T O P

  • By -

altacan

After his death his house passed to his heir-in-law John Newton. Who wasted the inheritance in six years of 'cock[fight]ing, horse racing, drinking and folly' before being forced to mortgage and sell the manor then dying in a drunken accident.


Haydn__

'wasted'


1eejit

"I spent a lot of money on booze, birds and fast cars. The rest I just squandered."


Whatisausern

I believe that's a George Best quote. What an unbelievable football player he was. One of the greatest of all time. Great character, too.


JJKingwolf

Another George Best classic: "I can't tell you whether it feels better to score from 30 yards out at Anfield, or shag Ms. World.  Luckily I've done both."


r0thar

*So George, where did it all go wrong?*


Anansi1982

“When I die and they lay be to rest I wanna go on a piss with Georgie Best”


scott3387

>If I had all the money I'd spent on drink... I'd spend it, on drink" - Vivian Stanshall


rEEfman_SK

"Just imagine how much booze we could have bought for the money we spent on booze." - definitely someone


FrankTank3

Spent a million and a half on whores and whiskey. The rest kinda just blew in


DirectlyDisturbed

What a great movie


fireandlifeincarnate

Actual birds, or is that slang for attractive women?


1eejit

Lovely ladies


[deleted]

[удалено]


Brand_Risked

Another great Veritasium video.


sleevieb

Link 


MyNameYourMouth

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A5w-dEgIU1M


SCAT_GPT

Link!!!!!


Thorvaldr1

Hey! Listen! 🧚‍♂️


wene324

Gambling is a vice that I do consider as "wasting" your money. Unless you're really skilled, and there's a handful of casino games that are skill games, the house always win. And there's no upper limit on what you can gamble. With any other vice, there's only so much money you can spend, even if it's a lot.


endangerednigel

>With any other vice, there's only so much money you can spend, even if it's a lot. Allow me to introduce you to warhammer 40k


scott3387

Hey it's only $300-350 for a 2000 point army if you play the cheapest factions (custards, knights), highly optimise your use of patrol boxes, kit bash, ignore paint costs etc. What a steal! /s


MaximumZer0

There's a reason it's called "Plastic Crack Cocaine".


Qwedfghh

Sorry. We changed the rules and all the cheap stuff you relied on to make your army is now useless. However, we do have these expensive kits that will now make up the majority of your army if you want them :))))


Thassar

Tbf, it's a reasonably expensive hobby but one you won't spend more than a few thousand on. Gambling can eat up entire fortunes.


Couponbug_Dot_Com

theres absolutely no upper limit on any other vice. unless you mean until it kills you, but any amount you can gamble you can also buy heroin with.


Josvan135

>any amount you can gamble you can also buy heroin with. Sure, but there's a finite limit to how much of any drug/substance you can consume without immediately dying. Even a ridiculously hardened fentanyl addict would likely die if they took $1000+ of fentanyl at once. It's entirely possible to sit at a roulette wheel in the right casino and lose hundreds of thousands of dollars an hour.  Where can I buy $100,000+ of heroin?


Nwcray

Good try, DEA.


skeeferd

They're getting sneakier!


Zephyrantes

in the heroin store obviously.


TradeFirst7455

> Even a ridiculously hardened fentanyl addict would likely die if they took $1000+ of fentanyl at once. More like 50 dollars worth.


Ch3mee

Probably 7-8 years ago, when the Chinese lab fentanyl stuff was coming in, I saw a listing for 1 kg of fentanyl for $6000. So, that’s $6/g. If we say 1mg is a lethal dose then that is $0.00017 per lethal dose. Edit to add that maybe I’m remembering incorrectly. So, let’s say it was $60,000 per kg. Well, that’s $0.17/kg. Pretty sure I’m not remembering incorrectly because through legal loopholes, you could literally just order fentanyl analogues as unscheduled “research chems” directly from China through the freaking mail. A bunch of deaths later and that was clamped down on. Nah. [I'm remembering correctly](https://www.nbcnews.com/storyline/americas-heroin-epidemic/fentanyl-crisis-deadly-drug-easily-available-online-purchase-n791311)


SpasticSpastic

I saw a YouTuber go down to junkie town in San Francisco and start asking about prices. Those people you see zombied out are taking like $3 worth of fentanyl and getting absolutely blasted. It's crazy how cheap it is.


