Tag Archives: failure

Games, Today's Failure

SimCity 2013 is just the saddest little failure

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SimCity 2013, from 2013, is not the real name of this particular videogame, it is in fact simple named “SimCity”, this is a lie, SimCity was released in 1989 and is one of the classical bedrock videogames of an entire generation of poor bastards.

It was a massively successful series of video games, all about building a city, supplying it’s inhabitants with services, designing the layout of the city and generally being solid simulators.

The intial 1989 game has been released on just about everything:

  • Acorn Archimedes
  • Acorn Electron
  • Amiga
  • Amstrad CPC
  • Atari ST
  • BBC Micro
  • Browser
  • C64
  • CDTV
  • DESQview
  • DOS
  • EPOC32
  • FM Towns
  • iOS
  • Linux
  • Mac OS
  • Mobile phone
  • NeWS
  • OLPC XO-1
  • OS/2
  • PC-98
  • SNES
  • Tk
  • Unix
  • Windows
  • X11 TCL
  • X68000
  • ZX Spectrum

Not bad eh? In 1993 a sequel was released in the form of SimCity 2000, which I never played as a child, my graphics card couldn’t handle 256 colours, on 16.

Followed in 1999 by SimCity 3000, which sold a million copies in six months, which by 2000’s standard, hell even by today, it pretty fucking good for a niche simulator game. Hell, most sources report that the game end up selling around five million copies by 2007.

SimCity 4 came out in 2003, adding cool features like regions, enabling you to essentially building cities and then zooming out to an over-world, where all the cities you could see would then interact with each other, in a fairly limited way true, but cool nonetheless.

SimCity 4 would sell somewhere around two million copies fairly quickly too. But then came the Sims and basically wrecked everything, combine that with a couple of crap games from Maxis, the developer, and the result was a TEN YEAR GAP.

And then came SimCity 2013, one of the early attempts at “Games as a Service” it essentially shoehorned in a whole bunch of online elements, like cooperative multiplayer and leader-boards and then made the entire game online-only.

SO TINY! SO FUCKING TINY!

“EA wanted to make it more of a platform, an ongoing platform, that they’d sort of build and develop on,” Quigley explained. “And so that […] mandated, kind of, the server and online stuff. Which, in retrospect — I mean, obviously — was the fatal flaw in it.”

Yeah, this was a failure of infrastructure before anything else, a million people logging into the game at once drove the servers into the abyss and EA had to basically go all out fire-fighter to fix it.

The game never really recovered, and worst of all, only sold two million copies, the same as the previous game had, after ten years, EA’s moronic executives obviously expected much more.

Didn’t help that the entire Online component and always online requirement, the developers told the customers that there was server-side calculations involved in the requirement, could be disable totally by removing two lines of code.

And offline mode was introduced in a later patch, the game got a bunch of crap DLC and a moderately okay Expansion.

EA don’t learn at all, Maxis no longer really exists, the Sims is a shell of idiots buying the same expansion over and over again and SimCity?

Go buy Cities Skylines instead.

MICROSCOPIC!
Today's Failure

Premier Smokeless Cigarettes are today’s failure

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Let’s go with a product for a fairly short failure, smokeless cigarettes, specifically the Premier brand developed by R. J. Reynolds Tobacco Company, now some of you are going “What, you mean e-cigarettes?”.

No, smokeless actual cigarettes, through some horrible chemical process RJR actually managed to somehow conjure up a cigarette that didn’t generate any significant amount of smoke, but was still functionally a cigarette.

Yeah, that looks a but off.

So what was the problem? It sounds pretty good right? The smoke is one of the biggest complains people have about cigarettes that and the dreadful smell.

At a cost of probably around a billion dollars, RJR released the Premier in 1988, and nobody bought.

Why? It “tasted” like plastic or possibly charcoal, required special instructions in how to light it and was STILL A CIGARETTE!

Just instead of tar, you’re were just breathing some other forsaken chemical mixture of death and more death.

Even the smokers didn’t like it. The lesson was actually learned, RJR withdrew the product within a year and never really bother after that.

