What are some notable blunders in history that resulted in huge loss? - eviltoast

Loss in terms of money or efforts. Could be recent or ancient.

  • ActualShark@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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    1 year ago

    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

    • Noughmad@programming.dev
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      1 year ago

      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.

    • Tippon@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      I vaguely remember reading about that when I was younger. I don’t know if it’s true, but this is what I read.

      The peasants and farmers were made to stand in the fields throwing stones at the sparrows, preventing them from landing. The thinking was that the sparrows would die from exhaustion, if they weren’t killed by the stones.

      What actually happened was that the existing crops were either trampled or broken by the stones, and as the farmers weren’t working the fields, nothing grew the following year either.

      Like I say, I have no idea whether it’s true, or if it was just 80’s anti communist propaganda, but it’s stuck in my head ever since.

  • floofloof@lemmy.ca
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    1 year ago

    Brexit. As historical blunders go, this has a beautiful unambiguous purity.

    • Bady@lemmy.mlOP
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      1 year ago

      I agree, but unlike usual blunders this was very much planned!

      • floofloof@lemmy.ca
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        1 year ago

        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.

        • CanadaPlus@lemmy.sdf.org
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          1 year ago

          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

        • new_acct_who_dis@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          I didn’t keep up with this at all (I’m from across the pond) and I wondered why Brexit was even thought up in the first place.

          It’s so sad to see conservatives fucking things up over there too.

          • floofloof@lemmy.ca
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            1 year ago

            Well, I’m in Canada and our Conservatives are pretty active in making this a worse place to live too. Currently they run almost all of the provincial governments, but they may take the federal government after the next election. Not something to look forward to.

            • new_acct_who_dis@lemmy.world
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              1 year ago

              It’s heartbreaking to see happen with y’all. We’re a mess, PLEASE LEARN FROM US!

              religious right wingers are dangerous AF. Don’t let religious folk skate by on some “we’re persecuted” shit.

              They know what they’re doing, don’t treat them with kid gloves like we did in the US

            • Hyperi0n@lemmy.film
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              1 year ago

              As long as Truedu isn’t running the party has a chance. Conservatives are split 4 ways and liberals only 2.

    • Lamedonyx@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      You can’t leave aside the fact that those typhoons were called “Divine Winds”, or kamikaze.

    • Bady@lemmy.mlOP
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      1 year ago

      I doubt if it counts as a blunder, but thanks for sharing anyway.

      • SilverFlame@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        Their blunder was using disgruntled Chinese labor to build their ships. It turns out that conquering people makes them rather upset.

        • CanadaPlus@lemmy.sdf.org
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          1 year ago

          It turns out that conquering people makes them rather upset.

          It can, but sometimes they hated the old bosses even more than your imperial ass.

    • DoisBigo@lemmy.eco.br
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      1 year ago

      The Las Vegas Loop.

      (known on dictionaries as a tunnel)

      And nobody have died there yet.

      • yetiftw@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        oh that’s not a blunder, that was intentionally a flop to prevent California from developing a high speed rail network

        • csfirecracker@lemmyf.uk
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          1 year ago

          You may be confusing the Las Vegas Loop and the Hyperloop. Las Vegas Loop is the shitty tunnel you drive teslas single file through in Las Vegas, Hyperloop was the “vacuum tube frictionless train replacement” that was used to reduce excitement about the high speed rail proposal.

      • StarkillerX42@lemmy.ml
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        1 year ago

        I hope the Redditors that didn’t care about the whole thing never find their way here. I can’t imagine being that apathetic about something you use daily.

        • jacktherippah@lemdro.id
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          1 year ago

          Eh. I wouldn’t hold that against them. Reddit or Lemmy is just social media. Just one small aspect in people’s lives. Pretty hard to care about something like Reddit taking away API access when you’ve got much more important things like a job, a social life and a family to care for. Even harder when you only use the official apps.

    • grahamja@reddthat.com
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      1 year ago

      I wish it had the same effect as version 4 of digg. He is probably still over there, editing posts he doesn’t like.

    • Name021@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      Nobody cared. Only reddit addicts and power tripping jannies, who all seem to have migrated here.

  • nfh@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    King Pyrrhus of Epirus. He was known for winning battles against superior armies, at the cost of taking heavy losses. He was once quoted as saying “If we are victorious in one more battle with the Romans, we shall be utterly ruined.”

    He was so famous for this, that the term for a victory that devastates the victor bears his name, a Pyrrhic victory.

  • fiat_lux@kbin.social
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    1 year ago

    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.

    • UnverifiedAPK@lemmy.ml
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      1 year ago

      Also the temperature at the bottom showing how cold it was on the way back. It explains why everyone died in the river.

      • fiat_lux@kbin.social
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        1 year ago

        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.