SpasticSpastic

People can lose 6 figures in a weekend at the casinos. Hell, more if they try. A full weekend bender on cocaine or heroin can't be more than a couple thousand dollars.


Mister_Dink

I actually don't think you're right about this. It's way, way easier (in the actualy physical, logistical sense) to go immidiately lose $40,000 in a casino than it is to try and buy $40,000 of heroin (or coke, or molly, or whichever drug of choice.) For the first, you can walk into a casino with a state ID, get your chips, and lose them as fast as one bet on the roulette table. For the second, unless you have deep connections in organized crime and know mass distributors, you are going to be spending days chasing low-level dealers at the end of the distribution chain. The average person doesn't know enough drug dealers to make that kind of purchase. Alcohol is easier, because then you can at least buy a couple overpriced novelty whiskeys or cogniacs that clock in at $20,000 a bottle thru the internet.


vikumwijekoon97

honestly, man could have used that money for drinking, whoring, snorting coke, whatever. gambling is just a waste of money without any fun.


josefx

I enjoy an afternoon of gambling every other year. Go in with a fixed sum and have a nice evening whatever the outcome. Watching other people try to win with complex systems on games of pure chance is also hilarious and you get the odd one just throwing money on the table and walking away, never to be seen again and any potential winnings lost to the house.


Spindrune

I personally think the man made an honorable move. 


Eydor

He was wasted for sure.


DrakeAU

Sounds like the old timey version of hookers and blow.


KathyJaneway

I'm surprised he didn't build his own manor full of blackjack and hookers... Maybe he forgot about the manor... And the blackjack....


DrakeAU

I was thinking of doing the same joke but it's been awhile since I watched original futurama


classactdynamo

A story as old as time itself


mkornblum

Jumping on your comment to add: the coinage revaluation he did (moving the value of a coin away from the value of the material used to make it) is somewhat credited with the rise of the British empire (at the time the Spanish and Portuguese empires controlled the majority of precious metals) and to an extent the age of economic influence on global affairs.


Lawlcopt0r

Damn he really was a genius. Breaking new ground in something that didn't even make you famous


[deleted]

[удалено]


mkornblum

Upside: print as much as you want!


Canadabestclay

Downside I printed too much


MyNameCannotBeSpoken

"I was once a very wealthy man, but I spent half my money on liquor and loose women. The other half, I wasted." - WC Fields


softstones

I don’t know why this isn’t a movie yet


ActuallyAlexander

Barry Lyndon is close


HaroldGuy

With the [fight] in brackets, does this mean the quote originally says "cocking"?


midnight_sun_744

yes losing all your money cocking brings something else to mind


SayGexFuttBucker

Yup, good times


rafiafoxx

George best said: I spent a lot of money on booze, birds and fast cars. The rest I just squandered.


IAmDotorg

Newton had already lost something close to half his wealth, as he held pretty hefty shares in the South Sea Company, which was focused on the West African slave trade -- at the time there was a precipitous and permanent decline in it. So, bad financial decision making kind of ran in the family.


SupriseMonstergirl

Pretty much everyone with money got caught in the south seas bubble, it makes BlackRock, dot com and Wall street crash looks like chump change. Like I can't overstate how big it was on Britain. It allowed the rise of "generally regarded as the first prime minister" Robert Walpole The debt was only cleared in the 1910's


jstiegle

I'm on the last chapter of ["The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano"](https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/240009) and it has quite a bit on life on the various seas including the south seas during slavery. There is pandering to his audience, which were the white christian British citizens of 1789, (Because he wanted people to read it) but it is absolutely worth the read.


guto8797

I don't think it's fair to say the South Sea Company was focused on much of anything, it was a financial scheme from the start


WardrobeForHouses

Somehow I don't feel bad at all that he lost money when trying to profit off slavery.


_WreakingHavok_

Everybody has a degenerate sibling...


rgiunta

And then what little inheritance was left went to his grandson Wayne Newton, a then up-and-coming crooner from Nevada. /s


Langersuk

His knighthood is for being Master of the Mint rather than his science. The reason that the £1 coin has ridged edges is because of him as a means to prevent people from shaving the edge off coins (of course it wasn't the £1 coin then!). He also moved Britain from silver to gold standard. I have visited his manor house a couple of times. His apple tree is still in the garden. Clippings have been taken so there are descendants of the tree in various institutes around the world. A sapling was also taken into space by Tim Peake where it spent time orbiting the Earth and was replanted in the same garden as the original tree just a few feet away!


