i L i n d . n e t

Hawaii woman arrested in Boston airport art display. We’ll read more on this soon!

The crowd that gathered on Kauai last night for Gov. Lingle’s appearance, estimated at “more than 1,100″ by the Adveriser,  comprised 1.7 percent of the island’s population of just about 63,000.  That’s a huge showing of concern and opposition. A comparable crowd on Oahu would have had to be over 15,000.  And if 15,000 people challenged the governor in public here on Oahu, you can be sure that the Superferry, and the governor, would start looking for options. Listen to Kauai, folks.

There’s an interesting discussion over at Hawaii Threads prompted by a new Star-Bulletin solicitation. It started with this:

Someone just called me today offering (1) year of Star-Bulletin every day of the week for under $1 per week

Had to take it.

Plus, I have to support the smaller paper since I want them to survive against the Advertiser.

I firmly believe we need at least (2) papers in this market.

Rock on SB!!!

But the most interesting item, in my view, came in response from a Star-Bulletin writer.

Last I recall, around 60,000 was the point of diminishing returns for us. It’s what the market will bear, and it’s tough for our little press to crank out more than that on a timely basis. So the goal now is to aim at around that number but make sure no papers are wasted. You’ll notice that the street racks aren’t overstuffed with Star-Bulletins — their daily sales are closely monitored.
In the paper business today, it’s better to be small and lean. The age of “major metropolitan dailies” is over.

So according to that viewpoint, the S-B is capped at 60,000 and their goal is simply to distribute that number with maximum efficiency. It’s an interesting way approach an obvious problem (press capacity) positively.

Pacific Business News, in its issue of Sept. 14, tweaked census data to come up with a list of what it calls “wealthiest zip codes”, with 96821, Aina Haina-Niu Valley, topping the list.

On statistic caught my eye–the substantial gap between “median net worth” and “average net worth”. These terms are often used almost interchangeably, but the median is the point where half of the people fall below and half above, while the average adds up all the numbers and divides by the total number. When there’s a big difference, you know that something is skewing the distribution. In this case, my guess is that the numbers are being driven by differences in home ownership.

In this case of net worth, there are quite a few zip codes where the ratio of the median to average ranges from 1-4 to as low as 1-7, meaning that there are a smaller number of very well off people pushing the averages way off.

The gap between median and average income is not nearly as large. Eyeballing the list, it looks like the maximum difference is about 1-1.5, meaning the average income doesn’t seem to exceed 1.5 times the median.

It seems a good guess that the gap in net worth is driven by housing. If you have a house and have built up equity, your net worth soars. If not, you’re dragging along with the majority of people. There’s a lot more reporting to do in order to figure out how this divergence is reflected in social and community issues.

The item I wrote for last week’s Honolulu Weekly is now online. It describes a case of alleged sexual harassment that has spilled into state and federal court lawsuits. It was difficult to deal with, as the subject is sensitive and the parties were both, for perhaps different reasons, reluctant to talk about it. However, it was unusual because the case drew attention last year when Ka Leo printed a small item about police responding to a campus assault. I contacted a UH spokesman at the time, as did several other people at the UH Manoa campus. We were all assured the situation was now on the administration’s radar and would be appropriately handled. But the lawsuits allege that, in fact, the official process failed despite the outside interest and internal red flags. That disconnect gives the case a special meaning or status, in my view, and I decided to push past my qualms and deal with it. I considered leaving out the names of plaintiff and primary defendant, but learned that enough people knew about the situation that their identities aren’t really as much of a secret as it first appeared, at least in a big chunk of the campus. And, by many accounts, it’s one of on ongoing series of cases in that particular part of campus where more attention is obviously required.

Moving on.

Mr. Silverman is another of our complex male cats. He was primarily an outside neighborhood cat who figured out about our cat door and adopted our house as his regular source of food. He is almost always here for meals. In the last year, I’ve taken to bringing him inside most nights, something which he seems to look forward to. He gets to occupy a room of his own downstairs. No other cats to sniff or otherwise make him uncomfortable. He’s the intro to today’s Friday Felines. This time they’re warming us up for the autumn equinox, which is, I think, sometime tomorrow. So just click on Mr. Silverman for a few more photos of a few of our critters.