International Mail Service Suspensions | Hacker News Reader

International Mail Service Suspensions

about.usps.com

166 pointstigerlily156 comments

This is part of DeJoy’s wider cost-cutting plans that were approved in March and are coming into effect now. The are transitioning towards ground transportation vs air mail, increasing postage costs, reducing office hours, automating some processes, and more. It’s all to mitigate a projected $168b loss over the next 10 years. This wouldn’t be needed if they weren’t mandated to pre-fund their retirement accounts or buy separate health insurance, but that is up to Congress to fix.

Everyone should be mandated to pre-fund their retirement accounts. Not doing so is part of why we get so many fewer government services while paying ever higher percentage of GDP.

Don't forget, it's a service. It doesn't lose money, it costs money. Otherwise please always say "lost" instead of "costs" for all military spendings, and all other government agencies.

I agree with the sentiment but for all intents and purposes, pretty much any organ within a State is run like a for-profit corporation. Their "income" is taxation, fines, etc.

i don't see how that's relevant

This doesn't sound right. It's a pretty big claim.

I suspect the claim is along the lines of stories like this https://news.usni.org/2021/09/22/navy-plans-to-cut-1000-civi..., where the U.S. Navy is working to fire 1,000 civilians due to budgetary pressure.

Even government agencies (even the military!) can't spend inordinately, they have to fit within a topline like private companies have to.

There are differences of course but there's a lot of similarity as well.

I believe the stark difference is, that a private company can spend what it earns, while the budget of government agencies or the military is basically arbitrary (committee-decided). Usually we would weigh agency spending against the value their service directly or indirectly provides. While a company's spending is weighed against its direct earnings.

incredibly simplified

Well, a private company can raise capital, so it can spend beyond what it earns, similarly to how the government budget can exceed tax receipts by issuance of debt and other methods.

The military budget is decided by a sort of committee (many of them, in fact, and not just Congress), but private companies all have ways of parceling out a budget as well, it's not as if most staff are literally paid out of their own personal direct sales. And the way that budget is decided almost invariably involves committees. The current DoD funding model was actually taken from what Ford Motor Co. used in the 60s.

When we were at risk of government shutdown earlier in the week, our office within the agency was relatively immune to the potential shutdown as our civilian staff are nearly all paid out of 'working capital' funds which are modeled after a direct earnings model, rather than being paid out of 'appropriated' funds which would have been at risk absent action from Congress.

> Most of the quasi-confusion can be traced back to the 1971 Postal Reorganization Act, which eliminated the old Post Office Department, replacing it with the US Postal Service. The act was intended to make the USPS self-financing from its own revenues, and to make it an independent, non-political public service. Prior to the PRA, postmasters (including the postmaster general) were political appointees; rates were set by Congress, and the POD had to go through the appropriations process to get the money it needed to operate.

USPS is a special case of government services which is neither a traditional agency nor a government-owned corporation. Its got a weirdly specific charter that was carved out to protect private shipping companies- for example they cannot buy their own planes. They simultaneously have to deliver mail to all US addresses with uniform pricing 6 days/week AND be operate without tax dollars. I use the term loss here because that is what they use, for example in their annual report: https://about.usps.com/what/financials/annual-reports/fy2019...

https://postalnews.com/blog/2015/05/09/postal-myths-2-the-us...

What a boondoggle: the private shipping companies use the USPS to deliver to unprofitable routes as they have no such mandate. Imagine if NASA were similarly kneecapped to protect private space companies - it'd be awful.

Knowing our government you may have predicted a future reality.

NASA's been kneecapped by Congress, several presidential administrations, and itself for decades. If private space corporations like SpaceX eat NASA's lunch in the next decade or so, it'll be in spite, not because of them.

Maybe for the better - SpaceX, et al haven't incinerated any crew on the ground, blown up any crew during the ascent, nor burned up any crew in re-entry by ignoring their engineers in favor of their political appointees.

A service for advertisers and salespeople to put paper products in a special box I have in front of my house?

> Otherwise please always say "lost" instead of "costs" for all military spendings, and all other government agencies.

I think you might have reversed your suggestion?

No. They said the USPS lost x mil. Dollars. By the danke token, the military lost x tril. Dollars.

This was my cynical suggestions for a consistent terminology.

Is it? I have been trying to send mail to Reunion for over a year, and it was stopped during COVID. Dejoy is worse than human shit, but … I don’t know that this is his doing.

What on earth has DeJoy (I'm really not a fan) to do with service disruptions in Germany due to flooding there to give one example linked on that page? The USPS is handing off parcels and some countries struggle to deliver them for various reasons, Covid being one of them but if you check out the different countries there are a wide range of events that can disrupt deliveries.

"This wouldn’t be needed if they weren’t mandated to pre-fund their retirement accounts"

Retirement account funding is a cost of employing today's employees. It should be paid out of today's revenues.

