Consuming

Hi All,

Its been awhile, as most of you know by now I have been cleared for surgery! So my gastric bypass will happen, baring me smoking or drinking a bunch of water the night before on November 18, 2013. After that it will be 6 months to a year of recovery. The good news is if all goes well I will be working again by week 2.

The Plan is back on, delayed by a month, and this delay has wreaked havoc on my finances. But enough about that, this post is about my proclivities as a consumer.

While I don't particularly want to argue about the nature of consumerism, I do want to expound on my distaste for used items.

The problem is the illusion of a good deal.

For certain items, purchase of a used item is a completely decidable problem, does the item work or not? This goes for things like various media, books, etc. However after the items whose operational modes are working or not working things get a little tricky.

I don't like used text books because inevitably they come marked up resulting in information being highlighted that I don't necessarily need, the result is a book that is less useful to me than a new one. For personal items, like clothing or dishes, I cannot get beyond the question of who wore this item before me, maybe that is a little OCD but the result is that used clothes, pots and pans, and mattresses are a no go for me.

Then we come to my personal favorites, complex items, cars, computers, telescopes, mounts. These items can be purchased used, but only after careful inspection, typically this only applies to cars. The issue is not just who used it before but how well did they maintain the item. Refurbished electronic items are a no go for me since they have a higher probability of failure maybe even a lower Mean Time Between Failures. Unless I can inspect the item, I am not going to purchase it, simple as that.

For telescopes they problem is that there are mechanical mechanisms that need to be properly used an maintained otherwise they must be replaced. As far as I can tell almost no one in our society is mechanically inclined anymore hence I do not trust used mechanisms. If I buy a scope on the cheap and have to immediately replace the focuser what is the point, I probably am not coming out ahead. Now if I know the person I am buying from that is another matter entirely but buying something off ebay or astromart, fuggetaboutit.

Mounts are a no go period. The issue is that the guts of the mount are usually garbage at the time of sale. This is because there are many more people who don't know how to maintain there mounts than do know how to maintain there mounts. The result is usually stripped worm gears, bad firmwares and all around terrible tracking from used mounts.

Some may say that I am too picky about what I am willing to buy, but hey to each his own, I am just never going to put anything on my skin that I don't know has come from a factory or further purchase something where the previous owner/manufacturer messed it up.

Denials and Delays

Hi all,

I know I promised a post on cross platform IDEs (Integrated Development Environments) but unfortunately life has intervened. A couple of weeks ago I got word that my insurance company was denying my pre-approval for the surgery on the basis that the surgery was not a covered benefit.

The irony of course is that there are still documents available on the website or my insurer referring to bariatric procedures as a covered benefit. This, along with the fact that the weight-loss center was told that the procedure was covered are the basis of my appeal. I mailed it about a week ago. This is my next immediate move.

As for the move after that its unclear. I need to get insurance that will cover the procedure, thus I may end up attempting to cancel my current coverage and go to an insurance policy which is on the newly set up exchange in Arizona. However, I think this will be costly as I have several pre-existing conditions. Another option is to sue my insurance company, which I really do not want to do since it will be costly. The other options available are to appeal to the insurance regulator in Arizona or go on Access.

All of this has delayed my plans, including The Plan. My goal was to have the surgery in mid to late October so that I would be recovering over the course of the end of fall beginning of winter. Then I would hit the ground running, putting the plan into motion. Now it appears that I am not going to have the surgery until mid to late November at the earliest. This delays my plan, and to be honest, I it has put me in a sort of purgatory, as my body continues to betray me.