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Ben Franklin is one of my all-time favorite historical figures; there are few people who have been universally successful in all they've done: business, politics, science, and humanitarianism. Franklin was one of these, and he's left a guidebook for those who wish to follow in his footsteps. (And really, how can you beat $2.50 for a brand-new book?)

I've been reading through it lately, and while it's easy reading, it's so chock-full of wisdom that I find it slow going. Lunchtimes and evenings find me with pencil in hand, underlining and annotating the bits that especially speak to me, and there are many.

I came across this paragraph, and I was astonished. With the anti-vaccination crazies gaining influence and mindshare, this earthy bit of common sense was a breath of fresh air, written in the 1700s by someone who knew a world without vaccines, and saw the devastation caused by these diseases — smallpox, polio, and many others — first-hand.

In 1736, I lost one of my sons, a fine boy of four years old, by smallpox, taken in the common way. I long regretted him bitterly and still regret that I had not given it to him by inoculation. This I mention for the sake of parents who omit that operation on the supposition that they should never forgive themselves if a child died under it, my example showing that the regret may be the same either way, and therefore that the safer should be chosen.

Simple and profound. Alas, I don't think the anti-vaccination types will take his advice to heart, and we are all the poorer for it.

While going through my RSS reader this morning, I came across one of JD's daily links posts, and one of them was to A History of Debt in America. It's quite a long article, but well worth reading. Unfortunately for people like me, reading large quantities of text on a screen gets to be painful after a few minutes.

I whipped up a quick PDF of all of the pages, and Tom, the author of the article, has graciously allowed me to post it here.

It's 21 pages long, and will take you a little while to read it, but it's worth the time.

PDF link.

If you enjoyed this, you may enjoy my post on how paying off debt is like folding laundry — a behavioral, as opposed to mathematical approach to paying off debt.

Matt, from Where the Hell is Matt is back, and it's awesome.

Here's the HD stream:

Where the Hell is Matt? (2008) from Matthew Harding on Vimeo.

I love Matt. I remember his first video from back in 2005 and 2006. Feels like yesterday.

Some of the locations in this video are:

• Papua New Guinea
• Munich, Germany
• Tongatapu, Tonga
• Chicago, Illinois
• Thimphu, Bhutan
• Mumbai, India
• Sydney, Australia
• Lisbon, Portugal
• The Demilitarized Zone, Korea

The list goes on and on. I dunno why, but it kind of brings a tear to my eye. It's just so… human.

It seems that Hillary Clinton wants to tax big oil, but only on their record profits. She would do this to make up the revenue lost while putting the federal gas tax on hold for a while. While I'm sure this is more of a ploy to pander to voters due to her faltering campaign, the whole thing is incredibly superficial for a couple of reasons.

The first is that taxing big oil is only going to shift the cost to consumers. While you might see a temporary drop in prices at the pump, businesses typically shift such burdens on to the consumers. Doing this only makes sense for their bottom line. Beyond this, it will cause an increase in demand, causing prices to rise naturally. But then, Hillary apparently doesn't care what economists think.

Secondly, there's the temporary nature of the repeal. Reinstating the tax after it's been rolled back for a while will be unpopular on an epic scale, but I suppose Hillary is mostly going for a short-term boost to get her through to the November elections. Naturally, I've heard nothing about rolling back the tax on big oil's profits once the federal gas tax would go back into effect. That means that the consumer is going to be doubly hurt in the end anyway.

This leaves big oil's profits right where they're at now. Taxing big oil's profits isn't the answer — and neither is breaking up the oil monopolies. (Though the latter might not be a bad first step.)

The real problem is that demand has exceeded supply. This is a result of the American way of life. We depend on oil for literally everything: we are a spread out nation of roads where a child's first thought of freedom = getting their drivers' license, and whose development has, for generations, been driven by cheap oil. Every aspect of our lives is controlled by the road: everything from our food to our consumer goods arrives via truck. Auto companies have been complicit as well, and in some cases actively undermined attempts to create efficient mass transit systems that were a direct threat to their business model.

This isn't a problem that can be fixed overnight, nor is it a problem that will be cheap or easy to fix. Comparisons to European nations and Japan with their comprehensive mass transit systems are inherently flawed because of the US's relatively low population density and sheer size of our country. While effective, efficient mass transit is certainly the answer in urban and larger suburban areas, those systems do not scale well in more rural areas.

In that respect, we will always be a nation of cars — or other personal transport devices[1]. The mantra that we need freedom from foreign oil is trite, and it misses part of the point: we need freedom from petroleum in general, inasmuch as that is economically and techonologically possible. We will always be somewhat dependent on combustible fuels so long as the internal combustion engine is our primary mode of getting from Point A to Point B. (And really, aside from bicycles and our feet, there's nothing out there that's as efficient from top to bottom as a modern internal combustion engine.)

So in that respect, even if Hillary's plan had a prayer of a chance of long-term success, and if she had any ability to get it passed — which she doesn't because it's an idea for this summer, not after January — it would be like prescribing a pain med instead of removing the thorn from one's foot.

The proposal is just astonishingly dumb on every conceivable level.

