Intercst Article on 2% SWR

Research on Safe Withdrawal Rates

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JWR1945
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Post by JWR1945 »

Alas, the strong rants seem to draw more views than the the number runs...
This works only in the short run. After a while, they drive people away.

Have fun.

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Post by hocus2004 »

"The strong rants seem to draw more views than the the number runs"

The "rants" draw a whole bunch more views than the numbers runs, that's a stone cold fact. However, it doesn't follow that people in our community are generally more interested in soap operas than they are in Numbers Guy research on how to win financial freedom early in life. Looking at view counts is one way to assess community interest in a thread, but it is not the only way. Another way is to listen to which sorts of comments community members put forward re various types of threads. The Numbers Runs that JWR1945 puts forward get lots and lots of positive comment. People LOVE that stuff. The "rants" that I specialize in are often disparaged, sometimes in very harsh terms. People HATE a lot of the stuff that I put forward.

It's a paradox, is it not? People read the stuff they hate and they ignore the stuff they love. It's not that everyone in our community has gone mad. There are reasons why people respond the way they do.

It is a healthy reality that people hate a lot of my SWR stuff. I have put forward a good amount of sustance stuff, but my focus during The Great Debate has been on the process questions. People do not like process in general. Make it a process question that involves discussions of negative aspects of another poster's posting habits, and the dislike grows stronger. Make it negative discussions of a popular poster's posting practices, and the dislike grows stronger still. Make it negative discussions of the posting practices of the founder of the community, and you go off the charts. I of course would prefer it if people didn't hate my stuff. But the reality is that, if you are going to ask a community to revoke the posting privileges of the guy who founded the community, you should expect to take on some heat. And so I have. I think it is a natural thing that there be heat directed at me. It's important, of course, that the heat be contained, that it not be permitted to fuel a fire that gets out of control. When you fire live bullets at the king, you should expect that people are going to be asking some questions. We just need to be sure that the questions are asked in the appropriate ways, and that appropriate procedures are followed in checking out the answers provided to the questions and so forth.

Anyway, people don't like the Soap Operas. We should not interpret the view counts for threads like this one as a sign that people enjoy this sort of thing or want to see more of it or anything along those lines. There are two reasons why people are more inclined to read the process-oriented SWR threads than the susbtance-oriented SWR threads.

The first reason is that people are able to figure out what is going on in the process-oriented threads. Some of the numbers stuff that JWR1945 puts forward is VERY HARD to understand. People want to understand it. But I think it is fair to say that they have not been gettiing an awful lot of help. It's not JWR1945's fault. He is doing an A+++ job. The problem is that the usual guides that people make use of to make sense of a numbers-oriented thread are not in place at this board.

There were lots of substance-oriented SWR threads at the Motley Fool board back in the days when some honest and informed posting on these questions was permitted. And there were lots of substance-oriented SWR threads at this site's FIRE board back in the days before the DCMs was so kind as to favor us with their presence there. Take a look at the view counts on those threads. We got lots of reads and lots of participation for substance-oriented SWR stuff in those days. People don't participate today (or even read all that much) not because they lack interest in the subject matter. They don't participate because the nature of the substance discussions has changed dramatically.

What has changed is that you only have a small number of people participating. We have about four regular posters at this board. That is not even close to being enough. When people read a numbers run, they don't want to put all of their faith in the one guy who put it forward. They want to see how OTHERS respond to the numbers-oriented insights. They review comments from ten or twelve people, all with different viewpoints, and that gives them a means by which to integrate the information into their own world view. Without feedback, you don't have a discussion board. You have a posting board. Our community has voted strongly in favor of numbers-oriented discussions on many occasions. It has voted AGAINST numbers-oriented POSTING WITHOUT DISCUSSION. There is limited interest in numbers-oriented posts that do not generate discussions.

That does not mean that JWR1945 should not continue to post his work here. The work is of great importance and it will be generating fine discussions for many years to come. In fuure days, we will need to return to threads that he put up here and have the discussions that those posts should have generated the first time around. We will have the discussions. We just can't have them now. For a circular sort of reason. There are many who will not enter a discussion unless others do first. And the ones who ordinarily go first (the community leaders) are engaged in a boycott of this board. They are trying to cut off discussion, not faciliate it. We cannot count on these people to help out the many community members who would like to learn from JWR1945's research but who are unable to make complete sense of it by themselves. The process issue needs to be resolved first. THEN we can expect a flood of wonderful substance-oriented discussions.

