That’s right, it’s an
oldie but Goldie, Enron, granddaddy of corporate failure and seeing as
Blockbuster now belongs to the pages of pointless history, I’d call it a nice
and comprehensible failure.
Enron’s idea was to
capitalize on the dot-com bubble by building massive fiberoptic backbones,
hoping to rent it out for various IT uses, hoping to essentially “corner” the
market for bandwidth.
“But that’s not how it
works Philip?”, yes, I am well aware that isn’t how any of this total nonsense
work, but Enron was Enron, they thought everything could be turned into a commodity,
just like they’d done with gas and electricity.
As part of this massive
gamble, Enron made a deal with Blockbuster for something very novel, a
streaming service, in 2000, nineteen years ago, Blockbuster would provide their
content through their contacts with the movie industry and Enron would provide
the technological knowhow and bandwidth to deliver the content.
Fairly straightforward
right? No.
Turns out that
Blockbuster had been pissing off most of Hollywood for years, forcing them to
give out increasingly large concessions, by way of their dominant market
position when it came to video rentals, so the content they provided to this “Video-On-Demand”
service was mostly softcore erotica and Z-list movies.
Combine that with the
fact that even today, there are many areas in the US with absolutely rotten internet,
you can imagine how small the customer base was.
The answer is to
small, the deal collapsed, and Enron hid away the massive loses in yet another
accounting boondoggle, that inevitably killed of the company later.
As part of the preparatory
work on this deal and the attempt to sell bandwidth as a commodity, Enron build
a massive datacenter in Las Vegas, costing millions, it was later sold for:
930000 US$.
The lesson learned:
Nothing, Venture capitalists are fucking morons frankly.
It’s Wednesday boys,
girls, toasters, assault helicopters and other, time for another failed crowdfunded
nonsense product and/or service. And today’s utter failure is Yogventure, a
masterstroke of failure, as it never actually released into anything resembling
the promised product.
I ought to know, I funded
the stupid kickstarter and I regret it to this day.
The concept originated
from a Youtube group know as the Yogscast, who made their fame from a series of
Minecraft adventures, mostly scripted with various storylines about wizard and
cookies and what not, high production values, decent fun for the time.
The idea behind
Yogventure was essentially a Minecraft clone, with a heavy focus on multiplayer
and modding, i.e. creating maps and gameplay elements tailormade for whatever purposes
your specific players needed.
They managed to get over
half a million US dollars out of it, with 13,647 backers essentially
preordering the game, they even had a prototype to show off.
Let’s list the
promises:
Just like Minecraft
Not blocks
though
Multiplayer-focus
Has
characters from our Award-winning YouTube series.
Crafting
Easy to
mod
There we go.
Fortunately, there are no real stretch-goals, thank fuck for that at least.
So, what happened? Well,
they outsourced the entire development to some other studio, rather than making
it themselves, which turned out to be brave. As in the whole thing just vanished
into bankruptcy and wasted money.
Apparently the
developer they’d basically outsourced the actual work to, hired an artist to do
assets, without a contractual obligation to actual do it and paid the artist in
advance? Which sounds utterly bonkers to me, you’d have to be completely
fucking stupid to anything like that.
Although there’s been at least seven other kickstarters that have failed due to contractual shenanigans, so perhaps it wasn’t that odd.
The single potentially
fraudulent thing the Yogscast crew really did, was that to claim that they had
a prototype during the kickstarter, turns out if was a Unity engine hackjob put
together just for the crowdfunding campaign, probably not fraud, definitely unethical
as fuck.
Yup, this one’s probably so niche that if it get’s anymore niche, I’d have to start a subreddit and sell tickets to my personal discord to freaky constitutional law fetishists. But enough about that, let’s party like it’s 1849.
Which, for those sadly unenlightened individual to the vast and utterly bonkers glory that is European history, in 1849 Europe was gripped by the “Spring of Nations“, a series of revolutions, revolts and general discord against the established monarchies and oligarchies of Europe.
It generally didn’t result in serious political change outside a few nations, it did however have other permanent effects: The end of serfdom in several countries, re-introduction of representative democracy in the Netherlands, Bismarck and the Danish Constitution of 1849.
So fancy.
Now, here’s the ting, that document was made by a Constitutional Assembly, and it had a strict deadline, a sensible thing to in any serious project, without deadlines things will rapidly get out of control.
Here’s the first failure, they ran out of time and whatever things they couldn’t agree on before the deadline, they simple basically add as “We’ll fix this in post” section of the constitution.
§ 72. En Lov ordner nærmere Forfølgningsmaaden.
§ 74. Den dømmende Magts Udøvelse kan kun ordnes ved Lov.
§ 75. Den med visse Eiendomme forbundne dømmende Myndighed skal ophæves ved Lov.
