U.S. Postal Service Nears Collapse

The only problem that I see with 'crashing' the system is the amount of time that would be devoted to the blame game. If that could be skipped so that we could jump directly to the debugging phase, then I'd say---let it crash. Also interesting to notice which kinds of problems get fixed before blame assignment versus blame before fix---I've no clue as to the pattern, just something I've noticed...

Previous submission:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2593671

The article starts by claiming that "Delivery of first-class mail is falling at a staggering rate." I have never seen this to be the case. The article also fails to substantiate this strange claim.

Delivery of first-class mail is succeeding at a staggering rate. I have not had a piece of mail get lost in the US in decades, and delivery coast to coast is often within 3 days.

When an article gets its basic premise so wrong it is usually not worth bothering with the rest of it. It is better to tell the student to rewrite the entire essay and take a look at the second draft whenever it is ready.

It's not talking about success rate of items that are mailed; it is talking about the number of pieces that are mailed in the first place. The latter number is declining.