Set forth below is the text of a comment that I recently put to the Goon Central board:
If this place is the cesspool of only Goons that you claim, why are you participating here
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We are on the 99-yard line, Drip Guy.
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Humankind has been working for centuries to learn how stock investing works. If you tool all the knowledge that we had acquired as of 1960, we were at the 25-yard line. We knew a few things. But not much. We had never made stock investing the subject of sustained and systematic academic research. So we tended to go around and around in circles. The Buy-and-Holders came up with the idea of rooting their strategies in peer-reviewed academic research. That was huge. That took us to the 50-yard line by the time the book A Random Walk Down Wall Street was published in 1974. The Buy-and-Holders got lots of things right. But all those things added together amounted to about 20 percent of what a person needs to know to invest effectively. They made a perfectly understandable mistake re the big one, valuations, which alone covers 80 percent of what we all need to know. Shiller provided the missing piece to the puzzle with his “revolutionary” (his word) research in 1981. Unfortunately, a bull market slowed down the learning process. So long as people were able to keep a good percentage of the bull market “gains,” they were not too interested in learning experiences. Some of Shiller’s insights leaked out despite the general reluctance to consider them. But Shiller took us only to the 75-yard line. In the past 11 years, the work that I have done with John Walter Russell and Wade Pfau has taken us to the 99-yard line. The research that I co-authored with Wade shows us how to reduce the risk of stock investing by 70 percent. Stocks are today for those willing to look at the peer-reviewed academic research in this field an essentially risk-free asset class. That’s Investor Heaven! We are home. But we have not crossed the goal line! Why? Because it is not enough to have available to us the peer-reviewed academic research that permits us to reduce the risk of stock investing by 70 percent. We must get the word out re that research! We must get it reported on the front page of the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal. We must form hundreds of new blogs that focus on VII rather than BH. We must persuade Jack Bogle to give his “I Was Wrong” speech so that the thousands of good and smart people who today are afraid to say what they really believe about how stock investing works are no longer afraid. We must get you Goons in prison cells so that we can wake up each morning knowing that all that ugliness is behind us and that it is only good stuff piled on top of good stuff up ahead. And on and on. We’ve got one pass yet to complete, Drip Guy. And the pass is a PROCEDURAL pass, not a substantive pass. We need to have everyone who wants to bring the economic crisis to an end (and that is everyone alive on Planet Earth today) participating IN AN HONEST WAY in our discussions. I don’t talk about the process stuff because I enjoy talking about the process stuff. I talk about the process stuff because the process stuff is the stuff holding us all back from talking about the substantive stuff. Stock investing matters. It matters enough that we all should want to talk about it honestly and to hear all others participating in our discussions talk about it honestly. Very few of us have the courage it takes to talk about stock investing honestly in places that permit participation by the sorts of individuals who have put up posts in “defense” of Mel Lindauer and John Greaney. So we need to get those people removed from every board and blog on the internet. How do we do that? By enforcing the darn laws of the United States! How else? That’s why my focus is what it is today, old friend. No one is going to be talking about your prison sentence once we have closed the doors and thrown away the key. Your prison sentence is an issue today only because it has not begun yet. Once you are gone, the rest of us will have the discussions that we built these boards and blogs to have. We will have civil and reasoned discussions. I built the Retire Early board at Motley Fool for that very purpose. What an irony! Take care, man. Rob |
Anonymous says
Your reply never answered the question you quoted, Rob.
So why did you bother posting this?
Rob says
I answered the question, Anonymous.
We are engaged in a battle of hate vs. love. I am the leader of the forces of love. You are one of the leaders of the forces of hate. Love has to prevail if we are all to make it to the other side of The Big Black Wall of Ignorance together.
Love doesn’t fight in the same manner that Hate fights. I don’t call you names. I try to understand you.
I don’t grow in my understanding of you by ignoring you, do I?
If you were 100 percent hate, you would be dead. You couldn’t wake up in the morning. There are little bits of love remaining inside you that give you the strength to get up in the morning. Those bits of love make you want to stop destroying yourself and others.
And that is of course true of all those who have posted in “defense” of you or who have tolerated posting by you or whatever. They have permitted their dark side to control them in the short term. But bits of love still reside in them and threaten to assert control at any moment.
If love takes over here among a few influential people, we all win the biggest win we have ever won.