Today's Failure

Nuclear Explosions for the National Economy was the People’s Victory against the Bourgeois Capitalist and not at all Today’s Failure

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This was basically the Soviet version of Operation Plowshare, same idea, same concept, just on a scale that was so much large and more grandiose and obviously even stupider than the American version, just like the good old days of Soviet Glory.

Starting up later then the American program, due to various political attempts to limit nuclear tests, when it started up sometime around 1960, it really went all out.

Like the American project, the Soviets essentially divided their many, MANY, nuclear tests into two broad categories.

  • “Employment of Nuclear Explosive Technologies in the Interests of National Economy” or “Program Six”.
    • This was the part of Peaceful Nuclear Explosions (PNE) designed for massive-scale construction programs: Canals, water reservoirs and other excavations.  
  • “Peaceful Nuclear Explosions for the National Economy” or, surprise, surprise, “Program Seven”.
    • This one was broadly similar to one of the American categories, using nuclear explosions to encourage mineral and gas exploitation, adding in plans about creating underground cavities to store gas.

The first program resulted in 124 tests with 135 nuclear devices, the second 115 explosions, most of them were similar to the American experiments, some 39 of them were used for experiments in using seismic waves to detected deposits of natural gas, 25 were attempts to encourage additional oil and gas production with similar irradiated gas results as the Americans got, the seismic experiments carried on much longer than any of the rest of them.

Some Twenty-two were used in experiments with large underground gas cavities for storage, two more for toxic waste storage, wonderful idea, let’s make toxic waste radioactive, like it wasn’t bad enough already.

Two were used to crush ore in open-pit mines, which sounds fucking nuts to me, detonate essentially open-air nuclear bombs just to crush some fucking rock? Madness as all hell.

Nineteen for various research purposes and a long one for coal mining? Underground? Holy shit, gotta give the old Soviets that one, I would never have even dreamt of using a nuclear bomb to mine out coal, quick, somebody tell President Trump about it, perhaps he’ll blow up West Virginia.

Now, there are nine of the tests that are interesting beyond the terror, some of them, actually did good, they worked as intended and did indeed solve fairly serious problems.

Five explosions you see, were used to stop “natural gas fountains”, that would be out of control gas fields spewing huge amounts of flammable gas straight into the atmosphere, in 1966 a thirty kiloton device were used to stop a gas well that had been blowing since ’63 and they repeated that success a few months later with a larger devices.

To be fair though, using explosives to stop well blowouts is actually the norm, usually you’d just use conventional explosives and not the Bringer of Death, the Destroyer of Worlds herself.

This is the Chagan shot, lovely isn’t it? Didn’t pollute nearly as much as the Sedan test

The last four, were used as tests, for building stuff, the Chagan test, which was basically the Sedan test with a much, much cleaner nuclear device, for those of you who do not care to dream beyond your small niche, radioactive waste from nuclear bombs is essentially unexploded material from the fission process, however, Hydrogen bombs don’t use that much fission, they use fusion, which doesn’t leave anywhere near as much radioactive material around.

The trick is to get as much as possible of the fissile material, used in hydrogen bombs as a starter, to well fission, resulting in a “clean bomb”, the Sedan was an older and much more primitive device compared to the Chagan, so the Chagan didn’t contributed seven per cent of the total radiation of the Soviet people, it barely contributed at all.

Neither did the Taiga tests, a series of the three remaining devices tested for canal building, all of these projects were deemed failures even by the Soviets delightful standards, the seismic tests continued until 1988, were Gorbachev’s glasnost put a stop to them.

Lovely lake right? WRONG! Made by a fucking nuke!

The lessons learned? Pretty much the same as the American, the only really “good” results were the blowout stopping power of nuclear weapons, but there’s a perfectly decent chance that you can get the same result using conventional high-explosives or thermobaric weapons.

So, nothing gained other than a handful of mildly irradiated lacks in the depths of Mother Russia and hey, who’ll notice another of those.

Now, please enjoy nuclear explosions!

Features of Failure, Today's Failure

Project Plowshare is today’s tremendously dangerous failure

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Project Plowshare was the United States Atomic Energy Commission’s forlorn attempt to somehow develop civilian uses for nuclear weapons, the idea being that activities and operations the would require significant amount of explosives, could use nuclear devices instead of enormous amount of TNT.

