Rotting food, dead animals and chaos at postal facilities amid cutbacks | Hacker News Reader

Rotting food, dead animals and chaos at postal facilities amid cutbacks

latimes.com

44 pointsilamont31 comments

You’re telling me that baby chicks are arriving dead to farmers across the Midwest. Food and medicines are spoiling from being stored in facilities that are not designed for storage. Old people and vets on VA plans are being forced to wait for their prescriptions sometimes for over 1 week after they are due.

All because this critical infrastructure lost $6B last year?!?!

The DoD’s base annual budget for 2020 was $633B - and they will spend every single penny of it.

The USPS spends less than 1% of our base DoD budget to deliver timely mail to every single registered household in the US.

Oh, by the way, this corrupt administration PLANNED TO LOSE $1.06T BEFORE THE PANDEMIC.

And, taxes collected from individual citizens make up approximately 60% of our Federal budget. Taxes on corporations make up just 7%. The rest is a smattering of funds that come from trade, interest from the Fed, and other sources.

If you ever wondered who this American government works for... it is not “We the People”.

The citizens are not treated like they directly pay for more than half of government expenses. They don’t even matter enough to support consistent communication infrastructure.

Your elderly grandparents can’t have your medicine on time because it costs the postal service an average of $0.033 above their collected revenue to mail each item...

...while each Javelin missile we fire at some poor goat herder in Afghanistan costs the same as a small house in the suburbs of a major US city.

The level of corruption in this administration and this entire government is more than nauseating - and the fact that they are doing with my tax dollars adds insult to injury. The shock is wearing off - and below it is nothing but rage.

Isn't payroll tax kinda like a 'per employee' corporate tax? In most cases, what is the point of looking at your pre-tax salary? It just seems like creative accounting between the company and the government(s). In most cases, all of the decisions you or your company make around salary deal with take-home pay. Companies must be paying people more specifically to account for payroll taxes. That amount is effectively the corporate per-employee tax.

No, not in any material way.

- When there's a rise in payroll tax across the board, I'd be extremely surprised all companies across the board raise their salaries. By default, a payroll tax hike will go out of the employee's cut.

- There are many huge companies whose payroll and profit are largely decoupled (as in, employee salaries are not a great indicator for company profit). Think McDonald's, Amazon, Walmart.

> The level of corruption in this administration and this entire government is more than nauseating

Let's be fair, it's not just this administration, it's administrations before it as well. How many bombs and rockets did Obama drop and fire?

No, not all administrations are equally corrupt. And Obama "dropping and firing rockets" is not an example of corruption.

https://www.govexec.com/management/2016/02/usps-records-firs...

Killing thousands of innocent people is not corruption at all. /s

This should be a reminder that mail, while on the decline for two decades, still is an important component of our day to day lives, and that we still heavily rely on its on-time delivery and reliability. I do not want to get political, but it seems impossible to me that mail would be entirely handled by the private sector. Mail, like many utilities such as public transport or water treatment, is rarely profitable with a low-enough cost to make it affordable for everyone. It really breaks my heart to know that people may not have had enough food on their table because their paycheck or allowance was delayed in the mail.

A package mailed to me in early June from the UK to California that touched down in Chicago in mid June is totally awol today. I used to have a tracking number that told me that it was in Chicago but since I reported it missing that has now disappeared in online searches.

I am not a fan of either of the two parties and putting politics to one side it is unclear why there is the reduction in equipment and force at the USPS at a time when there is a huge increase in deliveries due to the SIP directives.

It is extremely clear why this is happening. By reducing the efficacy of the USPS, they can delegitimize it. Then when voting time comes they can say "Hey look, they couldn't even get you your package, what makes you think that the the USPS can safely and securely handle your vote". And guess what, they'd be right because the USPS won't be able to do it safely b/c they actively ruined it. This has been the common tactic of the republicans for a long time and it is continuing to work.

And this policy has a name : Starve the beast.

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

Again, disregarding politics why is the USPS, which is well funded and overwhelmed with business delivering Amazon and Shopify packages, downsizing? This isn't a federal directive is it? You would think they would be expanding to meet demand.

It could just be that the monopoly online retail business models that broke the high street are now breaking the post office too. hiring a non postal service ceo/pmg sounds like a terrible idea also https://federalnewsnetwork.com/management/2020/07/usps-warns...