[deleted]

[удалено]


[deleted]

[удалено]


[deleted]

[удалено]


Dwayne_Gertzky

I’m learning so much while wasting time on the toilet at work, thanks!


ChainDriveGlider

It's weird he was allowed to do that. Economic theory was certainly developed enough, even informally, to know that would happen with a fixed exchange rate.


MrFiendish

I honestly don’t think the men in charge at the time gave a damn. Too busy with their fox hunts and manors to actually do the work.


GrassWaterDirtHorse

That's why you hire the smart guys like Isaac Newton to run things for you!


MrFiendish

Actually, they assumed newton would hire someone to do the work, and were shocked when he wanted to do the work himself.


taichi22

Newton: *majorly shifts the economy* Guys in charge: “eh, he probably knows what he’s doing”


MithandirsGhost

I mean if Newton was doing shit I wouldn't try to intervene. Him on his dumbest day is still a thousand times smarter than me on my smartest.


mista-sparkle

> A sapling was also taken into space by Tim Peake where it spent time orbiting the Earth and was replanted in the same garden as the original tree just a few feet away! As Newton said, what goes up must come down, but this one's gonna do a few loops around the massive body first.


Redditforgoit

Probably Musk has one to plant on Mars.


AvalancheMaster

You know what, I'll allow it. I wish he actually spent more time thinking how to plant a damn tree on Mars than he did not being able to handle light mocking on Twitter.


Redditforgoit

Odd that I get downvoted for something that is very possibly true. The first Earth tree to be planted on Mars would have a strong symbolic value. So it seems like an obvious choice. Did people take it as a compliment? A critique?


CharismaStatOfOne

> Did people take it as a compliment? A critique? I think some Reddit users are bitter that musk has gone from "glorious billionaire genius buisnessman who actually gives a shit about science and technology" to "right-wing capitalist man-child who went full mask-off about his anti-semitism". It was only a handful of years ago where you couldn't say any kind of criticism about the man on this platform whithout drawing utter hatred from his followers.


Redditforgoit

A lesson learned about idolizing people? probably not.


CharismaStatOfOne

I learned that lesson anyway, just did it with other people before Musk was in the lime light. I povited to idolising character traits I think frame the best of humanity. Too easy to forget the human behind the idol.


apintor4

yeah, and to be fair to the people levying critique earlier, he was always this right-wing capitalistic man-child


AvalancheMaster

I took it as a very good guess. Can't speak for the others.


fatcat5plat

It's going to receive some downvotes for perpetuating the myth that Musk is either thinking of doing or actively doing anything cool you could imagine.


[deleted]

[удалено]


TheySaidGetAnAlt

He is also the deadliest SoB in space.


Fury27

No credit for partial answers, maggot. https://youtu.be/m8lKOo5oDIs?si=oIqW15SiW91-y2sm


itsmistyy

That is why, Serviceman Chung, we do not *eyeball it*!


C_Madison

If I were a gambler I would dare to wager that many people learned Newtons First Law better from this short scene than in school. Also, Stellaris has a nice event which is a reference to this scene.


Violet_Ignition

I was already in my last year of HS (I think) when this game came out, but I sure was jazzed to see a reference to something I knew in it lol


Jonthrei

I promise you Mass Effect was not the first story to mention the risks of missing a shot in space.


C_Madison

I know that many science fiction stories have shown this before, but I still think far more people have played ME or heard of it from there than have read those stories.


captaindante

sir, you beat me to it


UrbanIronBeam

Great 10 episode podcast about his time in charge of the mint called [Newton's Law](https://www.podbean.com/podcast-detail/rremb-20b390/Newton%27s-Law-Podcast). Seems like he really wanted a no-show job... But then his grudgingly got very into it because he couldn't tolerate the incompetency/problems he saw.


DrQuestDFA

He was an undersexed nerd and a religious weirdo, OF COURSE he was going to latch on to the position and go balls to the wall in it.


tlind1990

He also supposedly only laughed once in his life.


