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.

I want to know more.

That’s an absolutely bonkers read; thank you.

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

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

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

I think Lemmy.world announced one? Maybe I'm wrong. I saw something in !newcommunities@lemmy.world a few days back

Wasn’t it something like the elephants were helping the soil by trampling it as they walked around?

Noted. Changed title

You can edit post titles on Lemmy.

Which is a godsend.

/thread

The truth hurts

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.

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

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 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 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.

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.