Process trumps substance. It is the resolution of process questions that determines what substance questions can be brought to the table. Process is more important. We are having two types of SWR discussions. We are having a Great SWR Debate, which is a debate about substance. And we are having The Debate About Having a Debate, which is about process. We've slipped in a lot of susbtance stuff while The Debate About Having a Debate was raging about us. Ultimately, though, we need to resolve The Debate About Having a Debate before we can proceed to the fully involved, fully satisfying Great SWR Debate that we all (well, all but one) would really like to be having.

The second reason why you see more interest today in the "rant" type threads is that people see them as being more important than the threads that focus on questions of substance. The purpose of the community is to deal with substance. So there is a sense in which we all tend to think of the substance stuff as being the important stuff. That is not always so, however. There are times when a process question is brought to the table that is so critical to the community's future that it sucks up just about all of the oxygen in the room, not leaving much for substance discussions. That's the sort of situation we find ourselves in here.

Say that there was a question before the voters as to whether we should go to war with Iraq or not. That's pretty darn important stuff, is it not? It's hard to imagine that there could be a more important issue than whether we go to war or not. But there are more important issues.

Say that there was a question as to whether citizens would continue to have any input into the question of whether we go to war or not. That process question TRUMPS the important substance question because it is so core an issue. If we are going to give up our democracy and become a distatorship, an argument can be made that there is no point anymore in even debating whether to go to war or not. If we become a distatorship ourselves, there's not much point in going to war in Iraq to oppose a dictatorship, is there? As important as the substance question is, the process question is far more important.

It is critically important that aspiring early retirees know what the historical data says re SWRs. But that is a relatively small thing compared to the process question that is before us--whether the founder of a board community may defy the clearly expressed desire of the majority of a community to permit reasoned discussions on SWRs and block such discussions indefinitely solely because he is too embarassed to acknolwedge that he got a number wrong in a study that he published on the internet back in 1996. If the board founder is able to dictate what we may or may not talk about, we won't have enough informed people participating here to even have any good discussions on substance questions in the future. Look at what has happened to the Motley Fool board. Again, the substance question is important, but the process question trumps it.

My post of May 13, 2002, was a substance post. I hate my process-oriented stuff as much as most other community members hate my process-oriented stuff. I wish that I didn;t have to spend so many hours of my days writing this junk. But the bottom line is that the process-oriented stuff is the stuff that matters today. There will be lots of time for substance in later days, after we have taken action on the intercst problem. I don't like dealing with it, and you all don't like dealing with it. But we must deal with it. He has not exactly left us any other options, has he?
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Post by ben »

Hocus; sometimes I read through your entire post like this one and still don't really get what you are saying :lol: . I must be dumber than I thought! :roll:
Normal; to put on clothes bought for work, go to work in car bought to get to work needed to pay for the clothes, the car and the home left empty all day in order to afford to live in it...
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Post by hocus2004 »

"Sometimes I read through your entire post like this one and still don't really get what you are saying."

It's not to worry, Ben. I feel the same way about some of them myself! Sometimes, I go back and read a post I wrote a few months back and I think to myself "Why did I even bother writing that? Why did that seem like such a big deal at the time?"￾Â￾ It's all part of the wonderful game called Learning Together.

Besides, lots of people say that they can't figure out what Bob Dylan is trying to say in the lyrics of some of his most famous songs. Where would he be today if he let a little thing like that stand in his way of contuning to write them? He said one time: "I just write them as they come to me." That's sort of the way I feel about posts. I write them as they come to me. I do my level best to help fellow community members learn what it takes to win financial freedom early in life. Sometimes, I get a pat on the back. Sometimes I get a slug in the jaw. Either way I have to go to bed that night, dream a little about a better future, wake up the next morning, and do it again, do I not?

