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
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”
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.
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.
The “why don’t we just…” school of public policy.
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.
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
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.
You can’t leave aside the fact that those typhoons were called “Divine Winds”, or kamikaze.
I doubt if it counts as a blunder, but thanks for sharing anyway.
Their blunder was using disgruntled Chinese labor to build their ships. It turns out that conquering people makes them rather upset.
Twitter
You mean X?
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.
Oh wow, that really takes me back. 🤌🏼
Nobody cared. Only reddit addicts and power tripping jannies, who all seem to have migrated here.
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.
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
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!
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.
I would have expected to see this story way higher in this thread!
World War I didn’t do anyone any good whatsoever; including any of the various parties that might be blamed for starting it.
Buying Twitter for 44B and renaming it to X.
Would be even more of a blunder if people just absolutely refuse to stop calling it Twitter.
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.
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.
Target’s failed expansion into Canada. It’s taught as a case study on what not to do in business schools now.
Walmart’s attempt to break into the German market is hilarious
Burger King tried to open up in France and literally nobody would eat their muck. So when McDonald’s tried, they had to completely change their menu and service style. Hence, “McDo’s” in France is actually quite good
When I was in France this past spring I did see advertisements for Burger King so they must have had some success. I do remember McDonald’s having great dessert options.
Yes, BK lost a ton of cash, so learned from Maccies and reopened. The way they pronounce “Boorgehr Keeng” in the adverts make you want to cut off your fuckin ears with an angle grinder though
Ah I see. The ads I saw were on billboards so thankfully didn’t have to hear them. They were advertising some kind of “Louisiana” style chicken sandwich, which was ironic because the French find black pepper spicy. I can only imagine how mild it must actually be.
Oh aye, Texmex restaurants are few and far between, and the authentic southern American places have to chill out their recipes and leave a bottle of chilli sauce on the table. The Argentinian place near me is run by an older lady and you can see her die inside a little bit every time a Frenchman starts sweating from eating a tortilla
Haha, yeah we went to an Indian restaurant in Nimes because my friend has a severe gluten allergy. I had a vindaloo there that was milder than any food I’ve had in North America.
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.
I’m not familiar with this story, could you give some details?
Empty stores, somehow, store managers had a perverse incentive to keep store inventory levels low. Their prices were really high as well. A rushed SAP implementation meant that executives didn’t have enough insight into business operations. You can read more here https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Target_Canada
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.
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
