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Pepsi’s $32B Typo Caused Deadly Riots

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Re: Pepsi’s $32B Typo Caused Deadly Riots

#112

Having lived for some time in a third world country that has real poverty and real day to day security worries, situations like this spring to mind when people completely without optics compare their situations to those in developing nations. Yes, as insanely ignorant as that sounds it happens. People here on HN last week, as one example, were trying to compare their experiences recently protesting to the Arab Spring…

I've always looked at it this way "things must be pretty bad if lighting yourself on fire sounds like a better alternative then living" I dont need to understand the particulars beyond that.

Re: Pepsi’s $32B Typo Caused Deadly Riots

#113

Having lived for some time in a third world country that has real poverty and real day to day security worries, situations like this spring to mind when people completely without optics compare their situations to those in developing nations. Yes, as insanely ignorant as that sounds it happens. People here on HN last week, as one example, were trying to compare their experiences recently protesting to the Arab Spring…

No matter what issue you examine, you can doubtlessly find that somebody somewhere at sometime had it even worse. I think these kind of observations are usually unproductive though; taking this attitude to it's logical absurd conclusion would have you telling people to stop complaining because at least they're not in death camps.

Re: Pepsi’s $32B Typo Caused Deadly Riots

#114

For everybody who was saying "Wikipedia is complete, there's nothing left to write about" yesterday, as far as I can there is not a word about this on the whole site, certainly not on the Pepsi page. Time to get to work! https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?search=Pepsi+349&ns0=1&... Edit: I stand corrected, there is a single paragraph in here. Nothing standalone/linkable though. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1992_in…

I've noticed that corporate history tends to be a blind spot for Wikipedia. I suspect part of the reason for this is corporate PR departments have more resources than volunteer encyclopedians.

Re: Pepsi’s $32B Typo Caused Deadly Riots

#115

For everybody who was saying "Wikipedia is complete, there's nothing left to write about" yesterday, as far as I can there is not a word about this on the whole site, certainly not on the Pepsi page. Time to get to work! https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?search=Pepsi+349&ns0=1&... Edit: I stand corrected, there is a single paragraph in here. Nothing standalone/linkable though. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1992_in…

Controversial stuff, even well documented controversial stuff, gets scrubbed from Wikipedia all the time. Check out https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAND_Corporation You would suppose a think tank directly responsible for such policy gems as : • Mutually assured destruction • The Missile Gap • Planned Shrinkage • tax cuts for the rich and service cuts for the poor • Systematic Torture of enemy soldiers in the Vietnam wa…

I looked at the edit history and couldn't find such edits in the last three or so years. Do you have any particular edits you're thinking of?

Re: Pepsi’s $32B Typo Caused Deadly Riots

#116
post #63

> The number “349” was the $40,000 winning number. > Pepsi had explicitly told its vendor factories not to print this number at all. Sounds dangerous to decide the winning number in advance. Makes it easier for a vendor or someone else to cheat. But I suppose they wanted short numbers.

It's not a lottery where people pick their own numbers. As long as you can't find out what it is without opening the bottle, it didn't have to be a number at all; it could just say "you have won" where all the other bottle caps say nothing.

Though, making it non-forgeable might be trickier.

Re: Pepsi’s $32B Typo Caused Deadly Riots

#117
post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps it is the wikipedia administration, moderation, and editing team that have put up such barriers who are selfish. It is selfish to expect others to jump through your hoops to contribute advanced technical knowledge out of the kindness of their hearts.

Just a reminder that you're only assuming that the information that arkades would like to add is even accurate. (No offense to them, I'm sure it is, just pointing out that the process of editing that encyclopedia is burdensome for a reason).

I do not contribute to wikipedia because I dislike the politics there but I often browse it and see content in technical articles that helped me in the past magically disappearing, or wiki articles getting deleted along with their history because the moderators were too clueless about a certain topic.

Re: Pepsi’s $32B Typo Caused Deadly Riots

#118
post #10

I would love to know what the bug was, sadly we'll probably never know. I imagine the engineer responsible for `NEVER 349` made a mistake that ended up flipping a single bit, to the `ALWAYS 349` position...

800,000 bottles ? This mightve been intentional

a Coca-Cola operative infiltrated in the factory took care of it

Re: Pepsi’s $32B Typo Caused Deadly Riots

#119

Having lived for some time in a third world country that has real poverty and real day to day security worries, situations like this spring to mind when people completely without optics compare their situations to those in developing nations. Yes, as insanely ignorant as that sounds it happens. People here on HN last week, as one example, were trying to compare their experiences recently protesting to the Arab Spring…

No matter what issue you examine, you can doubtlessly find that somebody somewhere at sometime had it even worse. I think these kind of observations are usually unproductive though; taking this attitude to it's logical absurd conclusion would have you telling people to stop complaining because at least they're not in death camps.

Another logical conclusion is “I will minimize my contribution to a system that actively causes substantial, unnecessary harm to other humans.”

Re: Pepsi’s $32B Typo Caused Deadly Riots

#120
post #112

Having lived for some time in a third world country that has real poverty and real day to day security worries, situations like this spring to mind when people completely without optics compare their situations to those in developing nations. Yes, as insanely ignorant as that sounds it happens. People here on HN last week, as one example, were trying to compare their experiences recently protesting to the Arab Spring…

I've always looked at it this way "things must be pretty bad if lighting yourself on fire sounds like a better alternative then living" I dont need to understand the particulars beyond that.

I honestly think that there are people in the US who feel distraught enough to do so, but they know that it wouldn't do any good for anyone else -- they would be ignored, or labeled as "crazy". No doubt life in the US is still much better than many other places, but we have to remember that protest itself has been systematically marginalized and penalized as a form of expression, and adjust our evaluation of the state of the US accordingly.
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