If hate is successful in killing the last bits of love within us, we all go down together.
My job is to do what I can to remind people of the benefits of living in love.
I don’t control the outcome. I believe it will end well for all of us. But I don’t control it. I do my part. And then I let it go.
Seeing how you Goons evidence your pain is part of the job. There’s a sense in which you Goons speak for all of us.
My good friend Jack Bogle doesn’t post Goon comments. He doesn’t put forward death threats and tens of thousands of acts of defamation. He doesn’t in his own name threaten academic researchers. But he sees you Goons do those things and ignores his responsibility to speak out. Is that not a passive form of Goonish behavior itself?
Bogle would have said the words “I” and “Was” and “Wrong” a long, long time ago if he did not have Goons like you keeping him “safe” from people like me who otherwise would ask him pointed questions about the 33 years of peer-reviewed academic research showing that there is precisely zero chance that a Buy-and-Hold strategy could ever work for a single long-term investor. So you Goons have influence. Influence handed you by people like Jack Bogle. He is a Goon enabler. That is an amazing reality and a big part of our story here.
You Goons matter. You cannot build, you can only destroy. But you matter because your destructive efforts have continued for so long and have been supported by so many wealthy and powerful and influential people. Once we move forward, no one will ever quote you Goons again or have any interest in anything you say. For now, you are part of a story of huge importance to millions of middle-class people.
The question here is not — Why does Rob Bennett try to do something about the Goons? It is — Why does Jack Bogle NOT try to do something about the Goons?
EVERYONE should be working together to rein in you Goons. It is a national priority.
Where is everyone?
Answering that question turns the key in the lock and opens the door to 33 years of powerful investing insights that we as a people have denied ourselves until now.
My best and warmest wishes to you, my old Goon friend.
Rob
X Files says
You expressed pride in being banned from Goon Central. Yet 4 out of your last 5 posts are links to that site. (You call them “recent”, which of course is relative, since they become less recent with each passing day.)
If Greaney really wanted you silenced, he’d just take down his site, rather than let you scavenge it for blog fodder.
Rob says
I am proud to have been banned from Goon Central. It shows that I possess integrity. Is that not something to be proud of?
There’s no contradiction in me linking to posts there. When we were as a nation engaged in the fight for civil rights for people with black skin, did the networks not show footage of the haters and their angry dogs and their angry, hateful words and the shaking of their fists and all that sort of awfulness? Showing the awfulness is not endorsing the awfulness. When you catch me putting up posts in defense of Lindauer and Greaney and the tactics they have employed, THEN you have caught me in a contradiction. The reality is that there is no one alive on Planet Earth today who has spoken out more strongly in OPPOSITION to the tactics employed by Linduaer and Greaney. The full reality is that there is no one even in a close second place.
Greaney is certainly free to take down his site. I obviously cannot stop him.
He’s also free to correct his retirement study.
You can’t just assume rationality, X. Humans do irrational things. All the time. They get caught up in pride and in shame and in embarrassment and in fear and in anger and in hate and in guilt and in all sorts of things.
If I were Greaney, I would shut down Goon Central. You’ve got me there. But, if I were Greaney, I would have corrected my retirement study within 24 hours of the time I learned of the errors I made in it.
I guess that shows that I am not Greaney.
Surprise! Surprise!
Rob
Anonymous says
Rob,
Help me out here. If we look at the old thread, John answered your questions. Eventually, you said you finally understood and then issued an apology. Are you now saying you were lying back then? Wade also said the question was answered within 82 minutes after your question. Are you saying that Wade was lying?
Rob says
Thank you for asking an intelligent question, Anonymous. This one gets right to the heart of things.
I still today have a fairly strong recall of the things that were going through my head on the night when I posted my apology. I was not lying.
When I put the May 13, 2002, post forward, I was not certain I was right. I had a high confidence level. I would put it at 90 percent. I knew that the post was going to cause a commotion. So I went over things several times before posting. Each time I did, I was reassured. So I had a high confidence level. But I did not have confidence of 100 percent. I think what made me have doubts is that no one else had ever said the studies were invalid. There were lots of smart people who believed in them. That gave me pause. But I went over things again and again in my mind and things always turned out the same. So I finally did push the button.