§ 76. Retspleien bliver at adskille fra Forvaltningen efter de Regler, der fastsættes ved Lov.
§ 79. Offentlighed og Mundtlighed skal saa snart og saa vidt som muligt gjennemføres ved hele Retspleien. I Misgjerningssager og i Sager, der reise sig af politiske Lovovertrædelser, skulle Nævninger indføres.
§ 80. Folkekirkens Forfatning ordnes ved Lov.
§ 83. De fra Folkekirken afvigende Troessamfunds Forhold ordnes nærmere ved Lov.
§ 88. Alle Indskrænkninger i den frie og lige Adgang til Erhverv, som ikke ere begrundede i det almene Vel, skulle hæves ved Lov.
§ 96. Communernes Ret til, under Statens Tilsyn, selvstændig at styre deres Anliggender vil blive ordnet ved Lov.
§ 98. Intet Lehn, Stamhuus eller Fideicommisgods kan for Fremtiden oprettes; det skal ved Lov nærmere ordnes, hvorledes de nu bestaaende kunne overgaae til fri Eiendom.
Now, I have translated those into English, the translations range from pretty much spot on to rougher than hooligans after the World Cup:
§72 A law concerning the method of prosecuting minsters will be addressed later.
§74 The Judicial Power’s execution can only be handled by law.
§75: The Judicial authority commanded by certain properties must be disestablished by law.
§76 The Judicial System must be separated from the Executive, following those rules, as made by law.
§79: I’m not translating this mess, it’s basically stuff about getting Juries into the court system.
§80 The Constitution of the Danish State Church is to be arranged by law.
§83 Those religions organizations, that deviate from the State Church, are to have their conditions handled by law.
88§ All limitations on the free and equal access to employments, which aren’t based on the common good, must be removed by law.
§96: The municipalities right to, under Central scrutiny, independently manage their affairs will be arranged by law.
§98 No noble estates or similar can be established in the future, those who presently exists are to be converted to free property, by later law.
Looks like fun right? Well, most of those were resolved, some fairly faster, other much less so.
72 was resolved in 1852, which is why Denmark has a Ministerial Court, that only handles cases against ministers of the Government, that is elected among the parties of the parliament. They rarely do anything, having only really handed out a single lone conditional prison sentence, ever.
74, 75,76 and 79, were a fair bit slower, as in over half a century, a law actually fixing this mess wasn’t passed until 1916 and didn’t come into force until 1919.
88 was fairly fast for the time, 1857, it basically abolished whatever was left of the old Guild Systems and gradually abolished the specially privileged cities around the country (1920 was the last gasp of that old system).
98 is special, very special, it to wasn’t passed until 1919, the reason being that the conservatives that had been in power for the decade prior, oddly didn’t seem to be in such a massive rush to get this dealt with. One wonders why a political movement that relied utterly on the nobles didn’t care to fix it. Hell, Jacob Brønnum Scavenius Estrup ruled as a dictator from 1885-1894, ignoring parliament utterly.
Here’s the best part, in the 1866 Constitution? We did it again, keep the above mentioned sections that hadn’t been dealt with in and adding TWO more.
One about what happened if the monarch is indisposed/sick or insane, which was made into a proper law in 1871, so not that bad.
The second one was about how the monarch wasn’t repsonsible for the action of the government, that responsibility lied in the hands of the ministers. This one took 98 year to actually get fixed.
And hey, in the 1953 Constitution? The latest one Denmark did? There’s just one, concerning the Ombudsman, and it was fulfilled the next year, with the first Ombudsman being elected in 1955. So that wasn’t that bad. There was an option for a diarchy here tough, which I think is a shame we didn’t go for.
Now comes to the true Failure:
§80 The Constitution of the Danish State Church is to be arranged by law.
§83 Those religions organizations, that deviate from the State Church, are to have their conditions handled by law.
Those two? Are still there. We never got any proper laws done about any of these things, everything is basically done based on customs and smaller laws. Nothing comprehensive, so they are still in the constitution and are still waiting laws.
Only 171 years delayed, nothing to worry about really.
The reason being that nobody really wants to mess around with the second on, the fact Denmark has a State Church is enough of a bother really.
This is Frederik VII, the Danish King who gave up on Absolutism.
I’m going to leave you with an anecdote: It was rainy evening in late 1848, a delegation of esteemed gentlemen was making their way to the Royal Palace, Amalienborg, this deputation carried a request for a Constitution to his Majesty the King, they were all granted access to the King’s office, his wife was sitting in the room too, these grand gentlemen politely presented their request to the King, expecting that they’d have to somehow either bargain or threaten him into giving up absolute power.
The king simply said: “Certainly, as long as all is done proper We have to Objections”.
