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Cliff Slater was right

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Honolulu rail transit is going to be a disaster. It is no surprise that the cost overrun is already estimated at $500 million.

Still worse, Honolulu is thinking of plundering TheBus to cover TheRail. Honolulu once had a good bus service. No longer. And raiding the modernization fund will just destroy what’s left of it.

Extending the excise tax surcharge to forever for Oahu is also under consideration.

Expect someone in the Legislature to propose extending it to the Neighbor Islands.

Note to Joe Souki: Do not allow it.

#maui

New price: $500,000,200

New price: $500,000,200

‘Getting the chair,’ but in a good way

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From Norwich, Conn., we learn of a pawnbroker who took the old advice and made lemonade from his lemons.

According to WTNH television, it began 5 years ago when Phil Pavone of A-Z Pawn bought a couple of motorized wheelchairs, expecting to resell them. They didn’t move, so he had another thought.

Kamaaina Loan blog called Pavone to get the rest of the story, with more perspective from pawnbroking operations than WTNH’s story provided:

It turns out, there’s more to creating a mobility project than taking in chairs by one door and handing them out at another. Pavone started by running newspaper ads, asking anyone with a disability to write or email him about their problem and how a chair would help.

chair

He got 60 submissions.”I heard from people who had been homebound for years. . . .  You cannot believe how many flippin’ people fall between the cracks of eligibility. It’s a disaster.”

Pavone, a cancer survivor, says he understands what it means to be sick. He went out and bought four more chairs to give away.

From there, it grew, but not without a big push from him. “The most expensive part of the whole thing was getting the word out.” He advertised heavily in newspapers and on television for two years.

Now that he is established as “the go-to guy” in his area, the chairs come in to him as donations or inexpensive purchases. The program costs him around $10,000 a year.

A team of volunteers refurbishes the chairs, which usually amounts to no more than a new battery or a charger. A battery distributor provides batteries at cost.

Then he and his volunteers match the chair to the applicant: by weight (up to 250-300 pounds; or over 300); right or left-hand controls. Occasionally, a recipient will require a tilting chair to keep legs elevated.

“It’s not a tax writeoff,” says Pavone, who has two shops, one in Florida.”It’s about looking in the frickin’ mirror and liking what you see.”

He keeps his “Gift of Mobility” campaign going year-round. Sometimes he installs a chair in his shop with a placard, asking for donations of no-longer-needed chairs.

Then, about this time of year, he advertises for more stories. (He asks and gets special rates on this advertising.) His volunteers fix up the chairs and a few days before Christmas they lend pickup trucks to deliver chairs to recipients who cannot come to A-Z Pawn.

As of Veterans Day, he had “at least 40-45 chairs” to present, and another 11 or so being spruced up and probably to be ready by donation day (around Dec. 21).

You can learn more about Gift of Mobility, with links to Youtube videos of past campaigns, here.

#mauipawn #mauiretail

 

Gold gyrates

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The price of gold changes every day, sometimes by quite a lot — a $25-an-ounce move is not unusual. But it doesn’t usually vary so much within a day that Kamaaina Loan has to adjust the amount it offers on gold loans or purchases.

Today, as gold continues a strange series of gyrations, a midday adjustment began to look like a good idea. (In the end, we didn’t change, though it might have cost us a few bucks.)

As our day began, gold was selling at just under $1227 an ounce.So that’sd where we pegged our offers for this day. Within less than 2 hours, it was down to $1209. It got as low as $1207 before rallying to around $1211 just before the market closed in New York City (which happens just after 11 a.m.Hawaii time).

The folks at Kitco, who offer a daily smorgasbord of gold news and opinion, thought the move — the biggest in 3 weeks — was an unhappy reaction to the release of the minutes of the Federal Open Market Committee. Kitco thinks gold traders think higher interest rates will be bad for gold (although, amusingly, you can find every shade of opinion on their website), for reasons that are opaque to us in the pawnshop.

Still, it has been a more than usually exciting couple of weeks for people who watch gold prices. As Big Rich always says, “Gold will go up, or it will go down, or it will stay the same.”

