Loss in terms of money or efforts. Could be recent or ancient.
China’s Four Pests campaign is a great example. As the campaign says, China had a bit of a pest problem. One of these particular pests was the sparrow. The government decided it would be a great idea to launch an “exterminate sparrows” campaign. The only problem was sparrows ate other pests such as bedbugs and locusts.
In short, they sucessfully curbed the “sparrow problem” and replaced it with a “locusts and bedbugs problem”. This ultimately upset the ecological balance and further lowered the rice yields. It was a complete disaster
- ∟⊔⊤∦∣≶ ( @luthis@lemmy.nz ) 24•1 year ago
Sounds exactly like a China thing.
One of the best examples of unintended consequences, aiding in one of the largest human caused disasters.
Another good example is when the Soviet Union dammed the Aral Sea in order to create irrigation canals for cotton and other produce in the region. It worked at first and they had a huge economic boom, but this is also one of history’s most prominent examples of “Ecological Collapse”
I mean, they did produce the cotton they wanted…
It’s less an example of a blunder and more an example of how few fucks the Soviets gave about being “green”.
I like to call it “The Great Stumble Backwards”
- socsa ( @socsa@lemmy.ml ) 6•1 year ago
Followed closely by the cannibal revolution
The great leap forward was such a colossal clusterfuck that you can’t blame it on any one thing (although most of them would be prevented without the authoritarianism). Literally everything was wrong. Sparrows, lysenkoism, forced collectivization (basically, and perhaps ironically, farmers not owning the means of production), Mao just being evil, backyard burners, rigid chain of command that gave the chairman absolute authority but at the same prevented him from knowing what was going on, everything.
Sounds similar to what we did in Australia.
Brexit. As historical blunders go, this has a beautiful unambiguous purity.
I agree, but unlike usual blunders this was very much planned!
Once the campaigns were underway, yes. But the opportunity came from a huge blunder by David Cameron. He called the referendum expecting an easy win for the remain side that would silence the anti-EU faction in his party and shore up his position as PM. Instead, the anti-EU faction won, prompting his own resignation and causing damage to the UK’s economy, a loss of global influence, the loss of British people’s right to live and work in the EU, and reopening difficult issues in Northern Ireland that had been laid to rest for years. It also arguably sped up the Conservative Party’s lurch to the right and its embrace of UKIP-like policies, disempowering Conservative moderates and leading to the spiral of ever less competent governments we have seen since then. In particular, Boris Johnson’s rise was a direct result of post-referendum power games among Conservative politicians.
So what’s David Cameron up to these days? I’m sure such a massive and unnecessary screw-up has landed him in dire personal straights. /s
Mmm-hmm. Aristos go brrrr.
It’s less that I think we should be tougher on former politicians, and more that I’d like to see anybody ordinary fail that upwardly.
Twitter
The Las Vegas Loop.
(known on dictionaries as a tunnel)
And nobody have died there yet.
You mean X?
Napoleon’s invasion of Russia. It led what might be the first great infographic ever though. Charles Minard’s Infographic of Napoleon’s Invasion of Russia from 1869 (Carte figurative des pertes successives en hommes de l’Armée française dans la campagne de Russie en 1812-1813)
Tan colour line from left to right is the trip from France to Moscow, 1mm line weight = 6000 soldiers, black colour line from right to left is the trip back to France. The line slowly thins and diverges like a tree branch until 422k soldiers are whittled down to 10k returning. Not quite the outcome Napoleon had intended.
Also the temperature at the bottom showing how cold it was on the way back. It explains why everyone died in the river.
I’ve heard that if he hadn’t ordered the retreat, they probably would have succeeded.
Given the Russians burnt out everything they left behind, which is one big reason the line keeps thinning, I doubt they would have survived very long on the land they occupied. But I’m no Franco-Russian war historian, I just like data.
I think the idea is they would have caught up with the Russians and defeated them in battle, and could have taken supplies there. By marching back through the scorched earth they actually maximized their exposure to it.
The Jan. 6th insurrectionists who thought Trump was going to pardon them all because they were heroes.
Buying Twitter for 44B and renaming it to X.
Recent or ancient, not future.
They lost almost half their ad revenue. I’d call that recent. Of course, it hasn’t actually killed the platform…
The Gunpowder Plot. Guy Fawkes and his friends were about to blow up parliament, and on the week it was supposed to happen, one of his accomplices sent a letter to a noble. In what was probably the worst example of “asking for a friend” in history, it asked “hypothetically, what would happen if someone went into the basement and blew up parliament”. The noble did what nobody expected he would do and, get this, responded to the letter. People searched the palace basement and found Guy Fawkes, he was arrested and killed, and we have Guy Fawkes Day. The reason this led to a loss is because the king of England at the time used it as an excuse to persecute Catholics and make the holiday which is used as a taunt.
Guy Fawkes wasn’t just killed though. He and his fellow conspirators suffered greatly before they died, and even after death their executioners inflicted torment on the corpses.
