USPS Plans to Slash Hours at Many Post Offices, Hoping to Save a Buck | Hacker News Reader

USPS Plans to Slash Hours at Many Post Offices, Hoping to Save a Buck

vice.com

30 pointsawoodbeck15 comments

USPS should be making every effort in such a crisis to expand the number of things it does for the community, not decrease them. How about, neighborhood banking services, ID verification, government benefits administration, etc? A whole slew of services that they could be the local outpost for -- in every single town in the US?

Unfortunately, the same Congress calling them to task are the ones tying their hands from being able to innovate what they do in this changing world. And produces a dysfunctional, costs-go-to-the-consumer mentality that is destined a slow painful death.

"In 2006, Congress passed a law that imposed extraordinary costs on the U.S. Postal Service. The Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act (PAEA) required the USPS to create a $72 billion fund to pay for the cost of its post-retirement health care costs, 75 years into the future. This burden applies to no other federal agency or private corporation."

This is the anchor that is killing the post office.

> Between 2007 and 2016, the USPS lost $62.4 billion; the inspector general of the USPS estimated that $54.8 billion of that was due to prefunding retiree benefits.

> Columnist Dan Casey wrote in a July 2014 op-ed in The Roanoke Times that the PAEA is "one of the most insane laws Congress ever enacted". Bill Pascrell, a Democratic House member from New Jersey, said in 2019 that it was rushed through Congress without due consideration, and referred to it as "one of the worst pieces of legislation Congress has passed in a generation"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postal_Accountability_and_Enha...

I have heard that, and I don't know the full detail. But I'm sure it was used as a political pawn to ensure that pension costs wouldn't fall on taxpayers later like other agencies, and that USPS wouldn't be able to expand and incur costs / hire people willy-nilly like it otherwise would.

What we need is for some leaders to figure out what they want the USPS to be. And fund it that way.

Leaders did figure out what they wanted it to be. They wanted it disbanded and replaced by private companies. It's not a secret; it's the libertarian conservative theory of government.

"I don't know anything about this, but I assume that the truth aligns with my personal beliefs"

Cool.

I have often thought that USPS has missed a great opportunity to provide a valuable service and make money while doing it.

I'm thinking about a webmail service with verified email addresses. You go the a local post office with a government issued picture ID, they give you an email address with a name based on you real name (with possibly some variation because of name collisions) with "usps" as part of the domain name. People receiving email from these addresses can have somewhat increased confidence that the email they're getting is, in fact, from someone they actually know.

The post office in Australia (or UK, I don't remember) does something like this but to do with credit cards. They basically make sure that the person applying for a credit card is real by having him/her show up in person to the PO. And the CC company benefits by having a lower fraudulent account rate.

Valuable to whom? I can't remember ever getting an email impersonating someone I know via a legitimate From header with the same name as someone I know.

That is trivially easy to do with a little social engineering. Contact lists are stolen all the time

My immediate impression is that I don't care about (and thus don't value) being able to identify people that are cold emailing me.

Excellent idea. Even if they decide to monetize this, at $12 a year.

It’s great to see how easy it is for bad actors to undermine the institutions Americans depend on. And by great, I mean absolutely awful. I hope that going forward governments are better about drafting legislation that doesn’t allow one person to slowly dismantle everything according to their whims.

I assume this is partly why my BarkBox shipment from USPS, which used to arrive in days, has now been stuck in transit for over two weeks. Bark says it’s because of COVID, but based on the news coming out about USPS, seems more like it’s conservatives trying to dismantle the post office.

americans, this is the time to ring up your legislators. elections will be stolen | rigged in broad daylight. first the president says mail in votes results in voter fraud. appoints a postmaster general that will do his bidding. then consider the legislation passed by R, to get USPS to lose money. once again, Fascism comes draped in an american flag carrying a bible. Remember people are already getting snatched off the streets - only the beginning.

Still subsidizing Amazon though? Cool.

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