 

Slow motion stock market crash

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The graceful swan dive by Wall Street — the DJIA managed to get under 15,000 today before closing at 16,141, about a thousand below where it was just a couple weeks ago — merits some comment:

Listen up, people. Inflation is whipped. Beat, over and done with. Deflation is the problem, the hardest of all possible economic crises to manage your way out of. (The famous hyperinflation in Germany was controlled rather easily by replacing all the money with “Rentenmarks,” though the damage done was irreversible.)

Some people just won’t believe it. According to Bloomberg News:

Investors who poured more than $1 billion this year into a $3.8 billion leveraged exchange-traded fund that bets against long-dated U.S. Treasuries are suffering a 4.1 percent loss today alone, Bloomberg data show. The fund is down 38 percent this year, a small window into the magnitude of pain in a market where many traders have been wagering debt prices would fall.

Gold, at last, finally woke up to the fact that securities are tanking and started playing its accustomed role as refuge when people are worried.  Gold, after managing to get below $1200 an ounce, was up to $1241 today. Not fabulous compared to where it has been over the last couple of years but reversing a slide that has been going on almost all year.

More from Bloomberg:

“The markets are clearly very jittery,” said Larry Milstein, managing director in New York of government-debt trading at R.W. Pressprich & Co. “It’s not just the global slowdown.”

While Wall Street economists may be sticking to their forecasts Treasuries will lose value, a lot of bond buyers aren’t listening right now. And the bears are suffering the consequences.

Worse off maybe than bond traders is Vladimir Putin. A different Bloomberg story says:

 

 Oil has been the key to Putin’s grip on power since he took over from Boris Yeltsin in 2000, fueling a booming economy that grew 7 percent on average from 2000 to 2008.

Now, with economic growth slipping close to zero, Russia is reeling from sanctions by the U.S. and the European Union over its land grab in Ukraine, and from a ruble at a record low. Putin, whose popularity has been more than 80 percent in polls since the annexation of the Crimean Peninsula in March, may have less money to raise state pensions and wages, while companies hit by the sanctions also seek state aid to maintain spending.

“His ratings remain high but for a person conducting such a risky policy, Putin has to understand the limits of patience for the people, business and political elite,” said Olga Kryshtanovskaya, a sociologist studying the country’s elite at the Russian Academy of Sciences in Moscow. “Putin is thinking hard how not to lose face while maintaining his support.”

Couldn’t happen to a nicer fellow, either.

Save those receipts

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A customer came in today with a Niihau shell necklace she was interested in selling.  We, of course, were interested in buying.

Niihau shell jewelry is particularly tricky because without documentation  there is no direct way to tell whether it is authentic. Fortunately, she had retained the Certificate of Authenticity that came with the necklace when she bought it.

 

American_Express_Shipping_Receipt_1853

Certificates can be copied, however, so a sales receipt helps add value. The more documentation , the better. A sales receipt, by itself, proves little, but a collection of papers for an item adds value. This is also true of designer bags and similar items.

The receipt might seem like clutter, but if you paid hundreds of dollars for an item, and someday you might want to sell it (or use it to raise a pawn loan),  that slip of paper might add many dollars to the amount you realize.

How would you use old Maui High?

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The county has published a bid notice seeking ideas to “use and repurpose” the old Maui High campus in Hamakuapoko. And please don’t call it H’poko.

What do you think?

For decades after the school closed, it housed the NifTAL agricultural; research project, and the old gymnasium was used as a community dance rehearsal hall until some creep burned it down.

#Mauihigh #mauiland

 

 

‘Pawn Stars Live!’ is dying

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The attempt to parody the uber-popular reality show and sell tickets on the Las Vegas Strip has failed.

The Las Vegas Review-Journal reports the show will close Aug. 24. (And who knew that denizens of n City call themselves Las Vegans? What kind of vegans are they?)

Even a complete rewrite and a move to another theater failed to resuscitate the show, which most critics said had misfired. It was probably a mistake to think of parodying a reality show anyway. Isn’t “Keeping Up with the Kardashians” already a parody? Satire might have fared better, but they say satire is what closes on Saturday.

Warning to the west side

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Have you been following Eileen Chao’s coverage in The Maui News of the plan to close Molokini II, the child/adolescent psychiatric ward at Maui Memorial Medical Center? You should, especially if you live on the west side and fantasize about having an emergency room there, so you won’t have to lose that “golden hour” riding an  ambulance to Wailuku if you have a stroke.

