Howzit Howard

The human factor in recession and recovery

It's more than a week to Thanksgiving, but Christmas decorations have been up at most Hawaii retailers since Halloween - earlier, in some cases. Maybe this offends your delicate sensibilities, but it's not hard to understand why retailers are doing it. They've been suffering all year from more cautious consumer spending, and this really early decking of the halls is their desperate attempt to get you into the mood for Christmas shopping. Because they know that consumer spending, the largest single chunk of U.S. economic activity, is not about numbers. For every consumer who is spending less by necessity, there are two more who have secure jobs and ample income but are also spending less, because they've allowed themselves to be panicked by the dire economic news reported by people like me. Consumer spending is at least as much psychological as mathematical, and local retailers can save their miserable years, and in some cases avoid going out of business altogether, if they have a reasonably good Christmas holiday season. There is even some reason to hope. I recently bought one of those cool Bose radio and CD players, the small single unit that faintly resembles the Bakelite radios of the 1950s, so Bernadette could hear music in the kitchen. Surprisingly, the Bose store at Ward Centre was actually crowded. A clerk speculated that people were treating themselves to good audio equipment after denying themselves expensive vacations; the net expenditure is small yet the consumer still gets something nice. The thinking behind staycations is similar - you don't feel comfortable spending $12,000 on a vacation to Europe so you spend a few days at a megastar resort in Hawaii, explore an island you haven't been to much, and for a fraction of the European vacation's cost you enjoy a holiday that a mainlander would pay a lot more for. As far as durable goods go - new cars, appliances, and so on - and clothes, so long as your personal situation remains good - you're still employed, with every expectation of remaining so - you can replace or upgrade material goods that regularly need replacement anyway, taking advantage of lower than usual prices, and - this next bit would be true even if you didn't get an unusually good price in this slump - reducing the need to make such expenditures a year from now when your situation may not be so rosy. I recently shared a stage with Bank of Hawaii consulting economist Paul Brewbaker and he made a valuable point about where you spend your money. A former member of the legislature who was in the audience asked about money going to mainland companies or to companies that hire people from the mainland instead of locals. The specific question was about rail, and in point of fact the big rail contract just awarded went to a company that already has hundreds of local employees. But the point Brewbaker wanted to make was that any company doing business here, no matter where it's based or where its work force comes from, winds up spending most of its local revenues in the local economy. To give an example relevant to my present topic, if you buy something at Macy's, well, Macy's isn't headquartered here, but its largest local expense is its payroll, and the people who work for the former Liberty House stores here obviously spending their paychecks mostly in the local economy. On the hand, even if there is not much difference between two businesses based on one being local and one not, there is the matter of scale. Clearly your $100 expenditure benefits a small business that does $2,000 in sales a day more than a large store that rings up $85,000 in daily sales. So if you want to maximize the good that your gift-shopping expenditures does, direct some of your shopping to small, locally-owned businesses. It helps the local economy to buy a toy at the local Toys-R-Us but it helps even more to buy it at locally-owned Thinker Toys.

The perverse appeal of disaster movies

When I was a child, I watched a demolition derby on television. I had never seen one before. I had never known they existed before. Guys drove junkers around, ramming into each other. By the time I tuned in, only a few cars were left, with more than a dozen others wrecked and halted, obstacles on the course. Fifty years later I remember the winner. He drove a station wagon, and for the last several minutes of the derby it only worked in reverse. For a year or two afterwards, playing with Play-Doh, I would fashion little cars (a sharp pencil was good for drawing doors and making holes to represent headlights) and then crash them into blobs. I have never been to a demolition derby, nor ever seen one again on television, but the memory of that one a half century ago is vivid. I thought about it recently when my "Sunrise" colleagues teased me about submitting a succession of car crashes for our daily Viral Video feature. We've all heard the theory that people go to auto races, circuses and air shows to see a crash. No: most normal people don't want someone to be killed, burned or busted up. But certainly there is some truth to what an old boss said in comparing an awful TV show to a train wreck: "It's awful, but you can't avert your attention." It is a true fact that a century ago an impresario bought two aging locomotives and ran them into each other head-on, selling tickets to the event. An appealing idea is to be able to watch something awful with the comfort of knowing that everyone actually gets out alive. That, I think, may be the attraction of disaster movies. The actors all get out alive. (Except Vic Morrow, star of the old TV series "Combat!" who actually was killed during a Vietnam War scene being filmed for the movie "The Twilight Zone.") Sometimes we are even assured that no animals were harmed in the making of the film. With a new disaster film in theaters this week, I read feature revisiting other recent disaster movies, which noted that these films do not merely seek to outdo each other on special effects like tornados, tidal waves and meteor impacts, but have also fallen into the habit of blowing up famous landmarks for our viewing pleasure. We have, of course, the satisfaction of knowing that when the film is over, the White House, Eiffel Tower, Big Ben, Colisseum and other cool places are, in fact, intact. The guy who made the new film also made "Independence Day," so one assumes he will be under special pressure to outdo, not merely his rivals, but himself. And if he really put himself under the gun, maybe the film will even have some sort of story line. There have been some really stupid screenplays in this genre, including but not limited to "Twister," "Armageddon," and "Towering Inferno." What would a screenwriter have to do to write a disaster movie script that tops all these others for quasi-verisimilitude?

