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Old 01-19-2014, 03:33 PM   #41
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I guess I'm a scavenger, because I'll take advice/wisdom anywhere I can get it. I don't at all get up in the personalities as I'm only interested in learning something new, I don't care how small it is.
This is me. I do pay attention to the biases of the sites that I go to. But, I get a lot from sites where I don't agree with everything the person writing has to say. I go to a lot of food/healthy living/weight loss blogs. I agree almost entirely with some of them. Others, I don't agree with entirely (I'm never going full Paleo), but there is often something there that gives me some ideas or perspectives that I do find valuable. That said, there are some sites - really a minority - where everything written is in service of a particular hobby horse that doesn't interest me, so I tend to not go back to those.
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Old 01-20-2014, 01:25 PM   #42
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MMM and his site remind me of a post-modern Thoreau in Walden's first two chapters "Economy" and "Where I Lived and What I Lived For." Thoreau's point about assessing spending in terms of life-time necessary to earn the spending one consumes is a fundamental point that I never forgot, even though I've been a wage slave for 30 years (but one who likes what I'm doing).

MMM does get a bit irritating about certain expenses, like car/commute and the like, but the value is that he asks readers to scrutinize their spending in terms of values. I find this blog a lot more wide-ranging and therefore much more useful in the utilitarian sense, particularly given the diversity of posters and situations, but taken with a larger container of table salt, I think MMM strikes at a lot of hidden consumer assumptions usually hidden in the middle-class, upper-striving American lifestyles.

YMMV. I can't help but see him as a modern-day married Thoreau.
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Old 01-20-2014, 07:20 PM   #43
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To me it's like cholesterol advice. Once you know that the investigators are not fully forthcoming, that sponsorship or professional pressures are apt to be influencing the report I pay no attention to what they might say. They have invalidated it.

Ha
Well that would go for any advice/publication/material, etc., wouldn't it? As the excellent Charles Hugh Smith would say, "One way to find an answer is to ask: cui bono, to whose benefit?" Or, whose sponsoring? To your point.

I would guesstimate that probably 99% of what's out there is worthless, redundant, conflicting, or invalid. However, it's the kernels contained in the 1% that can literally change a person's life.

A very wise person once said you will be who you are in five years except for the books you read and the people you hang out with. I would add, and the useful information your acquire.
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Old 01-20-2014, 07:54 PM   #44
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MMM seems sincere, with a bit of attitude to spice up the site and attract a following. ERE I always thought was just making stuff up in hopes of establishing a blog business. It's hard to know without knowing the people involved, but everything is not necessarily what it seems on the internet.
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Old 01-20-2014, 07:55 PM   #45
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Well that would go for any advice/publication/material, etc., wouldn't it? As the excellent Charles Hugh Smith would say, "One way to find an answer is to ask: cui bono, to whose benefit?" Or, whose sponsoring? To your point.

I would guesstimate that probably 99% of what's out there is worthless, redundant, conflicting, or invalid. However, it's the kernels contained in the 1% that can literally change a person's life.

A very wise person once said you will be who you are in five years except for the books you read and the people you hang out with. I would add, and the useful information your acquire.
For sure you are right. But there are miles between the type of personal finance bloggers we are taking about and say Robert Shiller, or Rob Arnott
or William Bernstein or about a million other people.

I am 100% sure that there is nothing worth bothering with in any of these pop-type PF bloggers, so by ignoring it you save yourself a lot of wheel spinning and BS and lose nothing.

Everyone of us knows about saving money, buying insurance for less, trying to take SS at ideal times, etc. The rest of it is counterproductive.

Ha
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Old 01-21-2014, 09:02 AM   #46
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