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Life is full of people trying to do things that others tell them are going to fail, but they do it anyway.

What's the most egregious and predictable failure that you've ever witnessed?

This post was inspired by news coming out today that the CEO of the Neom project in Saudi Arabia has resigned. To me, the Neom project was one of the most egregious, predictable failures I've ever seen.

I mean, the Kamala campaign is pretty fresh. Somehow, people forgot that the conversation for like a year had been how the Democrats were going to get around her because everyone knew she was a train-wreck of a candidate.

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True... but for some reason I didn't think it was that predictable.

Maybe I was gaslit by the corpo media into thinking she was a stronger candidate than she was, or maybe I had too little faith that my fellow Americans could see through their gaslighting.

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Also, all of the polling and prediction markets had her losing from well before she was even the candidate.

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Yet somehow Nate Silver had her at 50/50 days before the election.

I think the bump she got post-Biden-resignation, and the energy levels surrounding that really took me by surprise and I started to overestimate her

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Did Silver ever have her ahead, though, because I know he had Trump ahead at various points?

Nate Silver also got into a big argument with that other election forecaster, because he thought that guy was misinterpreting his own model in favor of Kamala.

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yeah for a few moments here and there

(judging by this graph, August and then again briefly in late Sept/early Oct)

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Ok, that's more than I would have thought. I still never bought it, because of how certain everyone was that Kamala would be a complete disaster and then her campaign did nothing to change that assessment.

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did you see the WSJ article about the French betting guy?

He called bs on the polls, thinking there was a clear anti-Trump sampling/social desirability bias of a few percentage points at least. So he went and commissioned his own goddamn polls.

Made a killing on the betting markets

I mean, I'm a Jets fan, so I've got dozens to choose from right there.

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Are you living through one of them right now?

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Was the predictable failure Rodgers or Adams?

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Rogers. I hated the trade from day 1 (especially since the Jets went through the "trade way too much and don't draft a qb for a should-be-retired Packer QB" with Favre already) and it kept getting worse.

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I was a little surprised at the time, because I didn't think Rodgers would want to follow Favre so closely.

Do you think they'll take a QB in the draft this year?

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Omg how did I forget about Favre doing the same thing?!

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Rahul Gandhi is the biggest failure as a projected Prime Minister for India by once the largest political party.

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I'll share one, an expat friend of mine from Russia would always take all his euro earnings and immediately convert them to rubles because the interest rate was quite good back then (2012).

I would constantly badger him about this because I was like, 'this is madness, a Russian with half a brain cell would never keep all their savings in rubles, and here you are'.

his excuse was always that he wanted to buy a flat and would need a large sum in rubles ready, even though doing a simple international bank transfer was not a big deal back then.

anyway, sure enough, after the annexation of crimea and sanctions + the oil price dropping, he ended up getting smashed. He did manage to get a flat in one of the poorer Russian regions eventually, but he lost probably the equivalent of 20-30k+ euros in the process.

if he had just kept it in Euros and done the transfer when needed, he would have come up like a boss.

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Watching many crypto projects on 2017 launching ICO and receiving millions of dollars...now, they don't exist any more...

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especially all of those influencer token launches.

Cash grab for shitcoins with no utility, just a pump and dump.

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Beyond meat is clearly a winner. Who knew people would like to eat heavily processed cocktails of highly toxic chemicals, it blows my mind.

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Every single government "war on ..." and "department of ..."

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on a small scale NEOM has completd something

in October 2024, Sindalah became the first Neom region to be completed https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=waraq6ejbGw

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