Keeping busy

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This morning I went to the breakfast meeting of the Rotary Club of Upcountry Maui, to see two high schoolers receive the club’s Students of the Month awards. They were an impressive pair, and I will relay a little about them in a moment, but what I found noteworthy was the variety (and, apparently, also depth) of the opportunities students have today.

There was nothing close to it when I was in high school, 50 years ago.

Of course, not all students get the same opportunities. Money and transportation would prevent some. Babysitting obligations would stop others.

But the opportunities are there for both private and public school students.

It is nearly impossible, in some circles, to bring up the topic of education without being subjected to a tirade against public schools. And teachers. And unions.

I spent a lot of time on campus when my children were in high school, and what I saw was generally good. Certainly far better than the Catholic school I went to. I do not believe that anyone pushing vouchers has the interests of the students uppermost. And religious schools are, with some but not many exceptions, antieducational.

The selectees were Jamie Gomes from King Kekaulike High and Josh Higa from Kamehameha Schools Maui. As you can see from the photograph, happy-looking kids.

Jamie said she had been thinking of becoming a family physician until attending a boot camp at Berkeley last summer where she observed a knee operation and is now wondering if becoming an orthopedic surgeon wouldn’t be better.

She plays water polo and for her community service requirement has started Operation JAG (Jamie Against Bullying) to go to the community with a message. She would like to attend Oregon State and then Oregon University of Health Sciences medical school.

Josh wants to become a botanist, with an interest in native plants. He’s been learning about the Hawaiian uses of plants as medicine — la’au lapaau. He does judo and runs cross-country and is studying Japanese in school. He has been on reef and park cleaning trips.

He has Northern Arizona and Pacific on his college list.

There were quite a few other items on Jamie’s and Josh’s busy lists, and I asked Josh’s mother Terilyn if she worries about burnout. “Yes,” she said.

But I think the kids will be all right.

150 guitars in a DAY

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I’ll say we are jealous, but then Maui is not Austin.

guitar2

This piece from the Austin Chronicle is one of the longest features about a pawnshop we’ve ever read, but the CashAmerica (formerly and famously Doc Holliday’s) shop on South Lamar is a different kind of cat. Austin’s huge music scene supports a huge instrument market:

If pawnshops hold rock & roll together, then the vast CashAmerica on South Lamar is what longtime employee Ian Doherty calls, “The big bottle of wood glue that holds all the broken guitars together. We make it happen for all the musicians who are struggling to get where they’re going. Even the really big-shot guys still have bills coming up.”

Maui’s music scene, while vibrant, is nowhere near as big as Austin’s where hundreds, if not thousands of bands play at SXSW, and the South Lamar shop claims to have sold 150 guitars on opening day one year.

 

guitar1

It is not made clear whether 150 bands showed up without guitars, or 150 kids were so inspired by the groove that they went right down and got their starter axes at CashAmerica.

Kamaaina Loan And Cash For Gold will not sell 150 guitars in a day. The two photographs show about two-thirds of our display inventory at 96 N. Market this morning. We like to think that our prices are as good as the musicians enjoy in Austin, and we can confirm that our pawnshop (96 N. Market, a few steps down the street from the guitars) has helped many a Maui musician between gigs pay the rent.

And here’s a pro trick you may not know. Quite a few musicians going on tour pawn their spare instruments. We store them in our bonded, insured warehouse. When the tour is over, the players reclaim their stuff, which is a lot safer way of ensuring their gear than leaving it behind and asking a friend to look after it.

 

#mauimusic #mauiguitar #mauipawn #mauiloan

 

Sell us your gold

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We at Kamaaina Loan And Cash For Gold buy and sell gold every day. It matters to us whether the world gold market is up or down but we cannot do anything about that. Here is a Bloomberg News story that is very down on gold:

“There are no compelling reasons to be in gold,” said Brian Levitt, a New York-based economist at OppenheimerFunds Inc., which manages $251.4 billion. “There are no inflationary pressures. You have a central bank that’s going to tighten sooner than most of its trading partners. That to me portends a strong dollar and weaker gold prices.”

What that seems to mean is that if you are thinking you might sell gold anytime in the next little while, now is the time to do it.

Ditto for silver, which fell under $18 an ounce for the first time in a long while last week.

#mauigold #mauipawn #mauiloanIMG_3682

Gold price is down; reasons to feel good about that

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Gold futures have declined, trading near the bottom of their recent price range, which is $1240 an ounce. (The spot price, which is what Kamaaina Loan uses to buy or lend on gold, is a little higher, about $1253 this morning; silver is below $19, which is the low end of its range, too.)

Thank goodness somebody is buying this stuff

Thank goodness somebody is buying this stuff

When the futures price is lower than the spot price, that suggests the big traders are expecting the price to continue to decline, according to Kitco.

