Brexit
I think the saying is, “Play stupid games, win stupid prizes.” You can edit post titles on Lemmy.
You can edit post titles on Lemmy.
Which is a godsend.
Noted. Changed title
Which reminds me: we need a leopardsatemyface community
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.
“Win stupid games, earn stupid prizes”?
BTW, I think it’s play stupid games…
Don’t forget to stop at Bathtub Brewery before you head out!
Probably the most pedestrian and US-centric answer but Japan bombing Pearl Harbor comes to mind almost immediatly.
The most US-centric answer would be the hundreds of seditionists at the Capitol on 1/6/21 who later got arrested.
Never fight a land war in Asia Scroll down to casualties.
… do y’all not know where Asia is? Both of those are European conflicts
Asia is somewhere east of Britain
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
This is a great example of why “It was fine last time.” is not an excepted safety standard in (most) engineering.
And then by tons of water in the ocean.
And then by tons of water in the ocean.
And then by tons of water in the ocean.
I want to know more.
I want to know more.
The Titan sub was a private vessel hosting visits to the Titanic wreck at $250k per ticket.
Its main cylinder was composed of carbon fiber, which goes against naval engineers’ recommendations that submarines have bodies made of steel (or any material known for its compression strength).
Not only generally, but the owner of the sub was repeatedly warned by engineers that the vessel would not sustain the pressure of the depth they were diving to.
Sub-prime mortgage crisis springs to mind.
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.