It also developed into, essentially, early experiments with fracking, just instead of using water pressure to fuck around with the geology of an area, they used smaller nuclear bombs, ranging from 29 kilotons to 43 kilotons.

Now the “civilian” uses of nuclear explosions were concentrated into two broad categories:

  1. Using the explosions to essentially eliminate large formations for specific purposes.
    1. Project Carryall from 63 suggested using TWENTY-TWO nuclear devices to outright blow a canyon out of a mountain range, so two of the partners, California Division of Highways and the Santa Fe Railway, could build a motorway and railroad.
    1. Project Chariot: LET’S BLOW UP ALASKA.
  2. Various fracking experiments primarily aimed towards encouraging natural gas fields.

Now, fortunately, none of the first ever get anywhere, which the people of California and Alaska are probably very happy about, seeing as Californians don’t have to wear protective suits and gieger counters when driving along Interstate 40, nor do Alaskan have even more radioactive shit in their food.

However, the fracking experiment resulted in 27 test explosions, of whom, three were practical tests, actual detonation near gas fields, to observe he results.

I do enjoy the irony of “gnomes” being underground creatures.

Now, almost all of the experimental explosions were done at the Nevada test site, except the first one, Gnome, done near Carlsbad, New Mexico, close to several oil and gas fields, and right inside a salt field.

The explosion was actually a remarkable success, six months later a team drilled their way into the underground cavity created and found that the radiation was only five milliroentgen, nothing special, temperatures inside the cavity was around 60 degrees Celsius, again, nothing spectacularly dangerous.

Yeah, let’s dig into a cavity created by a nuclear explosion deep underground, what could go wrong?

So they plowed on, the Sedan test was next, this was a test of Option One, using nukes for large-scale construction, 105 kilotons, caused an event of the Richter scale of 4.75, displaced eleven million tons of earth and created a crater 100 meters deep and 360 meters in diameter, it’s also the source of seven per cent of all the radiation Americans have gotten as part of US nuclear tests, so well done there.

BOOOOOOOOOM MOTHERFUCKERS!

A side effect here, is the fact that the crater left behind, helped with developing new theories on how impact craters from meteor happened.

Hey, mildly radioactive tourist attraction is always cool, seeing as the wind gave Mississippi most of the radiation anyways.

Now, three fracking detonations were conducted too, let’s not forget them, they were Gasbuggy, Rulison and Rio Blanco 1-3 and all three had something utterly not surprising in common:

Radioactive gas, which someone figured that Californians might not enjoy radiation from their gas ovens and furnaces.

None of the gas from any of the fields were ever used for commercial purposes, only industrial, and the entire program was quietly defunded and stopped.

The lesson learned? Nuclear weapons are nuclear weapons, they are designed for the sole purpose of destruction, the radiation they carry with the massive destructive potential, render them utterly unsuitable for any other real purposes.

And if you think the Americans just stopped the quickly? Then join me tomorrow, as we discuss the Nuclear Explosions for the National Economy program of the Soviet Union, the red Version of Project Plowshares and I’ll illuminate your staggeringly misguided desire for more explosions.

Today's Failure

Rabbits in Australia are today’s rapidly spreading failure

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On the 13th of May 1788, eleven great wooden ships departed from the south of England, two of them were Royal Navy Escorts, the remainder carried supplies and convicts, this was indeed the beginning of the story for Australia and for the literally and liberally fucking rabbits that now plague it’s interior.

They brought the very first rabbits with them to Australia, initially, this wasn’t much of a problem, as they were all in cages and eaten with great relish.

However, this came crashing down, as the local Australian predators were gleefully obliterated in the name of sheep herding and general agricultural nonsense, turns out they had kept the population of rabbits fairly stable, until evolution came along and went “ha, HARDIER BREDS” and everything went straight into uncontrollable growth.

Apparently the entire present horrible rabbit infestation can be traced back to twenty-four rabbits released in 1859 by Thomas Austin, a moronic idiot who thought it was a great idea to just randomly introduce English species of animal into a totally alien environment, a true vanguard of the kind of ineptitude that to this day continues to thrive among the Australian political class.

