Loss in terms of money or efforts. Could be recent or ancient.
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.
Do you guys remember that time u/Spez took the reddit API away from third party apps?
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.
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.
Nobody cared. Only reddit addicts and power tripping jannies, who all seem to have migrated here.
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.
That one really wasn’t as obvious at the time. Netflix was in huge debt and hadn’t really built their streaming platform yet. In fact streaming was barely possible. Blockbuster should have been able to out-compete Netflix at both dvd by mail and streaming but they screwed it up. Netflix won, but may now end up getting killed by the big studios.
That one really wasn’t as obvious at the time.
It never is, that’s how the investment market works. Blockbuster thought it was still ludicrously high for an ailing niche competitor. That’s arguable, but I don’t think anyone could guarantee Netflix was actually going to achieve their (at the time very sci-fi) vision.
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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The value of “X” has been repeatedly downgraded. It’s estimated at around $15b by fidelity. They’ve demolished their own brand by renaming themselves and how you interact.
This is before you get into the whole “twitter has been loaded with debt from the purchase of twitter and so is even more unprofitable than it was before” part of the debacle.
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It’s easy to check a fact before putting your foot in your mouth.
Twitter.com’s unique visitors declined 3.3 percent YOY in March 2023.
One of my favorite aspects of Lemmy is that bootlickers are very easy to spot and don’t have loads of other bootlickers to support them.
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Elon Musk is no George Washington.
The owner of the website certainly has no reason to inflate their numbers…
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It’s been almost a year.
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.
The program was called “Power Peg” for those googling for it. It was a test program not intended to be used on the live market.
The Power Peg program was designed to buy a stock at its ask price, and then immediately sell it again at the bid price, losing the value of the spread.
The Worst Computer Bugs in History: Losing $460m in 45 minutes
I get the impression that power peg is a risky google.
Thanks for sharing. This is exactly the kind of blunder I had in my mind when asking the question, a seemingly silly mistake like forgetting to do something causing way too much trouble!
It’s actually a good case for why you needed devops and an automated build/release
Talk about a Nanosecond Buyout!
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.
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.
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.
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
As long as Truedu isn’t running the party has a chance. Conservatives are split 4 ways and liberals only 2.
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
One of the best examples of unintended consequences, aiding in one of the largest human caused disasters.
I like to call it “The Great Stumble Backwards”
Followed closely by the cannibal revolution
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”.
Sounds exactly like a China thing.
I bet lemmygrad would explain how it was actually a good thing, especially for the sparrows.
Like how Florida is going to teach how slavery benefited black people
Yeah, authoritarians gonna authorit.
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.
I’d be shocked if they could actually throw that many rocks, but the basic idea is that the policy didn’t work as intended, and that’s correct.
The “why don’t we just…” school of public policy.
Sounds similar to what we did in Australia.
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.
Well, Russia, in 2022…
Oil spills, wars, Hiroshima/Nagasaki, not counting for 2 decimal places in employee cheques by a large firm in Metropolis
Hiroshima and Nagasaki were deliberate atrocities, not sure how you’d list them as blunders.
How about neither atrocity nor blunder? It was the right thing to do and saved lives on both sides by ending the war in the Pacific. Wars still happen but we’ve gone nearly 80 years without making the world wars into a trilogy since nobody sane wants to invite that level of destruction again.
The first bomb could be argued as saving lives. The second was just to test another type of nuclear bomb.
My bad, didn’t realize they’d surrendered between Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Not this again. Just because you can end a war faster by intentionally targeting civilians doesn’t mean it’s ever going to be moral or ethical. The U.S. government considers that act terrorism by definition.
I’m not going to relitigate the whole argument again. The U.S. government knew women and children were in the cities and the military proceeded to nuke the cities instead of an uninhabited because they wanted to show off the power of the weapon and observe the level of urban damage it could do.
And remind me the estimated casualty counts of operation downfall, along with the civilian casualties and damage. Not to mention a North Japan and South Japan like germany.
You won’t. But consider a pragmatic view and not an idealistic view, so be it if you need a show of force for an enemy who refuses to surrender and would rather destroy themselves and all who would try to make them yield utterly and totally.
Could do a show of force in an area where people don’t live, and then threaten to use it in cities or something. Like other countries with nukes do…
Are you kidding? Not to say we didn’t exactly have that luxury in 1945, but we didn’t.
We had enough uranium and plutonium for the 3 bombs, and that was it. Our bluff was that we would keep doing it. And the nuke hadn’t been displayed before that point either, so what good is a threat when it hasn’t been shown before? We did exactly that and they didn’t care.
No need, they were both among a set of legitimate targets. It wasn’t terrorism and the only people complaining about it slept through all their history classes.
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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)
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
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
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.
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. :)
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!
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.
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!
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?
Pickett’s Charge at Gettysburg
Scotland trying to colonize the Darien gap It bankrupted Scotland and forced the union of England and Scotland to be the UK.
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Ah fellow Brit.
Oh, a fellow German
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Was supposed to be a little joke. I bet a lot of people feel this way about their country, unfortunately.
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See what happens,when this attitude makes it go away!
