Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by gholap 2166 days ago
We don't even need a fictional nail-factory example, because an almost-similar real example exists: the Backyard Furnaces of China during the Great Leap Forward [1]

> Pots, pans, and other metal artifacts were requisitioned to supply the "scrap" for the furnaces so that the wildly optimistic production targets could be met.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Leap_Forward#Backyard_fu...