The United States of America
Agriculture
Let’s go with the atomic bomb…if you disagree, consider that we made a weapon too powerful to ever be used again, but nations that have them get taken way more seriously in diplomacy.
And let’s be serious, it’s pretty much tick-tock, tick-tock before they get used again when they get put in the hands of zealots. Let’s be doubly serious, it will be religion that convinces some leader that they are within their divine rights to cleanse the world of their enemies.
Human history, as a whole, is so depressing and meandering it’s a weird question to try and answer. Were the great empires a success, or a failure? It depends on if you’re measuring monuments built or social justice enacted, and if you’re comparing against modern polities or whatever shitty local warlord they replaced. History doesn’t really have an end goal, as much as we’d like it to.
Maybe you just meant a personal failure:
Thomas Midgley is one of my favourites, because he’s famous for three things: Inventing leaded gasoline, inventing ozone-destroying PCBs, and inventing the accessibility contraption that strangled Thomas Midgley. He did nothing else of note; he’s like the real Bloody Stupid Johnson.
Marathon is famous for running a long way just to deliver some news first, and then dying from exhaustion. People regularly make the same trip and are fine. He was regarded as a hero, and the races were originally in his honour, but I wouldn’t want to be him.
Muhammad II of Khwarazm received an envoy from Ghengis Khan, who wasn’t bent on invading at all but wanted trade, and decided to take their shit instead. Then he killed the people sent next to ask for a nice apology. You can guess where that went.
The Soviets once tried to sextort Indonesian quasi-communist leader Sukarno with a sex tape. It did not work, because he was shamelessly proud of his “virility”. In at least some tellings he misinterprets the KGB’s presentation as a gift, although I doubt he could have been that dumb.
If it’s the same person I’m thinking about he understood that it was blackmail but didn’t care. He requested copies of the tape to keep for himself.
Isn’t what we call a marathon just the last short leg of his journey, and he ran like 100-150 miles?
In addition to mixing up the man and the place, I got that wrong. Fixed.
Humans.
Agriculture.
Ohh it’s much worse than that. Usually humans would live to around 60 if they survived infancy before that. Their diet was varied and since food was a limited resource, there was no way of population blasts. But agriculture just fucked it all up. We stopped moving around since the land needed constant maintainence and since the diet became mostly carbohydrates, combined with back breaking work, our life expectancy dropped to 40. We didn’t domesticate wheat, wheat domesticated us. It took modern medicine… ie 20th century to get the average life expectancy up again.
I recommend you read the book called Sapiens. It’s an eye opener.
Because it lead directly to feudalism and other forms of autocracy?
Opting for gasoline over electricity early on when cars started to become a thing, we were already going electric, but a smear campaign put fear into people’s minds about electric and switched tk gasoline.
Batteries could have been standard for a bit longer, but it seems to me that eventually the need to go faster for longer would have forced combustion engines to be a thing. All they had were lead-acid batteries (or primary cells, but that would be dumb) and new more energy-dense chemistries didn’t show up for a long time after. Maybe they could have found one if they really needed, but it’s a tricky science even today, so I’m skeptical.
It’s possible, I suppose, that infrastructure could have been rolled out for both en mass, but I don’t see an even mix lasting through the whole 20th century. Probably not even past WWII.
That’s because of car companies pushing the mentality that everyone needs to drive everywhere… for freedom and shit.
We could have been more like europe is today and have a robust railsystem. Shit, we could have had the best rail system in the world.
Or, y’know, there’s a war on and you can’t stop to recharge, or you need to cross a desert, or you just want to do an express route with one vehicle…
Combustion is just a superior vehicle technology vs. lead-acid electric, assuming you don’t worry about emissions, and that will show up in plenty of contexts. Eventually, lead-acid would go the way of the other workable-but-not-as-nice technologies like crystal radios or black-and-white film.
So… there isnt a war in the US right now, and there probablywont be one.
“Lead-acid electric…” when was the last time you looked at an electric car. Electric cars can now give you 400+ miles of range just like ICE vehicles, and I don’t have to scavenge fuel from who knows where, all I need is a few solar panels and I’m good… eventually.
Also, IF this was a war zone, I’d rather be whisper quiet than to tell everyone around that I’m driving by with the sound of an engine. Oh and it’s easier to remain undetected by food than on a vehicle anyway.
Yeah, I know, I’m not arguing against electric now, or even as a concept then. This was an alt-history exercise, remember?
Batteries could have been standard for a bit longer, but it seems to me that eventually the need to go faster for longer would have forced combustion engines to be a thing. All they had were lead-acid batteries (or primary cells, but that would be dumb) and new more energy-dense chemistries didn’t show up for a long time after. Maybe they could have found one if they really needed, but it’s a tricky science even today, so I’m skeptical.
It’s possible, I suppose, that infrastructure could have been rolled out for both en mass, but I don’t see an even mix lasting through the whole 20th century. Probably not even past WWII.
We always have to pander to the capitalists profits, how could the make money with clean electricity???
Me
Stuart Pearce of England’s missed penalty kick in the 1990 World Cup semi finals.
letting unqualified businessmen rule the planet instead of experts in their given fields.
For me, this post is right under the person who said “Agriculture” and the response “Because it lead directly to feudalism and other forms of autocracy?”
And if unqualified businessmen ruling instead of experts in their “given fields” isn’t a perfect way to describe feudalism, I don’t know if irony has survived.
The election of Richard Nixon. I sincerely believe that’s where we traded the “flying cars robot butlers” timeline for the “worst inequality of literally ever” timeline.
Thought that was Reagan?
My friend and I argue this occasionally. The difference IMO is that Nixon was a politician while Regan was an ideologue in a politician suit. He wanted to push his agenda no matter the negative consequences. Nixon pushed the car down the hill, but Regan started it up and floored the accelerator.
He helped, but Nixon was anti union and pro debt.
Money
Many of us will be miserable for the rest of our lives and society won’t care.
MS Excel
Are you referring to Microsoft’s spreadsheet software in particular or to spreadsheet software in general?
In both cases, why?
When people started taking dudes in fancy hats seriously
