Leaving the tide pools. Possibly even forming proteins to begin with. I much more enjoyed being stardust.
Many of us will be miserable for the rest of our lives and society won’t care.
The Citroen 2CV.
There are many cars that have something worse; three wheeled things, Tesla design, the Renault dash mounted gearstick, etc.
But there is no other “modern” car which so significantly fails in every way as the 2CV.
It has nothing that could be described as performance or ride or comfort. There is nothing about it that can be called practical or stylish. It has zero properties that any sane person could find desirable in a car.
It’s so bad that even the Trabant has less to damn it, and that really is terrible.
I think the best evidence that the 2CV is man’s biggest failure, should you really need any, is that you are more likely to see them in the country they were made, repurposed as a chicken coop.
If that’s not the ultimate failure, I don’t know what is.
0-40 km/h (25 mi/h) in 42 seconds…. That’s 42, not 4.2 in case someone thought I missed the decimal. How did this sell almost 92k units per year up through the 80s?
No 0-60, you would die trying. Even 40 mi/h is over ambitious. Clearly, the 2CV was spawned by Satan to destroy our will to live. I see no other reason for that many sales.
I think the Austin Allegro would like to challenge you for a car with absolutely zero redeeming qualities.
If memory serves, I think at least some versions of the Allegro had reasonably comfy seats. I’m afraid that can’t be said of the 2CV.
Also, the use of a “double skin” body, dropped by almost every manufacturer a decade or so before the Allegro, is really just another amusing tidbit we can taunt it with.
There absolutely nothing even faintly comic about the 2CV, it is an abhorrence at every level.
But I’ll grant you, the Allegro is definitely in the top 10.
If you needed a light car with simple mechanics, it was kinda fitted though
There were so many better options that I can’t even grant you a nod in this direction.
Nil points, yellow card, etc.
Leaded fuel
At least it was (mostly) dealt with. Cars generally don’t need it anymore, and the few that do can reduce engine knock through additives. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a pump offering leaded fuel.
One big exception to all of this is small general aviation aircraft. They mostly run on AVGAS100LL, but it’s not because of the planes anymore. Just like cars, the few planes that need it can use additives. But regulation for fuel standards change slowly, and ICAO moves at the pace of glacial drift.
They were probably also alluding to the long term effects it had on likely the people who are still the most influential age group still running the world.
I remember one of my engineering profs describing Midgley as the most environmentally destructive organism ever, Dude also was involved in the creation of freon.
But he also killed the biggest environmentally destructive person on the planet.
Discovering agriculture
The downvotes suggest nobody has read “Sapiens: A Brief History of Mankind”. A great book that I very much recommend.
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.
- We mine and manufacture nutrient dense fertilizer at massive environmental cost.
- We use the nutrients to grow plants
- We eat the nutrients in our food
- We expel 95% of these nutrients in our waste
- We dump our waste into the rivers and oceans with all the nutrients (often we purposefully destroy the nitrogen in the waste since it causes so much damage to rivers and oceans)
- We need new nutrients to grow plants
Before humans there was a nutrient cycle. Now it’s just a pipe from mining to the ocean that passes through us. The ecological cost of this is immeasurable, but we don’t notice because fertilizer helps us feed starving people and waste management is important to avoid disease.
We need to close the loop again!
Are you saying we need to start mining the rivers and oceans for nutrients? Or poop directly on the crops?
Poop indirectly on crops. Systems like this or the Aztec chinampa system, basically try to keep nutrients in the loop with fish and other aquatic organisms. Obviously, there’s a disease risk if you do it wrong, but that’s also true for modern water treatment.
You can sterilize waste pretty easily, we do it all the time, and you should before reclaiming not-water for reuse. Otherwise you’re gonna end up with epidemics like it’s the 1700s.
Like evasive chimpanzee said we need to poop INDIRECTLY in crops. Hot aerobic composting for example has excellent nutrient retention rates and eliminates nearly all human borne diseases. The main problem would be medication since some types tend to survive.
Also urine contains almost all of the water soluble nutrients that we expel and is sanitised with 6-12 months of anaerobic storage. So that’s potentially an easier solution if we can seclude the waste stream. Again the main issue would be medications.
I don’t have the answer, if it was easy we would have done it already. The main issue is we don’t have a lot of people working on the answer because we’re still in the stage of getting everyone in the world access to sanitation. Certainly the way we’re doing it is very energy and resources intensive, unsustainable in the living term, and incredibly damaging to the environment. We’ve broken a fundamental aspect of the nutrient cycle and we’re paying dearly for it.
The other problem is, like recycling, there isn’t a lot of money in the solution, so it’s hard to move forward in a capitalist system until shit really hits the fan.
Investing everything in engines and abandoning battery development in the early 1900s. Lead-acid batteries were heavy but usable, and electric cars were more popular until electric starters were added to engines. A disproportionately big, short-lived reason was the lack of sufficient electrical grid for electric cars trying to go far.
Nobody in government was thinking ahead, so everyone was forced to trying to make their own money NOW, and that’s how we get inhumane tech in general. Same thing happening in computers for decades now. We need centralised R&D free from market influence for the benefit of all life.
We need centralised R&D free from market influence for the benefit of all life.
So you’re actually saying holding on to capitalism past it’s useful point was the mistake because it created the conditions for these things to happen?
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.
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.
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.
“Thanks bro/comrade!” would be a great way to play this off diplomatically with someone you still want to be allies with, so that could be the origin of that bit.
Humans.
Me
Stuart Pearce of England’s missed penalty kick in the 1990 World Cup semi finals.
When people started taking dudes in fancy hats seriously
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
