Ukrainians Can Destroy a Russian Tank For About The Price of a Nirvana Artifact.
One thing is for sure, I never should have tossed those hair metal concert relics and other memorabilia from my teens. You know, the ones that in the eras before social media you’d buy and wear to school the next day to show off that you were At The Thing.
[Sidenote, my first concert was 1985 Madonna ‘Like a Virgin’ tour w Beastie Boys opening. The t-shirt might have had that old school raised webbing on her bustier top]
“I can think of Nirvana shirts that I sold 15 years ago for $10 that are now worth anywhere between $1,000 and $5,000.” Pop culture clothing apparently has had its own run-up in price during the recent years. If you’re still straining to understand why these things are cool, think of them as NFTs you can wear.
I’ve been sharing the above linked FT article a lot because it’s so relatable to us of a certain age. Perhaps even more than ‘mom threw out my baseball cards!’ (most of which have plummeted in price anyway), almost every I know had some variety of this gear that got tossed, worn out, lost, or traded away. Most of my stuff is gone although I did manage to locate a Grateful Dead Giants Stadium (NJ) tie dye and a Poison tour short (unfortunately later era — by that I mean third album). So it was top of mind when I read about another object which costs just a few thousand dollars.
“War is an economy. It’s money,” said Graf, a stout, bearded Ukrainian soldier in charge of his unit’s drone team. “And if you have a drone for $3,000 and a grenade for $200, and you destroy a tank that costs $3 million, it’s very interesting.”
As the Russian invasion approaches its year anniversary the suffering inflicted is heartbreaking. But the resistance of Ukrainians, and their forced resourcefulness, is quite inspiring. The activities describe above are of course more commonly known as asymmetric warfare and practiced by all sorts of fighters, many of whom are more morally compromised than the men described in the Times article.
To get the grenade closer to the desired weight, his team has been using a 3-D printer to try to make a lightweight casing that can hold the explosives needed to penetrate a tank’s armor. The painstaking task involves experimenting with grenades of differing designs, clasped in a vise in their workroom, and operating around the explosive mechanisms to fine-tune them.
It’s just like my life, only if making an error in an Excel spreadsheet caused my laptop to combust with the force of a land mine.
This blog post doesn’t end with some grand statement of economic theory or judgment about a world where some fashionable people are wearing off the shoulder grunge nostalgia to brunch while others are shaving ounces off of a bomb.