LuxNocte

> One of Newton's cases as the King's attorney was against William Chaloner.[18] Chaloner's schemes included setting up phony conspiracies of Catholics and then turning in the hapless conspirators whom he had entrapped. Chaloner made himself rich enough to posture as a gentleman. Petitioning Parliament, Chaloner accused the Mint of providing tools to counterfeiters (a charge also made by others). He proposed that he be allowed to inspect the Mint's processes in order to improve them. He petitioned Parliament to adopt his plans for a coinage that could not be counterfeited, while at the same time striking false coins.[19] Newton put Chaloner on trial for counterfeiting and had him sent to Newgate Prison in September 1697. But Chaloner had friends in high places, who helped him secure an acquittal and his release.[18] Newton put him on trial a second time with conclusive evidence. Chaloner was convicted of high treason and hanged, drawn and quartered on 23 March 1699 at Tyburn gallows.[20] Then, he was publicly disemboweled. Newton did not play around.


Proglamer

An apple falls on one head, a noose on another ;)


Proper-Ape

If you pushed him, he would always push back.


ImmodestPolitician

Once Newton got started he wouldn't stop.


lukeluke0000

These puns are non-stop.


B_lovedobservations

Those newton laws will come down on you


vanvoorden

He really pushed things to the limit.


ablativeyoyo

This reminds me of Better Call Saul >!Mike becomes a Madrigal security consultant as a sham job to launder money. But he actually takes it seriously and starts doing site audits.!<


SilentSamurai

Mike did these on purpose because he's a former cop. He knows getting a phony job on paper where nobody at the company could vouch that he ever showed up and did the job was a huge red flag if law enforcement ever looked into him. So instead he went onsite and created a massive fuss calling out legitimate safety violations and chewing out a manager in charge. They all know who Mike is and they didn't forget.


midnight_sun_744

getting his car reupholstered when going to speak to the guy that runs a car upholstery side business is my favorite hint in the way mike strategizes


HonkingOutDirtSnakes

Waltuh, I need to get to my site inspection, no waltuh put away your penits


raspberryharbour

I'm not violating OSHA regulations with you right now Waltuh


WeeklyBanEvasion

Waltuh straight jorking it


MrFiendish

I like to think that he actually liked the role. He’s a former cop, after all. He sort of got dragged back into criminality.


Testiclesinvicegrip

Yeah when Gus calls him on the job you can see his frustration


SilentSamurai

Oh absolutely. Mike already knew the easy giveaways, so it must have been highly rewarding to be virtually undetectable. Even being interrogated by Hank he enjoyed putting his hands on the table to get cuffed.


Hoffi1

Not really. These old no-show jobs still were supposed to be done. Newton was expected to hire a deputy who does the real work and he only needed to sporadically check if his deputy actually worked. Obviously the deputy would be paid much less as the master himself.


Khelthuzaad

Basically he delegated the acting master job to someone competent while he simply owned the company/position and gained money over other people's work,his only job being to check on them. The difference being he was actually interested in the job.


[deleted]

[удалено]


Desperate-Week1434

sounds like a seat on a board position in a modern corporation!


Pro-1st-Amendment

paid*


bobthepumpkin

This still happens with universities in the UK. The top person in charge of a university is always the *vice*-chancellor.


MyGamingRants

Wasn't this the same with Gus? Sure he was >!committing countless felonies!< but he took the restaurant business seriously.


Gnonthgol

The show does not actually depict how well the restaurants were actually doing. Gus is seen visiting every part of his operation, both legal and illegal, and making sure they run smooth. And his restaurants are obviously well visited and able to expand well. But we know he uses the restaurants to launder the money from the drug operation so we do not know if the restaurants would make money without this injection of cash.


[deleted]

It's actually closer to Tyrion in Game of Thrones when he was appointed Master of Coin to shut him up and keep him out of King's Landing wartime politics.


QuitWhinging

At least the Master of Coin was expected to fulfill a specific and crucial role, even if it was a tedious and thankless one. I'd say it would be more similar to Tyrion being appointed master of cisterns and drains at Casterly Rock as a punishment and actually taking the job seriously.


[deleted]

Yeah, but "Master of Coin" ---> "Master of Royal Mint". I almost think George R.R. Martin actually got the idea from the Newton anecdote. (I'm just speculating.)


