this post was submitted on 05 Jul 2023
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Asklemmy

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[–] [email protected] 83 points 1 year ago (8 children)

I've got my vote for the guy who thought carbon fiber would do great under pressure after being told "no" by tons of experts in the field.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago (1 children)

This is a great example of why "It was fine last time." is not an excepted safety standard in (most) engineering.

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

And then by tons of water in the ocean.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

And then by tons of water in the ocean.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (2 children)
[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

The submersible that crumpled and killed all passengers by the Titanic.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

boy do i have good news for you

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[–] [email protected] 57 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (4 children)

Given that it'd already killed someone, I'm going to nominate the second guy who thought he could cowboy criticality testing with the Demon Core at Los Alamos.

By coincidence, at this moment I am camped on a mountain overlooking the Los Alamos NL.

β€œWin stupid games, earn stupid prizes”?

BTW, I think it's play stupid games...

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago

That’s an absolutely bonkers read; thank you.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

Louis Slotin: smartest dumb guy or dumbest smart guy in history?

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

Don’t do it man. The Demon Core isn’t worth it! No man should wield such power and it’s folly to try!

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[–] [email protected] 28 points 1 year ago (3 children)

Which reminds me: we need a leopardsatemyface community

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago (1 children)

If we do, can we please keep it a little more respectful than the Reddit one?

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago

Yeah reddit's leopardsatemyface in the last few years was just awful.

It seemed like it was just a bunch of kids making stupid complaints and posting pics of severely mentally ill people's Facebook page.

Who needs Facebook pics when you can look in the mirror?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

I think Lemmy.world announced one? Maybe I'm wrong. I saw something in [email protected] a few days back

[–] [email protected] 25 points 1 year ago (1 children)

There is this guy who killed 40,000 elephants because he thought it'd improve the environment.

His name was Allan Savory.

Anyways, it was a poor decision, which harmed the natural regrowth of grasses in Africa. And probably contributed to drought and poor soil conditions there. Sadly, he has been regarded as an expert and heralded as an environmentalist par excellance. So, less of a stupid prize for him than a poor prize for humanity writ-large.

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[–] [email protected] 23 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I think the saying is, "Play stupid games, win stupid prizes." You can edit post titles on Lemmy.

[–] [email protected] 20 points 1 year ago

Noted. Changed title

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

You can edit post titles on Lemmy.

Which is a godsend.

[–] [email protected] 18 points 1 year ago
[–] [email protected] 17 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Probably the most pedestrian and US-centric answer but Japan bombing Pearl Harbor comes to mind almost immediatly.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

The most US-centric answer would be the hundreds of seditionists at the Capitol on 1/6/21 who later got arrested.

[–] [email protected] 17 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Pretty much the entire three kingdoms period in China. No one accomplishes what they set out to do, all the great heroes die ordinary deaths due to politics or disease, and everything they create gets arbitrarily absorbed into a Jin dynasty that none of them foresaw (except maybe Kong Ming) or wanted.

Awesome story though.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (3 children)

Eh, I'd argue that it was less stupid games and prizes and more... Unusually equally matched candidates vying for the throne? I mean, think of the warring states, or the Chu-Han contention, or whatever the fuck was going on in Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms.

In each of the cases, after the fall/overthrow of the previous dynasty, multiple powerful folks threw their hats into the ring. Warring states ended with Qin beating its rivals. Liu Bang out maneuvered Xiang Yu to reunite all/most of China. The Song Dynasty succeeded where all the previous 5 Dynasties failed and absorbed the ten kingdoms. The Three Kingdoms era was mostly similar, but somehow the three major contestants managed to almost perfectly balance their power and just got stuck at an impasse for long enough that the good ol' classic causes of the downfalls of Chinese dynasties (corruption of bureaucracy and the imperial families) took hold.

On reddit, I once read a really good perspective of the whole thing. To summarize: one of the greatest tragedies of the three kingdoms was that Liu Bei, Cao Cao, and Sun Quan were born in the same conflict era, as each of them were more than capable rulers and leaders that had what it would have taken to unite china. Meanwhile, the other conflict eras had only one or two truly capable emperor-aspirants that had the potential to take it all.

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[–] [email protected] 16 points 1 year ago (2 children)
[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago
[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

The truth hurts

[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 year ago (5 children)

Thomas Edison famously tried to prove that AC current was more dangerous than his DC current. (Edison was pushing DC current for long distance transmission and as home electrical service.) To do this he electruted Topsy the elephant in front of an audience. When the AC current wouldn't kill Topsy he switched to DC current and zapped her to death.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago

I don't know that this one really counts. First, as stewie said, Edison didn't electrocute Topsy (though he did film it).

But anyway, what "stupid prizez" did Edison win? An enormous pile of money and immortal fame and admiration?

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

Although Edison was a complete ass, and did lasting damage to the world by teaming up with JP Morgan to extinguish Nikola Tesla's work, he wasn't the one who electrocuted Topsy.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

I mean… if you use DC digitally (I.e turning it on and off making it binary code), it really is a cleaner information transmission than AC. But I doubt that’s what Edison had in mind.

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[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 year ago (1 children)

That guy, who made a steam powered rocket to see if the earth was flat πŸš€

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Steam powered rocket sounds crazy but it would of worked if they didn't shoot him down with the space laser.

Sad fact: he only made it about 500m so he never even found out.

We may never know.

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[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Sub-prime mortgage crisis springs to mind.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago

You would think that, but the big banks made out like absolutely crazy from the derivatives and then got to seize a whole swathe of land they then sold on for even more money or kept for themselves and used to artificially inflate the rental markets while at the same time curb stomping their competition thus giving them a much larger piece of the pie after everything shook out.

The real own goal here is the poor saps who thought they were getting a cheap mortgage until the interest rates started going up and up.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago

Failing to heed the (Army Corps of Engineers)’s warning and fix the dikes in New Orleans, in the years leading up to 2005.

(Sorry for those weird parentheses but I had no idea where to put that possessive apostrophe in that phrase.)

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (2 children)
[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I'm not a geography expert, but I think that's Europe?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

By most definitions Ukraine is definitively not part of Asia. The only line that would intersect with Ukraine at all is "A" which only the Soviets ever claimed to be the line between Europe and Asia

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[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

… do y’all not know where Asia is? Both of those are European conflicts

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Asia is somewhere east of Britain

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago

Argentina claiming the Falkland Islands from Britain in the 80s πŸ€¦β€β™‚οΈ: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falklands_War

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

spez fucking with 3rd party developers, mods and fucking down on lies to the community.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

WWI

Newly industrialized nations, to an extent, went to war to test out their new industrial and mechanized firepower. What proceeded this was unprecedented death and destruction.

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