Blog – Page 26

November 22, 2013

iPads were a luxury item even in the 1930s

This year we’re giving you a week’s notice before you camp out like a masochist. Today’s rhetorical discussion question: Is your time worth anything? Anything at all? If Black Friday represents something other than an unmarked holiday for you and yours, an opportunity to do nothing that’s normally required of you, a day on a par with Veterans Day and Christmas, only without an official designation of its own, shake yourself. Here at CYC we don’t underestimate the pull of the mob and the temptation to embrace and be a part of overarching cultural fads (hell, it’s gotten at least one President elected), but thinking with the crowd often makes no sense. Sometimes it can get you trampled to death for your troubles.

Maybe you like retail shopping as recreation, which we can’t quite understand but to each her own. Still, shouldn’t the shopping itself be pleasurable? Leisurely? Not only is Black Friday inherently frenetic, it’s senseless. Literally senseless. It makes no sense. There is no reason why you should be going out of your way to be at a mall on by far its busiest day of the year.

We have this thing called Amazon now. It’s been around for a while. You can buy our book there, but that’s not the point. You can buy millions of other items there too. There’s also eBay, and for those of you less concerned with fraud protection, Craig’s List.* What, are we explaining this to our great-grandparents? How do you not know this? (More rhetorical questions, although not for discussion.)

How much time does it take to purchase anything on any of the above sites? Negligible. You don’t have to lose a night’s sleep, or freeze, or engage in the continuous hell that is associating with other people. And good luck finding another personal finance site that modifies Jean-Paul Sartre quotes. Maybe DQYDJ.net, but that’s it.

Not only do people never learn, it only gets worse from one year to the next. If you work in local news, congratulations: on the last Friday of every November you have a ready-made feature for your highlight reel, until you finally escape to a bigger market and get out of your current hick town forever. Hey, who’s going down to the post office on April 15 to film the last-minute tax filers?

Here’s a quote from one of 2012’s Black Friday imbeciles, courtesy of South Florida’s Sun-Sentinel:

Orlene Thomas of Palm Beach said she came to Town Center when the mall opened at 6 a.m. because she wanted to soak up the spirit of the holiday season. She bought a few things at Macy’s, but said she wouldn’t think of missing Thanksgiving dinner to wait in line, as many people did.
“I would never do anything that crazy,” she said. “Thanksgiving Day is for family and friends.”

It’s good that she has a sense of perspective, then. Think about your own Thanksgivings past, and honestly assess whether spending the day fumbling for conversation topics with your in-laws and drunk cousins is more or less crazy than waking up early enough on a holiday to wait in line at a mall at 6 a.m. In Palm Beach, no less. Why was this woman doing anything other than spending the day frolicking in the sand and surf? It was 78° that afternoon, with no precipitation. Ms. Thomas might not even be the dumbest person quoted in the article:

Michelle Esteves, 28, of Boca Raton arrived at Town Center at 6 a.m., hoping to beat the crowd at clothing retailer Hollister. It didn’t help. She and her friend waited in the checkout line for an hour and 40 minutes.
“It was horrible, but last year we waited in line for two hours,” Esteves said.

That’s 3 hours and 40 minutes of this woman’s life that she’s never going to get back, assuming she never did this in previous years and won’t do it in subsequent ones. She could have knitted her own chiffon skater skirt in less time than she waited in line.

Things you should wait in line from 6 a.m. to 8 a.m. for:

North Korean exit visas
Emergency surgery
Space Shuttle flights
Eternal salvation

That’s our entire list, and yours shouldn’t be much longer.

You’re familiar with the following mental exercise, right? (We probably featured it on the site once, can’t remember where and are too lazy to look.) The store next door is selling dress shirts for the regular retail price of $50. It’s an ordinary weekday, not Black Friday or anything. However, another store across town is holding an 80% off sale! Mildred, load up Junior and the girl, we’re taking the Oldsmobile to Marshall Field’s!

Meanwhile, the Bass Pro Shop down the street is selling Nitro Z-7 sport boats for $39,795. But the boat dealership 30 miles away is selling them for $39,755. Are you going to attach the hitch to your Delta 88 and drive to the other side of the county so you can save .1% off the price of a boat? Of course not, you’re not insane. (No one should own a boat, not when you can make friends with someone who already has one.)

Of course, the point is that a $40 saving is a $40 saving, and if you’re going to inconvenience yourself for that amount of money once then there’s no reason why you shouldn’t do it twice.

And this is just depressing. Same article:

Saul Gelin of Plantation got in line about 6 p.m. Thursday looking to score a 32-inch HDTV for $97.

(By the way, it appears that Mr. Gelin is black, not [likely] Jewish, so don’t accuse us of reinforcing stereotypes about frugality.) There was a publicized limit of 6 TVs available at that price, and incredibly enough, Mr. Gelin later discovered that he was no better than 7th on the list.

(Dammit, now we inadvertently reinforced a stereotype about black people being late. There’s no winning with you, is there?)

Saving money is great. We highly encourage it, so you can purchase assets with your savings. Which will position you to free up more of your time in the future. But spending time, ridiculously long amounts of it, to garner piddling savings? This is no different than the Goldbergian process for making Trent Hamm’s laundry detergent. Wake up late next Friday, fix some breakfast, visit Amazon and start shopping. And be grateful that you live in a society where the kind of nonsensical hyper-commerce your mouth-breathing inferiors are engaging in is not merely tolerated, but encouraged. They’re keeping the internet tubes clear for the rest of us.

