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 post was submitted on 05 Jul 2023
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Asklemmy
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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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And then by tons of water in the ocean.
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 engineersβ 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.
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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.
βWin stupid games, earn stupid prizesβ?
BTW, I think it's play stupid games...
Louis Slotin: smartest dumb guy or dumbest smart guy in history?
Thatβs an absolutely bonkers read; thank you.
He was more of a reckless rocket enthusiast grifting Flat -Earthers to find his latest near-suicidal venture.
Donβt do it man. The Demon Core isnβt worth it! No man should wield such power and itβs folly to try!
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There is this guy who killed 40,000 elephants because he thought it'd improve the environment.
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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I think the saying is, "Play stupid games, win stupid prizes." You can edit post titles on Lemmy.
Noted. Changed title
You can edit post titles on Lemmy.
Which is a godsend.
Which reminds me: we need a leopardsatemyface community
If we do, can we please keep it a little more respectful than the Reddit one?
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?
I think Lemmy.world announced one? Maybe I'm wrong. I saw something in [email protected] a few days back
Yes!
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.
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.
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That guy, who made a steam powered rocket to see if the earth was flat π
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.
I feel like that's how a lot of these go. We could've had flying pintos if they had used larger wings. But then the inventor dies and their work rarely gets picked up again, even though most of the heavy lifting is done.
Argentina claiming the Falkland Islands from Britain in the 80s π€¦ββοΈ: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falklands_War
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.
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?
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.
I meanβ¦ 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 thatβs what Edison had in mind.
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Failing to heed the (Army Corps of Engineers)βs 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.)
spez fucking with 3rd party developers, mods and fucking down on lies to the community.
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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