I like the James Bond icon (or whatever it's called), by the way. The other one I like is the one that Cathyet uses. I have been meaning to get one up for me that is a magician's wand being swirled around, but I am not very good at the technical side of the posting experience. I generally consider a post a succees if the words appear on the screen after I push the "Submit"￾Â￾ button. As you have probably noticed, I lost the ability to put things in italics and bold when I became "hocus2004."￾Â￾ So I am a little concerned that, if I try to work up one of those icon things, I might push a wrong button and start an international incident or something. Maybe someday when I am feeling particularly frisky and modern and liberated and bold.

Here's how Bob Dylan once summed it up:

"The best is always yet to come.
That's what they explained to me."

Even if you don't understand precisely what he is getting at in literal terms, you are able to pick up on the gereral thrust of the message, are you not? It means--Oh, it ruins it if I have to spell out what it means! The answer, my friend, is blowin' in the wind. It is what it is. To each his own. It's all unknown. If dogs run free. Do boppity, boppity, bomp, bomp, bomp!
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Post by hocus2004 »

Yikes!

Intercst just put up another one of those "This Week in Hoco-Mania" threads and he directed his vast listening audience to THIS THREAD! That last response of mine included a lot of personal stuff that was really intended to be read only by Ben and perhaps the three or four others who sometimes venture into this tiny little board community we have stiched together here. Now that intercst has blabbed, the whole cotton-picking Retire Early community is gonna know our business!

Oh, well. The folks who congregate at the Motley Fool board are my old friends too. I guess it's OK, kinda sorta. Please be kind, Motley Foolers. Ben and I were just thinking out loud in that last exchange. We didn't mean for those somewhat philosophical musings to be the subject of serious public debate or anything like that.

The Karen Carpenter stuff too. That was also intended as something to be shared just among a few friends. Back off, ogrecat!

And while I'm at it--Wise up, 2828. Peace, ariechert. You can be anything you want to be, CatherineCoy. Calm down, InParadise. Good work, tmeri. Keep at it, SeattlePioneer. Long time, no see, 1HappyFool. And a belated Merry Christmas to everyone! And a healthy and happy and prosperous New Year too!
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Post by hocus2004 »

"Oh, there's one more."

Good idea, Mazke.

If the shindig comes off and I am invited, I will make a serious effort to attend. I would love to be able to put faces to the names. It's so much easier to punch someone in the nose when you know what he or she looks like!
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Post by JWR1945 »


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Post by hocus2004 »

Thanks for trying to help out with the italics thing, JWR1945. Actually, making things italic is one of the few coding exercises I have figured out. For some reason, the italics coding does not work for me at NFB. I am able to make it work at the Early Retirement Forum.
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Post by JWR1945 »

Good news! Here is the solution to your posting problem. You can check it out in preview.

I started with this in mind:
Do you have the buttons at the top when you post a reply? They start with B (which is the same as B[ /b] without the spaces), then i (which is the same as i[ / i] without the spaces), then u underlined (which is the same as u underlined[ /u] without the spaces), then quote and so forth.

They are toggled. For example, the B button starts (without the space) and then becomes [ /b] (without the space) when you click on it for the second time.

Then I realized what was going on.

Look at the bottom. Have you checked (or did somebody else check) Disable BBCode in this post? If so, all of the above mentioned commands disappear. Click on the box to remove the checkmark.

I think that Disable HTML in this post eliminates any link to another post, Disable BBCode in this post causes the problems that you are having and Disable Smilies in the post eliminates Question something else.

I always check the final box Notify me when a reply is posted. The site sends me an email when there is a response.

Have fun.

John R.
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Post by hocus2004 »

Thanks for drilling down a bit on this, JWR1945. I did try what you are suggesting here at an earlier time, and that was not the problem; the disable button has not been clicked. I also tried clicking the disable button "on" to check the possibility that somehow the button options had been switched, and that did not work either. I tried putting the codes in now just to make sure that the problem is still there, and it is.