And now rabbits are everywhere in Australia, causing havoc, rabbits aren’t picky eaters, basically devouring every single plant, which has the consequence of erosion, in Europe our plants have evolved alongside the rabbits, so they are much hardier breeds, much better suited for the kind of grazers we have.

It does help we didn’t manage to wipe out all our foxes and wolves, one wonders if the Dingo might be slightly more helpful in keeping them down, in Australians didn’t consider them a pest.

Oh well, the Australian government will just BIOLOGICAL WARFARE against the rabbits, having learned an important lesson from the Emu War, that they so comically lost.

The Emu War

Either that or just make massive fences everywhere, at least we have gained the enlightenment of how Trump got his idiotic wall from.

A Great Big Fence in the Country!

The lesson? Don’t released animals, at all, you don’t do that, it’s bad. This is one of those lessons that animal rights activists that have become radicalized don’t seem to understand, releasing fur-producing animals into foreign environments are REALLY fucking bad for it.

Features of Failure

The Republic of Nauru and their giant pile of shit is today’s rather unfortunate failure.

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So, for those who are commiserable wretches with lacunae the size of the Pacific, Nauru is an island in the Pacific Ocean, it has some ten thousand really fat people living on it, it has basically two things going for it, fishing rights over its economic exclusivity zone and guano.

Thank you Atlas of Economic Complexity, for showing us just how bad it really is. (2017 Exports)

Guano? Right, bird shit, enormous staggering quantities of solidified bird shit, accumulated over thousands of years by vast flocks of marine birds, now turned into phosphate rock, which you can strip mine with utter banality of ease.

The mining started in 1906 and terminated utterly in 2002, thousands of years of birds shitting obliterated utterly in less than a century, not a bad track record, not bad at all. The unbelievable environmental damage is a totally different story, the interior of Nauru was basically a nightmare of jagged limestone pillars, with absolutely zero agricultural value and frankly very ugly.

Note the slight drop in the early 2000’s

Remember the first thing they had going for them? The fish? Yeah, the run off from the Phosphate mining basically wiped out forty per cent of the marine lifeforms within reach of the island, and island that doesn’t have a harbour due to ragged coral reefs surrounding then entire island, the only way they got the damn phosphate off the rock was using a large ram reaching above the reefs to pour the materials into the ships.

Now, Nauru did something very sensible, they established a Sovereign Wealth Fund, just like the Norwegians and several Arab nations have done, the Nauru Phosphate Royalties Trust, which began investing in various real estate projects around the globe, at it’s height, it amount to almost a billion US dollars.

It included:

  • Fiji: The Grand Pacific Hotel
  • India: Paradeep Phosphate
  • New Zealand: Auckland Sheraton Hotel, Roturua Sheraton Hotel
  • Philippines: Manila Pacific Star Hotel, Philippines Phosphate & Fertilisers
  • Contiguous United States: Pacific House (Washington), Singer Building Development (665 acres – Houston), Hillside Property (600 acres – Oregon)
  • Hawaii: Nauru Tower, Hawaiki Tower
  • Guam: Pacific Star Hotel
  • United Kingdom: 3 Chesham Street (London)
  • Samoa: Properties at Vaitele and Sogi
  • Australia: Nauru House 

Not bad right? Sure, but overspending and relentlessly poor management of the wealth contained, began to make itself known, they managed to burn off the cash reserves they had, meaning loans, that they couldn’t pay.

How mismanaged? One of the advisors to the fund, Duke Minks (A music producer, famously known for Unit 4 + 2, yeah I don’t know who that is either) recommended they invest two million pounds sterling in a musical, which he wrote.

Leonardo the Musical: A Portrait of Love, a giant of a musical, took four hours to perform, nobody stayed to watch, ran for five weeks, lost all the money.

In the end, the fund ran out of cash, it’s last attempt was a consolidation of their loans, essentially taking a giant loan from General Electric to pay everything off, it failed and GE seized what they could.

Yup, a railroad, it still counts!

The Phosphate was gone, the money was gone, hell, most of the island was gone. Nauru now survives from hosting a “processing center” for refugees arriving to Australia and not much else.

