It's possible and achievable without major sacrifices with high probability, if you're reasonably well paid.

The basic tricks are (1) put a really substantial fraction of your income, at least about half, into savings -- index funds or similar -- and (2) learn to live a less gratuitously-spendy life than is normal in the affluent West, especially in the US. I strongly endorse both of these; but living on half your nominal income is much much much easier, and requires much much much less sacrifice, if that income is $100k/year than if it's $30k/year.

And if your investments misbehave badly enough, you're screwed. Firstly, if you hit a bad market crash before you were hoping to retire, your retirement date gets pushed out. Secondly, if the longish-term performance of the market turns out to be anomalously bad, you run out of money after being retired for years. You're supposed to save enough that the risk of the second failure mode is really low, so the question here is how comfortable you are with inferences like this: "Over the last 100 years or so, there's been no 40-year period in which you'd have run out of money if you held a broad stock-market-index-like portfolio and took out 3% of the initial capital, inflation-adjusted, every year; so you're safe adopting such a strategy now."

(I do not know whether the specific statement in quotation marks there is correct. There are studies whose conclusions have something like that form. Look them up before making retirement decisions.)

[EDITED to add: Just to be clear: I really do think the mustachian approach is a good one, and I follow it myself, and I do think anyone reasonably well paid who follows it has a very good chance of a comfortable early retirement. But I prefer not to see these things overstated, and I prefer to avoid formulations that -- wrongly but seductively -- encourage wealthy people to look down their noses at poorer people for whom living that way is very much harder.]

"Over the last 100 years or so, there's been no 40-year period in which you'd have run out of money if you held a broad stock-market-index-like portfolio and took out 3% of the initial capital, inflation-adjusted, every year; so you're safe adopting such a strategy now."

Assuming that you invested in the United States stock market. Argentina would have looked like a good bet back in the 1920s, but it hit some really bad times...

Mr.Money Mustache on finance and positive psychology. Specialties are doing the math of everyday life, and understanding the concept of the hedonic treadmill.

You should not: 1) expect that other people will become more rational, if you yell at them enough;

I think the rest of your summary is accurate, but Vassar actually said that you can't use to rational argument to convince people of much of anything. Now that I think about it, carefully judged yelling probably works better than rational argument.

Isaac Asimov, history's most prolifi writer and Mensa's honorary president, attempted to formulate a more modest set of ethical precepts for robots and instead produced the blatantly suicidal three laws

The three laws were not intended to be bulletproof, just a starting point. And Asimov knew very well that they had holes in them; most of his robot stories were about holes in the three laws.

In the original article (PDF, free to download after you register) I find:

"The artificial connectome has been extended to a single application written in Python and run on a Raspberry Pi computer."

I wish I had actually applied myself in studying a foreign language instead of putting in the minimum effort to pass. I wish I had studied computer science, it would had accelerated my career by 5 years and CoSci is fun. I wish other people had taken more English classes, because writing clearly is hard and needs to be taught*.

*My alma mater my be unusual in actually teaching clear writing in English classes. I credit the professors involved.

If you think you will be let go from your current position in the near or mid future, start looking for a new job now. I'm not sure whether you will gain anything by disclosing your condition, vs. having the unexplained gap. Don't lie outright, of course. Can you say that you paused your studies to care for your child, without mentioning exactly what's going on? Your plans to return to grad school are a mark in your favor - that could also be a stated reason to switch jobs (i.e., "I want a job that will support me doing night school/ flexible hours for a year or two while I get even smarter").

Also, you have a Master's in EE. I'm guessing that's a field where there are far more jobs that qualified applicants, like basically all forms of engineering. That, plus the fact that even neurotypical engineers are really weird, and I wouldn't expect things to be too bad on a job hunt.

I got one and took my young son to get one as well. Convincing a child of the benefit of getting a shot or nasal spray makes for an excellent lesson in rationality since you must convince the kid to accept immediate and certain pain in return for a moderately reduced chance of experiencing a larger amount of future pain.

I enjoy taking long walks outside, but it's starting to get cold out. I'd like to continue my walks, but I need better protective gear.

People who live in cold climates: How do you dress up to stay warm for long periods outside when it's freezing / windy / snowing? What advice would you give for choosing appropriate clothing? Any specific brands you'd recommend? Any links to guides for choosing appropriate clothing?

My area (Baltimore, MD) doesn't usually get much colder than around 0 degrees Fahrenheit even with the wind chill, so I don't need the type of gear that really cold climates require.