Set forth below is the text of a comment that I recently posted to the discussion thread for another blog entry at this site:
“But, yes, there is a frustrating side to it. I don’t say different.”
So you agree with the previous contributor that you feel that you have the right to ignore everyone else, but that people don’t have the right to ignore you.
Did you let that sink in? Do you see the hypocrisy? You say you want to have a discussion, but that is not true. You want your opinion to be heard and accepted, but you are not interested in anyone having a different opinion.
It sounds like the only “job” you are qualified for is the next dictator of North Korea.
I obviously don’t agree with any of that even a tiny bit, Anonymous.
Everyone has a right to ignore me.
No one has a right to ignore the laws of the country in which they live.
Using death threats to cover up an error in a retirement study is against U.S. law. Using demands for unjustified board bannings to cover up an error in a retirement study is against U.S. law. Using thousands of acts of defamation to cover up an error in a retirement study is against U.S. law. Using threats to get an academic researcher fired from his job to cover up an error in a retirement study is against U.S. law.
People who disagree with me within the constraints of U.S. law are helping me and all the people listening in by putting my ideas to a challenge. People who violate U.S. law are hurting themselves and others by violating social norms that are important enough to all of us to be reflected in our laws. I see a big difference between those two.
I want my opinion to be heard by those who care to listen to it but not by any who do not care to listen to it. And I want my opinion to be accepted by those persuaded by my arguments but not by any not persuaded by the arguments. I love it when people express other opinions but only when they stay within the confines of the laws that apply. When you Goons put forward death threats and all the rest, you turn what could be a positive (constructive discussion of important differences) into a negative (criminal acts of financial fraud).
That’s it. That’s the entire story.
I could be wrong on the substantive points. I don’t think I am. But I could be. If I were wrong on the substantive points, I probably wouldn’t see it. Self-deception would be causing me not to understand points that I needed to understand to make complete sense of things. So I need people on the other side trying to poke holes in my arguments. Those people are helping us all.
But I don’t see any possibility that I am wrong on the process points, on my belief that none of us should advance death threats or demands for unjustified board bannings or thousands of acts of defamation or threats to get academic researchers fired from their jobs. My entire life’s work is rooted in a belief that the laws of this country relating to free expression of differing ideas are good laws. I am a journalist. Those social norms mean something to me. So, no, I don’t have an open mind on the question of whether people should work hard to remain on the right side of the felony line or not.
Is every policeman who arrests someone and places him in a prison cell a dictator? I sure don’t think so. The site administrator had a responsibility to arrest you in a very small way by removing you from the Motley Fool site when you advanced your first death threat. If he had acted on that responsibility, you wouldn’t be on your way to landing in a prison cell today. It was by not taking his responsibilities seriously that he caused you 1,000 times more trouble than he would have caused you by banning you from a discussion board for a few months. By acting on his responsibilities, he would have liberated you in a very important way. By acting on his responsibilities, he would have freed you from your own self-destructiveness before it was able to do more harm to you.
Our laws are not the laws of dictators. Our laws are there to limit our behavior in cases where our behavior threatens to get so out of hand as to destroy us and others. We flawed humans need those limits. You Goons have hurt yourselves and others in very, very, very serious ways with your insanely abusive behavior. As a society we need to act on our responsibilities to free both you and millions of middle-class investors to live far better lives in the future than you and they have lived in the recent past.
That’s my sincere take re these terribly important matters, in any event.
I naturally wish you all the best that this life has to offer a person, my dear Goon friend.
Rob
If laws were broken, then file charges. Otherwise, you are just repeating lies.
It is all the people of the United States who use the internet to learn how stock investing works. So the crime is against all the people of the United States. So we all need to pull together to demand that charges by filed by the prosecutors who work for us.
That will happen. Did the people who were defrauded by Bernie Madoff insist that charges be filed before the fraud was exposed? They did not. Madoff’s investors referred to him as “Saint Bernie” in the days before they lost their retirement money. The fraud had been going on for a long time. But it was only when they saw their retirement funds disappear that charges were brought. It appears to me that it is going to go the same way with The Great Buy-and-Hold Con.
