A sure thing

Smart people make good investments. The rest of us either get lucky, wish we could get lucky, never get lucky, or sit around and call everyone who makes good investments lucky.

Sure thing investments are not difficult to figure out. Long ago, smart people in Hawaii figured out the obvious. There’s no new land, so buy up what you can, sit on it for awhile, sell it at great profit and retire to Las Vegas, or charge a lot of money for someone to use your land.

Smart business people figured out that things like sugar or caffeine is mildly addictive so they invested in products that are mildly addictive, cost little to make and sell, yet are very profitable.

Can you say, Starbucks?

I think  a sure thing for Hawaii investors would be water. Or orange street cones. Water is obvious. There’s not much fresh water around, what we have is being used at an alarming rate and will surely cost us more in the future. Meanwhile, we’re surrounded by water we can’t use. Figure out how to make the water we can’t use into water we can use.

Or, go for an investment in the company that produces and sells orange street cones, those 24-inch high seemingly self-multiplying pylons of plastic which dot Hawaii’s deteriorating streets and roads. We’re going to need plenty of them.