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Maui clout

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Twenty-five years ago, Maui County was riding high in the state Legislature. Mamoru Yamasaki was chairman of the Ways and Means Committee in the Senate, and Joe Souki was speaker of the House.

State government thought it was rich, because of $500 million a year in payments from Duty Free Shoppers, and the political word was that this would be the last time that Maui, or any Neighbor Island, would be so well placed to get state funding for local projects. Once the unusual combo of Yama and Joe ended their dominance, Oahu would take over.

And for a generation, so it seemed.

Then, one month ago, it looked like 1988 all over again. Well, almost. Souki was slated to be speaker again, after some years on the outs with Democratic House leadership. Yama had passed away, but young Shan Tsutsui would continue as Senate president.

Then Dan Inouye died. Brian Schatz was appointed to the U.S. Senate, and Tsutsui accepted an appointment to replace him as lieutenant governor.

So, although Maui County came within days of regaining its legislative clout, suddenly it dissolved.

Of course, DFS is out of the picture and the state no longer thinks of itself as flush. Gil Keith-Agaran, who is nominated to move up to the Senate; leaving a hole in the House leadership where he had a shot at majority leader.

So it remains to be seen how well Maui County will do in the jockeying for state funding, especially for CIP (capital) projects. Keith-Agaran notes that since the days of the Yama-Joe duo, the budget has been restuctured so that CIP is rolled into the overall spending program.

Maui County would dearly like to return to the days when the state picked up a big part of water, solid waste and sewage treatment obligations; but the outlook for that looks slightly less rosy than it did late in 2012. 

 

Torn limb from limb

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If it seems like there have been a lot more power outages since Thanksgiving than in a normal early winter, you’re right, there have been. Today alone, MECO reports outages in Molokai and Lahaina; and yesterday there were more power failures Upcountry.

Some of this is unavoidable. When winter comes, rain returns and salt spray that has built up deposits on insulators during the dry season (even, sometimes, well away from the ocean) becomes wet and “flashes over.” A program of washing down insulators can help but has never entirely eliminated this source of power outages.

Most outages this year, though, apparently are from falling limbs. Some of this is beyond MECO’s control. Today the county closed Piiholo Road because eucalyptus trees had blown down across the road.

However, MECO used to have an aggressive program to identify which trees would, within the next five years, grow big enough to be vulnerable to winds and likely to interfere with power lines. Lumberjacks went out and preemptively removed and reduced those trees.

It looks like MECO needs to ramp up that preventive maintenance.

The newest pawn on TV entry

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“Hardcore Pawn Chicago” has begun showing, in case you cannot get enough via the original Detroit-based “Hardcore Pawn” or “Pawn Stars.”

According to a story in the Chicago Tribune, Royal Pawn is in a tough neighborhood:

Royal Pawn Shop gets the occasional odd item, including a fake leg and dentures, but it’s the people who walk into the store that make the environment unpredictable. Wayne said the customers vary from crack addicts, gang members and mobsters to athletes (the Bulls’ Jimmy Butler visited in September), doctors and a priest who wanted to pawn a cross.

One thing about working at Kamaaina Loan, we don’t see a lot of mobsters. Maybe that’s why we don’t have our own show yet.

Tribune photo of Randy and Wayne Cohen

 

Gold’s good year

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Gold momentarily touched $1800 an ounce last year and is now trading under $1700, so it may come as a surprise that — taking 2012 as a whole — gold had its best year since 1920.

So reports Bloomberg News.

At Kamaaina Loan and Cash For Gold, we buy and sell gold. We do not predict whether it will be higher or lower next month or six months from now, because we just don’t know.

What we do know is that we offer you the best price you’ll find any day in the week.

Notice Bloomberg reports that some famous investors are betting gold to go up:

Investors from John Paulson to George Soros have a $140.6 billion bet via near-record holdings in gold-backed exchange- traded products after the Federal Reserve said Dec. 12 it would buy $45 billion of Treasury securities a month as of January, adding to $40 billion a month of mortgage-debt purchases.

That’s kind of funny reporting, because all last year Bloomberg was reporting the details of Paulson’s failed bet on Chinese trees, where his fund put hundreds of millions of dollars into what turned out to be imaginary forests.

Paulson got famous by making a spectacularly good guess about mortgage securities but it was just a guess.Maybe he’ll have better luck with gold. At least gold exists

 

More ‘Pawn Stars’ soap opera

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According to Fox News, “Pawn Stars” dumped Oliva Black because she was formerly a model at the Suicide Girls nude website.

Apparently, she still works at the pawn shop.

We are pretty sure Big Rich has never modeled for Suicide Girls.

When we auditioned for a reality TV show for Kamaaina Loan, we asked the

staff to sign model releases, but nude modeling was not on our minds.

Another Craigslist catastrophe

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Via our friends at Jaxpawn, a story

A lonely place to meet a stranger

about a Craigslist encounter that went horribly, fatally wrong.