The problem started when I signed up as hocus2004. I believe that I made brief mention of it once to ES, but I never made a fuss about it because I don't consider it all that big a deal. Every now and then there is something that really does need to be in italic, and in those cases it is annoying.
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Post by ElSupremo »

Greetings Hocus :)
Every now and then there is something that really does need to be in italic, and in those cases it is annoying.
It's beyond me why you have that problem. :? I've used this software in every browser type and it's worked fine. Right now the only annoying thing is the extended line issue which there is a fix for. I'll get to that later this year after the server change if the new version is not done. If I stumble over a solution for you I'll let you know. ;)

(Bold and italics are meant as humor. :lol:)
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Post by hocus2004 »

I take note this morning that the Motley Fool community has behaved in an exceedingly mature manner and resisted the temptation to score points against Ben and me for a few personal comments that we exchanged among ourselves never dreaming that they would someday be given worldwide broadcast and dissemination on the Grand Poobah Network (GPN). They even took a pass on the Karen Carpenter thing. Now that's mature! Ataloss put up a thread with the letters "YKW" in it, but I think he was just trying to attract a few reads (the content of the post contained no vitriol and in fact had nothing to do with me or my SWR claims), and even in the best of circumstances there will be always be one or two, right?

I see this as an encouraging sign. Perhaps we finally are begininning to gain just a wee bit of tractiion on this Normalization thing afterall! Today is another day. All of us given the gift of getting to enjoy another 24 hours walking and singing and dancing and arguing on This Magnificant Planet will get to find out for ourselves which way it goes--

Starting Right Now!!!
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Post by hocus2004 »

"Bold and italics are meant as humor."

Was that comment intended as a reference to bold and italics included in this last post of yours, ES? If yes, we might have a clue to the problem I am experiencing. I do not see any bold or italic in your post. Is it possible that my problem is not that I cannot WRITE bold or italic, but instead that I cannot SEE italic or bold?

I aimed to put this entire paragraph in italic. It does not appear to be in italic when I used "Post Preview." Are others seeing this paragraph in italic?
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Post by ElSupremo »

Greetings Hocus :)
I do not see any bold or italic in your post.
Well how about that! :shock: It looks like you've discovered your problem. Yes I included both bold and italics and yes they both show on my screen as such. Also your italics in your post show up just fine as well! Now it may be a setting in your browser or in your profile that is haywire. I would check all your settings closely to see that you do not have anything disabled or enabled that should not be. That should solve the mystery. :D
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Post by hocus2004 »

Your italics in your post show up just fine as well!

That's great news. I never thought to check that it might be a problem of me being able to see the italics instead of being a problem of me not being able to create them.

It may be a setting in your browser or in your profile that is haywire.

That's probably right. That would mean that at some point I pressed a wrong button. That's only happened about 10,000 other times.

The other possibility that occurs to me (someone with no knowledge of what he is talking about on this question) is that it might be because I am still using the Apple 9.1 operatiing system. The 9.0 series was discontuinued a couple of years ago and the new machines all contain the Level X software. It seems possible to me that you made an update to the software here at NFB and the guy who wrote the software did not provide for all of the changes to work on Apple 9.0 series systems on the thinking that there aren't enough of those to make it worth his trouble.

Anyway, the part that matters is now worked out. So long as people other than me can see the bolding and italics that I include in my posts, I can add that one back into my SWR Posting Warrior Bag of Tricks once again. It's sort of like getting your Mojo back!

Watch out, intercst, I'm coming to get you!
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Post by ElSupremo »

Greetings Hocus :)
That's probably right. That would mean that at some point I pressed a wrong button. That's only happened about 10,000 other times.
LOL! :lol: Yea, me too. :)
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Post by JWR1945 »

For hocus2004: I wrote the following before your latest exchange with ES.

TRY NUCLEAR OPTION 1. It is free. It will work.

[Nuclear Option 2 will not work.]

Quote:
I guess we will have to go with one of the nuclear options.

But before that, if you are copying text from your word processor into your posts, try putting in the brackets into the text after you paste your text. This might make a difference. At Dory36's site, it is necessary with Microsoft Word processing programs to enter apostrophes in such a manner. Otherwise, you end up with something like a smiley face and four numbers. [This happens all of the time. It is easy to recognize.]

Now for Nuclear Option 1: Download the version of the Firefox internet browser for Apple computers. It is free. You can keep both your current browser and Firefox on your computer, using whatever is best for a particular site.
http://www.mozilla.org/

I got this hint from Kim Komando's TIPS of the Day. You may wish to sign up as well. Visit her website at http://www.komando.com .