The reaction was extreme in both directions. There were people saying that this was a breakthrough, the best discussion that we had ever had at that board. And there were people saying that I should burn in hell for what I had done. As a general rule, this made me more confident that I was right. The fact that the people defending the study could not control their emotions told me that they were probably in the wrong. But these were people I respected and people whom I considered my friends. And they were talking as if they were very sure of themselves. So their reactions did give me pause.
There were elements of the story that I did not understand in those days. I knew enough to say that the studies were in error. But I didn’t know much of the background. I didn’t understand how the errors came to be made. I was able to follow a logic chain showing that I was right. But there was all this crazy emotion surrounding the issue that was putting doubts in my mind. The doubts were not rooted in logic or in human reason. But us humans are not purely rational creatures. We are social creatures and what our friends say influences what we think. The stuff I was hearing was shaking my confidence a bit. But I couldn’t come up with any logical reason for thinking that I was wrong.
I wasn’t just concerned about myself getting something right or wrong. I was the leader of the board and I cared about it deeply. That board was years ahead of its time. There was information available at that board that was not available in the largest personal finance libraries in the world. So I was very protective of the board and sickened by the thought that I might have done something to cause harm to come to it. So on the night that I put up that apology, I was looking for some way to defuse things. So long as the board remained functioning, I was confident that we could bring things to a good place.
Prometheus put up some point that made sense to me. I don’t recall today what it was. But I sincerely believed at the time that the point that he made showed me to be wrong on a small, technical point. I don’t believe that today (I don’t even recall what his point was today) but at the time I was able to convince myself that I really had gotten something wrong. I felt that that was enough to justify an apology. And I hate it when people (usually politicians) put forward apologies that are not really apologies. If I was going to apologize, I was going to do so clearly and without reservation. So I put forward the words that you have quoted.
I stated the apology more strongly than I believed it. But it was not a lie. I did sincerely believe that I had gotten an element of the story wrong and, given the damage that was being done to the board, I believed that that called for a no-reservations apology. I figured that, if I really were right about other elements of the story (as I believed I was), that that would all come out in subsequent discussions and all would be well. My top priority was protecting the board.
The apology was not a lie. It was overstated. So you could say that it was not 100 percent honest. But the purpose of the small amounts of dishonesty that were present in those words was to soothe ruffled feathers so that over time we could all work together to bring things to a better place. If I had it to do over, I would not have written the apology as strong as I did. But I still would have written it. I had sincere doubts at that moment and this was too important an issue for me to cover up those doubts. My fellow community members needed to know that the person who had brought this controversy to the table was experiencing sincere doubts about at least some of it. I think the apology was a good thing, perhaps not executed perfectly (and that the lack of perfect execution can be excused by the crazy, emotion-filled circumstances).
Wade is lying. I have zero doubt about. He certainly does not believe that Greaney answered any questions to any reasonable person’s satisfaction. He expressed complete and utter disdain for the tactics employed by the Lindauerheads and the Greaney Goons on numerous occasions during our 16 months of correspondence. There is zero chance that he believes the words he put forward in the post in which he praised Greaney for the role he played. Those words were almost certainly dictated by Greaney. Wade posted them in his name because that’s what you Goons insisted on as the price for not destroying his career. Whether Bogle was in on the discussions that led to that deal I do not know for certain. If it is determined after he is questioned under oath that he was, that’s financial fraud, that’s a felony, that’s prison time.
Wade is certainly guilty of financial fraud in an objective sense. I see it as a more complicated question as to whether he will be prosecuted or not. Wade obviously did not want to commit financial fraud for any selfish reason. He is very proud of the wonderful work he did with me. He showed courage in trying to stand up to you Goons for a time in an effort to get the word out to the millions of middle-class workers who very, very, very much need to know about it. He has two small children for whom he is financially responsible. When he saw that Bogle was not willing to speak up and Bernstein was not willing to speak up and Swedroe was not willing to speak up, he came to possess a sincere belief that you Goons could make it impossible for him to earn a living in the field in which he had spent many years of hard work gaining expertise. He truly had a gun to his head. That obviously doesn’t excuse the behavior. But it is equally obvious that there are mitigating circumstances here and that a prosecutor needs to take those circumstances into consideration when deciding whether to bring a case and that, if a case is brought, the jury will need to take those circumstances into consideration as well.