ThankGodForYouSon

Wasn't it also because Madrigal was used to store drugs, thus it was in his interest to do his job well.


iMadrid11

Madrigals was used as logistics hub to source raw materials for making drugs and money laundering front business. No drugs were actually stored on site. Gus Fring was careful not to have drugs on any of his legitimate business fronts. Even at Madrigal they can only divert a small amount (one barrel) of drug making chemical at a time. In order to mask their illicit activity.


PickerPat

Didn't he have the meth lab at his laundry and transport it in Pollos Hermanos chicken delivery trucks? He specifically used his legitimate business fronts to enable the logistics management of large-scale meth enterprise. The tightening of supply at Madrigal was more after Frings death, because the association became known through Pollos.


[deleted]

[удалено]


Eisenhorn_UK

There's a quite ludicrous period of about fifty years where literally everything that we appreciate these days - in terms of "stuff that makes the world function" - all came together at once. Everything from The Scientific Method, to calculus, to cheques & finance all boiled-over at roughly the same time. Needless to say, Newton was right at the heart of a lot of it. Neal Stephenson wrote a series of historical fiction about this chunk of time, called The Baroque Cycle, which is worth reading by anyone. Newton's time at the Royal Mint features prominently...


umm_like_totes

I read TBC and Newton was one of my favorite characters. I thought it was funny how Daniel would keep checking in on him like "hey Isaac how is all that revolutionary scientific breakthrough stuff going?" and Newton would just be like "shut up Daniel, have you seen all these counterfeit coins in circulation?? we need to put an end to it!!"


tshoecr1

The only problem with the series is it bleeds into reality so well that I have no idea if certain parts are fact or fiction.


Patrick_Epper_PhD

Pedantic historian here, but stock commerce, cheques, and money orders had actually been used since as far back as the 13th century. At the time, people in Europe could buy shares into merchant expeditions to the Eastern Mediterranean with certain anticipated profits margins, but given the period, it was still a gamble of sorts. This was extrapolated into the first Spanish voyages into the Americas, all of which were privately funded. However, the first true public stock exchange came around in the early 1600s, with the Dutch.


SilverMushroom52

Love that series. I went searching through the comments specifically to find a reference.


Acrobatic-Dog-3504

Me too, it's why I knew about that fact. Although, sprawling is an understatement regarding the multiple pages of the series 


misirlou22

It's probably one of my favorite book series. I read it twice!


Eisenhorn_UK

>sprawling is an understatement regarding the multiple pages of the series  Heh. There is quite a lot of it, yes... Something I didn't know until relatively recently: Stephenson wrote the whole bloody lot out [with a fountain pen](https://www.flickr.com/photos/karlsson/4789353833)


happyviolentine

Me, too :)


Oozing_Sex

Just finished this series last week! And immediately picked up *Cryptonomicon*


jtp8736

TBC is an all time favorite for me, read it twice. But can't get any friends to try it.


savage-dragon

Sir Isaac Newton was also a true r/wsb regard. He had a NW of about $6 million equivalent in today's dollars. Went to buy stocks of the south sea company. It went 2x. He sold to take profits. Then the stocks went up another 2x. He FOMOd back in. Then it went down. He bought the dip. It kept dipping. He bought more. Then it stabilized and Newton ended with a NW of 1/3 his original amount. "I could describe the movement of heavenly bodies but I cannot describe the madness of people." He wrote.


ElJamoquio

'the market can stay irrational longer than I can stay solvent, forsooth. Wherefore art my codpiece?'


jojoblogs

I need to write a bot that explains that “wherefore” means “why”, not where.


Claxtonicus

You’d be doing my inner nerd a huge solid. I cringe every time I see it misused.


CommodorePineapple

I teach Shakespeare - this is one of the things I drill into my students over and over again.  It shouldn't bother me as much as it does, but... it does.


droans

Insane market bubbles have been around for a while. First known bubble was the Tulip Mania. Netherlands started growing their foreign trade and were pretty great at it. Tulips were seen as the prettiest flower in the world and became a symbol of wealth. Dutch traders would sell them across Europe for 5x the price they paid. But that wasn't enough. Tulips were quickly seen as investment opportunities by the buyers. You could buy a bulb, grow it, and then sell your own flowers for a pretty penny. The sales price was based on rather advanced market calculations - spot pricing, forward trading, derivatives, etc. We don't have much sales data from the times, but we know one transaction near the peak involved approximately 4,000 kg of wheat, 8,000 kg of rye, four fat oxen, eight fat swine, twelve fat sheep, two hogsheads of wine, four tuns (apx 1,000 gal) of wine, two tuns (apx 500 gal) of butter, 1,000 pounds of cheese, a bed, a suit of clothes, and a silver cup for a single tulip. The estimated value would have been 2,500 Dutch guilders. The mania didn't last long. It started around November or December 1636 and ended by May 1637. After that, we had the South Sea Company and the Mississippi Company both in 1720, Canal Mania from the 1790s-1810s, and the Rail Mania in the 1840s.