All who follow the peer-reviewed research have known since 1981 that valuations affect long-term returns. So in an intellectual sense the fraud was exposed in 1981 (except it wasn’t really fraud until it was exposed — until Shiller published his “revolutionary” research findings, Buy-and-Hold was a mistake, not a con). But people have not suffered devastating losses to this day. We have seen poor returns for 18 years running now as a consequence of the out-of-control bull of the late 1990s. But the full reality is that those following Buy-and-Hold strategies have not done poorly if you count what happened in the years before 2000 and even from 2000 forward the losses have not been devastating. That’s what most people look at, most people look at the numbers on their portfolio statement to see how their investment strategy is doing. So most people are not inclined to demand that criminal charges be brought today. That would probably change if honest posting were permitted and people could see what has been done to them and how the Buy-and-Holders have behaved to keep the cover-up going. But I think it would be fair to sat that you Goons have zero intention of permitting honest posting. So we are where we are.
The fraud is ongoing. If the market continues in the future to perform anything at all as it has always performed in the past, we will see the devastating losses in the next year or two or three. Is there some reason why we would not demand charges to be brought at that time? That’s sure what I expect to see happen. All of us who love our country should of course be doing what we can to have this massive act of financial fraud exposed as soon as possible. But there is only so much that humans can do. You Goons are pretty darn brutal in your abusiveness. I think it would be fair to say that no one who lives in the United States has seen an act of financial fraud this extensive. So it may be that we are going to need to wait a bit re the bringing of criminal charges. We can let people know that they are coming so that they can avoid putting posts up in “defense” of the Lindauerheads and the Greaney Goons so that the number who go to prison will be as small as possible given the circumstances that apply today. And we can do what we can to urge you Goons to come clean prior to the crash so that your own prison sentences might be shortened a bit. And then we need to let it go and accept what comes. No?
The bottom line is that the good news here is 50 times more good than the bad news here is bad. The last 37 years of peer-reviewed research is amazing, life-enhancing stuff. The fact that we are going to see a good number of our Goon friends sent to prison is a drag, to be sure. But the negative here hardly compares to the good we will see done for millions when we are able to tell people how to invest in ways that permits them to retire many years sooner while taking on only a fraction of the risk that they had to take on in the Buy-and-Hold Era. We have to take the bad with the good. We should do all that we can to keep the bad as limited as we can possibly make it. But we should not lose site of the full reality that the good news here is 50 times more good than the bad news here is bad.
Does that help at all?
Rob
You are the one making the claim. So you file the charges.
I have zero intention of filing any criminal charges, either now or at any other time. So, if that is what you are worried about, you can stop worrying.
I will continue posting honestly re safe withdrawal rates and scores of other critically important investment-related topics. In the event that there are lots of other people demanding that charges be filed in the days following the next price crash, I am going to put forward some words aimed at putting the behavior of you Goons in the best possible light so that your prison sentences will be as short as possible given the circumstances that apply. If charges are brought, the members of your jury will determine the length of your prison sentence.
Under our system, I do not determine when charges are brought or how long the prison sentences will be. I AM required to post honestly under out system. If I say that I believe that Greaney’s study contains a valuation adjustment, then I am guilty of financial fraud too and I go to prison too. Not freakin’ interested, you know?
I will do my part and I will leave it to others to determine how others will play it (with the sole exception being that I will put in a good word for you Goons as a result of my feelings of friendship towards you).
I hope that works for you, my dear Goon friend.
Rob
“I have zero intention of filing any charges, either now or at any other time.”
Of course not. You don’t do things. That’s not your thing. Doing things require effort.
No, your thing is to speculate on what other people will do, someday. And you’re convinced that your speculation has tremendous value, despite a batting average that approaches .000. Any dart-throwing monkey has had better results.
Okay, Anonymous.
I wish you all the best that this life has to offer a person, in any event. I hope that that helps a small bit.
Hang in there, dear friend.
Rob
you’re convinced that your speculation has tremendous value, despite a batting average that approaches .000.