I had a problem show up in Internet Explorer. It is related to links within an email or on a website. [It falls under the category MIME.] Many times, when I click on a link, the computer goes into never-never-land. If I can, I click on the Stop sign and then refresh. That puts the address into the browser and it gets me to my destination. In other cases, however, there is no Stop sign on the display and I cannot reach my destination.

Mozilla Firefox got rid of that problem. However, it has some minor problems of its own. The biggie is that I cannot install the www.iespell.com spell checker. [This spell checker works only with Microsoft's Internet Explorer. It does not work with any other products.]

The other minor problem is that some sites fail to recognize me. I think that conflicting cookies or something else along these lines causes this problem. [I think that it would be very easy to correct. All that I would have to do is contact a website's Help section. I haven't because it has not been necessary.]

Now for Nuclear Option 2: Try signing up as 2004hocus. It may get rid of the problem. It is likely that some software that ES cannot get to causes this problem. Most likely, it is called up whenever a username begins with hocus.

Have fun.

John R.
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Post by ElSupremo »

Greetings John :)
TRY NUCLEAR OPTION 1. It is free. It will work.
Yes I agree. Hocus should use NUCLEAR OPTION 1. :wink:

I hear good things about FireFox. :D
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Post by hocus2004 »

hocus: That would mean that at some point I pressed a wrong button. That's only happened about 10,000 other times.

ES: LOL! Yeah, me too.

When I was selling my "Secrets of Retiring Early"Â￾ report on the Soapbox.com service, the authors of the various reports had to create a PDF file and push various buttons to make their reports available for sale to the general public. I had mine ready a few days before the date of the Soapbox.com launch. The day before the launch, I discovered a typo, so I wanted to take down the existing report and replace it with a new version. It was a little unclear as to whether the thing to do was to push a blue button or a red button, so I pushed the red button and hoped for the best. That seemed to work well.

It turns out that I should have hit the blue button instead. Since it was the day before the launch, there were tech types checking up on everything. One noticed my mistake and fixed it without telling me. He should have told me, but he probably figured that anyone dumb enough to push the red button was beyond salvation.

After the launch, they started a discussion board for report authors, where we would share marketing tips and such. One day after the service had been up for about a month, a woman said that she wanted to put up a new version of her report and asked if anyone knew how to do that. The gallant hocus stepped forward. "Oh, that's so easy even I was able to do it,"￾ I said., "All that you have to do is push that red button, you see the one up in the right hand corner, just push that and all will be fine."￾ That night I slept the Sleep of the Just, knowing that I had helped a fellow community member in need.

The next morning I opened the discussion board to discover a disturbing message. The tech guy had put up a post saying "Everyone Please Read This Message! Do NOT--I Repeat, Do NOT--Do What hocus Said to Do Yesterday!! If you do that, your entire file will be deleted. That means that the site will say that no one has yet purchased your report. It means that any reviews that anyone has written for you will be lost. It also means that we will not be able to pay you for any sales you have achieved because we won't know if you have had any or not. Do NOT push the red button unless it is truly your intent to take down your file and never again offer your report for sale here."￾

If the woman had lost all her sales, I would have felt bad. But the word reached her in time, so I thought it was pretty funny. The moral of the story is a two-part rule: (1) If hocus sounds confused in offering computer advice, be highly suspicious about what he is saying; and (2) If hocus sounds confident in offering computer advice, be very afraid indeed, his advice is probably going to cause nuclear weapons to be sent flying through the air.

And that's the story of how I almost single-handedly caused the Soapbox.com service to go "poof"Â￾ about a month after its launch. Of course, it mananged to go "poof" without my help about six months later, so perhaps all I would have been doing was putting it out of its misery a little sooner. I sometimes find it a comfort to reflect on the reality that ashes return to ashes and dust to dust. If this were not so, if there were some chance that any of us could succeed in the pursuit of our worldly plans on a long-term basis, the responsibilities of day-to-day living might be too much for us, given our inherently flawed nature.
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Post by JWR1945 »

hocus2004 wrote:hocus: That would mean that at some point I pressed a wrong button. That's only happened about 10,000 other times.

ES: LOL! Yeah, me too.
Hocus, can you see the bolding yet? I have noticed that you are using it.

Have fun.

John R.
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