Poor Richard's Almanack
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blog.plover.com
He was an towering intellect and positively influenced any situation he was placed in - the odometer, the mapping of the gulf stream, counterfeit detection for paper bills are so far removed from his background in publishing, and later role as statesman - I can't think of anyone since who had such an striking impact; certainly no contemporary leaders who will be remembered so fondly 200 years from today.
We ask for people to be more and more specialized. But problem-solving skills are a lot more universal than the specialization frenzy of today assumes.
I think the biggest hurdle to having universal geniuses nowadays is being allowed to work on problems where you're not certified or specifically educated on them in some sense.
We don't just let anybody have a crack at a problem anymore. How can you work on an odometer if you're not an automotive engineer? How can you work on anti-counterfeit measures if you're not a fraud expert?
IMO problem-solving abilities don't merely work well across disciplines, you might actually be able to detect similarities between problems across domains if you've worked on both domains.
But we can't let that happen. Stay in your lane.
It was quite interesting. He was talented and accomplished in many ways.
His famous letter to a young man on the pros and cons of marriage vs. choosing a mistress was interesting and highly controversial, probably both at that period, and also in later decades and centuries.
https://www.google.com/search?q=Benjamin+Franklin+essay+to+a...
A few of the search results:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advice_to_a_Friend_on_Choosi...
https://web.viu.ca/davies/H320/Franklin.advice.mistress.htm
https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Franklin/01-03-02-00...
I found his style very modern - it reads really well even today.
I remember reading his Autobiography as a young student and I was thinking - well, if this is the kind of people who where the Founding Fathers, then no wonders US became a world superpower.
Another recommended read would be the 'newer' version - by another big thinker, inspired by Franklin - Charlie's Munger 'Poor Charlie'a Almanack':
1) seeding his former apprentices with funding in exchange for a small amount of equity in their new printing ventures, 2) forming non-profit organizations to address public needs (such as subscription libraries, fire departments, and street sweepers) 3) forming groups of like minded tradespeople who were interested in improving themselves and their communities through ventures like 1) and 2)
...then one might even say that Benjamin Franklin was a kind of 18th century YCombinator
I'm curious to know when Y Combinator did this.
I also learned a lot of interesting history they don't teach in school, like how he was involved with an effort to form an alliance between the English colonies and the Iroquois Confederacy for the defense of North America but the collective colonial governments rejected the alliance and favoured bringing in overseas troops to conquer the Iroquois instead. He was a really smart guy as well as a self-righteous pompous prick, and he would certainly not have fit into today's USA what with his "radical left" "socialist" "woke" views. Not sure he fit into his contemporary society either because of those views.
Benji also printed his own benjis: https://arstechnica.com/science/2023/07/was-benjamin-frankli...
— Daddy Warbucks, *Annie*> Benjamin Franklin wrote and published Poor Richard's Almanack annually from 1732 to 1758
Benjamin Franklin, you know: Founding Father [of the USA], signer of the Declaration of Independence and of the Constitution; first postmaster general of the USA; first US ambassador to France; secretary and president of the American Philosophical Society; inventor of the lightning rod and bifocal eyeglasses; founder of the Library Company and the University of Pennsylvania... Polymath, inspirational figure...
And surely you know that jokes in these pages make sense only if they fulfill the purpose HN has.
Well I could not predict it the same way I could not predict Stravinsky doing somersaults on stage.
dey no have value in de real world except for hipsters.
eye em oh.
* #sorrycudnresistderhyme
repeat afta me:
we doan need no spellucation!
ah said ta repeat afta me, but ya went ahead, bro!
ennyway, kudos, n sudos!
ah B frum Unix land, you C ...
that would have made your trick more believable.
still, nice try.
:)
[but seriously: did you ever figure out whether it was more likely Loki had thought of the goat shtick beforehand or not?]
...You seem to be confusing "restraint" with something else.
The pivots here are «intellectual curiosity» and «a good... comment teaches us something». Of course some of us believe also those mandates should be taken with flexibility and common sense - but one should not forget them and the more general spirit behind them when posting. A rubberband should bind to them - if it's not there, there's probably a misunderstanding of the opportunity given.
