lagrangian
22d ago
I don't even have an emergency fund. Other than my credit card's "12 month no interest financing on my credit card, with a 4% fee up front"
Owning a home is great. I am glad I do, most days. It is not a good financial choice.
For example: since I bought my house 4 years ago, it has gone down ~10% in real dollars. Then, leverage by a factor of 5+. The market has gone up 80%. The lost market growth on my down payment alone works out to about the same amount as I've paid in mortgage etc.
Even if the math did work in favor of owning in my specific case, this is like being the smug friend who held NVDA or BTC. Not a genius, just a lucky gambler. Actually, worse: a REIT would be a better analogy for that. Owning a specific house and being happy it worked out well is way higher variance. Foundation cracks? Meth lab next door? Have fun.
lagrangian
29d ago
Absolute nonsense. The amount of minerals in water is very minimal, and most of what is there is sodium, which people generally have too much of.
Calcium and Magnesium are the two you might miss, and see below for how jack shit nothing it'd take to replace that with food. The health crazies conflate that pure water leaches minerals out of things (true) with the amount being relevant (false). You have plenty of minerals to spare in your body.
Below stats are for typical tap water. Double them if you have hard water.
The target is just two numbers: 120 mg calcium and 47 mg magnesium. Everything else the water gives you is nutritionally negligible, so ignore it.
Best single food: chia seeds, 19 g (90 kcal) — 120 mg calcium, 64 mg magnesium. Overshoots magnesium slightly, hits calcium exactly. Sesame seeds do it in even less mass (12 g, 70 kcal) but come with a bioavailability problem, below.
Best two-food pairing: 10 g parmesan + 9 g pumpkin seeds (90 kcal, 19 g total). Splits the job cleanly — the cheese covers calcium at 118 mg, the seeds cover magnesium at ~47 mg.
Calorie-minimal: 100 g skim milk + 6 g wheat bran (46 kcal). Milk delivers the 120 mg calcium in 34 kcal with dairy-grade absorption; bran is the densest magnesium source that exists at 610 mg/100 g, so 6 g covers 37 mg and the milk supplies the remaining 11 mg.
So: roughly a tablespoon of seeds, or a splash of milk and a spoonful of bran. Under 100 kcal any way you slice it, often under 50.
lagrangian
29d ago
I count expenses I would not have incurred were I not traveling as travel expenses. So, if I buy groceries, not a travel expense; if I eat out (which I ~never do otherwise), travel expense.
I also have* subcategories, and even tagging (ie non-disjoint categories). So for your extra driving, it could be Travel::Family::Obligation, where a more fun trip is Travel::Family::Fun, and even add ::Gas on the end of those if you want. Or, just tag the whole trip FatherChemo. (*: Beancount concepts; see my other post in this thread). Claude is great at analyzing these things, cross referenced with my calendar even to identify if something is a date or solo dining or friends etc.
Tutoring's a great gig, I did it for years. You'd be amazed what you can charge. "First lesson free" is a great strategy when you're well below your target hours/week.
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