Loss in terms of money or efforts. Could be recent or ancient.
Okay, I listen to a fair amount of history podcasts, so let’s see what I can pull out of my head for fun:
There was Rainbow Man, who famously went to sports games across America, holding up a sign that read “John 3:16” in an attempt to convert people to Christianity. He later died in a hotel shoot out where he took a maid hostage in his hotel room full of guns.
There was the time the President of America secretly went on a trip to Panama on one of two ships. While trying to show off to the president doing drills, the other ship accidentally shot a torpedo at the presidents ship. He pulled a pistol and attempted to shoot the torpedo with it.
The settlement at Roanoke, which was one of the earliest attempts by Europeans to settle in America and by the time ships got back with supplies (I believe years after they said they would be back) the settlement was empty. Still unsolved to this day.
America has dropped at least two nuclear warheads on itself accidentally, which have all failed to detonate.
Benedict Arnold was one of the best military minds ever born in America. He paid for his own troops for years, and when he asked for repayment or even his own salary, the Republicans claimed he actually owed the government money. They gave him tje reputation of only caring about money and refused to ever pay him until he finally took money from Britan to make ends meet.
George Bush senior crashed into German electrical lines and flew the plane back to base causing an international incident. He never received punishment for this and continued to fly for the military. He also did a bunch of drug smuggling and no one cared.
Look into pretty much any time people wanted to explore an area for the first time and there was most likely a massive loss of life and money. Australia and America seem to have the funniest stories of people’s attempts to name every river and mountain they see.
That’s what I got off the top of my head. :)
The settlement at Roanoke […] Still unsolved to this day.
The word “CROATOAN” was carved on one of the buildings in the colony. The colonists had had friendly interactions with the native people living on Croatoan Island, which was nearby. There were later reports of native people with fair skin and beards on Croatoan Island.
So mysterious! Where could the colonists possibly have gone?
They were not the only white people to have ever been there though. The colonists could have been slaughtered and those were French decendents or something though. There is no way to prove what happened.
Historian here. Prove? No. Draw a highly likely conclusion that should accompany every telling as the most likely explanation? Yes.
Thank you for the professional input RimJob4.
Didn’t even get it right lol
A Freudian Slip or a joke? Either is funny to me.
It’s pretty common when people want to have an edgy name in a game with name filtering. You just swap the first letters in two words. Like datfick4, bamrutt4, that kinda thing.
No problem Dildo.
There was Rainbow Man, who famously went to sports games across America, holding up a sign that read “John 3:16” in an attempt to convert people to Christianity. He later died in a hotel shoot out where he took a maid hostage in his hotel room full of guns.
^ Emphasis mine. I was curious about this and did a search. Turns out he’s still alive.
Interesting! Thanks for the update!
None of these resulted in losses. In fact the nuclear bomb example is notable precisely because there were no losses. They’re amusing failures or errors, but nothing was lost.
A nuke costs something like $80,000,000 to produce. It takes time and effort from multiple groups of people. What is an example of losses if this doesn’t count?
America has dropped at least two nuclear warheads on itself accidentally, which have all failed to detonate.
These are known as “Broken Arrow” incidents, and at least 32 have been officially recognized by the government. Some of them were accidental releases of the bombs, others were plane (or other vehicle) crashes that contained bombs. There’s likely more that haven’t been recognized by the government. almost all of them happened between 1950 and 1980. Now that the cold war has died down, we haven’t been moving around our nuclear warheads as often and so haven’t had a new one. At least, not an official new one.
It’s pretty hard to have an accidental detonation at this point, though. Prompt criticality is tricky to achieve and easy to deliberately not achieve. Word is the newest bombs require a specific electronic sequence of fuse activations that’s stored encrypted, and would require being a superpower to reproduce, so it’s actually impossible to set them off as designed even if one was stolen.
Good info thanks for adding on!
Well, Russia, in 2022…
Cambium stock recently dropped to $10 after the CEO stepped down during their call. A large part of their problems are likely due to the pandemic shortages catching up.
But a high failure rate on their new line of switches, and high prices while starlink eats their lunch isn’t helping.
Edit: Used to be over $50.
you may want mention the before stock price, that $10 needs something to compare with
It was around $15.
It was around 50.
It was $50 in 2021.
The CEO stepped down 4 days ago when the stock was at $15, as a consequence it lost one third of its value and is now at $10.
Scotland trying to colonize the Darien gap It bankrupted Scotland and forced the union of England and Scotland to be the UK.
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…
Would be even more of a blunder if people just absolutely refuse to stop calling it Twitter.
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.
You don’t hold onto a useless material for 400 years hoping it has some value in the future.
HODL
Ever heard of the cables drawer? Bet you feel real stupid now
No. I pair and clean my out monthly.
Prepare to laugh your ass off.
I’m due for surgery next month to finally get my ass sewn back on after listening to this.
I had to brush the dust off after rolling around on the floor.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s): https://piped.video/watch?v=5jDbJbCuKl4
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source, check me out at GitHub.
Can we make a bot that cuts out the begging for likes and subscribes for a full minute at the start of videos?
There actually used to be (maybe still is) a Chrome extension for this, applying what’s known as the Wadsworth Constant :-)
You mean something like Sponsorblock?
It doesn’t just skip sponsors, it can skip subscription reminders, as well as a bunch of other stuff.
Thank you!
That’s amazing, thanks!
Wow. I was so annoyed by the prospect of a 20min video but it was chock full of incredible moments of stupidity. Good entry.
Sorry about your ass. But it was worth it right!