Add to that the literally most obese people on Earth, due their diet being mainly processed food, no cash, no tourism and no prospects.

But hey, at least they’ve got an airport and a railroad.

The lesson? That mineral wealth is very much finite and don’t waste it if you’re a stupid little island in the Pacific.

Sources:

Features of Failure

The Mummy from 2017 is today’s failure

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The Mummy (2017) is a reboot of a reboot of the Original Mummy franchise, started way back in 1932 with good old Boris Karloff as the titular mummy. For those who are unaware, the image that pops into your head when I write Frankenstein’s Monster, is Boris Karloff, that’s how old this is.

The Mummy Franchise was rebooted once before, back in 1999 as a Adventure-Action movie series, similar in nature and design to Indiana Jones, just without the hat and whip, the two first one were pretty solid action-adventure movies, with a fair amount of comedy and jokes, interspaced with perfectly decent action sequences, the third one was absolutely dreadful and killed off that franchise back in 2008.

BEHOLD! THE DOMINATOR!

However, Marvel’s Movie universe began taking off and somebody in the depth of horror that is Universal Studios marketing department went “hang on, we’ve got a whole mess of monsters, don’t we? Why not make a Universe out of them? A DARK UNIVERSE!”

They basically did a sort of alpha test of it with Dracula Unleashed, but it was frankly dreadfully boring, and even Universal realized that and downplayed the whole connection.

The big takeoff was supposed to be the 2017 rebooted “The Mummy”, starring Tom Cruise, Sofia Boutella as the Mummy and Russell Crowe as Dr. Jekyll/Mr. Hyde. Tom Cruise? He stars as fucking Tom Cruise, the overwhelming domination that only Tom Cruise can do to a movie.

Sure, Tom Cruise is weird and probably not human, but he’s not that bad an actor at all, but this movie was called “The Mummy”, the focus ought to have been at least a little more on the Mummy, instead it was all about how Tom Cruise got superpowers and became Seth or something?

This was supposed to be a big franchise were the Mummy would have been part of it and they trap the Mummy at the end of the movie, she should have just vanished away or be temporarily sealed for some else to release later.

But nope, just Crowe hurling exposition about old nonsense and secret societies and then Cruise riding though the desert.

It killed the Dark Universe dead, the movie made about 400 million US$, the budget was around 125-195 million US$.

That may look like a success, but it isn’t, those figures don’t count marketing, add that to the total: 345 million US$, which is not enough to risk the establishment of a full franchise.

So the Dark Universe died before it basically started, there are still two other “Shared Universes” other than Marvels running: DC’s, of which only Wonder Woman and Aquaman are worth anything, and the Giant Monster thing with Godzilla and King Kong.

The DC movies have all but died and the last Godzilla didn’t do to well, we’ll see how Godzilla Vs King Kong will do.

These universes require a massive amount of work to ever get to work, but every single movie have to be good too and that’s a problem that Marvel have somehow managed to avoid so far.

Features of Failure

The Twelve Battles of the Isonzo River is today’s staggeringly massive utterly wasteful failure.

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It’s the 23rd of June 1915, the glorious Kingdom of Italy have just joined the Entente in the war against the Central Powers, they were promised territory, they didn’t get as much as they wanted, this failure was one of the reasons why.

It’s the end of June, 225.000 Italian soldiers attacked the Austro-Hungarian army across the valley of the river Isonzo, today called by its Slovenian name Soča, thousands of poor young boys flooded across the valley, under the fire of artillery and towards entrenched enemies on the opposing side, fourteen thousand dead for the Italians, ten thousand for the Austro-Hungarians, the Italians actually outnumbered their enemy 1:2.

The result? Two hills captured by the Italians, tactical victory to the Austrians, thus the first Battle ends.

The second? The Italians actually had some successes, it helped when they’ve got a quarter of a million men and the enemy has 78.000, unfortunately, the Italians also had Luigi Cadorna, an incompetent idiot if ever you ran into one, the very personification of Italian military prowess, brave soldiers, awful officers and absolutely staggeringly, incomprehensible, reprehensible and stupefying idiotic Leaders.

