What are some notable blunders in history that resulted in huge loss?

Loss in terms of money or efforts. Could be recent or ancient.

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China's Four Pests campaign is a great example. As the campaign says, China had a bit of a pest problem. One of these particular pests was the sparrow. The government decided it would be a great idea to launch an "exterminate sparrows" campaign. The only problem was sparrows ate other pests such as bedbugs and locusts.
In short, they sucessfully curbed the "sparrow problem" and replaced it with a "locusts and bedbugs problem". This ultimately upset the ecological balance and further lowered the rice yields. It was a complete disaster
- Sounds exactly like a China thing.
  
  I bet lemmygrad would explain how it was actually a good thing, especially for the sparrows.
  
  Like how Florida is going to teach how slavery benefited black people
  
  Yeah, authoritarians gonna authorit.
- One of the best examples of unintended consequences, aiding in one of the largest human caused disasters.
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Chinese_Famine
  
  I like to call it "The Great Stumble Backwards"
  
  Followed closely by the cannibal revolution
  
  Another good example is when the Soviet Union dammed the Aral Sea in order to create irrigation canals for cotton and other produce in the region. It worked at first and they had a huge economic boom, but this is also one of history's most prominent examples of "Ecological Collapse"
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aral_Sea#Irrigation_canals
  
  I mean, they did produce the cotton they wanted...
  It's less an example of a blunder and more an example of how few fucks the Soviets gave about being "green".
- The great leap forward was such a colossal clusterfuck that you can't blame it on any one thing (although most of them would be prevented without the authoritarianism). Literally everything was wrong. Sparrows, lysenkoism, forced collectivization (basically, and perhaps ironically, farmers not owning the means of production), Mao just being evil, backyard burners, rigid chain of command that gave the chairman absolute authority but at the same prevented him from knowing what was going on, everything.
- I vaguely remember reading about that when I was younger. I don't know if it's true, but this is what I read.
  The peasants and farmers were made to stand in the fields throwing stones at the sparrows, preventing them from landing. The thinking was that the sparrows would die from exhaustion, if they weren't killed by the stones.
  What actually happened was that the existing crops were either trampled or broken by the stones, and as the farmers weren't working the fields, nothing grew the following year either.
  Like I say, I have no idea whether it's true, or if it was just 80's anti communist propaganda, but it's stuck in my head ever since.
  
  The "why don't we just..." school of public policy.
  
  I'd be shocked if they could actually throw that many rocks, but the basic idea is that the policy didn't work as intended, and that's correct.
- Sounds similar to what we did in Australia.

213 comments