Loss in terms of money or efforts. Could be recent or ancient.
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.
Long-Term Capital Management was a hedge fund founded in 1994 that had notable academics and Nobel Prize winners on its board. It was very successful in the early years (while critics warned of the risks) and eventually collapsed in 1998, losing $4.6 billion in a matter of months due to its leverage and impacts of currency crises. The US government stepped in to shore up the financial system. It’s taught as a case study in how a strategy can post impressive returns but quickly turn into a wipeout.
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?
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.
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.
You mean X?
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.
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.
Saddam?
I’ve heard that if he hadn’t ordered the retreat, they probably would have succeeded.
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.
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.
Wow. I was so annoyed by the prospect of a 20min video but it was chock full of incredible moments of stupidity. Good entry.
/c/nocontext
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.
That’s amazing, thanks!
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.
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.
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.
hiroshima and nagasaki atrocities or conscription to vietnam that went for 4 terms, both parties, was the day that america died for me
Coming down from the trees was a pretty big blunder. Nothing but losses ever since.
And some said that even the trees had been a bad move, and that no one should ever have left the oceans.
In the beginning the Universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move.
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…
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.
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.
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).
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!
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.
King Mansu Musa was incredibly rich and when he went on hajj to mecca he spent much of his gold in Egypt causing a massive inflation. On his way back to Mali this has caused him needing to spend much more this time on his route through Egypt which is why he needed loans from merchants.
Dunno if this could be considered a big loss?
In terms of money and business, my fav is how Xerox didn’t know how to market/capitalize on what was effectively the first personal computer before personal computers were even a concept, which is estimated to be a $1.4 trillion mistake.
This Xerox Alto restoration series is a really interesting reflection on that. Here’s the point in the series where they finally get it running. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9OQMhvArI9g
Yeah, Xerox made revolutionary progress. But it appears that their proximity to a viable consumer product is a bit exaggerated. It really did still take another set of eyes and minds to wrangle it in. I think if they did release it sooner, and without the leaks, the next competitor still would have seen that and soon come along and done a better enough job to nullify their first-mover advantage.
Those days were chock full of companies that ended up just contributing to the zeitgeist of computing without themselves reaping in the glory.
I think Steve Jobs’ comments about what Xerox could have been… Is largely him stroking his ego that he and Apple pulled off what they couldn’t.
I don’t think Xerox would be the Mac of today in most timelines.
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https://piped.video/watch?v=9OQMhvArI9g
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I’m open-source, check me out at GitHub.
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
It’s actually a good case for why you needed devops and an automated build/release
Talk about a Nanosecond Buyout!
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.
Ahh, the Gipper strikes again. Famously an expert Economist, Rocket Scientist, and “totally not a racist”
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. 🤦🏼♂️
Are you saying that the January 6th people are responsible for the nation’s shit credit score? Please explain that connection.
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. 🤌🏼
Nobody cared. Only reddit addicts and power tripping jannies, who all seem to have migrated here.
I wish it had the same effect as version 4 of digg. He is probably still over there, editing posts he doesn’t like.