Luigi Cadorna, incompetent twit

The battle ended when the RAN OUT OF BULLETS. Tactical victory to the Italians, the only lost 41.800 compared to 46.600, that’s a victory in World War One.

And then the Third Battle of the Isonzo, now Cadorna have actually learned something, after using the blood, sweat and fucking tears of some sixty thousand Italian boys, artillery is really awesome and frontal attacks WILL CONTINUE!

Hey, a step forwards, artillery is important, he’s learning. Not enough, the Italians would keep attack on limited fronts and through terrains that negated their massive numerical advantage, even if this was the first battle were, they actually had helmets.

Another Sixty thousand plus casualties for the Italians, some forty for the Austrians, failure for the Italians, even if loses were proportionally roughly the same.

The fourth, to damn cold, more casualties for the Italians, in the end December and the winter brought everything to standstill, why anyone would fight this kind of war in the middle of the winter is beyond anyone sane, but sanity isn’t a requirement for Generals after all.

The fifth was even more pointless than usual, basically a bit of sabre-rattling from the Italians, mainly just to keep the French at bay. The Italians took a mountain, huzza.

The Sixth Battle? Was a Victory for the Italians, this time to actually managed to get an entire city, paid fifty thousand casualties for it, that’s what frontal assaults do to an army.

The Seventh Battle? Inconclusive as they say, basically everyone died in roughly the same amount, pure attrition warfare.

The Eight battle, much the same, just more dead, fifty-sixty thousand on the Italian side, 38.000 on the Austrian side, the biggest splash was the death of Antonio Sant’Elia, of the leading lights of Futurist architecture (One of the predecessors to the later Art Deco movement), the battles become shorter and shorter, the armies are getting tired at this point.

The Ninth, the Austro-Hungarians are starting to lose the War of Attrition at this point and the Italians manage to advance, slowly, but an advance is an advance.

The Tenth had a change of plans, most of the previous attempts were narrow breakthroughs, this one was a forty kilometre massed assault against the Austrians, the Italians had a 1:2 advantage again, 400k against 200k, the result? Little territory was really gained, 150,000 Italians casualties, 125,000 Austrian, the war of Attrition was taking its toll on everyone at this point.

The Eleventh? 200,000 plus casualties spread across both sides, the Italians managed to move forward a little, the Austro-Hungarian armies were actually at their breaking point at this stage, one more assault would have broken them, too bad the Italians couldn’t attack again even if they wanted to.

But hey, the Royal Bavarian Infantry Lifeguards Regiment got a march out of it, it isn’t all bad.

And now for the final one: The Twelfth Battle of the Isonzo, which also have its very own name, the Battle of Caporetto, because guess what? The Germans have arrived, with all the cool tricks and clever tactics they’ve learned at the Western front and against the Russians, assault troopers, infiltration tactics and poison gas.

The Italians were absolutely fucking destroyed here, SIX HUNDRED THOUSAND casualties, the Second Army basically gone, the Italians had 800,000 soldiers against 350,000 Germans and Austro-Hungarians and they absolutely lost.

Unfortunately, the rest of the war being as it was, there really were no further opportunity or resources to carry on and knock the Italians out of the War, the Germans were starving at this point, literally.

Luigi Cardorna would later be promoted to Marshall of Italy by Mussolini, in a blatant attempt to pretend Italy won great Victories in the Great War and deserves much more. He’s son would actually do much better in World War Two, changing sides in the end and fighting against the Germans in Northern Italy.

This guy was made a Baron and a Marshall, the only Marshall the south Slavs had produced so far.

Svetozar Boroević, the primary commander for the Austro-Hungarians, would be promoted to Marshall and ennobled during the war, sadly, his fellow Croats and south Slavs weren’t very welcoming, he was buried in Austria. The result? Italy’s poor performance during the war, resulting in them not really getting anything good, which was one of the issues exploited by the Fascist as they took over.

Features of Failure, Uncategorized

The Goiânia accident is today’s failure

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What was the Goiânia accident you ask? Why it was a Five on the International Nuclear Event Scale, Chernobyl was a Seven, the scale only goes to seven.