The deputation profusely thanked his Majesty and bowed and scrapped and left. Just before the door closed, the legend goes that his Majesty turned to the queen and said: “Perhaps now I can sleep until noon every day”.
Some countries have constitutions born in blood, sweat and guillotines, some are born out of wars of freedom, some are negotiated into being by compromises and Denmark? They got one because the King was a big fat lazy son of a motherfucker.
Now, for those who wonder what Apex Legends is, it is a so called “Battle Royale” video game, basically just a big open map with a whole bunch of player, either solo or in teams, with the objective being delightfully simple.
Last player/team standing, everyone else must die, there’s various mechanics to ensure the whole game doesn’t end up with one player hiding in a corner, there’s a slowly decreasing play area, anyone caught outside get’s melted by video game magic or lasers or what have you.
Ever since Player Unknown’s Battleground (PUBG) released a buggy game, this has been the big thing the AAA publishers have been trying to get into, with various degrees of failure, Epic’s Fortnite is the present number one on the market, but everyone’s trying this. It’s MOBAs and MMOs all over again.
Now EA had Respawn Entertainment slam Apex Legends together to make a quick buck using existing assets from Titanfall 2, using existing assets to make games isn’t by any means a bad idea, Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon was assembled out of re-skinned assets from Far Cry 3, so if you need something fast, this was the correct way to do it.
Nobody planned for Apex Legends to make gargantuan amounts of cash, just a nice little share of the market, however, with people being fatigued from playing PUBG or unwilling to handle the art style and player-base of Fortnite, Apex Legends was a solid contender with decent enough gameplay.
Until this happened:
And the reddit didn’t behave properly, not the usual echo chamber, when we are all with amazing alacrity, shown just what the business strategy is for Apex Legends monetization: Massive Whaling.
Whales being a video game term for big spenders, the gambling equivalent of a high roller, gamers who lack the self-control and spent small and sometimes LARGE fortunes on silly digital items and such nonsense.
Well, nice to see what they think about everyone, except the whales of course
Yeah, this isn’t the best way to communicate with your audience, on the other hand, it’s honest, the fucking hate everyone who doesn’t burn though 100+ US$ for a silly video game.
Wow, what the fuck?There’s a whole bunch of these.
So? Why is all this going on? Simple, Apex Legends made about 150 million US$ in revenue for EA in their most recent quarter, that’s about 10% of the company’s total revenue, from one source, that definitely wasn’t planned to be this massively successful.
So what happened? Well, EA now have an interest in really getting the revenue up as far as possible, squeezing every single penny and cent out of the players as the possibly can, which is what they always do.
But not only that, when Respawn was bought by EA back in 2017, EA paid 151 million US$ in cash, that isn’t the noteworthy part, the second part of the price is: ” Up to $164 million in long-term equity in the form of restricted stock units for Respawn”
Obviously, we don’t have a clue how this equity would work, we have no clue what the restrictions are, however, what I can tell you with absolutely certainty: The Leadership of Respawn Entertainment has a really big stake in the company’s profitability, for it’s a fairly safe assumption, to presume that a significant element of the restrictions are based on earnings.
So of course the developer goes nuts, why wouldn’t he/she/it/they? That person might have a lot of money at stake, a lot of stress, a lot of greed.
Not it matters, nothing will come of this, everyone will forget it within a week or two.
This one’s a good one, there’s nothing like
a failure on such a massive and frankly comical degree, that frankly it should
not have been possible, incompetence of such a staggering degree, exist today
only the last few absolute monarchies, kleptocratic states, Chris Grayling and
the Trump Administration.
The journey was impressive in only one
regards, that the Imperial Russian Baltic Fleet somehow managed to actually
reach the straits of Tsushima, by all accounts, the journey ought to have ended
in only sunken ships somewhere around Zanzibar or possible Dover, frankly
either would have been favourable outcome for the Tsarist navy than actually
reaching their destination.
The glorious and grand Baltic Fleet of 1904
set sail, the flagship proceeded to sail aground, a destroyer lost an anchor
chain, then rammed another battleship, all this IN the Baltic Ocean, well done,
well done indeed.
Then rumours arose of Japanese torpedo boats station in Denmark, the fuck? I’m an amateur historian and I don’t recall the Great Japan-Danish alliance of 1904 permitting Japanese naval elements in Danish harbours, do you?
Rumours continued, with the Japanese mining
and having submarines active, in the North Sea and Kattegat, 30,000 kilometres
away from the nearest Japanese naval base. They fired on fishermen bringing in
dispatches from the Tsar, the repair ship “Kamchatka” reported that it was
under attack by multiple torpedo boats, about eight, from all directions,
better get used to the proud hulk “Kamchatka”, they’ll be back, again and
again, dumber and dumber.
