no way that whatever amount of funding they were talking about back then is actually true today, once the rubber met the road of real world test and operations. Not saying they didn't beat the price and schedule of ULA, but worth at least being accurate in the comparison.

Nothing tops the Dragon Warrior promo commercial for Nintendo Power...

Inhumanoids was definitely a great 2nd best on toys, aside from Transformers, though.

I'm surprised you feel that way about TMNT. My kids LOVED IT, with no existing context for the turtles -- though sure, watching it with another adult that had no context for it might be odd. Super Mario Super Show isn't all that bad. It i just really goofy. I think part of my issue with revisiting MOTU, was that it was done on the heels of rewatching Thundercats, which was a legitimately well made show.

Just to piggyback and rephrase why my advice further up might have sounded like -- you can go ahead and open and fund the Roth IRA WITHOUT it being "in the market". Attakid - Roth IRA is just an account designation with special tax treatment -- it doesn't require you be invested in anything in particular, and you could just as easily park it in money market funds for the short term while you figure out your plan. (and the $6k that Jonas mentions is $6k for you plus another $6k for your wife in her account -- "individual" retirement accounts are just that -- separate limits for you and the wife). (also -- Jonebone leaves out Schwab, but they are cost-competitive with Fidelity, and both Fidelity and Schwab have a much better website and trading platform than Vanguard, though aside from the ancient UI, there is nothing wrong with Vanguard)

There are a lot of people trading individual stocks right now with no business trading individual stocks, and are riding a situation similar to the saying "everybody looks like a genius investor in a bull market".

double post

You sound like you would really benefit from reading the Personal Finance flow chart stuff: https://www.reddit.com/r/personalfinance/wiki/commontopics From what you're saying, I'm going to hazard a guess that your marginal tax rate is low enough that it makes more sense to work on maxing out your Roth IRA's (you and your wife) each year, before you revisit ratcheting up your 401k savings rate. But don't be down on where you're starting from. There are still plenty of people at 35 that are in debt and starting from less than zero. Search for "average 401k balance by age" and you'll probably feel better about your starting point. The old proverb about the "best time to plant a tree is 20 years ago, the 2nd best time is today" is absolutely true for personal finance decisions -- starting today is always better than putting it off even longer just because you neglected to do have done it in the past.

I can't read Roth without thinking of Sly Dog Studios...

It's a guy's name, not an acronym. (William Roth, former DE senator) And Roth IRAs are the "best" account ever devised. You contribute after tax money (up to an annual limit), and gains and withdrawals are tax free when you get the age where those withdrawals are allowed. At ANY age, with ANY account maturity, you can withdraw the contributions with no penalty (and no tax, of course, since you've already paid taxes on them).

For USA readers, if you are NOT currently filling up your Roth IRA every year, then building up your intial long-term e-fund in a Roth IRA is the best option, IMO. You can withdraw contributions with no penalty, if you really need them, while making sure you took advantage of the special tax-space on gains in the meantime (and if no emergency comes -- you made sure you filled the tax-free investment space).

Do you have a 401k at work, and/or a Roth IRA? If not, you likely need to start there, with either target date funds (the super "easy button" option for balancing your portfolio) or a 3 or 4 fund portfolio (look up the concept and recommendations for funds and/or ETFs on Bogleheads) Vanguard, Schwab, or Fidelity are all great discount brokerages, which each have their own brand of free-to-trade ETFs and low-fee funds, and each have their own interfaces (so you can pick what you prefer, from a UI standpoint). But if you're not filling up your Roth IRA every year, for you AND your wife (whether she works or not, she is eligible based on your income), you should look into that. $18k is a decent emergency fund, if that is the extent of your cash on hand, but you should probably start by thinking of how many months that can cover you in the event of job losses, etc. You have a ways to go before you should reasonably consider investing in anything other than ETFs or low-fee Mutual Funds, IMO. EDIT: a GREAT first place to start your reading on the topic is the sidebar of the personal finance subreddit. There is at least one well-made flow chart, that is pretty solid advice for anyone starting out.

You sound like you're real fun at parties

The practical thing to do is you send fuel or pre-fueled return rockets as a separate mission payload, ahead of time. You need enough of it that it is an entirely separate launch mission to get it there, and you need to make sure it gets there completely successfully before you risk humans getting stuck. Realistic (not Musk-proposed) timelines are far enough in the future that it is never going to be an option for me, whether I wanted to, or not

I must have paid to rent them on Amazon Prime Video, or something, because I know I've rewatched both of them with the kids in the last couple of years. For their target audience, they really aren't that bad, and there is some interesting character and set design overlap with other non-star-wars stuff (seeing how the castle overlaps with Nockmar in Willow, for instance)

No offense, but it would be better said as, at best the original She-Ra is "just as BAD as the original MOTU" (this is coming from someone who had PLENTY of nostalgia rewatching a chunk of MOTU with my kids). But She-Ra is almost irredeemably bad, at least in her original appearances in He-Man. Haven't rewatched any of the original series, though, so I can't say whether she's portrayed better in her own series.

Your math seems off. Acceleration due to gravity on mars is 3.71 m/s^2, vs 9.81 m/s^2 on Earth. That is nearly 2/3's LOWER, not "2/3's that of Earth". (i.e. more precisely Mars is around 38% earth gravity) Moon gravity is 1.62 m/s^2, so a little less than 17% earth gravity. That still gives Mars around twice the gravitational pull of the Moon, but Mars gravity is about half of what you stated.

I had some college classmates participate in part of that experiment back in the early 00's. But in terms of any SpaceX related dates, you've got to correct for "Musk-time" (i.e. publicly boasted targets versus real world plausible execution), which slips any estimates "to the right" by a significant margin.

More like, if we could convince science deniers that it isn't all a political stunt.

Always enjoyed him in the Ewok movie, as a kid. And later, that made his role in The Thing all the more unnerving.