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
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”
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.
We’ll there was that time Kublai Khan tried to invade Japan with the largest amphibious assault in history (until D-day) and got absolutely wrecked by a typhoon.
Then tried again a few years later, with an even larger force, and got wrecked by another typhoon.
I doubt if it counts as a blunder, but thanks for sharing anyway.
Twitter
The Las Vegas Loop.
(known on dictionaries as a tunnel)
And nobody have died there yet.
You mean X?
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.
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.
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.
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.
I would say he overpaid by exactly the right amount.
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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…
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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
The thing to remember with these examples is that those companies would have royally fucked up their purchases. Big companies always impose a culture and a mindset.
AT&T would definately have crushed the internet with a monopoly - we would have had to use AT&T approved internet devices, and they would have brought long distance type charges to it. Oh so your email is going overseas? That’s an extra 10c.
Same with Google and Netflix. They were all able to continue with the founders vision and create something special.
Or Blockbuster turning down a $50 million offer to buy out Netflix.
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…
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.
Similar to the misperception of the USSR from outside before the collapse.
You still believing that? Wow
It is not a belief, it is fact.
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Tankie is sufficient. Filthy scum is a bit too far, imo. Like how I called a Musk apologist a bootlicker. But I didn’t say anything further. Let’s try to remain civil.
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