The stage is set in the city of Goiânia, in the Brazilian state of Goiás, in the hallowed year of 1987, the Cold War is slowly grinding to a halt, Chernobyl is still fresh in everyone’s memories.

The backstory, a specialized radiotherapy clinic relocates to brand new buildings, the previous one’s being rented, they left behind a 1977 External beam radiotherapy machine behind, those things are usually quite large.

A conflict happened between the clinic and the rental company, the courts ordered the building sealed, BEFORE the Cesium source of radiation was removed.

To the credit of the clinic, they tried to remove it, the rental company prevented it, including calling the cops on them, they even warned the Brazilian National Nuclear Energy Commission repeatedly that there was a serious radiological hazard within the building.

Now, as long as the source was nice and sealed inside of the machine, inside a nice and sealed building, no worries.

There were no guards and on the 13th of September, a scavenger got in and stole a whole bunch of stuff, including the source, which he belived could be sold as scrap metal.

He pierced the seal of the containment unit, he SCOOPED OUT SOME OF THE MATERIAL, IT WAS GLOWING BLUE!

He then sold it to a scarp merchant, who then scattered the glowing blue dust on HIS FUCKING KITCHEN FLOOR!

Then his daughter ate a sandwich, smeared the dust on her body, in the sandwich, all of it radioactive as all mighty fuck.

It was noticed in the end, hundreds of houses had to be destroyed, topsoil removed, items burned.

  • Leide das Neves Ferreira, died, daughter of the scrap merchant, it took her a month to die, she was buried in a lead casket, she was six.
  • Gabriela Maria Ferreira, the mother of above, wife of the scrap merchant. Also a month.
  • Israel Baptista dos Santos, an employee, only lasted six days.
  • Admilson Alves de Souza, another employee, lasted about a month.

Devair Ferreira, the scrap merchant survived his exposure, he died of cirrhosis of the liver in 1994, you can probably guess why, he did accidentally caused the death of his daughter and wife.

The lesson? All radioactive material is horrendously dangerous, even stuff that’s used to save lives.

There was a massive Organizational failure here to, not in the aftermath, the Brazilian authorities were able to handle that, but in everything else too.

Features of Failure

The Alaska Syndicate is today’s failure

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“What the fuck is the Alaska Syndicate?” I hear at least four of you think, in the future, because I am special. And no, this isn’t some strange meth drug ring based in Alaska you’ve never heard of, most Meth distribution in the US is done by Mexican cartels and freaks in basements, so don’t worry about that.

The Alaska Syndicate was a conspiracy in 1906 between J.P. Morgan (The actual person, not the Bank, mind you, American banks count as persons these thanks to the US Supreme Court being corrupt as fuck) and the Guggenheim family. That’s right, and actual conspiracy, not a theory, a fact.

J.P. Morgan, the person, not the Bank

And what was the Grand Goal for the dastardly manipulation of the United States of America? Why, to prevent Alaska from getting statehood.

And that’s a Guggenheim, that’s one hell of a nose, eh?

Why? You may ask, I shall regale you with a fairly simple story, by keeping Alaska as a territory, the Syndicate only really had to manipulate the Secretary of the Interior and whatever Senators happened to handle whatever subcommittee in charge of US territorial Oversight.

If Alaska got statehood, they’d have to deal with local politicians, depending on a native electorate, rather than various Apparatchiks in Washington.

The Syndicate managed to get the Secretary of the Interior Richard A. Ballinger to favour them fairly heavily, unfortunately, they got to greedy, and when the Secretary transferred large chunks of a National Forrest to the Syndicate, including land he owned himself, the gig was essentially up.

Well, kinda, the Syndicate’s ownership of various mines would continue until the Great Depression broke the prices of Copper and pretty much everything else.

This was one of their mines, it is now a tourist attraction.

The Syndicate liquidated their mines and vanished back into the pages of history, Alaska got statehood in 1959, so the Syndicate failed in their secondary purpose of keeping Alaska out in the cold.

They didn’t fail in their primary purpose though, they made an absolutely staggering amount of money, one mine giving up some two hundred million US dollars, in the 1920s.

Not bad at all really. The lesson? Give Puerto Rico Statehood already you racist motherfuckers.