Nice moments in unintended penalties—when one thing that appears like a fantastic thought goes horribly mistaken. Watch the whole series.
Half One: Beef Grief
The 12 months: 1946
The Downside: The price of beef is skyrocketing! And voters are indignant! And it is an election yr!
The Resolution: Reinstitute federal war-time worth controls.
Feels like a fantastic thought, with the most effective of intentions. What may presumably go mistaken?
Seems, artificially low costs are tougher to swallow while you’re the one promoting. Indignant farmers, unwilling to promote their meat at government-mandated costs, refused to deliver their cattle to market. Meat manufacturing plummeted. Now everybody was indignant. Miners went on strike. Butchers closed. Hospitals complained they’d must serve horse meat. With voters up in arms and an election weeks away, President Harry Truman lifted the restrictions. However not quickly sufficient: in what’s been referred to as “The Beefsteak Election,” Democrats had been slaughtered on the polls, shedding Congress for the primary time in 16 years.
However at the very least that meat scarcity was cured.
Half Two: Reaching New Lights
The 12 months: 2010-ish
The Downside: Site visitors lights in Japan deplete an excessive amount of vitality!
The Resolution: Replace the incandescent bulbs with vitality environment friendly LEDs that last more and price much less to function!
Feels like a fantastic thought, with the most effective of intentions. What may presumably go mistaken?
Seems, it will get chilly! And since LED bulbs do not radiate sufficient warmth to soften snow and ice, the indicators turned obscured, leading to quite a few site visitors accidents and employees being despatched out to wash the indicators with brooms. And it wasn’t just Japan—in Inexperienced Bay, upkeep crews in bucket lifts scraped their new lights by hand, St. Paul used air compressors, and Newark even employed Tremendous Soakers stuffed with anti-freeze.
Varied options are within the works, however till they get all of it discovered simply deal with it like a four-way cease, OK? That is snow joke.
Half Three: Conserving Up With The Boneses
The 12 months: 1937
The Downside: Discovering early human fossils is difficult, especially in Indonesia!
The Resolution: Pay locals for every fragment they can find!
Feels like a fantastic thought, with the most effective of intentions. What may presumably go mistaken?
Seems, it labored like a appeal! Paleontologist and Superior Identify Membership member Gustav Heinrich Ralph von Koenigswald was delighted to seek out that enterprising locals had been bringing him helpful fossils. Even higher, the small fragments match collectively to create a nearly full hominid cranium. They match collectively so nicely, actually, that he realized the useful locals “had been breaking apart the bigger items behind my again, with a view to get a much bigger bonus.”
That is one method to get forward.
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