• No powerful but boneheaded official who won't listen to the heroes and keeps reassuring the president that everything is under control.
• The president can be neither a wonderful father figure, who eventually entrusts everything to one hero, nor an evil hack who makes bad decisions because he's hung up on how it will play with the public.
• No two scientists can be divorced but one still carries a torch for the other and they argue a lot but eventually work together and fall in love all over again.
• No self-centered teen can become mature and caring during the crisis, in the process rediscovering the wisdom of her parents; and her boyfriend can be neither an apparent bad guy who turns out to be good, nor an actual bad guy who cons the girl for awhile but then she figures it out.
• No TV reporter so obsessed with getting an exclusive that she (she seems usually to be a she) does something irresponsible even after being cautioned not to by her cameraman (who seems always to be a he).

Hollywood is obsessed with the idea that drama is conflict, so avoiding these cliches would be difficult, leaving the writer with nothing more than the conflict between his characters and the crisis itself.

Oh, air sickness bag, where is thy sting?

Ever eat something that doesn't agree with you, and the effect hits later when you're doing something that cannot readily be postponed? My wife's eldest daughter was in this situation as she and Bernadette boarded their flight home from Las Vegas. Bernadette, trying to be helpful, told a flight attendant her girl was feeling slightly queasy and it might be a good idea to put her on the aisle if possible. The flight attendant immediately wanted to bump both of them from the flight, which would have made both of them late for work the following day. Only some fast talking by Bernadette kept them aboard. Her daughter, as it turned out, soon felt better and was never sick. This happened in the spring of 2008, before H1N1 was a twinkle in a pig's eye. But Bernadette was struck by how eager the flight crew was to bump two passengers on the merest suggestion of what the flight attendant called "a severe illness." That term may have some legal or regulatory significance, because when Bernadette was doing her fast talking, what sealed the deal and kept mother and daughter on the plane was pointing out that she had never reported a severe illness of any sort, only the possibility of some nausea, a medical condition so mild it can be induced by turbulence in someone who has no medical ailments whatever. Obviously my reason for bringing this up is the recent case of a woman who was bumped from a United Airlines flight after some pills she took for a leg condition made her queasy. (More pills than not will make you queasy on an empty stomach. Even vitamin pills can do that.) She was sick in the lavatory and then decided to ask for an air sickness bag just in case it happened again. Before she knew it, she and her daughter were ejected from the flight on suspicion of having the flu. The flight crew, which knows as much about medicine as I do about flying a jet, nonetheless is allowed, indeed required, to make decisions from time to time on who gets to fly who gets bumped. This can be handled with varying degrees of understanding. The woman in this case thought she was treated like an illness rather than a person. I rather doubt, though, that any amount of diplomacy and kindness suffices to reduce the sting of being kicked off a flight because you asked for an air sickness bag before needing one. For most people, the sting of protracted travel is far worse than than a discreet upchuck. Some reports said United Airlines declined to rebook the woman until the following day, forcing her and her daughter to overnight in Florida with a relative. But the woman says what actually happened was that United tried to book her immediately on an American Airlines flight to Honolulu, and she declined, because it made her feel morally queasy that she was, apparently, too sick to fly United, but not too sick to fly American. Everyone rushed to interview the woman, and then get reaction from United. I would have preferred to get reaction from American. Someone should have asked an American spokesman, "Does your management know that United sends its sick passengers to you?" I wonder if American flight crews, now that they know this, will peer intently at all passengers coming from United for signs of illness, and, if so, will they bump someone whose ashen features might not otherwise have attracted their notice? The problem with the policy is not, you will be surprised to read, that flight attendants are not doctors. The problem would exist even if they were. The problem, I suggest to you, is that it is possible to carry the flu, or a cold, without showing symptoms. It is not possible to catch everyone who is carrying a bug, and the chance that bumping one lady from a flight of several hundred people will leave the cabin innocent of illness is too small to justify the policy. I leave you with a joke: How do you get onto an American Airlines flight? Get onto a United Airlines flight and start sneezing. Bon voyage!

