Thrifty business

Fantastic Journal, on frugal chic:

Our cities grow odd organic appendages at the weekends, temporary infestations from the countryside that spring up to sell expensive organic vegetables to a niche market troubled by supermarkets and urbanity. There is a sort of alchemy at work here, the turning of base metal into gold, or thrift into luxury. For coal tar soap and muddy potatoes were surely never meant to be luxury products. It takes a particularly weird intersection of class and socio-economics to make them so. And whilst Labour and Wait remains packed on a Sunday morning, my local Woolworths - that most genuinely thrifty of shops - is already a boarded up memory.

Charles Holland attributes some of the inspiration for his thinking to the recent Austerity Nostalgia post by Owen Hatherley.

How the US forgot how to make Trident missiles

The US National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) “lost knowledge” of how to make a mysterious but very hazardous material codenamed Fogbank. As a result, the warhead refurbishment programme was put back by at least a year, and racked up an extra $69 million.

During the final heist in Bottle Rocket, Dignan, played by Owen Wilson, discovers the guy who’s supposed to be cracking the safe might not be who he says he is.

Kumar: Man, I blew it. I blew it, man.
Anthony: Kumar, what were you doing in the freezer?
Kumar: I don’t know, man, I lose my touch, man.
Dignan: Did you ever have a touch to lose, man?

I wonder if we ever had a touch to lose.

The bees are back in town

Colony collapse disorder (CCD) once made headlines; now it’s the bee glut. While the cause of the former remains a mystery, the latter is largely economic:

The price of almonds dropped by 30% between August and December last year, as people had less money in their pockets. That has caused growers to cut costs, and therefore hire fewer hives. There is also a drought in the region, and many farmers are unlikely to receive enough water to go ahead with the harvest. Meanwhile, the recent high prices for pollination contracts made it look worthwhile fattening bees up with supplements over the winter. That may help explain why there have been fewer colony collapses.

The rise and fall of the managed honeybee, then, owes as much to the economics of supply and demand as it does to the forces of nature. And if the nutrition and disease theory is correct, next year’s lower contract prices may see beekeepers cutting back on supplemental feeding, and a resurgence of CCD.