The decommissioned mail sorting machines are part of a long-term plan to respond to reduced demand for paper mail. https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2020/08/20/postal-se... The USPS has been saddled with a series of unfortunate events and in my opinion should be full-backed by the US government. That said, this article seemed apt focus on hyperbole rather than attempt to articulate an accurate story. Dead animals, bugs, ballots... The same brand of doom and gloom so popular in the media these days. I suspect the problems reflects the capacity to accommodate increased demand but I wouldn't know because I have to read between the lines of several articles intended to get me riled up instead of telling me the real story of cause and effect.

Anyone else read this and feel rage bubbling over about Trump and his enablers? I'm not trolling, either. I used to not get _that_ emotional about politics, but lately I feel like I'm about to explode.

Have you considered whether the way you feel reading the news is by design?

Have you considered the underlying actions were designed to solicit an emotional reaction via news channels, I.e. trump is trolling to own the libs, at the cost of watching the country burn (literally here in CA).

Trump is responsible for the fires in California?

Edit: seriously people? He’s a monster but let’s accuse him of the things he’s actually done. To make stuff up is not helpful.

Of course not. Although, he did blame the last fires on insufficient raking of the forest [1]. If he actually stands by it, and didn't do anything to address the lack of forest, uh, raking, then one could reasonably assign him responsibility for the current fires. I don't advocate for that, because raking forests makes no sense.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/nov/19/make-america...

You're exactly right, which is why we've ended up with a reality TV president. He knows how to play this game, and the game is now very much in favor of ppl that know how to play it. This is the leader we get when enough mid-life trolls spread their pepe love.

Not mutually exclusive. The news heavily optimizes for pageviews and one way of doing that is to optimize for anger. (Other than awe, which is hard to generate, anger has been shown in studies to be the most viral emotion.) However, they wouldn't have any raw materials for this if certain folks in government weren't routinely doing stuff worthy of anger.

Trump and the mainstream news media exist in this unhealthy symbiosis, where they create this toxic emotional environment for a whole country because both of them would fade away into nothingness if they didn't.

The thought behind your comment seems to be "Trump is no different than other recent Presidents, just he's treated differently" without saying it in so many words. Is that indeed what you think?

Republicans have long complained about the media being mean to right-wing presidents (or, sometimes, remembering Clinton and Carter, to white presidents, where Obama is considered a PC outlier), but this sort of non-defense is a convenient dodge in terms of having to actually defend Trump's specific actions...

The irony here, too, is that it also ignores right-leaning media's long history of fear-based politicking.

No. I'm suggesting a new (?) media purpose is to rile people up, divide and polarize them. It may have worked

Politics and reporting are scummy, biased games, but none of what is happening now is business as usual.

If the stories about what is currently happening in the Post Office were reported in a completely factual, completely neutral way, they would still be enraging.

Yes I have. Then I consider the hysteria news agencies would be doing if Obama did this. And I feel the current coverage is laughably sedate.

I feel like op established that this type of thing does not usually affect them. Are you suggesting the LA Times has cracked the code to finally reach the psyche of op? Or can we take them on their word that the USPS situation rankles them. Seems silly to suggest that they don’t really care, “but for the media”.

The media has been evolving over the years, it's not a sudden shift. However if you are looking for one, I suggest watching the Shadowgate documentary on youtube (released in the last few days). It's about a specific government program whose aim was exactly to "crack the code to finally reach the psyche of op."

I think op likes the Postal Service

> Packages piled up, blocking the aisles and the heavy sorting machinery. Boxes of steaks, fruit and other perishables rotted. Rats dashed across the floor. At one point, Scantlebury said, the “whole building was filled with gnats.”

Keeping in mind this is the result of a conscious decision made at a high level, at one of the times the postal services has been most crucial to the functioning of a nation in modern history...

Can you rephrase this in a way that doesn't make it aggravating to hear?

Thank goodness there are still news agencies going out and getting stories at the ground level. Live animals dying slowly while packaged in boxes is a fact that they uncovered, not hyperbole.

I generally try to avoid bringing my political opinions to Hacker News. I think a general attitude in this community is that this is a refuge from politics. I also try to keep my politics out of the work place. That said, we're living in a world where even wearing a mask is political! Now the post office is political! I almost can't check my politics at the door any more; I too.... feel like I'm about to explode. You're not alone, but hang in there! (the 'hang in there' part is just as much me talking to myself as it is to you ;-) )

I don't know, but at this point its not really "politics". We have a malicious actor in the whitehouse and his cronies ruining the country. There is nothing political about this, its just a fact. Whether a person chooses to believe (or cannot understand) this doesn't invalidate this fact. You don't have to subscribe to a particular political party to be upset with what is happening.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com