Pet peeves, or, Those Hollywood stars are animals!

People don't always post home movies of their pets on YouTube. Sometimes they enter them in contests like the one being held Saturday at Blaisdell Center. Apparently it's the Cannes of curs. I didn't get the spirit of the event quite right when, Friday morning, appropos of nothing, I offered a Top 10 Animal Movies list, which I now add for your perusal:

1. "Day of the Jackal."
2. "Dog Day Afternoon."
3. "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof."
4. "Monkey Business."
5. "Of Mice and Men."
6. "The Lion in Winter."
7. "A Fish Called Wanda."
8. "Jaws."
9. "Snakes on a Plane!"
10. "Planet of the Apes."

I just discovered that this blogging software does not allow me to change the numbers to count down, Letterman-style. Bummer.  I made "Planet of the Apes" first because my children love  both of Charlton Heston's most famous lines, "Damn dirty ape!" and "Solyent Green is PEOPLE!" Left to my own devices the top choice would have been "Snakes on a Plane!" because I consider it the worst movie ever made and hilariously funny as a result. Compared to it, "Attack of the Killer Tomatoes" is just another You Tube posting. I would also like to specify, since there are several very different movies called "Monkey Business," that I meant the early Marx Brothers film. Now you can tell me your favorite "animal films."

Should new strings be attached to Waiawa Ridge?

[Note about the following post: this refers to a would-be Gentry Homes project. I misidentified it. The post is fixed now but if you read it already I wanted to make sure you saw this. HMD] Good land use planning involves, among many other things, requiring developers to install roads, sewers and lights for the homes they're building. Otherwise residential development privatizes profits while socializing costs. Developers oppose this when they can, because it's their job to maximize profits, and sometimes they can do that by worming out of responsibility for new infrastructure. Don't blame them; we should blame ourselves for not always insisting on what's necessary for the quality of our life. The single greatest planning mistake that is commonly made, is underestimating the negative impact a new development will have on traffic. For example, the Allure Waikiki, a high-rise now being finished in the first Waikiki block of Kalakaua, won approval because, and only because, not one but several levels of governmental and citizen review deluded themselves into believing the existing roads can handle the extra traffic. The existing roads can't handle the existing traffic. Any idiot can see that. But it's hard to say no when faced with pleasant, intelligent developers with lovely artists' conceptions who present mostly accurate information about economic benefits of a new high-rise. Also, our officials have made the probably wise decision to allow dense development in the already-urbanized part of Oahu to keep the North Shore reasonably rural. Sometimes, though, a development plan is so unwise that we really ought to stand in the way of it. Waiawa Ridge is in line to have 12,000 homes one day.  The only reason there isn't someone up on the ridge planting surveyers' stakes now, according to Andrew Gomes of the Advertiser, is that thye developer missed a financing deadline and its agreement with Kamehameha Schools fell through. Waiawa Ridge extends northeast from the H-1/H-2 merge. Can you imagine an extra 12,000 cars driving down to that vicinity? Rail will be built right by the H-1 at the bottom of the hill. Perhaps a condition of developing the ridge should be building a road down to the nearest rail station, and paying for a big parking structure. I'll suggest that such infrastructure will raise the value of the homes to Gentry Homes. A local developer may write it and offer sensible reasons why my logic is wrong and I'd like to hear it. But keep in mind, if these 12,000 homes are built and a wormhole to the train station has not been built, the taxpayers will likely wind up doing it.