Now, having survived the depredations of the mighty “Danish” Squadron of the Imperial Navy of Japan, you’d think it’d be smooooth sailing all the way to the pacific theatre? That an imaginary flotilla would be the end of this farcical display of ineptitude? No, not just yet.
The Glorious and Mighty and not at all
Imaginary Battle of Dogger Bank against the Japanese menace and definitely not
just a bunch of British Trawlers.
Having escape from the Vodka-fuelled
adventures of the Danish straits, the fleet entered the North Sea, heading
south towards the channel, moving past the Dogger Bank, for those who don’t
know, the bank is a massive fishing hot sport, even today the area has trawler
prowling around.
This was a Japanese torpedo boat of the era, Hayabusa-class. Hell, these little fuckers actually fought the Russians, near Japan of course, not in Danish waters. This one’s Danish from the Era. Can you tell the difference?
In 1904, the Russians spotted some British trawlers doing what you’d expect trawlers to do, which would be fishing, for those of you who are clueless glue-sniffers, the glorious Pacific Squadron, formerly Baltic, opened fire on the trawlers.
This is the trawler CORNELIAN, can you tell the difference? The RUSSIANS COULDN’T!
Let’s just take a short break here, Russian
warships open fire on British fishing boats, in 1904, when the British Empire was
the single most powerful empire on the planet, this story could have had a very
different ending, something like “entire Russian fleet obliterated by the British
Home fleet and Russia forced into humiliating peace agreement”.
Hmm, I guess the story wouldn’t have ended
that differently, oh well, back to the comedy.
And comedy it is, several ships reported being hit by Japanese torpedoes, fired from UNARMED British trawlers, on the Borodino, the crew panicked so much, the either hugged the floor in their lifejackets or believed they were being attack by Jack Sparrow and armed themselves with fucking cutlasses.
You gotta admit, those old warships looked cool as fuck.
And here comes the smallest success ever in
human history, the mighty Second Pacific Squadron managed to damage four
trawlers and SINK ONE, unfortunately, because this story is ever so silly, they
managed to shot their own cruisers, twice, which isn’t that impressive, when
SEVEN battleships are firing at you.
A little side note, one of the ships are
the cruiser Aurora, note “are”, you can actually go to Saint Petersburg and see
the Aurora, it’s activities in the revolution that followed ensure that it was
preserved by the Soviets.
Just to punch home how bad whatever
lunatics teaching Russian sailors how to shut had fucked up the training, the
battleship Oroyol fire five hundred shells, without hitting anything other than
Poseidon’s imaginary palace.
Now, the fleet did sail on, which the
Russian government was prostrating itself before the mighty British Empire
apologizing, Admiral Rozhestvensky was instructed to leave the officers responsible
for this whole mess behind as he reached Vigo, Spain, which he proceeded to use
to get rid of some Captain he didn’t like.
So Captain Klado did the sensible thing
and, wait, no, he didn’t, he was told to gather reinforcements for the
squadron, and out of spite, he got his hands on the worst of the worst, old
tubs, useless junk and ships that were, I know, worse than what the squadron
already had.
Except Repair Ship Kamchatka, nothing could ever be worse than that insanity.
Behold! he might of Imperial Russia.
And now, back to the beginning, welcome
to Africa!
Now, the Magnificently inept Russian fleet have finally reached Africa, without shooting anymore British ships, just a certain ship having been out of contact for a while, who happened to have shot some 300 hundred shells at respectively: a Swedish merchantman, a German trawler and a fucking French Schooner, now how a Schooner, a SAILING ship get’s mistaken for a Japanese anything, is a wonder that only the utterly degenerated Captain of the Repair Ship Kamchatka could answer.
That is a schooner by the way, just as example, sure looks dangerous, and the Swedish flag does NOT resemble the Japanese naval jack.
Let’s
just quickly go through the event as the fleet goes from Tangier, whereas they
left, one of the Russian ships managed to snag and sever the underwater
telegraph line, cutting the city off for four entire days, great start.
Now, these ships are old school coal powered
vessels, none of this fancy new-fangled heavy fuel oil here, good old coal, which
means they need to refuel at some point, coal doesn’t have the same amount of
energy oil does, not even close.
Now, this wasn’t actually fucked up,
Russian Naval Command had arranged for German coalers to resupply the fleet of
Dakar, Today’s Senegal, however, this is stupid as fuck, so they went with
double loads of coal. Which means that EVERYWHERE HAD COAL, everywhere, which
means dust, in an ultra humid environment, filled with Russian conscripts from
the interior of the country.
Hello lung diseases, how are you? Fucking
up Russian sailors? How delightful.