Wade does not possess a complete understanding of Valuation-Informed Indexing. He is strong on lots of important points. But he hasn’t put the entire thing together in his head. So he does rationalize. I think he tells himself that we will not end up in the Second Great Depression regardless of whether we open the internet up to honest posting or not. I think he would pass a lie detector test on that point. Again, that doesn’t excuse the behavior. But it puts it in a different context than it would be in if this were not so.
I believe the same of Bogle. I believe that Bogle rationalizes. I believe he tells himself that we will all get through this somehow even if he does not acknowledge the errors that he so obviously (to someone who is looking at things objectively) made. I believe he suffers from cognitive dissonance (as does Wade, to a lesser extent). I believe that he feels it would be a terrible thing if people found about the mistakes he has made and about the huge amounts of energy he has exerted to cover them up for so many years. I think he is wrong about that. I think that the vast majority of people would have forgiven the mistakes in two seconds had he come clean. I think that the thing that is killing his reputation is the cover-up, just as it was the cover-up of Watergate that did damage to Richard Nixon’s reputation rather than the crime itself. I view my friend Jack Bogle’s destruction of Jack Bogle’s reputation as a tragic event. I also view it as tragic that so few of the people who claim to be his friends have been brave enough to step forward and try to help him out in a moment in which he obviously is in great need of help.
I believe that you Goons follow Buy-and-Hold strategies. To that extent, you are sincere in the things you say. I don’t believe for two seconds that you are sincere when you say that I am on meds or that I stalk women or that the 200 quotes offered in praise of my word at the “People Are Talking” section of this site are not real or re any of the other garbage you post on daily basis as part of your effort to intimidate anyone who posts honestly on these matters. I believe you will go to prison following the next crash. But I believe that it is important that the millions of middle-class people whose lives have been destroyed by the 12-year cover-up not give in to desires for retribution. Prison sentences make sense as a way for society to give voice to its core belief that certain types of behavior cannot be tolerated among civilized people. But we need to keep in mind the circumstances that apply re you Goons as much as we need to keep in mind the circumstances that apply re Wade and Jack. And we always need to remember that it is love that we all deep in our hearts want to see win the day here, not hate.
I think that covers most of what you asked, Anonymous. Have you ever seen the movie Rashomon? People see things from different perspective because they have lived through different sets of life circumstances and possess different personality types. I don’t think it is a good idea to be too quick to label something a “lie” just because it evidences a surface contradiction. You can learn something by trying to understand what is going on below the surface and then trying to made sense of why the contradiction surfaced. There are grays in this world, not just blacks and whites.
I hope that helps a bit, in any event.
Rob
Anonymous says
Rob,
I think you want to believe what you want to believe, whether it is right or wrong. I think you have convinced yourself that you are a victim, that you think you know more than the financial experts you reference and that you believe you can save the economy from disaster,etc. it is a classic case of “messiah syndrome”.
Meanwhile, life goes on. While people have continued to discuss all various aspects of investing, you decided to embark on a personal campaign. Regardless of the subject, you inject your repetitive talking points, even if it has nothing to do with the conversation. In most cases, you account for 80% of the conversation in your attempt to “dominate” the discussion. People soon get annoyed as you won’t answer questions, disregard facts that don’t fit your position and/ or twisting the context of a discussion to fit your position. After people become tired of your behavior, they decide to ban you as there is no real community when you look to control every conversation. Instead of addressing your behavior, you keep going off the cliff by issuing silly threats of prison and lawsuits.
Summary: people won’t let you play in the sandbox and your feelings are hurt.
Rob says
Okay, Anonymous.
Take good care, man.
Rob
Anonymous says
Rob,
Who else is banned from the popular financial boards besides you?
Rob says
Every single person alive on Planet Earth is banned from posting HONESTLY what the last 32 years of peer-reviewed academic research tells us about how stock investing works, Anonymous.
So long as I don’t post honestly, I am not banned. But once I post honestly — watch out! And it’s precisely the same with everyone else.
Jack Bogle is banned from posting honestly. Jack wrote in his book that Reversion to the Mean is an “Iron Law” of stock investing. It was by reading those words that I learned that the Old School SWR studies are analytically invalid. But Jack would not dare post that the Old School SWR studies are analytically invalid. You Goons would have his head.