/c/nocontext
I didn’t think I’d watch the whole video but wow, the level of incompetence was just unrivaled. Komchatka was captained by Mr. Bean confirmed.
33,000 km, woah!
The Battle of Manzikert led directly to the end of the Roman Empire, all because of mismanagement.
If I saved one person the 4 calories worth of finger movements required to open a new tab and Google this themselves then I’ll go to sleep happy.
Thank you, my bulk is saved
Bah! I’m in the habit of spending those calories (history nerd) and did so before reading your comment. Still, your comment is appreciated. Also, thanks to @Cleverdawny for clueing my into something I hadn’t known.
The Jan. 6th insurrectionists who thought Trump was going to pardon them all because they were heroes.
Or that they were doing the middle class any favors by fucking up the nation’s credit score (as it were) with their smooth-brain fuckery. 🤦🏼♂️
removed by mod
Do you guys remember that time u/Spez took the reddit API away from third party apps?
Nobody cared. Only reddit addicts and power tripping jannies, who all seem to have migrated here.
Oh wow, that really takes me back. 🤌🏼
I wish it had the same effect as version 4 of digg. He is probably still over there, editing posts he doesn’t like.
Unfortunately most reddit users didn’t even notice. Or just don’t care.
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.
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.
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.
I was going to say something like the Hindenburg, but I think you have me beat.
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.
Twitter
The Las Vegas Loop.
(known on dictionaries as a tunnel)
And nobody have died there yet.
oh that’s not a blunder, that was intentionally a flop to prevent California from developing a high speed rail network
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.
You mean X?
World War I didn’t do anyone any good whatsoever; including any of the various parties that might be blamed for starting it.
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?
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.
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…
Nazism may have been the worst thing that ever happened to the German people.
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
This is why I never felt comfortable enough to use one of those. A have a formula for generating passwords for each account so I only have to remember that instead of individual passwords. I know password manager might be more convenient but I’m too used to the way I’ve been doing things all these years…
Have you had any luck recovering your Bitwarden?
What’s more likely: forgetting the master password to your password manager or one of the many passwords you have memorized? I totally get not wanting to trust a hosted service with all of your passwords in case it disappears (having an offline backup would remedy that), but not using one out of fear of forgetting a master password is overblown.
I get what you mean and you’re right. It’s just that I got used to how I memorize my passwords and so far haven’t really felt the need to try a manager (yet).
You can always do the mostly sane thing of having a master password to your main vault as the only saved password of different password vault, i.e bitwardens master password saved in an encyrpted keepass file. You have 2 passwords to remember, but also a fail safe if you forget one.
That or just write it down somewhere safe and sane.
The best offline backup is a piece of paper.
Bitwarden effectivly uses your master password to encrypt all the other passwords.
Without the master password all the data is gibberish. Even if you reset your master password, you get back nothing.
Um I’m still searching for the final piece of the puzzle. I know every word (or at least I’m 99% sure) except for one word. The way I make passwords, especially for important passwords that I can’t risk forgetting (ironic, since I still forgot), is to choose a word and make an acoustic poem out of it. Like for example (not the actually password or the “seed word”):
Lemmy:
Lemons Eat My Melons Yesterday
The actual passphrase I chose is unfortunately does not form a sentence nor are related words. This is how I choose to compromise between security and being able to remember.
So I know the starting letters of every word of the passphrase, and I know how many words there are, I’m just missing one word. 🥲 I feel so sad. Luckily, Bitwarden allows unlimited attempts, but each attempt requires a captcha. All these captchas I gotta solve… 🥲
There are Browser plug-ins for captchas. Haven’t tried any, but in your case it might be worth it to check them out.
I used to do this, there’s always a slight worry that some place will get a couple of your passwords and be able to figure out your formula the chances are pretty slim. Were the real pain came from me, when a website forces you to change your password, or they require some limit to the letters numbers and punctuation that wouldn’t allow me to use my formula. I had a growing list of websites that had more exceptions.
You’re right about those pesky sites that have exceptions (like no special characters)!
Alright, I’ll check out a password manager. Maybe it’s time to see if I can get used to it…
I started out using LastPass because it’s what work used which was obviously a bad idea. When it came time to leave them I moved to bitwarden which has been pretty fantastic but I mainly use it because I need to share passwords amongst my family and I really like the TOTP integration.
If I didn’t have that need I would probably use KeypassX and throw it’s database into a Dropbox or Syncthing.
I just downloaded Proton Pass. I’ve been using their email for years now and I like it quite a lot. But I’ll check out bitwarden as well!
Sorry to hear that. I didn’t mean to remind people of their personal mistakes. Hope you’ll recover your password soon.
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…
Any history book will be filled with such stories. Depending on the outlook, I’d say all history is like that.
Take any one event. Let’s pick any decisive moment in history. Say, the battle of Salamis. Now flip it to the side of the Persians and you have the kind of blunder you’re looking for.
Very true when talking historical events. Say the USA lost the American Revolution and it’s now a land mass of Brits that can’t believe how foolish the revolutionaries were. (Although if other colonies are any indication independence may have eventually happened anyways)
Difference being canada still sings “God save the Queen/King” and it would be a parliamentary government instead of the 3 branches. Maybe things would be less deadlocked and more democratic if the American Revolution failed. (Ironic, I know)
Although ww1 would have looked very different if the UK had America’s resources from day 1
Say the USA lost the American Revolution and it’s now a land mass of Brits that can’t believe how foolish the revolutionaries were.
Futurama imagined this: All the Presidents’ Heads