The newest challenge to Hawaiian Airlines

Hawaiian Airlines marks its 80th anniversary Wednesday with much cause to celebrate. It's one of the very few profitable airlines at this end of the solar system. It dominates the interisland business as it has never done before and it has shown it can compete with the big boys across the Pacific. The airline's chief executive, Mark Dunkerley, a trained stunt pilot with detailed knowledge of most of the jobs in an airline from having worked those jobs himself, has proven to be tough as nails while remaining civil, a combination in short supply in most industries. The rank-and-file of Hawaiian, including a variety of second and third generation airline employees some of whom came from Aloha Airlines after that carrier folded, have stepped up to give the airline the best on-time record there ever was and ever will be in the airline business. Airbus jets are on order that will allow Hawaiian to fly farther than it does now, reaching mainland cities deeper inland or markets in Asia. Yet Dunkerley worries. He always worries. He considers worrying part of his job. When the transpacific routes are performing well, he worries that this will catch the attention of other airlines who will launch competing service. He's seen that happen before; so have I; and it is happening again. It happened before when Aloha Airlines, years back, decided to join Hawaiian in adding flights to the mainland, though Aloha tended to choose secondary markets not served by Hawaiian. For example, Hawaiian flew to San Francisco; Aloha flew to Oakland. Hawaiian flew to Seattle; Aloha flew to Vancouver. Hawaiian flew to LAX; Aloha flew to Orange County and for awhile to Burbank. It happened when Northwest saw Hawaiian making good money out of Portland, though in fairness Northwest was flying here from Seattle before Hawaiian did. Hawaiian has occasionally had competition from United on certain routes. And all the mainland carriers noticed demand for direct flights to neighbor islands, which took the ginger out of interisland flights. It's happening now with the newest challenge to Hawaiian's hegemony, such as it is, from another airline named for a state. Seattle-based Alaska Airlines has decided that Hawaii is going to be a big part of its manifest destiny. Alaska has almost 50 flights a week to Hawaii. It flies here from Seattle, Portland and Anchorage. This week, it launched daily service from Oakland, with each day's service going either to Kahului or Kona. On Tuesday it announced that next spring it will do the same thing from Sacramento and San Jose. For Hawaii tourism this is good news for two reasons. The first is that any new airlift is good news because people might fly it. The second is that by committing planes to Hawaii routes Alaska is voting against committing those planes to Mexico, a rival sun-and-surf destination for Californians and one that is often cheaper. For Hawaiian it means direct competition from an airline that is more nimble than the megacarriers Hawaiian usually competes with from the Left Coast. An example of the nimbler mindset: Alaska is serving Hawaiian cuisine on its Hawaii flights, and handing out little packets of macadamia nuts instead of cheaper packets of pretzels. This is a direct response to Hawaiian's attempts to "make the Hawaiian vacation begin at the gate on the mainland." Very smart. This is a serious competitor. Watch out for hula dancers next, and I'm guessing they won't be wearing fur and mukluks.

Fall into the (budget) gap

With the state fiscal year one third over, state revenues are down 11%. That's not 11% below normal, it's 11% below last fiscal year, which was already down 9% from the year before that. A fifth of the state's accustomed revenues simply aren't coming in. If Sen. Inouye wrote us a check for $200 million it wouldn't cover the gap. Some state senators are calling on Gov. Lingle to let the school system have $35 million in discretionary funds she's been sitting on. Maybe she will, especially if the school system gives her something in return in the way of fiscal prudence. But the crisis will remain. School officials, btw, estimate each Furlough Friday in the school system saves about $5 million. The reason it's not more is that moves like this create some costs even as they save money in other ways. Since this is a tough problem, and one that involves arithmetic, some people have given up on trying to understand it, preferring to blame it on someone and adopt the Tooth Fairy view that the problem will be easily resolved if the bad person has a conversion experience or moves to Maine or something. Whether your pet target is the Republican governor or the Democratic legislature or school system officials or the unions or something else I didn't think of, the fact is that this crisis is bigger than all of them and none of them created it. The Wall Street meltdown of last year converted what would have been a mild, garden variety recession into a serious and long-term evaporation of trillions of wealth, a wholesale freezing up of credit markets, and a tenth of American workers unable to find jobs. The scariest thing about general excise taxes running 13% below the already-depressed levels of last fall is not what it tells you about state tax revenues but what it tells you about consumer spending and business spending. Taxes are down because spending is down, and down a lot, with no clear sign of bottoming out. The key fact about Hawaii's economy is something important about its manufacturing sector. As Paul Brewbaker puts it, "We don't make anything." This cushioned our downturn but will slow our recovery. We're probably going to have to deal with insufficient state tax revenues for two or three more years.