At this point, Kamchatka decides that
sailing along the Angolese coast during a storm needs a bit of drama and send “Do
you see torpedo boats?” instead of “We are all right now”.
At Cape Town, the Admiral was informed
about the reinforcements that the enraged and spiteful Captain Klado had
arranged were on the way, I don’t think any fleet in history have ever actively
tried to avoid their own reinforcements.
Now, you can imagine that there were
certain issues with morale on board at this point, as in their morale were
fucking gone. To try and keep themselves amused and moderately happy, the
sailors started bringing exotic pets onboard, mostly birds, which is pretty
harmless, the crocodile and the poisonous snake, that bit a captain, less so. And
then the refiguration systems onboard the “Esperance” broke down, meaning a lot
of rotten meat had to be thrown overboard.
Now, sharks can detect a drop of blood in
water with a frankly amazing range, how easy do you think it was for them to
detect tons of rotting meat being dumped off a supply ship?
So this is the image as the Russian Squadron
rounds the Horn of Africa, a sailing Zoo, filled with despondent sailors, the Kamchatka
causing mischief every few days and they are followed by a trail of rampaging
sharks.
Circus of nightmares at this point.
From the Cape of Good Hope to the
inevitable.
The fleet had reached Madagascar, when Admiral
Rozhestvensky fell ill for two weeks, his Chief of Staff? Brain haemorrhage and
partial paralysation, what does this mean? Nobody’s in fucking command, apparently
having a chain of command was to much work for the Russian Imperial Navy, shit,
no fucking wonder Lenin won.
Now the crew just go and do R&R on their own, diseases start just killing crew on a daily basis and of course Kamchatka during a funerary salute, fires a LIVE round hitting the Cruiser Aurora, but it’s fine, they were getting used to it at this point.
She’s still around today.
Now, let’s talk about some of the supply ships,
the “Malay” was sent back with a whole bunch of revolutionaries, mutineers and
general fuck ups, oh yeah, did I mention the fleet had actual revolutionaries
on board? Yeah, being in command of Russian ships of this era was basically hard
mode, some crazy office had bought cigarettes filled opium, TWO THOUSAND OF
THEM.
Then came the supply ship “Irtysh”, it was
supposed to bring fresh ammo loads, having spent so many shells in the Glorious
Battle of the Dogger Bank, however, in the finest tradition of utter
incompetence, it brought twelve thousand fur-lined boots with lovely matching
winter coast, perfect for the Indian Ocean.
They meet the Transport Ship “Gortchakoff”,
hoping to get that most precious thing for any military service personal,
letters from home, instead it carried the letters they had themselves send from
Madagascar.
Now, to try and restore some degree of order
and morale, the Admiral orders gunner drills, let me recap:
The destroyer couldn’t hit the side of barn
even if it hit them in the face.
The Battleships managed to hit the ship towing
the target, well, one of them did, fortunately, it was the flagship.
One of the destroyer squadrons, ordered to
sail line abreast, scattered instead, someone forgot to get them their new codebooks.
Seven torpedoes were in fact fired, which
seems miraculous, one jammed, two where so slow they missed, three just weren’t
aimed properly and swung wide and the last one went in a circle causing panic amongst
the ships.
The last thing may sound funny, but that
happened way to often in the World Wars, torpedoes are actually pretty hard to
get to work properly.
Oh yeah, and the Kamchatka signalled that
they were sinking, because of course they did, turns out if was just some steam
leak in the engine room.
While this mess is happening, the reinforcements, now named “The Third Pacific Squadron” had left Tallinn with some old fossil Admiral Nebogatoff as commander, the Russian Admiralty issued him the following orders: “You are to join up with Rozhestvensky, whose route is unknown to us”, the comedy continues. And Rozhestvensky then read in a newspaper, that when he’d beaten the Japanese and made it to Vladivostok, he’d have to surrender command to someone else arriving by train.
And you know what? The Third Squadron
actually managed to join them, one of the signs of divinity I’ve heard of, on
the 11th of May 1905, the second and third squadron actually merged
and proudly head towards Vladivostok.
The end of this comedy of failures
On the 27th of May, the Russian Imperial Fleet engaged the Japanese Imperial Navy, the Russians lost, badly: 126.792 Tons of shipping versus 450 tons of Torpedo boats.
The Kamchatka did not survive the battle,
sinking with her captain and most of her crew.
The Aurora actually did survive, together with three other cruisers they made it to Manilla, at this point in time an American protectorate, and were thus interned for the rest of the war.
“Dmitrii Donskoi” managed to survive an engagement six against one, but was to badly damaged in the engagement.
She fought and died well, at least.
Only ONE lonely ship actually made it to Vladivostok: Almaz, which was barely a cruiser, being more appropriately an armed yacht.
She actually made it.
