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
I bet lemmygrad would explain how it was actually a good thing, especially for the sparrows.
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”
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.
Brexit. As historical blunders go, this has a beautiful unambiguous purity.
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
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.
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.
Their blunder was using disgruntled Chinese labor to build their ships. It turns out that conquering people makes them rather upset.
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.
Do you guys remember that time u/Spez took the reddit API away from third party apps?
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.