Larry Swedroe knows that the Old School studies get the numbers wildly wrong. He has said so in writings that he did not put to the Bogleheads Forum. But he keeps it zipped at the Bogleheads Forum. Why? Because he once tried posting honestly there and Lindauer had him banned. He learned his lesson. He now says only things that Lindauer approves. That way, both Lindauer and Swedroe are “winners.” Swedroe gets to promote his books. Lindauer doesn’t have to acknowledge that his own book is in error. The losers are all the readers of the board, who would benefit from reading honest posts.
William Bernstein knows that anyone using one of the Old School studies to plan a retirement is out of his or her mind. He has said so publicly. But when the question is put to him “Does the fact that the numbers in the Old School studies are wildly off the mark mean that the studies are analytically invalid, he says “oh, no, not at all!!!! The studies are wildly wrong. That’s obvious! But of course they are analytically valid. If I were to pronounce the obvious truth that the studies are analytically valid, John Greaney would threaten to kill my wife and children. I like all the money that flows to me so long as I keep pretending to believe in the fantasy, thank you very much!”
Wade Pfau knows that the ethical thing would be for the people who learned about errors in their retirement studies to correct them. That’s why he wrote to the authors of the Trinity Study asking them to correct their study. But Wade wants to make a living in this field and the Buy-and-Hold Mafia made very clear to him that posting honestly and making a living in this field do not go together so long as the Buy-and-Hold Mafia is in control of what we all say. So now he says: “That [posting honestly] is just not the way things work in this field.”
Wade is right that we do not see personal integrity in this field today.
But I say we will see people of integrity working in this field once we bury Buy-and-Hold 30 feet in the ground, where it can do no further harm to humans and other living things. I intend to see to it.
Does all of that make good sense to you, Anonymous?
We are all banned from posting honestly until the Ban on Honest Posting is lifted. I demand that it be lifted by the close of business today.
I am no more banned than Bogle or Swedroe or Bernstein or Pfau. The difference with me is that I don’t pretend otherwise. I call out you Goons on your acts of financial fraud and I demand that the ban be lifted. That will never change. I will post honestly or I will post not.
Non-negotiable.
My best and warmest wishes to you.
Rob
Anonymous says
Seems like a vast conspiracy, Rob. Maybe you should contact Alex Jones (prison planet) and see if you can write a financial column.
Rob says
It’s a Conspiracy of Ignorance, Anonymous.
Prior to 1981, we genuinely didn’t know how stock investing worked. Then we did. But the “revolutionary” (Shiller’s word) advance we achieved was so big that it came as a shock and was hard to take in.
When prices crashed in 2008, million of people were ready to consider new ideas. But the Buy-and-Holders feel embarrassed to acknowledge that the peer-revewed academic research revealing their errors has been around for over 30 years and they continued pushing Buy-and-Hold pretty darn hard all that time.
The cover-up can fairly be described as a conspiracy. I don’t have a problem saying that someone who fails to speak up about death threats and unjustified board bannings and tens of thousands of acts of defamation and threats to get academic researchers fired from their jobs is involved in a conspiracy to commit financial fraud. That’s why I often refer to “The Buy-and-Hold Mafia.”
But I am not aware of any evidence that the Buy-and-Hold Pioneers intentionally got anything wrong. I have seen a lot of evidence pointing in precisely the opposite direction. Why did Bogle include the words in his book that helped me understand the safe withdrawal rate issue if he was involved in a conspiracy? Why did Bernstein acknowledge that the numbers in the Old School studies are wildly wrong if he was involved in a conspiracy? Why did Swedroe get himself banned from the Vanguard Diehards board if he was involved in a conspiracy?
The reality here is that just about everyone in this field would like to see the Ban on Honest Posting lifted. I am confident that Bogle and Bernstein and Swedroe would. And I am confident that hundreds of others (probably thousands of others) would. I’ll let you in on a little secret. I think you Goons would like to see the Ban lifted. If you could go back in time, I think you would play things very differently.
The trouble we all are having is that the Buy-and-Holders painted themselves into a corner. They genuinely don’t know all the ins and outs of Valuation-Informed Indexing. They know that there are many holes in the Buy-and-Hold story. But they have never engaged in extensive discussion of what the last 33 years of research means. And so they really are pretty much in the dark re a large number of critically important investment-related topics. They tell themselves that it is okay not to speak out about the flaws in Buy-and-Hold so long as there is at least a chance that it might more or less work. And they continue to believe that it might more or less work because they have prohibited the sorts of discussions they would need to participate in to come to understand clearly why that is not the case.