Russia lost the war, Japan won, Revolution came in Russia a short while later.
Not only is the Aurora a survivor from this battle, that you can see today, the flagship of the Japanese? The Mikasa is moored in Yokosuka as a museum ship too, making the pair the only survivors from the same battle on opposing sides.
Now obviously,
the first failure is a bottled water product in any country with a functional
water infrastructure, so most of the western hemisphere is pretty much included
there. I could see the point, silly point but point nonetheless, with water
drawn from an actual spring, those sometimes have cool shit in them, sometimes
actual shit.
Mineral water and bottled water are just silly nonsense outside of areas with unsafe tap water, so okay in Flint, Michigan and Somalia, not in Denmark or Germany.
Why? WHY? WHY? NO!
But on to the
actual failure of Dasani.
Dasani was
introduced in 2004 in the UK with a degree of success more common to that of anything
Chris Grayling has ever done. A total failure, a shambolic mess, omnishambles,
disastrous, delightful fun for outside observes, less for everyone actually
involved.
Dasani was
advertised with the tagline “Pure”, which is at best misleading and at worst
outright bloody fraud, the water was sourced from tap water from Sidcup, a neighborhood
of London, which was filtered by mean of reverse osmosis and then
RE-MINERALIZED.
They literally
took perfectly drinkable water, made it undrinkable and then added a bunch of
minerals to it, pure as fucking hell indeed.
Obviously, this
was found out and Desani didn’t sell anywhere near as well as expected, which confused Chief Publicity Officer of Dasani Mr. Richard May (No
relation), seeing as his position was basically that of an Iraqi Minister of
Information, this shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone with half a neuron’s
worth of activity upstairs.
It didn’t help when the health authorities found bromate in the fucking thing, turns out the ozone treatment they’d done converted the naturally occurring bromide, into a CARCONOGENIC compound, well done, no wonder it didn’t sell well.
I couldn’t find an example of the 2004 trophy, the fuckers change it every time.
So in 2004, the CocaCola Company won the Ig
Noble prize in Chemistry, for doing just this.
They did a re-branding and re-launch in 2012
up to the Olympic Games in London, buying a local company and using Schweppes
to hide it.
The lesson? Just drink fucking tap water
you arse-clown.
The Ouya is Today’s
Failure, because every Wednesday is going to be failed crowdfunding projects,
because otherwise we’d never learn anything.
The Ouya was a micro-console, I say was, you can’t get the misbegotten thing anymore, for which all of humanity ought to be immeasurably grateful, it was a silly thing. Annouced in 2012 as a “revolutionary” home video console by Julie Uhrman, described as an industry veteran by many, she wasn’t an industry veteran when we’re talking about a console, she would be one talking pure business development, but that didn’t translate over.
HELLO! MY NAME IS JULIE UHRMAN! I AM VERY PASSIONATE ABOUT THINGS!
They used kickstarter
and did get over eight and half million US dollars, not bad for the former Vice
President of Digital Distribution of IGN (Note, IGN doesn’t actually do proper
digital distribution, IGN is a website for basically paid reviews), at the time
the fifth largest sum kickstarted, even on that platform it has been eclipsed,
all the way down to nine, including all platforms Ouya isn’t even close to the 200
million US$ and more StarCitizen has raised.
Still, not to shabby,
combined it with various venture capital, they actually managed to release the
product, that’s right, for my fellow engineers out there, they released a “Minimum
Viable Product”.
Fucking hell, this was massively popular? Why?
It was a smartphone in
a box, literally, the blasted thing used Andriod and had an Nvidia Tegra 3 chipset
to handle the lifting, wont call it heavy, it can run mobile apps, that isn’t
heavy lifting even at the worst of times.
And guess what, the design
of the ugly little shitbox? YVES BEHAR, the primogenitor of the damned himself
returns to sprinkle failure all over the venture, the Ouya had issues with
overheating and STANDING UP, mostly due to issues with the case.
The controller? The buttons would get stuck all the time, the touch pad in the center, designed to handle mobile games touch controls, didn’t work properly in the earlier versions and it felt cheap. Then again, what did people expect from a device costing 99 US$.
Hate.
April 2013 they began
delivering the pre-ordered Ouyas, June it was put up for sale, October they announced
a redesign in 2014, it went up in the end of January 2014, double the storage
and a new controller, hot damn.
Now, as with virtually
all consoles released since like 1995, Ouya didn’t make any money on the
consoles, nobody does, except Sony on the first PlayStation but they basically
made the whole thing in-house from whatever random crap they had around, the
money comes from licensing and software sales.
But the Ouya was
terminally stupid, you could replace the entire thing with a HDMI cable and a
laptop, then add in various casting devices and the Raspberry Pi being better
in almost every way.