        • CanadaPlus@lemmy.sdf.org
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          1 year ago

          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.

  • fubo@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    World War I didn’t do anyone any good whatsoever; including any of the various parties that might be blamed for starting it.

    • rjthyen@lemm.ee
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      1 year ago

      I’m by no means brushed up on my world war knowledge, but didn’t WWI help set the stage for the nazi party’s rise in Germany? Still a horrible event, but may have benefited someone even if the wrong someone?

      • pungunner@feddit.de
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        1 year ago

        Kinda. The winners of WWI decided to leave Germany be, but took most things of worth and some land. The reparations were brutal. I think Germany finished paying of the reparations a few years ago. Additionally there was military propaganda that the reich was “undefeated in battle, stabbed in the back”, because the civilians negotiated the harsh peace treaty and ignoring the fact, that the war was going badly.

        I will not go more into details because I do not know exactly. But the combination of a very depressed economy, the feeling of being treated unjust and the desire for revenge led to a disgruntlement -> rise of populism -> rise of extremist parties.

        I am missing a ton, but when things are unstable it is easierfor radical forces to emerge and succeed.

        Hitler literally was tasked to spy on the NSDAP and joined them. You have to see: at the time two major parties in the reich were anti constitutional.

        That is why a lot of people in Europe look worringly at trump or at least at the whole movement. The USA has issues that need fixing. There is a large disgruntled part of the population and people start to radicalize.

        I may generalize, but the start of WWI was mostly a series of pride, miss communication and bad luck.

      • halo5@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        but didn’t WWI help set the stage for the nazi party’s rise in Germany? Yes, but the Great Depression was another big factor. It amplified the country’s economic woes…

  • Etterra@lemmy.world
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    When the Spanish were raping the New World in the 1500s for gold, they dumped enormous quantities of platinum into the ocean because it was the wrong kind of shiny metal. Nobody in Europe had any clue how valuable the stuff was, only that it was often used to counterfeit gold. But since it wasn’t gold, or even silver, everyone thought it was worthless. This was exasperated by the fact that nobody could melt the stuff until the 1800s. But mostly it was just not yellow enough for the idiots at the time.

  • Mpolmanteer@lemmy.world
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    Knight Capital - They were biggest equities trader in 2012. They manually deployed code and didn’t get configuration right and it reactivated “Powder Peg”. They lost $460 M in 45 minutes and went bankrupt.

  • AlmightySnoo 🐢🇮🇱🇺🇦@lemmy.world
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    Elon acquiring Twitter for $44B in the first place, not taking into account the subsequent blunders. He not only overpaid too much for a social media company without even understanding it, he also wrecked Tesla’s stock price as investors saw he was clearly spending too much time on Twitter and he had to panic sell Tesla shares to fund his Twitter adventure. He easily wiped out hundreds of billions from Tesla’s market cap during that time.

  • LemmyLefty@lemmy.world
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    Since December 1982, the O-rings had been designated a “Criticality 1″ item by NASA, denoting a component without a backup, whose failure would result in the loss of the shuttle and its crew.

    Richard Feynman[:] “… [the shuttle] flies [with O-ring erosion] and nothing happens. Then it is suggested, therefore, that the risk is no longer so high for the next flights. We can lower our standards a little bit because we got away with it last time. You got away with it, but it shouldn’t be done over and over again like that.”

    Taken from an excellent writeup of the fatal 1986 Challenger flight.

    • Alto@kbin.social
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      1 year ago

      Never forget that Reagan heavily pressured them to not delay for political reasons

      • Alterecho@lemmy.world
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        Ahh, the Gipper strikes again. Famously an expert Economist, Rocket Scientist, and “totally not a racist”

  • idle@158436977.xyz
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    1 year ago

    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.

    • Ejh3k@midwest.social
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      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.

      • some_guy@lemmy.sdf.org
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        What I know of it is mostly from the HBO mini-series that aired a few years ago. Did it really have that much impact on the fall of the USSR? My understanding was that the gradual attrition of competing with the West was the ultimate cause. I’m interested to learn more. Gonna go read some wikipedia on it.

        • raubarno@lemmy.ml
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          It was one of the reasons, as it required huge spending on extinguishing the reactor, draft up to a million personnel, dosimetry equipment, helicopters, thousands of trucks, then cleaning the zone around the reactor, building the sarcophagus on rush, evacuating people from the exclusion zone, digging up upper layer of dirt in a radius of several kilometers, patient treatment, and keeping everything in secret.

          It wouldn’t be an exaggeration that the costs of the liquidation compare to costs of a small war. Besides, the Soviets were involved in a harsh Afghanistan war.

    • portside@monyet.cc
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      Yeah it struck fear, we could never fully utilize nuclear energy because people are scared.