We worry about people who agree to sell gold through Craigslist. And this story — although it involved an ATV, not gold — is why. Inviting strangers to your house to buy your gold; or agreeing to meet a stranger in a remote place displays a trust in human nature that is not really justified.

Better, we think, to sell your gold jewelry at an established store where security measures are in place.

Besides, you’ll get just as good a deal, or better, from any pawnshop.

A new era for pawn shops in China

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According to this article in China Daily Europe, pawn shops are modernizing in China. In China, you can pawn wine. That’s something American pawnbrokers haven’t gotten into.

What the article does not say is that Chinese banks are very dubious affairs. No wonder small businesses prefer the direct and simple convenience of dealing in pawn — especially when Chinese pawnbrokers will lend on real estate, cars and other goods that most American pawnbrokers would not consider.

One example from the story:

Wang Qinghong, the owner of a small company based in Tianjin that makes drinking straws, is a typical customer. Last month a supplier pushed forward the date of a down payment and Wang had to raise all the money within two days.

“At first the bank was the only lender I could think of, but it would have taken at least a week to get a loan from the bank,” Wang says.

The pawnshop, by contrast, was able to give him money in a few minutes after having verified that he owned a flat

 

Good bread for everybody

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Lots of people are posting fond memories of Jose Krall, the baker and pastry cook at Maui Bake Shop & Deli, who is missing since his plane crashed Saturday. Here is our favorite.

Jose’s productions were first-rate and priced accordingly. A strawberry dressed up in a tuxedo made of dark and white chocolate, for example, cost about $3. The exception was his baguettes, the bread that is the staff of life for the French.

When a sort of imitation baguette was available at local supermarkets for $3 or so, a genuine, crusty, hard baguette from Jose cost just $1.25. I once asked him why his baguettes were so cheap when his other loaves were priced around $6. I cannot recall his exact words, but the gist was:

“Everyone should be able to afford to eat good bread.”

In his old shop, before his brief retirement, he had a poster that read, in French, “In his (the baker’s) hands, the essence of good bread.” Jose Krall was a master baker who took his craft seriously. He walked the walk.

Jose Krall, picture from The Maui News

 

Stories about diamonds

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Perhaps you have seen one of Kamaaina Loan’s ads that offers

to buy diamonds, “especially wanted, 1 carat and higher.”

However, as an episode a few days ago reveals, not all big stones

are good stones.

A customer wanted a loan on a whopper of a diamond, 3 carats.

But, in the words of Jimi, the broker who examined it, the stone

was, in technical jargon, “one level above frozen spit.”

Diamonds are valued according to size, color, clarity and cut.

This particular diamond was very poor in the clarity department,

with several inclusions and flaws that cut down on its sparkle.

Its maximum loan value was only a couple hundred bucks, very

low for such a big stone.

Diamonds are examined with a 10-power loupe.

Cut also matters. The standard or round brilliant cut has been

determined both mathematically and by experience to produce

the most sparkle and glitter. But not every stone is suited to

the standard treatment.

As an example, a couple weeks ago we were shown a largish

stone with a weird cut, not quite exactly like any of the usual

categories, such as emerald, rose etc.

What would induce a cutter to choose such a method?

We couldn’t ask the cutter, but it may have been that given

 the flaws in the stone, the bizarre cut was judged the best way

to get the most fire and light out of the stone.

Kevin recalled an example some years ago (not at Kamaaina ‘

Loan), where a customer had a cracked 2-carat stone. (Yes,

diamonds, hard as they are, can crack and chip.) Another

jeweler had recommended tossing out the stone, but Kevin

suggested sending it out to be recut.

It worked. The cutter managed to rescue one and a half carats

of good stone from the wreck.

Sometimes, it seems, the true skill of a good cutter is better

displayed on a poor stone than on a good one.

In any event, with diamonds size matters but not more than ‘

color, cut or clarity.

The beginning of the end for Mount Trashmore?

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According to The Maui News. the county is issuing a request for trash-to-power proposals in order to divert a lot of opala from the Central Maui Landfill.

It will be interesting to see who applies and what technologies are offered. The county put on an all-day seminar 20-some years ago when trashpower was a hot item, but the then-director of  public works preferred to bury garbage. That got expensive in the ’90s when EPA began requiring environmental safeguards on dumps.

Oahu went ahead with H-POWER, against a lot of skeptics, but it seems to have been successful enough. At least, Honolulu is expanding it in a big way.

A question for Maui will be, do we generate enough trash? When plastic recycling was attempted, there just wasn’t enough plastic garbage.

By definition, garbage has low unit value, so you need a lot of it in order to make money, or to justify the considerable overhead of a biggish power plant. Unlike wind or solar, though, trash is firm power, available anytime.

Trash can have unusual properties. In Virginia Beach, Virginia, which is a flat as the back of your hand, the city piled up trash several hundred feet, covered it with dirt and grass and turned it into a park, called Mount Trashmore. (The city officials didn’t like that but the name stuck.)

Once they had a hill a couple hundred feet high, the city could finally have a Soapbox Derby competition. Before, it was too flat for the cars to roll.