"They were to be “put to death halfway between heaven and earth as unworthy of both”. Their genitals would be cut off and burnt before their eyes, and their bowels and hearts removed. They would then be decapitated, and the dismembered parts of their bodies displayed so that they might become “prey for the fowls of the air”.
Based on his orders, the king sounds like he had a bone to pick.
I’m willing to nominate Charles II, King of Spain as a formerly alive blunder. The result of decades of Hapsburg inbreeding, he had a number of health and intellectual issues from birth and he was notably infertile. If you live in a monarchy where succession is passed down through children, it’s REALLY BAD to be infertile and be King. His death directly caused the War of the Spanish Succession, a 13-and-a-half year war that eventually involved pretty much all of western Europe and likely led to the deaths of over 1 million people.
Literally could have avoided this if the Habsburgs decided to have sex with other people.
You should be blaming his parents, he didn’t ask for all those problems to be born with.
Literally what I’m doing
Chernobyl comes to mind as the biggest fuck up ever. Whenever I think I fucked up I try to remember, it can never be as bad as Chernobyl.
Ended up taking down the soviet union. The whole meltdown is fascinating. I read a book about it. I think it was called midnight at chernobyl, so something like it.
Yeah it struck fear, we could never fully utilize nuclear energy because people are scared.
I was going to say something like the Hindenburg, but I think you have me beat.
Russia invasion of Ukraine. They used to be number 2 army with sophisticated weapons. Now they are number 1 world laughing stock with weapons that works exceptionally well for invading Mars but not on earth.
As they say, from number 2 army in the world to number 2 army in Ukraine.
Now with a risk of becoming number 2 army in Russia…
- 🇵🇸 Free Palestine 🇵🇸 ( @Fissionami@lemmy.ml ) 5•1 year ago
You still believing that? Wow
I don’t think they used to be the number two military. I think people THOUGHT they were a world class military. Apparently hadn’t been for decades.
Does personal blunders count? Because I changed my Bitwarden password and now I’m locked out of all my accounts.
For details: https://reddthat.com/post/1115518
You have my deepest sympathies
That’s that actually makes me feel better (seriously, not joking). I’m learning a lot words as I flip through the dictionary looking for that last word of the passphrase, so I guess thats a silver lining?? 🙃🥲 Maybe I’ll find that word soon… any day now…
Sorry to hear that. I didn’t mean to remind people of their personal mistakes. Hope you’ll recover your password soon.
Didn’t really result in a loss, but a huge missed opportunity, when AT&T turned down an offer for them to purchase the early internet.
At least something we can all cheer about :)
This also reminds me of Yahoo turning down the offer to buy Google in their early stage! https://finance.yahoo.com/news/remember-yahoo-turned-down-1-132805083.html
Or Blockbuster turning down a $50 million offer to buy out Netflix.
The first thing that came to mind, oddly enough, was Blockbuster refusing to buy Netflix for the equivalent of a rat and a string to swing it with.
I really doubt that Netflix would be what it is today if they had gotten bought. Too much would change too soon.
In that case it may have prolonged the movie-rental paradigm by a few years allowing Blockbuster to dominate a bit longer.
Target’s failed expansion into Canada. It’s taught as a case study on what not to do in business schools now.
Wendy’s tried to get into the Netherlands, but couldn’t, because there was already a snackbar (think small fastfood place but greasier) that was registered under the name “Wendy’s” at the chamber of commerce. This spawned a lawsuit. You had Wendy’s, a local snackbar who claimed rights to the name because they were already established, and Wendy’s, a franchise coming from America. They claimed right to the name because they were a franchise, and not just a single fastfood joint.
To solve this issue, the local snackbar opened up a second location, making local Wendy’s a franchise, and winning them the lawsuit
It was so weird when Target opened in my city. Everyone was pumped for the great deals Americans are always on about. The grand opening comes, and it was basically just a super expensive Walmart with half the products out of stock. Then they closed without notice like a month later. Employees came in the morning to open up and there were chains on the doors.
In terms of money and business, my fav is how Xerox didn’t know how to market/capitalize on what was effectively the first personal computer before personal computers were even a concept, which is estimated to be a $1.4 trillion mistake.
This Xerox Alto restoration series is a really interesting reflection on that. Here’s the point in the series where they finally get it running. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9OQMhvArI9g
Yeah, Xerox made revolutionary progress. But it appears that their proximity to a viable consumer product is a bit exaggerated. It really did still take another set of eyes and minds to wrangle it in. I think if they did release it sooner, and without the leaks, the next competitor still would have seen that and soon come along and done a better enough job to nullify their first-mover advantage.
Those days were chock full of companies that ended up just contributing to the zeitgeist of computing without themselves reaping in the glory.
I think Steve Jobs’ comments about what Xerox could have been… Is largely him stroking his ego that he and Apple pulled off what they couldn’t.
I don’t think Xerox would be the Mac of today in most timelines.
Thanks for sharing, I remember this from a documentary on Steve Jobs.