It ain’t ever going to happen, and the reasons are right there in today’s story:

1. Molokini II had 124 patients last year. Considering that psychiatric admissions last only for the acute attack and seldom last more than a few days, that means that much of the time the unit was empty.

Yet it still had to have staff ready around the clock.

There is no adolescent psychiatrist practicing on the island, and not likely to be any time soon either.

2. No other hospital on the Neighbor Islands has an adolescent psych unit.

Now, consider an emergency room. It requires, at the barest minimum, 5 ER physicians, one for each 8-hour shift each weekday and 2 more to cover weekends, vacations etc.

Plus nurses and other helpers.

Most of these cannot be used on other tasks whenever there isn’t an emergency case, because they have to be ready to respond STAT as you have seen so often on the TV doc shows.

But there won’t be many patients from the west side, and if you have been around ER physicians you’ll have noticed that they are not shrinking violets. They are not going to sit around playing hanafuda waiting for the next big car crash (and how many of those does Lahaina generate? not even one a day).

If you have a condition requiring Level 3 care, you’ll have to leave Maui anyway.

As medical care gets more complicated and equipment becomes more specialized and expensive, economic factors force concentration. Health treatment is not immune to the same forces that have closed down full-service gas stations in favor of gasoline0-dispensing stations one place and car repair shops somewhere else.

There are other reasons the west side (or South Maui) will never have an ER but those are sufficient; we don’t need to go any further.

#mauihospital #westmauihospital #mauimedical

 

 

Pawn your sneaks? Sure, why not?

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You can do it in Harlem now.

Smell this

Smell this

A 16-year-old kid with 200 pairs of sneakers had the idea. It works about like any other pawn, which is to say, if there is a market for used goods, a pawnbroker somewhere will make a loan on them.

As we say at our Maui pawn shop, we’ll take in anything that doesn’t eat. And no doubt somewhere in the world there’s a pawnbroker who does take livestock, we just haven’t heard from him yet.

At Sneaker Pawn, there is a bit of a different wrinkle. If the shoe owner wants to sell, instead of making a straight purchase, it operates more like a consignment: Sneaker Pawn makes the sale and splits 80/20 with the seller — 80% to the seller.

Biggest drawback from the pawnbroker’s point of view: He has to sniff each shoe.

 

 

Ain’t nothin’ like the real thing

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As Smokey Robinson so wisely taught us long ago.

It appears that the magic of “Pawn Stars” is limited to the actual Gold & Silver Pawn Shop cast, at least if you value the opinion of critic Steve Bornfeld.

There’s a Vegas show called “Pawn Shop Live!” that’s supposed to be a spoof of the top-rated cable “reality show.” Vegas Steve didn’t like it when it opened early this year, and now that it has been revamped, he likes it even less:

Flashing back to the original Pawn Shop Live! at the Golden Nugget in February, I labeled it “an amateurish misfire of major proportions.” Updating to the rewritten Pawn Shop Live! at the Riviera, I amend that to “an amateurish misfire of TITANIC proportions.”

We suggest authenticity counts with tongue in cheek. Much as we like “Pawn Stars” and appreciate how much it has done to enhance the reputation of pawn shops everywhere, life with Rick and the family is not really what pawnbroking is like.

Pawnshops, including our Maui pawn shop, do get fascinating, rare and curious items from time to time, but emphasize time to time. Not all the time, like on “Pawn Stars.”

Here’s a secret: TV reality shows are scripted. And not only that, but a show like “Pawn Stars” has agents who comb the country for telegenic items to “pawn.” The owners, who get a chance to explain their treasures on a big stage, cooperate but those are not real transactions.

The valuation offered by Rick may be authentic,  but it’s all for show not dough.

If you think about it for a moment, you can understand. It costs thousands — in the case of “Pawn Stars” tens of thousands — of dollars to create each minute of program. The producers cannot wait around until the next interesting customer walks in.

Even “Antiques Roadshow,” which does draw thousands of hopefuls to each city it visits, sends out advance agents to recruit good antiques and even arranges to transport the big items (like Federal-period highboys) to the auditorium where the show is taped.

If you want to see a real pawn shop in action, come down to 52 North Market Street any day of the week. But you might have to wait several days for any excitement.