Please consider what the P/E10 level has been for the entire time in which I have been putting forward these “speculations.”
You’ve heard the phrase “irrational exuberance,” right? At a time when the irrational exuberance reaches the sorts of levels it has reached in recent decades, do you think you could realistically expect to see anything different?
I’m not saying that I like this reality. I am just trying to provide a bit of perspective. How much rational behavior should we expect to see when prices have gone this far out of control?
Will rationality ever be restored? That’s the question. It always has been restored in the past. I think it will be restored this time too.
But I have been known to get them wrong from time to time. We are just going to have to hang in there a bit to find out for sure.
My best wishes.
Rob
Your speculation is worthless. Even you must see that. If you want things to change, you have to take action yourself. But you refuse.
Consider the old man shaking his fist at those darn kids on his lawn. Anyone impressed by him? No. Anyone handing him $500 million? No. And that’s you.
But I wish you all the best that this life has to offer a person, in any event. Even though that helps not even a small bit.
I don’t think I need to take action myself, Anonymous. I believe that that way lies madness. Considering what is at stake here, if I took this all on my own shoulders and considered where things stand today at the end of 16 years of discussion, I would go insane. No. That ain’t the way.
We live in communities. If the community of people that invests in stocks to provide for their retirements wants to open the internet to honest posting re the last 37 years of peer-reviewed research, that community of people will do that thing. I intend to help. I very much want those efforts to be successful. But this is not a job for me to do alone. This is not all on my shoulders.
It’s a community that enacted the laws against financial fraud. It’s a community that awarded Robert Shiller a Nobel prize for his “revolutionary” (Shiller’s word) research findings of 1981. It’s a community that established posting rules at every site at which I have posted that prohibit the abusive tactics that you Goons have engaged in to silence the thousands who have expressed a desire to participate in honest learning experiences.
The United States is a good community. Our laws are good laws. We will prevail in the end. I have zero doubt.
It would be a terrible mistake for me to think that I should do this on my own or even that I COULD do it on my own. This is community business. My job is to let the community work its will.
I have a part to play and I intend to play my part. I will never say that I believe that John Greaney included a valuation adjustment in the retirement study posted to his web site. I would be letting down the community if I did that. So that will never happen. But it is for the community to decide how to proceed and when to proceed. My job is just to facilitate the process by which the community arrives at its decisions as to how to proceed and when to proceed.
I love my country, right? Is that not the catch phrase that I use all the time? That’s the bottom line here. That’s been the bottom line here going back to the morning of May 13, 2002. I love my country and so I cannot bring myself to violate its laws re so important a matter.
I hope that helps a small bit, dear friend.
My best wishes.
Rob
So your plan is best expressed in the Dusty Springfield song “Wishin’ and Hopin’ “.
Dusty made a tidy some from that song. Because she did more than that.
I am a huge fan of “Dusty in Memphis.” That album makes me crazy. I’ve purchased it in several different forms at different times in my life. She hit it on the head with that one. (I understand that the song you refer to is not on that album, the reference to Dusty Springfield just makes me think of it.)
I would say that with me it is less wishing and hoping and more believing. I believe that this is a good country. So I follow its laws.
That’s the bottom line here. That runs deep.
It will be interesting to see how it all plays out.
Rob
Of course Wade Pfau had something to say about your contentions when he wrote this column directly aimed at you:
https://retirementresearcher.com/valuations-and-withdrawal-rates/
Needless to say, this caused you significant embarrassment after being set straight and has led you down a dark path since that time.
I believe that Wade was speaking honestly in the scores and scores of e-mails that we exchanged during the 16 months in which we were working together on the breakthrough peer-reviewed research we co-authored.
I believe that Wade would like to feel free to post honestly today and that we all should be working to make that a realistic option for him.
And I believe that Wade will testify honestly when he is put under oath at your trial.
It will be interesting to see how things play out.
My best wishes.
Rob
Wade already told us what we needed to know. It has already played out and that is why you act the way you do.
Okay, Anonymous.
All good things.
Rob