In 2015, Alibaba for
some forsaken reason, throw ten million dollars at the sinking ship, guess
what? The whole mess was sold to Razer in July of the same year, frankly,
Alibaba probably didn’t even notice the cash was gone.
Razer only purchased
the software and developer relations elements, the rest was left to rot in the
sun, they used this technical staff to support their own micro-console and what
do you know, it was discontinued in 2016.
And how does this sordid
tale end? Total shutdown of everything in June this very year, rendering a default
Ouya an even more useless hunk of junk.
Julie Uhrman now works
as Head of Media, for Playboy.
The lessons learned are that micro-consoles are silly.
The concept sounds pretty good right? Give a laptop
to every child for educational purposes? Great right? Well, yes, yes it is.
Most Western nations do that now, my niece got a bloody awful tablet for “school”
work.
And that was it, a dirt cheap laptop for every child,
simple and straightforward, and also well over a decade to early, sadly.
Today, the cheapest laptop available is priced at
just about 95 US$ at time of writing, the last time the OLPC’s laptops were for
sale commercially, they cost 399 US$, the use a bizarre screen that apparently
can switch between colour and monochrome, which even for the middle 2000s was
bloody odd, apparently something about saving power.
Even at the
best of times, they couldn’t actually get to 100US$ point, only reaching a
little over 200 US$ and I still fail to understand why on Earth everything had
to be custom-made, it’s a cheap laptop aimed towards various poor countries and
the US, because apparently Detroit now counts as an African nation or something.
Even for
the time we’re talking, around 2010 for the last round of deployment, off-the-shelf
stuff would have been vastly more efficient and almost certainly cheaper, just slam
together a nice straightforward PC laptop and put in a solid though case, IBM
would probably have let them license their old ThinkPad design, those things are
fucking indestructible.
But no, Yves Behar showed up and created this monstrosity:
IT HAS FUCKING EARS! You dumb fucking arseweasel!
This isn’t
smart or wise, a laptop needs to look like it’s purpose, education, this green
bag of stupid doesn’t look educational, it looks like a toy, no they should
have been grey, boxy and solidly built, nothing less nothing more.
When this
was rolled out in Uruguay, the kids just used the TOY-looking device for
entertainment purposes, not for educational work, but what do you expect, with
the message sent?
I found an
old Targa laptop from 1994, damn thing must have spent twenty years in a closet
somewhere, and it still worked, sure the CMOS battery was long dead, but you
can replace those, so that’s not a big thing.
This is how the One Laptop Per Child should have looked:
Okay, perhaps an Acorn is a bit toooooo outdated.
The thing
is, you could probably do it fairly easily today, using off the shelf
components you can easily build cheap laptops today, shove them into a though frame
and send them off to Africa, no fuss, no Yves Behar.
There,
problem solved, get in though with my One Laptop Per Child, so I can yell at
you.
Now, for
those who don’t know what a blackout is, I wonder what bizarre dream world you
happen to live in? Do you burn fearie dust for heat in the winter or something
equally deranged? But nevermind the freaks who fail to understand a basic
concept of electrical generation, a blackout is a total loss of power, hence
the name, BLACKout, the slightly less horrible occurrence is a brownout,
meaning a partial loss of power, rather than total.
Blackouts
are pretty much always the result of some failure somewhere in the system, like
the Northeast blackout of 1965, caused by a safety relay at the Sir
Adam Beck Hydroelectric Power Station, the relay had been programmed poorly
and triggered when a significant load happened, mostly due to it being October
and Ontario and New York, freezing cold and a lot of electricity being
consumed.
That single point of failure, ONE relay in ONE
powerstation, caused a blackout hitting some thirty million people, all because
one relay wasn’t programmed properly, thanks to cascading failures it was just
overload and automatic shutdown after another.
And it takes a while for electrical grids
getting back up, if you don’t configure everything properly, the damn thing’ll
just shutdown again.
Lesson here? Don’t fuck up your programming, it won’t end well.
Yup, somewhere in there the initial failure rests, thanks Wikipedia for the image.
The New York City blackout of 1977 is actually
totally different, this one was caused by a series of lightning strikes,
causing a number failures to pop up in several separate areas of New York City’s
electrical infrastructure, however, this wasn’t the true cause of the blackout,
not the true cause of the failure:
Problems with communication, apparently the electrical
generation company, Consolidated Edison, used different definitions to the term
“Shed Load” when compared to the Power Lines management, a matter of amount of
load dropped and how fast.
The whole
thing just cascaded into all sorts of delightful failure points, Long Island
tried to send way to much power through lines that were being adjusted, nobody
told them, probably due to a growing sense of panic.