So why should anyone feel good about that? Well, as pawnbrokers dealing in gold, we don’t feel especially good about it; but there is a bigger world out there, and falling gold prices generally (but maybe not always) suggest that people feel pretty good about the future. Despite bad news — fighting in Ukraine and Iraq and Syria, disease wrecking the already not-too-good economies of west Africa, nervousness about elections in America and Scotland, apparently “people” are feeling pretty chipper.

Well, what people? People who control the bulk of the world’s gold exchanges.

And why should we think they have an especially good handle on the future? Now, that is a complicated question. The short answer is that studies have shown that among people who make predictions (which is what futures trading is all about), the trend among the many tends (but only tends) to make a better forecast than any one particular guru.

In the Financial Times, Tim Harford reports (“How to see into the future”) on a study that supposedly supports that idea. Of course, for every trader who offered a pessimistic price, there was another who disagreed with him, but the trend is supposed to be the thing. And the price trend is down.

(There are some real problems with the study, the main one being that its time frame is so short, with participants being asked to make predictions one year out. As we know too painfully, someone who forecast in 2006 that the stock market would crash [and there were such people] was only too right, but he would have looked wrong for the next year and more.)

Anyhow, so the theory goes, precious metals are a refuge in times of trouble, and so when people are expecting trouble, they should be bidding the price up. Instead, the big money is bidding it down, which ought to forecast rosy dawns and blue skies ahead.

#mauipawn #mauiloan #mauigold #gold

 

 

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

 

 

Old bugbears

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wind

It is amusing to watch Mauians, even newcomers, rushing to stock up on rice and toilet paper in anticipation of storms Iselle and Julio.

Buying bottled water makes no sense either.

Batteries, yes. Tank of gas? Half a tank ought to be plenty for most people. Cash? Maybe, where are you going that you will be spending money? If it really does rain 4 to 8 inches Thursday and maybe again Sunday, I am not going anywhere except in an emergency. Nor will I be calling for pizza delivery.

It’s been over 20 years since we’ve experienced a big storm and nearly that long since even a moderately big one. With a population turnover in the neighborhood of 4% a year, probably half the people on Maui (not counting the tourists) have never been through even the outliers of a hurricane.

Stocking up on TP has more to do with memories — second hand at that for most people — of dock strikes over 60 years ago. Distribution methods have changed a lot since, and a TP or rice famine is hard to take seriously now.

But rushing to the stores to stock up doesn’t hurt anybody and probably has more to do with socializing than real preparedness. It gives people a chance to ask each other if they are being prudent and to reassure themselves that, 1) it won’t be that bad; and 2) they’ve done what they can (short of offering a bed indoors to a homeless person, something I haven’t seen or heard any concern about, although the shelterless are one group that could have a rough time even if Iselle arrives as nothing much more than a winter windstorm).

Sustained winds of 55 mph, if that’s what we are going to get, are no scarier than the usual winter nights, where 60 is common.

Should either storm turn out much worse than current forecasts (always possible, remember that the Butterfly Effect means that forecasts more than 5 days out are pretty much imaginary), or if you have the rotten luck to have a tree fall on your car in even a moderate blow, make sure your insurer will honor its contract.

After Iniki, a lot of people on Kauai and Oahu got stiffed. Amongst all the precautions I have seen being passed around, no one has mentioned that one.

And bottled water. Fill a jug from the faucet. County water is just fine.

Why make a police report?

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Here’s an unusual story from Wyoming and South Dakota which reinforces the notion that you should always make a police report when you experience a theft, even though statistics show that the vast majority of burglaries are never solved; and with sneak thefts, the clearance rate must be even smaller.

(One in 8 burglaries are cleared, according to the FBI.)

burglar

It is not unusual for someone to come into our Maui pawn shop and alert us to something that was stolen, in case someone brings it in and tries to cash in. And when we say,”‘Have you filed a police report?” very often they say, “No, it’s not worth it.”

Well, yeah, burglaries are hard crimes to solve (see link above), but without the palapala, how are we to know the item was stolen?

In the Wyoming case, the item — a World War I gas mask — was lost or stolen from a museum display back in the ’20s. In this case, if there was a police report, it has long since disappeared, but the item did have a label saying it came from the “Pennewill Collection.”

Hardly anybody has heard of the Pennewill Collection, but there’s always somebody, and he’s on the Internet.  The label was nearly as good as a serial number, and the mask was restored to the Wyoming State Museum.

Chris Johnson,  the Rapid City pawnbroker who bought the mask — almost certainly not from somebody who realized it was stolen property — said the right thing afterward:

“Any time we hear that something has been stolen, it gives us a little bit of a sinking feeling,” Johnson said. But he added that he was pleased to be able to donate it to the Cheyenne museum.

“You can’t put a price tag on giving something back to the rightful owners,” Johnson said.

The AP story does not make it clear, but apparently the museum had both a record and somebody on the staff who was aware of the theft from 90 or so years ago.