The arithmetic of being out of work

At any given moment, for the past few months, there have been 20,000 to 21,000 people in Hawaii getting unemployment checks. The count is updated weekly, and also shows about 2,500 first-time claims per week. If no one was out of work, and suddenly we began getting 2,500 new claims per week, and all of them stayed jobless, it would take only eight weeks to get to 20,000. What does that tell you? It tells you that a lot of people are turning around and finding new jobs very, very fast. I'm mean they are seriously hustling. Because there is no way for the total number of claims to stay so close to flat, week after week changing by no more than a few hundred one way or the other, unless most people thrown out of work are quickly getting new jobs. Yet there are others who are out of work so long that they are exhausting their benefits, which can last a year or more depending on the circumstances. Maybe you're think they're just lazy. They figure, there aren't that many jobs out there anyhow, so they'll take some time off, make some nominal calls to keep the benefits coming, and get serious about it after a few months of R&R. Some are taking care of an aging relative, making repairs to the house, catching up on necessary chores that there was never time to do while working. Some are doing some charity work, helping those who are homeless as well as jobless. Some go back to school and get your degree, the better to be employable in the future. I'm not going to waste time lecturing some hypothetical lazy bum who's spending his day on the carport drinking beer and watching the teenagers come home from school. He doesn't read this blog anyway. Let's focus on job skills. Because I know people who are hard workers, reliable employees, people who want to work and can pull their weight, but their lack of job skills limits the number of jobs they can do, and the jobs they can do are the ones in short supply right now. I've seen good people make the following bad choice: they get a semi-skilled job while young, it pays reasonably well, so they don't go on to college because there's no need. They see college as nothing but a doorway to a good-paying job, and they have one already, so why bother? The logical fallacy in that thinking is that the job you have today is no guarantee that you'll have a job tomorrow, and there sure as shootin' is no guarantee of similar jobs for the taking for the rest of your natural life. Look at the lifetime jobs now vanishing on the Gay & Robinson and Maui Land & Pineapple plantations. Some people think MLP made some bad decisions, but so what? I don't agree, but let that pass; the more important point is that there is no guarantee, ever, that a company won't suddenly get a dumbass CEO. If anything the reverse is true: most companies eventually get someone in charge who's not qualified to be. As for Gay & Robinson, was there ever a more responsible employer, one that cared more deeply for its workers? And the jobs still vanished. If you know anyone in high school or college, here's a message to convey to them: no job is ever forever except by accident, and that doesn't happen often. It's way more common to be thrown out of work, sometimes suddenly, and, yes, sometimes when a lot of other people are in the same fix. And there's never a guarantee that there will be ample openings for your preferred line of work. You need options. You need multiple skills. Anyone who dismisses the need for more education by citing someone who has a poor education but makes a good living is missing the point - that the other person makes a good living at the moment but due to lack of education is at great risk of not being able to find another good job when this one goes away. Like you, I know truck drivers who get good wages. That doesn't mean lack of education won't screw up your life when you get thrown out of work. Anyone tells you different, don't their advice on any topic from now on. They don't know what they're talking about.