I do have some related thoughts about the next ten years…

1) We'll see a small resurgence of the railroad industry. Rail travel is more efficient than air travel, and solves some of the mass transport problems presented by our spread-out nation. This will resemble the current hub-and-spoke airline system in the short term. Business travelers won't mind taking the train as much due to the ubiquity of wireless internet access and the fact that you can use cellphones while on a train. Trains don't have to be slow, either. So while you won't be taking the train from NYC to LA for a one-day affair, you might well take it from Boston to Washington DC for the same.

2) More effective car-pooling systems. Thanks to the Internet, it's easier to more effectively carpool with folks headed in your direction. This could be supplemented by mass transit systems — buses in the beginning, and trains later on — where people gather at smaller, de-centralized staging areas for a trip into the city. Many suburban areas already have these systems, but there are many, many larger cities that don't.

3) More and better research into biofuels as a replacement for traditional petroleum. This goes beyond corn-based ethanol which was a failure of epic proportions, as it resulted in increased food prices and is energy-intensive to produce. The graphic below (click for larger) demonstrates some of the more promising alternatives, particularly algae and switch grass.

(Preserved against link-rot from this article.)

I think America is getting to the point where they're ready to think about letting go of their precious four-wheeled transportation. Drive by a used car dealership, and you're likely to see quite a few gas guzzlers sitting on the lot. This alone is anecdotal evidence that the PED of gasoline isn't zero. A more formal study finds that when the price of fuel goes up and stays up by 10%, the process of adjustment is dynamic and far reaching:

• The volume of traffic will go down by roundly 1% within about a year, building up to a reduction of about 3% in the longer run (about five years or so).
• The volume of fuel consumed will go down by about 2.5% within a year, building up to a reduction of over 6% in the longer run.

The reason why fuel consumed goes down by more than the volume of traffic, is probably because price increases trigger more efficient use of fuel (by a combination of technical improvements to vehicles, more fuel conserving driving styles, and driving in easier traffic conditions). So further consequences of the same price increase are:

• Efficiency of use of fuel goes up by about 1.5% within a year, and around 4% in the longer run.
• The total number of vehicles owned goes down by less than 1% in the short run, and 2.5% in the longer run.

Prices have certainly gone up by more than 10% in the last 12 months, and the snowballing effect of this phenomenon is that many people of my generation have gotten rid of their cars where and whenever possible, and instead opt for healthier, less expensive modes of transportation: walking or biking. When they need to travel a longer distance, they rent a Zipcar.

I certainly would if it were realistic.

[1] I could see motorbikes becoming more popular, as they are in the UK, as gasoline prices continue to rise. For Americans who have not been to the UK, it is not uncommon to see motorcycles and scooters out and about, even in the rain.

I chuckle every now and again when I see the MSM reporting on blogs. The usual suspects almost always turn up: TechCrunch, the HuffPo, GigaOM, BuzzMachine — as well as a smattering of the hot blogs du jour. This time it was Steve Rubel's MicroPersuasion and Passive Aggressive Notes.

I must confess some incredulity, because I have never seen Ars Technica mentioned in a story that focuses specifically on blogs. This despite being relegated to merely a "blog" (albeit acknowledged as an influential one) most of the time by the mainstream media when they reference a story that Ars breaks.

Now, the HuffPo is a huge website. Probably a little bigger than Ars with 5.7M unique readers per month. TechCrunch is markedly smaller, and GigaOM is smaller still (1.37M pageviews/month or so).

It makes me wonder why these particular blogs are chosen. Is it because the stories about blogs are by their nature more noise than substance? Indeed these stories are often widely hyped when they hit and will make their way around the 'sphere several times before disappearing like yesterday's newspaper. (The blogosphere echochamber at its finest.) Ars seems to be anti-hype most of the time. It's been known to take a somewhat dim and sometimes even contrarian view to what's hot in the blogosphere this week — "The Cloud!", death by blogging! — if indeed what the blogosphere is focusing on this week is even worth talking about at all. (Usually it's not.)

So here are some sites that Business Week may want to think about including, because these sites are the real movers and shakers in the Internet publishing world. This list is by no means comprehensive, and I make no comments about their content or quality of the sites, only their size. This list isn't sorted in any meaningful way:

• High-Def digest: ~7.23M
• Destructoid: ~4.25M
• Gamersyde: ~5.17M
• SB Nation: ~8.76M
• Celebrity Baby Blog: ~8.64M
• Confessions of a Pioneer Woman: ~6.05M
• Fark: ~37.09M
• BoingBoing: ~6.93M
• SeriousWheels: ~9.05M

For comparison, TechCrunch sits at ~7.5M pageviews per month, and Ars Technica sits at ~30M.

This isn't a real license plate, but I loved it anyway. The car is a 2007 Audi RS4, you may notice, probably one of the sexiest vehicles I have ever seen. (Though I'm partial to yellow, myself.)

Part fourteen of my license plate special series. I took all of the pictures myself in my travels.

Some thoughts on vanity license plate density.

Enjoy.

License plates, vanity plates, holy shit

Part thirteen of my license plate special series. I took all of the pictures myself in my travels.

Some thoughts on vanity license plate density.

Enjoy.

License plates, vanity plates, SNAFU

Hard to read but it says "SNWDRFT".

Part twelve of my license plate special series. I took all of the pictures myself in my travels.

Some thoughts on vanity license plate density.

Enjoy.

License plates, vanity plates, snow drift

Part eleven of my license plate special series. I took all of the pictures myself in my travels.

Some thoughts on vanity license plate density.

Enjoy.

License plates, vanity plates, piano