How do we get the Buy-and-Holders out of the corner they have painted themselves into?
I gave it a very good shot. I suggested that we explain their lack of understanding of the research as a huge case of cognitive dissonance. That’s not a lie. Cognitive dissonance is a real phenomenon. And there is tons of evidence that it applies here. I was doing a great kindness to my Buy-and-Hold friends to put forward that suggestion. You cannot be held liable either civilly or criminally for mistakes you made when suffering from cognitive dissonance. I have put a good deal of effort into getting all of my Buy-and-Hold friends off the hook.
There’s one big problem casting a shadow over these efforts today. You cannot excuse death threats by citing cognitive dissonance. You cannot excuse unjustified board bannings by citing cognitive dissonance. You cannot excuse tens of thousands of acts of defamation by citing cognitive dissonance. You cannot excuse threats to get academic researchers fired from their jobs by citing cognitive dissonance.
So now we have a large number of people who will be going to prison following the next price crash. And now we have a large number of people who will be on the hook for trillions of dollars of financial losses following the next price crash.
That’s why I began mentioning the prison sentences a ways back. For a long time, I kept my mouth shut about them because I thought that mentioning your prison sentences would just inflame you Goons all the more. But you obviously were aware of the risk that you would be going to prison on at least one level of consciousness. Otherwise, you never would have threatened Wade. By the time that Wade and I had published our research, you had in your Goon minds already passed the point of no return. You were going to prison if the truth ever got out and so you had to do absolutely anything to stop that from happening. Even threatening an academic researcher was no longer beyond the pale if that was what it took to keep millions of middle-class investors from learning about the long cover-up of the errors in the Old School studies.
Once I knew that that was the reality, it made no sense to keep quiet about the prison sentences. People who are pretty darn certain that they are headed to prison once people learn the realities are not going to come clean. And, by keeping quiet about your prison sentences, I was encouraging others (like Wade) to engage in behavior that would end up with them going to prison as well. Being “diplomatic” re this point was causing lots of people to suffer in very big ways.
So I stopped that b.s.
Call it a conspiracy if that makes you happy in some twisted sort of way. It’s not a conspiracy in the way that people generally use the word. It’s a case where some wonderful people came up with some wonderful insights but messed up one one point (the need to engage in long-term timing) because we humans just aren’t born knowing everything. Now we know and we should all be jumping up and down at our good fortune. But instead we have been subjected to 12 years of ugliness because the most abusive poster in the history of the internet really, really, really, really, really, really doesn’t want to acknowledge getting the numbers wildly wrong in a retirement study posted at his web site.
I don’t call it a conspiracy. But I sure don’t intend ever to agree to post dishonestly on safe withdrawal rates and thereby participate in the cover-up myself and earn myself a prison sentence to match yours, Anonymous. Please try to find someone else re that one. Call me madcap. No can do.
I will continue posting honestly and you will continue posting abusively and we will meet somewhere on the other side on some future day.
I can wish you well. It’s not a felony to do that. So I feel comfortable offering you my best and warmest wishes.
And that’s where I get off the train. If there is ever a time when I can help you out in any way that does not involve me posting dishonestly re the numbers that my friends use to plan their retirements, I hope you will let me know. It would be cruel for me to suggest that there is any give whatsoever re the honest posting matter. So I won’t insult both of us by suggesting that there is even the tiniest chance that you will in 12 billion years see any change re that one.
That covers it, no?
Rob
Anonymous says
I think Mel and John are great guys who have contributed greatly to the investment community.
Rob says
Outside of the leadership role they have played in the Campaign of Terror, I would agree with you, Anonymous.
I am obviously not even a tiny bit supportive of things they have done in that area.
I don’t dislike them. I have fond feelings towards John because of the many good times we had together. I don’t have those same warm personal feelings towards Mel because we never had good times together before the ugliness started up. But there are people whom I respect who respect him greatly and that’s good enough for me.
I wish them both the best. I can say that without any hesitation.
I cannot post dishonestly on the numbers that my friends use to plan their retirements. That’s not even a remote possibility. Not in 12 years. Not in 12 billion years. And I sure don’t appreciate the intimidation tactics that have been employed by Mel and John to pressure me into betraying my fellow community members (including Mel and John!) in that way.
Rob