Music Post: A little night music

The term "night music" - in German, "nachtmusik" - in French, "nocturne" - once referred to a light piece meant to be performed in the evening at a social gathering. It was refined party music. Mozart's "Eine kleine nachtmusik" is the best example of this. Somewhere along the 1800s, as classical music got bigger and more dramatic, "night music" came to mean, for some composers, music that conveyed a sense of darkness, music of shadows. Much of what Arnold Schoenberg wrote sounded like night music in this spookier sense, from his famous "Transfigured Night," which I will excerpt on my radio show Saturday, to his Second Chamber Symphony, a late work that returns to tonality; I'll excerpt four recordings of it. Sergei Rachmaninoff wrote dark music. Some commentators get so hung up on his obsessive quotation of "Dies irae," the Song of the Dead, that they don't notice how dark his music is even with those bits ignored. In the first half hour of the show I'll play the scherzo from his First Symphony, which shows how the shadows creep even into a straightforward fast movement. Gustav Mahler could write blazing sunshine music but he was better at the neurotic stuff. His Sixth Symphony, "Tragic," is my favorite, and I consider it the most successful of the really big symphonies, those over, say, 45 minutes, by any composer. I'd rather hear it, for example, than Beethoven's Ninth. But shortly behind it is the Seventh Symphony, a five-movement work marred only by the false triumph of the finale. Or maybe I've simply never heard it conducted properly. Anyway, two of the three inner movements, the second and fourth, are called "nachtmusik," but the real night music, for me, is the movement in the middle, which I will play on the show. The dark, nocturnal sound can be richly experienced in the finale of Prokofiev's Violin Concerto No. 1, and in the first movement of William Walton's Cello Concerto, both of which I will play in the second hour. Finally, you'll hear excerpts of three versions of Cole Porter's "In the Still of the Night." First, from the movie of his life, Kevin Kline sings it, totally getting the mood. Then Helen O'Connell sings utterly against the mood in a hopped-up double-tempo recording. Then you'll hear the Neville Brothers, also partially against the mood but in a way that works better. What's interesting about this song is the way it peaks early. The highest and loudest note of the song, when it's done right, is the beginning of the question, "Do you love me, as I love you?" Or is this a passing thing? The lover/singer expresses worry about the love affair, fearful it will be transient, as the music slowly retreats back into the nocturnal still from which it came. "Howard's Day Off," a program of "classical music and related materials, packed in authentic juices," airs live on Hawaii Public Radio stations KHPR Honolulu, KKUA Wailuku (Maui) and KANO Hilo (Big Island) and streams live on www.hawaiipublicradio.org Saturday mornings between 5 a.m. and 7 a.m. HST. Facebook members can join the Howard's Day Off Appreciation Society founded by Max Cacas of Washington, D.C.

Music Post: Symphony confirms planned Ch. 11 filing

A week after the board of directors voted to do it, the Honolulu Symphony finally confirmed Friday its intention to file for protection from creditors under Chapter 11 of federal bankruptcy law. The Symphony, which spends more than $4 million a year on wages/benefits, currently carries $1 million in debt. It gets 30% of its revenue from ticket sales that have been strong but has fallen short of the other 70% as corporate giving fizzles in an economic downturn. There are two significant points in the lengthy news release confirming the orchestra's plans for the Chapter 11 filing. The first, in a quote from Halekulani Corp. executive Peter Shaindlin, is that "even now" it is not too late for government, corporations, individuals and foundations to step in and do something to save the Symphony. This, if I'm reading it right, is an exceedingly nice way of saying certain parties that traditionally support a city's symphony orchestra haven't done anything for this one, even though it's quite good and has enhanced Honolulu's reputation as a city that nurtures all musics. The other is that there is a reference to the "full orchestra" business model proving to be financial unsustainable. I'm pretty sure I know what this one means. The "full orchestra" refers to a basic fact of classical music, which is that comparatively small ensembles can perform Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, the entire Baroque repertory, and a selection of works from the 20th century when small resources became popular again, stuff like Stravinsky's "Histoire du Soldat" and Schoenberg's Chamber Symphony, for example. You need more musicians to perform Wagner, Tchaikovsky, Rachmaninoff, Sibelius, Copland, Ravel and so on. The full orchestra isn't really a business model. It's what you need, or else you're only able to play part of the classical repertory. What the news release is getting at is that the organization simply isn't getting enough financial support to field a full orchestra. So it may have to punt. I'll write more about this as the matter unfolds. For now, I'll close by saying Chapter 11 is not a bad thing if you're broke. It keeps the wolf from the door, buying time, under the supervision of a bankruptcy judge with broad powers to order vendors not to cut off supplies, to figure out what to do next and how.