Set forth below is the text of a comment that I recently posted to the discussion thread for another blog entry at this site:
“the good stuff that we have seen is 50 times more good than the bad stuff we have seen is bad.”
You keep saying that. The bad stuff is obvious. Bans from every major finance board. The one and only lifetime ban from the Bogleheads conference. Personal finances – utter disaster. Writing career – nonstarter. The only expert who ever acknowledged your existence disowned you years ago. To the few people who are aware of you at all, you are universally reviled as a passive-aggressive narcissist and pathological liar.
Where’s the good stuff? What could possibly top that steaming dung heap, 50 times over?
I would have to write seven books to cover all the good stuff, Anonymous. Review the site. Start anywhere and then just go from there. You’ll get the idea if you can open your mind even a tiny bit to the possibility that the Buy-and-Holders are just as capable as any other humans of making a mistake.
To keep it simple, let’s look at one thing. I put a post forward on the morning of May 13, 2002, saying that the retirement study posted at John Greaney’s site lacks a valuation adjustment. That’s huge. If that’s true (and it is — thousands of people have looked at the Greaney study over the past 16 years and not one has been able to identify a valuation adjustment in it), that one post has the potential of saving millions of people from suffering the effects of a failed retirement. It’s not just Greaney who made that mistake. Lots of people did. There were thousands of articles on retirement planning that advised people to employ the infamous 4 percent rule that Greaney advocates in his study. Once we open the entire internet to honest posting re the last 37 years of peer-reviewed research in this field, we will be making honest and accurate retirement planning studies and calculators available at every site on the internet.
If getting those accurate retirement planning numbers out to millions of people were the only thing that I did with this thing, that would justify all of the abuse that you Goons have dished out to us. But that of course is not the only thing. That was the first day. I have been building on that foundation for 16 years now. And I will continue to do so.
Has the bad stuff hurt us? obviously.
What really matters in the long run? The good stuff.
Love builds. Hate destroys. Love triumphs over hate in the end. Every time. If it didn’t, we wouldn’t be here. If it didn’t, we wouldn’t live in such a great country. You could look at a lot of things and focus on the bad stuff and talk about how terrible the world is. The trick is to overcome the bad stuff, to make something good out of it. And you can look at the slider at the top of every page of this site and see what expert after expert after expert who visited this site had to say about the amazing work that I have done with the help of thousands of fine fellow community members.
Goon garbage is Goon garbage. I am stunned that you Goons ever enjoyed a single victory. I’l give you that one. But the very fact that you have had to engage in criminal behavior tells the story of what following a pure Get Rich Quick investing strategy does to people. Not this boy, you know?
I love my country. So I am going to continue to follow the laws of my country and to advise all others to do the same. I will do anything in my power to help you Goons out because I think it would be fair to say that you got caught up in something a lot bigger than you realized you were heading into in the early days. But nothing on the wrong side of the felony line for this boy. Not in 16 years, not in 16 billion years.
Does it make me sad to reflect on how things have transpired over the first 16 years of our discussions? Sure. Without question.
Does it make me excited to look forward to the advances that we will be achieving in days to come? Sure. Without question. And the positive feelings are 50 times stronger than the negative feelings.
We’ll see how it goes, Anonymous. I am 100 percent certain that the American people are going to come out on top re this one. But you are not going to believe it just because I say it. You are going to have to see it all play out with your own eyes. You are going to become worried about what it means to cause millions of failed retirements on the day they take you away in handcuffs to your prison cell. It breaks my heart. But I can’t change it, can I? At least we have all the good stuff to look forward to. So I make an effort to focus on that.
Love is the answer. I am 100 percent sure.
And I do wish you all good things.
Rob
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