<<eye twitch>>
You're doing that on purpose.
Sorry, I don't get what you mean.
Some denounce the "slippery slope" arguments as a fallacy in arguments - but denouncing a slope is only sometimes a fallacy, not always (it is a weak correlation). In case elzbardico intended to imply that the original proposal was a fallacy, he was replied the relevant slope is real. "If we unleash without restraint here, the place will fill with noise". Reasonable restraint makes this place a better place for its purpose.
Irregardless is a word sometimes used in place of regardless or irrespective which has caused controversy since the early twentieth century, though the word appeared in print as early as 1795.
The usage dispute over irregardless was such that in 1923 Literary Digest published an article titled "Is There Such a Word as Irregardless in the English Language?" The OED goes on to explain the word is primarily a North American colloquialism.
To be fair, there's more variations of English in the UK than in the whole of North America so it's a quaint bit of Queen's English snobbery from the Oxbridge and wannabe's set.
It seems like a case in which the prothesis is an effective intensifier, but compromised in the final logical flow of the word.
What he did was write the guy a letter saying that he had always wanted to read a particular book that this dude had in his library and ask to borrow it. After borrowing the book he returned it with a courteous letter of thanks and not only did the person support his vote but became his lifelong friend.
Ben Franklin explained to others that asking the guy for a favour made all the difference because there was no way his brain could rationalise him doing a favour for someone he didn't like and therefore they became friends.
[1] https://www.themarginalian.org/2014/02/20/the-benjamin-frank...
But if you do someone else a favor, they will tend to resent you because then they will be indebted to you. So only do favors for your friends.
I love Franklin.
thats the amount of almanacks he gave his brother's widow, if I computed right
https://www.in2013dollars.com/us/inflation/1735?amount=10.84
Now the current minimum agricultural is Massachusetts is $8/hour. $8 * 8 * 14 = $896, which is pretty close to that $851 number (especially considering that was 1735 and I'm using 1752 wages).
[1] https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=msu.31293006308070&se...
Before decimalization, a pound was 240 pence, so fivepence should be 0.02p today (5/240). Here we can find that in 1735 one pound is £181.43 in today's money:
https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/monetary-policy/inflation/in...
That comes out to £1.81 per pence or £3.63 for 2p.
I'm probably wrong but it was an interesting rabbit hole to go down.
No, it didn't say that, that was the total. It said that 500 copies of the book at fivepence was worth ₤10 8s. 4d, and the maths checks out on that: 5500=2500 pence (written 2500d as old pence). There are 20 shillings in a pound, and 12 pence in shilling, so 2400d = £10, with 100d remaining. 8 shillings is 96d, so from 100d leaves 4d remaining, which matches exactly what was originally written.
The post-decimalisation equivalent preserved 20 shillings to a pound, so 1s=5p. An interesting fact is the new 5p coins were the same size, and existing shillings continued to be legal tender for another two decades, until the size of the 5p coin was changed. So, the parent to your post was totally wrong with the $10.84, it should be £10 + 40p + 1½p (closest to 5p4/12), so £10.41½ after decimalisation. The closest conversion rate I could find to the time the US introduced the dollar was £1 = $4.55, because it was done at the prevailing values of gold and silver at the time.
Using your link, and adding precision to the numbers, £10415 in 1735 would be £1,889,613 today, so £108s4d then would be £1889.61 today as the total gift. Dividing by the 500 copies gives £3.78 each today, which is close to your approximation (most of the difference will be the accuracy lost in rounding 5/240 to 0.02).
The inflation rates are also certain to have been difference in the US though, if for no other reason that the current exchange rate is approx. £1 = $1.28, so at the very least it's close to a factor of 4 out in the period since the US dollar was introduced.
Franklin's Autobiography has that famous story about his first day in Philadelphia when he tried to buy three pennies' worth of bread and was taken by surprise hen he got three giant rolls instead of the tiny loaf he was expecting. And that was just the difference between Boston and Philadelphia.
Traveling to Europe from the USA wasn't exactly an easy route back then.