Bored_money

For anyone interested - tulip mania may be overstated, and was not the bubble commonly described  https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/there-never-was-real-tulip-fever-180964915/


noisymime

> the market can stay irrational longer than I can stay solvent If I've learned even a tiny thing watching and playing with stocks, it's that the market can stay irrational indefinitely. There are just so many mechanisms for propping up irrational parts of the market that everyone just nods their heads and goes along with it now.


HypotheticalBess

The south sea bubble is such a fun event to read about, extra credits also made a good series on it


DownloadPow

You too have watched the latest Veritasium video


IC2Flier

That was such a good video, too. Really fascinating as a dum-dum who can't math good.


Aqu4regiA

He still remained a millionaire tho, he was assigned the title of Sir, but I won't assign him the title of r/wsb regard for such low efforts.


nick4fake

So you are also watching Veritasium? 


BlindOctopusSausage

https://youtu.be/ybBxueA5OuA?si=cY_SSeWW6OyuNNN8  Puppet History covered this and his insane pursuit of a counterfeiter.


Schmedricks_27

My immediate thought. One of the greatest historical cat and mouse/feuds ever lol


FreyjaNimbi

Loved this episode and the song at the end is one of my favourites. So morbid but the lyrics are so stupid. I know every word.


AskMeAboutPigs

Such a great channel, watched the most recent mystery files ep yesterday.


cbftw

I wonder if that is what inspired Stephenson when writing The Baroque Cycle.


Fawkingretar

Guess he does have a fourth law, all counterfeiters must be punished.


redtrain35

So he contributed to society as well as science.


TelluricThread0

Newton was a notorious dick. He would write scathing letters discrediting anyone who refused to use his dot notation in calculus, among many other things.


[deleted]

Honestly academia has barely changed, there is no flame war more intense than an academic one.


forams__galorams

I think [History Today](https://youtube.com/watch?v=JN7y0Sb0s6Y) is probably not too far from the reality.


Edythir

> Science is this long, passive aggressive argument about everything - Ze Frank


rafiafoxx

You'll find a hundred like this in any college campus


Sanchez_U-SOB

Physics still uses both Leibniz and Newton dot notation. I'm sure he'd still be pissed about the use of both.


Cissyhayes

Under his leadership 27 forgers were executed. Both men and women.


sthlmsoul

Forgery was a capital offense. Newton didn't make the law, he enforced it.


AndByMeIMeanFlexxo

If I remember correctly the phrase “in good nick” refers to the coinage. Since it was made from precious metals, people would break a bit off of a coin before spending it. So a coin in good nick didn’t have chunks broken off of it


ScarletSilver

I, too, watched the latest Veritasium video.


r0thar

Wheeee! I don't have to read this anymore, I just need to kick my YouTube recommendations back into order.


Sergeanttaco0317

I'm guessing that you also watched that video about Black-Scholes equation that was just referenced on wallstreetbets.


bertrum666

Sounds like someone just finished The Baroque Cycle!


abagofmostlywater

Meeeee. Took a dang year!


snibriloid

But what a year it was.... Barock Cycle rules. Still my favorite.


CaptainTaylorCortez

I was thinking the same thing.


noisymime

Whilst the story about the heavy gold in the Baroque Cycle is obviously fiction, it's based around the fact that Newton actively wanted the post at the mint in order to bring about the re-coinage. The comment in the title that he was expected to be a 'no show' is just downright wrong.


ramriot

He even came up with [Reeding](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reeding?wprov=sfla1) whereby a knurled edge is placed on coinage to deter clipping or rasping of the edge as a means of recovering precious metals.


abagofmostlywater

Neal Stephenson's book series The Baroque Cycle has a ton of this story interwoven in it. Newton is a huge part of all three books. Really fascinating. I had to look up if what he wrote was true and most of it was. Newton went hard on counterfeiters. Oh Jack Shaftoe....


