Loss in terms of money or efforts. Could be recent or ancient.
Buying Twitter for 44B and renaming it to X.
Recent or ancient, not future.
They lost almost half their ad revenue. I’d call that recent. Of course, it hasn’t actually killed the platform…
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
Chernobyl comes to mind as the biggest fuck up ever. Whenever I think I fucked up I try to remember, it can never be as bad as Chernobyl.
Ended up taking down the soviet union. The whole meltdown is fascinating. I read a book about it. I think it was called midnight at chernobyl, so something like it.
What I know of it is mostly from the HBO mini-series that aired a few years ago. Did it really have that much impact on the fall of the USSR? My understanding was that the gradual attrition of competing with the West was the ultimate cause. I’m interested to learn more. Gonna go read some wikipedia on it.
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
Sounds exactly like a China thing.
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.
Scotland trying to colonize the Darien gap It bankrupted Scotland and forced the union of England and Scotland to be the UK.
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.
The Jan. 6th insurrectionists who thought Trump was going to pardon them all because they were heroes.
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.
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
Twitter
Cambium stock recently dropped to $10 after the CEO stepped down during their call. A large part of their problems are likely due to the pandemic shortages catching up.
But a high failure rate on their new line of switches, and high prices while starlink eats their lunch isn’t helping.
Edit: Used to be over $50.
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.
Target’s failed expansion into Canada. It’s taught as a case study on what not to do in business schools now.
Wendy’s tried to get into the Netherlands, but couldn’t, because there was already a snackbar (think small fastfood place but greasier) that was registered under the name “Wendy’s” at the chamber of commerce. This spawned a lawsuit. You had Wendy’s, a local snackbar who claimed rights to the name because they were already established, and Wendy’s, a franchise coming from America. They claimed right to the name because they were a franchise, and not just a single fastfood joint.
To solve this issue, the local snackbar opened up a second location, making local Wendy’s a franchise, and winning them the lawsuit
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.
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.
