An Olympic gold medal is only plate, not solid gold.
It’s really silver-gilt: thin, nearly pure gold over sterling silver.
At current prices of around $!,600 an ounce for gold and $28 an ounce for silver, the metal content of an Olympic medal is around $788.
Add in the sweat equity, though, and it’s priceless.
The host Britons are doing exceptionally well at the XXX Olympiad (despite Mitt Romney’s doubts), leading to claims by NBC reporters that this is the greatest, most uplifting sporting success in English history.
This is typical of TV, which knows nothing of history. The greatest sports event in English history was its wholly unexpected victory in the 1966 Football Association World Cup, which came at a time when memories of the losses of World War II were still fresh (and you could see bomb craters in London) and the country was in the midst of a distressing economic slump.
As any Englishman will tell you, the ’66 cup changed the public outlook. The well-known writer David Lodge even wrote a novel about it.
Idly, I wondered about the “Dow 30,000” book I recalled seeing (but never reading) on a day when the Dow struggled, again, to get to 13,000 and when Bill Gross, the , declared that securities are a “Ponzi scheme” and we will never again see the returns of the past century.
I had forgotten that there were also “Dow 36,000” and “Dow 40,000” books, and learned — what I had not known before — that James Glassman, author of the “Dow 36,000” book, was a financial adviser to John McCain’s presidential campaign and is today founding of the George W, Bush Institute at Southern Methodist U.
That explains a lot.
What does this have to do with pawnshops? Nothing directly, but if you have assets, Kamaaina Loan can turn them into cash. Whatever number the Dow index is at
Some background on the controversy about the Kihei megamall:
Less than 30 years ago, the sum total of national retailers on Maui was Sears, National Dollar and Woolworth, among general retailers. No Kmart, no Wal-mart.
Today, no Woolworth and no National Dollar.
There weren’t a lot of specialized national retailers here 30 years ago, either: no Pier One, no Sports Authority (which didn’t yet exist).
Today we have outlets from Tiffany to Home Depot and it night seen that rural Maui has caught up with national urban retailing trends. Far from it,
Around 1990, a speaker brought in by the Main Street Association asserted that there were 140 national chains that were NOT on Maui.
I haven’t seen any more recent estimate, but although we have added many, many national chains since 1990, my guess is that the number today would be even higher than 140.
There are a lot more national (and even international) retailers like Ikea than there used to be.
If you think about just fast food chains, Maui lacks dozens. Chick-Fil-A is in the news, but on Maui you cannot either support or protest its position about marriage, because it isn’t here.
Neither is Sonic, Long John Silver’s, Popeye’s, Boston Market, Friendly’s and many more.
Among non-food retailers that are still absent are Target (probably on its way soon), Kohl’s, Bed Bath & Beyond, Pottery Barn and on and on.
This helps to explain the desire of developers to build more malls on Maui. Maui may or may not be a top tier location — it wasn’t for J.C. Penney — but national chains have to expand to satisfy Wall Street.
Every day, a pawn shop is the scene of stories that are uplifting, tragic, funny or a combination of all three, Here, heard at the National Pawnbrokers Association convention, is one that is tragic and inspiring:
THE TEACHER WHO LIKED RINGS
In a southern pawn shop, there was a customer, a schoolteacher, who liked rings. She bought rings, sold rings, occasionally pawned rings.
Sometimes, when she found one she liked, she put it on layaway. Once she retired, and was living on a small pension, she sometimes had difficulty keeping up with her layaway payments.
Often, she failed to pay off within the store’s usual time limit of six months, but the pawnbroker treated her leniently because she was a good customer.
One rather expensive ring had been on layaway for more than two years when the woman died.
The pawnbroker called the woman’s daughter and told her that her mother had had a ring on layaway, still only half paid for, that the daughter could claim if she wanted to.
The daughter came to the store and told the owner that when her mother’s house burned (the cause of her death), everything she owned was destroyed.
“I don’t have a single thing of my mother’s,” she said.
The pawnbroker said, “This ring obviously meant a lot to your mother, since she tried so hard to pay it off. Here, you take it.”
He did not ask for the unpaid balance.
The daughter told the story to her local newspaper, which published it.
I bought a fountain pen, so I went to Office Max to get a bottle of ink. The very young clerk was eager to help, but she didn’t know what a fountain pen was.
“I never heard of that,” said she.
A slightly okler clerk came to our rescue, but it turned out the store had only ink cartridges, not bottled ink. The clerk advised me to try Ben Franklin.
Ben Franklin had bottled India ink, but in a locked cabinet. “You need to lock up the ink?” I asked,
“The kids steal it,” the very helpful clerk said. “They use it for tattoos with a pin.”
I learn something new every day.
(Our Maui Gold Buyers store at 98 North Market sells new, professional tattoo gun outfits for a reasonable price. Don’t steal ink. If you are going to tattoo, do it right.)
Now that the Final Environmental Impact Statement has been approved, the Wailea 670 project will most likely happen. I had my doubts over the past two decades since it was proposed. There are a lot of lessons to reflect upon in this development. Some are good reflections, some not.
In no particular order of significance:
1. Honua`ula, as it is now called, will have one golf course. Wailea 670 was to have had 2. Golf courses have managed to lose a lot of money for their owners over the past 20 years here. Several have gone bankrupt. Others have sold at distress prices. There’s no doubt golf sells, but there are many courses, relatively few golfers. We will keep seeing golf courses in big developments, because they are an attractive way of decorating the main drainageway. For each developer, it looks like a way to monetize a piece of infrastructure. Over time, it probably results in more courses than the traffic will bear.