The end
result was a total collapse of the power supply of the entire city of New York,
except Queens and for reasons “old generator on site” the Pratt Institute in
Brooklyn, unlike the previous blackout, which had only five cases of looting,
this one? Some two thousands, that’s what an economic recession and heat does
to you, nobody goes looting in freaking October weather.
Lessons? Make sure everyone’s using the same terminology at all times or CHAOS REIGNS.
Lars Von Trier is a terrifying human being.
The 2012
India blackouts is just fun, essentially just a massive overload of A QUARTER
of India’s population power supply, caused by a couple of states power Load
Centre being “to slow” to react to the Regional Centre’s orders to balance to
load better.
And let’s
be honest “to slow” in India means “fuck the central government, we need MORE
POWER”, the whole thing was a massive shitstorm of bureaucratic ineptitude and incompetence.
This
happens all the time too, hell, it happen TWICE in the same blackout, the first
one just a quarter, the next one? Almost half the population, that’s SIX
HUNDRED MILLION people without power, basically more than the total population
of Europe lost power for way to long.
This is the
primary reason why Private Industries in India now have over thirty GV of off-grid
power supplies available and planning to add more.
The lesson?
De-Centralization might not be a bad idea here, I mean central planning of power
is all well and good, but not for a billion people, that’s just not something
that can really be managed, not with an infrastructure were people outright
steal power.
Welcome to the
first main feature, a larger more comprehensive tale of woe and miserable
failure than you have previous been used to. Unfortunately, LinkedIn has a
character limit that I personally find rather, well, limiting. So, this feature
here will mainly been a separate website, I know, what hardship I impose you poor
highly paid academicians, engineers and various other entities, I apologize
most sincerely.
Look at him! LOOK AT HIM!
Back to the
story of Harald Plum and this first Feature of Failure, the story of off good
old Rise and Fall, massive spending and ridiculous things spewed forth from the
pages of history.
Harald Plum
was born 1881 in Assens, a small provincial town on the southern part of the island
of Fyn, Denmark, and he was a rich kid, the Plum family’s fortunes would
survive his own disgrace, other parts of the family would later end up with a
company selling various cleaning agents and alcohol hand sanitizers, that kinda
stuff.
He was a
trained lawyer but a merchant by trade, in Denmark, his ilk were called “Goulash
barons” selling canned food to both sides during World War One, seeing as the
Germans had a fair few issues with starvation at the end of the war, the whole
thing was highly profitable, even if the food wasn’t what you’d call “quality”.
Soldiers will eat anything really, we all will, when hungry enough.
Now, H.P.,
as was his preferred nom de guerre, wasn’t the only one making money on being
neutral in World War One, everyone in Denmark was, which meant that the banks
in Denmark, ended up with absolutely staggering amounts of cash, combined that
with an absentee CEO and a deputy whom rumour has it may have been a little to
close to HP, and by to close I mean probably gay lovers, in the early 1900s, points
for being progressive I guess.
You can probably
guess were this is heading, the bank in question “Landsmandsbanken” (Farmer’s Bank),
now known as Danske Bank, went down, why? This:
One of the
biggest markets for HPs little bit of war profiteering was Russia, now, this
was a bit of a problem, with the Russian Revolution of 1917, Lenin wasn’t too
fond of western war profiteers and tended to either brutally murder them and
dump them in ditches, fortunately for Harald, he was in Denmark, so Lenin’s
government merely confiscated everything active Russia.
Landmandsbanken
had the modern equivalent of billions in outstanding loans to the companies,
the bank went down and had to be rescue by the government, sounds familiar doesn’t
it? To big to fail is by no means a recent concept.
Harald
Plump was fine though, much like Trump’s many bankruptcies, he didn’t suffer
any personal hardship and was able to restart his little business empire back
up, unfortunately, he didn’t really learn anything at all from almost causing the
failure of an entire nation.
His second
business empire ended in 1929, massive accounting fraud, fake bonds and all those
lovely things corporate scandals are made out off, caused him to commit suicide
on the small island of Thorø, were he
had wild plans about turning the island into some bizarre glorification
paradise of himself, even build a mausoleum there.
Thorø was an island, thanks to movement of sand and shit it’s now a peninsula.
A bit of
justice here at the end, he was never placed in the mausoleum, the island of
Thorø was bought by the Teacher’s Union of Copenhagen during the bankruptcy
auctions and they decided to remove the whole grave site monstrosity. They also
sold the giant statue of Thor fighting the ice giants, but did finish some of
the buildings, not to his specifications, but just enough so they’d be useful,
basically instead of adding more floors, they just slammed a roof on it and called
it a day.
The lesson? Don’t be fraudulent, it doesn’t end well. Even if it means you get the chance to have a cannon salute you when you arrive.
Yup, one Hotchkiss Revolving Cannon, used for salutes.