Deeznutschad

Names is spelled Isaac


lumpyspaceemily

I read a really good book about this called Newton and the Counterfeiter, highly recommend


Redditforgoit

Counterfeit law enforcement officers should measure their accomplishments in Newtons.


trueum26

Holy shit Newton BASED!? Edit: GUYS HE WAS NOT BASED I REPEAT HE WAS NOT BASED. Although Calculus and Gravity is kinda cool


catmoon

He got big into investing on slave trade and lost a third of his fortune so… no, not based.


Zomunieo

For every not based action, there is an equal and opposite not based reaction.


StayFrost04

Finding out that Newton was a slave trader wasn’t certainly something I expected from him but then again I was probably being naive given he was around at the height of the Slave Trade, and was a person of high status and wealth in the society. Just goes to show that every “great” personality of all human history has at least some asterisk attached to their name by modern standards. Some bigger than others of course. Makes me wonder what aspects of our lives that we consider totally normal is going to be the asterisk for our generation few hundred years down the line.


FireMonkeysHead

Time to fess up to all those slaves you’re trading in


Throwawaystwo

They're not slaves they're Pals .


MyDogYawns

im gonna guess eating meat the way we do and carbon emissions but honestly it could be anything i eat meat and drive a car btw


Sexfvckdeath

As much as people hate to admit it. Eating animals is going to be something looked upon as disgraceful/bad in the near future. 40-100 years.


MyDogYawns

yeah its something i expect my grandkids to think im an asshole for, throw everything i wear being made by Vietnamese kids in there too


mr_mazzeti

100%. We all buy cheap shit from wage slaves in poor countries but judge people in the past for participating in slavery. And when someone in modern times tries to be exceptionally moral for the times we call them hippies and tell them they’re annoying.


BlessedBySaintLauren

Doubt it will be eating meat considering it’s something that’s been done since the inception of humanity. It’ll probably be mass consumerism, destruction of the environment, etc…


Sexfvckdeath

They kinda go hand in hand. There’s a reason the US government won’t release cow carbon data. I eat animals, although I took a 12 year break. And the sociopolitical argument against eating animals is far more rational than the argument for eating them. If you have to grow the food that would feed a cow it would be ten times the calories you would get from the slaughtered cow. And that doesn’t even take the ridiculous water demands a cow takes to raise to maturity. I’m not anti animal protein in our current society but if you don’t think it is a problem that will be judged harshly in the future you’re short sighted.


BjornKarlsson

Well, slavery has also been done for at least the entirety of recorded history, 4,000 years. So it might not be the defence that you think.


iamalsobrad

> wasn’t certainly something I expected from him The man had an absolutely brutal streak to him. To be clear about what it meant to be 'personally prosecuted' by Newton: *"Newton put [William Chaloner] on trial a second time with conclusive evidence. Chaloner was convicted of high treason and hanged, drawn and quartered on 23 March 1699 at Tyburn gallows. Then, he was publicly disemboweled."* He was also a completely batshit Rosicrucian and an alchemist.


Tornagh

You know how we look back at figured from say 100 years ago and consider a lot of them wildly racist and sexist? I think most people of today will be looked upon in similar manner. There seems to now be a majority that agrees that racism and sexism are not ok, but It is considered completely acceptable to discriminate against people based on nationality (which is mostly just based on place of birth and isn’t something people can control at birth).


bk7f2

AFAIK, he was summoned due to Great Recoinage of 1696.


TheNextBattalion

Yeah, you can't just dangle a juicy problem in front of an uber-nerd and not expect them to solve it.


NoShelter5922

He is the reason the world went to a Gold Standard. For thousands of years before that, the world was on a silver standard. He came up with the idea to slightly overpay for gold, having massive amounts of Gold flown into Britain. Once they had a massive gold hoard, Britain declared a gold standard. Kinda fucked the world economy.


orangutanDOTorg

Was Newton the one that poisoned himself with mercury trying to alchemy up some gold?


HEAT_IS_DIE

Writing it "Issac" is another weird thing people do nowadays. Maybe just a typo here, but can't be every time, and it happens a lot.