2. A cap on annual deliveries of 100 houses a year is novel. In the past, developers wanted to sell as many as quickly as they could, particularly in a big project in an area devoid of infrastructure. The upfront infrastructure costs incurring a heavy burden of debt service. Today, and for as long as the Federal Reserve decrees, the burden of debt service will be small. Over the past 20 years, few developers could sell as fast as they hoped, so the cap of 100/year probably won’t have much practical effect.
3. But requiring the 250 (off-site) affordable houses to be built first will add heavily to the builder’s upfront costs, especially if they end of costing him beaucoup bucks. The history of affordable in South Maui has not been inspiring. When the Grand Hyatt (as it then was) built its off-site employee housing, the employees didn’t want it. The project found a hard time filling up in competition with other, standalone projects, too. In West Maui, the story has been different, because there, instead of too much (by some people’s standards) housing, there has been too little (by anybody’s standards). But that should be the topic of a future post.
4. Off-site environmental mitigation has had a mixed record. Lee Altenberg, a population biologist, fought for years to preserve a patch of native wiliwili forest in the lower corner of Wailea 670/Honua`ula. Lower corners, though, are where developers want to put their sewage treatment plants (to avoid pumping costs; sewage runs downhill), and so here. So far, Altenberg has not succeeded in making his point with the Maui Planning Commission. It’s hard for people who do not care for native plants to get it, though. 95% of the native wiliwili forests have been wiped out by farming and building and roads. By definition, the remnants are in “waste lands” that nobody (until now) cared about. It is hard to get people to understand the concept of “scarcity value” when it comes to land use. From the developer’s point of view, putting his sewage treatment plant anywhere else raises costs and makes his houses harder to sell.
5. Already, according to Nanea Kalani’s news report in The Maui,News, there is nervousness about the cost of water in the private water system. The infrastructure expense is eyepopping — $22 million for a 1,150-unit project, or about as much as the county water department spends on its physical plant for the entire island in a year. That’s expensive water. The report does not mention, and perhaps nobody remembers, that there was a question way back when about that water. Wailea 670 drilled 2 wells, for irrigation. They were expected to come up brackish. They flowed sweet and clean. David Craddick, then the water director, said if they were fresh, the water was the county’s. Charlie Jencks said, just wait till we’ve pumped for a while; the water will turn brackish. This is an experiment worth watching. There are rumors of more fresh water in the South Maui aquifers than the older studies (and current legal parameters) admit. Wailea 670 did not choose a promising site for its wells. It drilled where it owned. If it’s true that you can hit fresh water more or less at random on the south slope of Haleakala, that changes the development game in a huge way. Low-growthers should be praying nightly that those wells turn brackish and soon.
6. Bike and hiking trails. These have to be in developer plans in order to get approving nods from trendy people, but it’s doubtful they will ever be used enough to justify their cost. There’s a reason nobody hikes that hillside now: it’s steep, hot and dusty. Following development, it will still be steep and hot.
7. Jencks said the project needs to move within 3 years, but he is counting, in part, on either joint venture partners or buyers of pieces with their own development money. Presumably, he has somebody in mind, but Kaanapali 2020 has been looking for JV partners for a long time and apparently they are hard to find.
Even if you’ve never been to Las Vegas, you probably know about the fountains at the Bellagio, which are as much a symbol of the city as the Gateway Arch is of St. Louis or the statue of Kamehameha I is of Honolulu.
What you don’t get from the pictures, though, is that the leaping jets of water are choreographed to music blasted out over the lake. These comes in sets of 3 (every 30 minutes during the day, every 15 minutes during the evening, when the sidewalk around the lake is crowded and various street hucksters set up).
I had never expected Vegas to be ironical, still less self-deprecatory, but I was wrong.
The first song in the set I watched was “Hey Big Spender,” catchy, brassy and apparently written for the occasion (“Hey, big spender, spend a little time with me”). The next was equally appropriate, “Viva Las Vegas.”
The third tune was unexpected: “Simple Gifts.”
This one, however, was instruments only, no vocal. Still, I know the words, and “It’s a gift to be simple” was decidedly odd coming under the sponsorship of the Bellagio.
Thank you readers of Maui Time Weekly for voting Kamaaina Loan Cash for Gold the best “Green Business” on Maui. Not only do we deal in “green” providing affordable loans to the people of Maui, all of our merchandise is recycled.
From Maui Time: “My first encounter with Kamaaina Loans and Cash for Gold was something out of a bad sitcom. I was shocked, how could there be a tie for best ‘green’ business? And both of them are pawnshops? Imagine my embarrassment learned the truth. It was like thinking I was dating twins, only to find out they were the same person. Kamaaina Loan/Cash For Gold provides a professional alternative to banks. Get it? They deal in ‘green’ every day. They offer accountable services, at competitive rates and have been in business for over 35 years.”
The editor is right. Pawnshops are the original green businesses, in the sense that everything is recycled. (Well, almost everything. Our shops do stock a few new items.)
And it appears that some people filled out their forms using one name — Kamaaina Loan — and some another — Cash for Gold. But both are the same business, and when the winners were announced, the owner, Big Rich, was at the National Pawnbrokers Association trade show in Las Vegas, scoping out new services and systems to serve you even better in the future.
Because while our merchandise is recycled, the systems in the back office that support the operation have to be up-to-date.
Well, Daniel is now reduced to a tropical storm, but he and Hurricane Emilia are predicted to bring us some rain. Right in the middle of the dry season.
That saying about clouds with silver linings? It fits hurricanes perfectly.
Most people do not realize that in Hawaii we get most of our rain on just a few days a year — usually in winter kona storms, but occasionally, like later this week, when a tropical storm/hurricane brushes past.
Florida depends on hurricanes or tropical storms hitting the Mainland for virtually all of its freshwater. Lucky we live Hawaii, we can get the water without the wind — most of the time.
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Saturday – Sunday 10 am – 4 pm