*It’s a possessive followed by a noun. Spelling it “Craigslist” is for illiterates.

Our Attempt At Obamacare

November 20, 2013

Image-heavy post today. If you’re on your phone, you might want to postpone reading until you’re in front of a computer.

Exhibit A, a letter we received early last month. Which brings up an aside: Why are we still getting mail in 2013? Anyone of you want to forgo reading Control Your Cash online every day and instead have us print up the posts and send them to you? Let us know. Anyhow, after 12 years and $50,000 or so worth of business, Anthem Blue Cross/Blue Shield didn’t even give us a pair of boots and a backpack before telling us we could take a hike:

We were incensed at the time, but took some sort of solace in company. After realizing that we were merely among the first of millions, it didn’t feel so bad. Besides, this isn’t ABC/BS’s fault. As the letter indicates, the health plan that had been mutually beneficial to both them and us for a long time (they got money, we got coverage, everyone was happy or at least tolerant of the situation) is now illegal. Or will be at the end of the year. Why? Because it violates at least one provision in this, the laughably titled Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, and if you think we’re going to scour all 389,365 words of it (actual count, not hyperbole) to determine exactly which subsection(s) our old plan ran afoul of, we’re not.

But the good news is, as evidenced in the lower corner of the photo, that all is not lost. In fact, we might find an even better deal at our state’s new health insurance exchange! The exchanges, one to a state, are supposed to operate as an Orbitz or Expedia of sorts, only for health insurance instead of hotels and flights. Although there’s one crucial juncture where the analogy self-destructs: Orbitz never goes down, at least not in the dozens of times we’ve ever used it. Then again, technically our state health insurance exchange has only gone down once.

The exchange has been open for 7 weeks now, sufficiently long to have ironed out any kinks, right? That’s enough time to have built a dozen floors of the Empire State Building, or 384 miles of the Alaska Highway, so rewriting a few lines of code in an air-conditioned office with a break room and probably a foosball table shouldn’t be too hard, should it? Let’s ask the members of this happy and ethnically-ambiguous-but-certainly-not-Caucasian family that adorns our state exchange’s landing page:

The “Apply Now” button redirects to…the page shown above, in a recursive display of a recursive display. So instead we clicked the hyperlinked text that reads “sign up for an account”. It goes without saying that we weren’t looking to purchase anything in earnest, so we used a bogus name and bogus other data. Thank you, Howard Stern, for giving us a readily available pseudonym for just such situations:

Why the username has to contain at least one numeral (they said “number”, but including the string “five” in our 1st attempt at a username didn’t take), we couldn’t tell you. Again, that requirement is merely for one’s username, not the password. If you live in Nevada and have a juvenile bent, like us, you’ll be happy to know that the site will accept a username that includes a 4-letter obscenity. Provided, of course, that you include at least 4 other characters, no fewer than one of which must be a numeral.

Given that we were on a site sponsored or at least mandated by a federal government that won’t stop spying on its citizens until it achieves omniscience, we figured it’d behoove us to actually read the Terms of Use this time instead of just blindly signing off on them. The worst Apple can do to us is apply Digital Rights Management to our song purchases. Nevada Health Link wields a little more power over its customers than does the largest company on Earth, for those of you who are still convinced that corporations pose the biggest threat to modern society:

You call it “chilling”, we call it faceless cyber-surveillance that the attorneys didn’t even bother to attribute to a particular entity. Just know that you’re being watched, and that’s that. Hey, at least they went to the trouble of disclosing it, instead of just monitoring us without our express consent. We clicked the boxes – excuse us, Baba Booey clicked the boxes – and we continued to the next exciting page in this charade that serves only to add complexity to what used to be the relatively uncomplicated task of buying health insurance.

A couple of points about “You’re about to begin the employee healthcare enrollment process for .”

Go back to the 2nd image, the one with the happy family dancing in translucent glee. There are two fairly conspicuous buttons at the bottom of that page. We clicked the “Individuals and Families” one, so we’re not sure why being an employee of anyone or anything would factor into this. Besides, the folks at the exchange should know that we’d take it as a gross insult if they’d insinuate that we’d work for someone else.
How the hell is that sentence supposed to end? We’re about to begin the employee healthcare enrollment process for what?

Information from our employer? Seriously, what are they talking about? We were fluxxomed (it’s like flummoxed, only worse) but we’d still crossed every x and dotted every j up until this point, so we continued by pressing the “Next” button. And got this page:

Wait, did it not take? Let’s press the “Next” button again, make sure that the page refreshes:

Well, this is getting awkward. Okay, one more time:

And that’s where they left us. 513 other people found a back door that we don’t know about, so right now we’re among the 99.9998% of Nevadans on the outside looking into this life-saving, labor-saving construct that will protect us as patients and make our care easier to afford. Thank you, elected overlords. Thank you from the bottom of our hearts. Which are fortunately beating at a normal rate, otherwise we might need health care coverage. The good news is that we’ve still got 6 weeks to comply with the law. Just 330 more miles of frozen tundra to slog through.

Stay In Bed, You Fools

Our Attempt At Obamacare

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