If not, you could easily end up in a situation where your retirement benefit expenses exceed your revenues (let alone profits) and you have no way to pay.

No other company has to do this. They created this rule specifically to make the USPS run at a loss so they would have a reason to gut it. And that's what they're doing now, gutting it.

John Oliver had an episode about this: https://youtu.be/IoL8g0W9gAQ

"No other company has to do this."

This is false. Every private company has to do this.

do you have a source for this? the USPS claims "Unlike any other public or private entity, under a 2006 law, the U.S. Postal Service must pre-fund retiree health benefits. [1]" and everything else i've seen on the topic agrees that this is a requirement unique to the USPS.

[1] https://about.usps.com/who-we-are/financials/annual-reports/...

Private companies have to fund retirement benefits. The US government doesn't -- which is why there's arguments over why the US debt is around 20 trillion (current bonds outstanding) or over 100 trillion (including unfunded social security benefits).

Also, unfunded US govt retirement benefits come in two forms:

A) future pension and medicare costs, for people who are alive today, and

B) future retirement benefits for current and former govt employees

IMO (B) should be prefunded (or at least have an actuarial value on the govt balance sheet) because it's an actual liability.

But whether or not (A) should be treated the same way depends on whether the benefits are fixed as of now, or whether they can be reduced/eliminated if they take too large a part of the total budget at the time they're due to be paid.

Agreed, although (a) the fact that social security is the "third rail of politics" suggests that while it's not a contractual obligation like employee retirement benefits, it's effectively an unavoidable obligation; and (b) even if the future value of benefits to be paid out isn't recorded as a liability, the social security taxes paid should probably be treated as "deferred revenue" since that revenue is at least theoretically being gathered for the purpose of paying the future benefits in question.

Yes, taxes collected by govt effectively go into a single pool. The money is not ringfenced for particular purposes.

Both in the UK (where I'm from) and in the US (where I live now), there are separate taxes ('social security' in the US, 'national insurance' in the UK), but the AFAICT this is just a trick to obscure the true rate of payroll/income taxes.

There are two separate things:

1. pensions (what I was talking about)

2. retiree health benefits (what you are talking about)

For #1, all private companies have to pre-fund them.

For #2, private companies don't usually have to pre-fund them because (i) most companies don't offer medical insurance for retirees, and (ii) even if they do, they are discretionary (i.e. unlike the pension, the benefits can be cut/eliminated).

Correct. The 2006 law being referenced was trying to lock in retirement health benefits to USPS workers that were generally not available to private sector workers. It was one of the many pieces of union pork in that bill, and there is no end of irony that it is being portrayed as some nefarious Republican plot to kill the post office. It is not about how the benefits are funded but that congress mandated these benefits that disadvantages the post office by raising their labor costs.

Of course the post office is advantaged in many other ways -- e.g. it is illegal for a private agency to deliver mail, only the USPS is allowed to do that. Fortunately, the post office is magnanimous enough to allow private courriers to deliver mail if they purchase a stamp and then cancel it! Why must they purchase a stamp and affix it to the letter? Because it is illegal to place anything in a mailbox (even if you own the mailbox) without postage and only the USPS can collect postage. The USPS is also the only company that it is illegal to undercut by offering letter delivery for less than the USPS charges. IIRC, you have to charge at least six times as much, thus FedEx will never be able to outcompete the USPS on letter delivery as it's only allowed to operate under the "extremely urgent" mail loophole which requires higher charges mandated by law.

"The USPS actually enforces these rules from time to time. For example, Equifax learned a terrifying lesson in 1993. Armed USPS inspectors raided the company’s Atlanta headquarters to determine whether or not the letters the company had been sending via FedEx were indeed “extremely urgent” as required by the Private Express Statutes. The letters didn’t pass the test, and Equifax ended up having to pay a $30,000 fine."[1]

You can read more about the Private Express Statutes on wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_Express_Statutes

See also the American Letter Mail Company, which was a private rival to the post office that was outlawed by the government.

[1] https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/26424/why-cant-you-start...

"it is illegal for a private agency to deliver mail"

At least there's some rationale for this. National postal agencies typically have monopolies, but the flip side is they have universal service obligations, i.e. they have to deliver mail to even unprofitable locations, e.g. rural areas.

This is analogous to taxi regulation: in theory, the monopoly granted to medallion holders has a flip side: rates are fixed, and they can't discriminate between riders based on destination.

In practice, taxis in NYC skirt these regulations pretty often.

Yeah, I understand the logic. But I was pointing out that yes, while Congress does mandate retiree health benefits for postal workers, it also advantages the USPS in other ways. It is a weird monopoly, with all sorts of carve outs. I am not advocating for some kind of drastic postal reform one way or another.

> No other company has to do this. They created this rule specifically to make the USPS run at a loss so they would have a reason to gut it.

This is a great reason to not get your news from John Oliver, as everything you have said in this comment is false (except I'm sure the link works).

"Prefunding" a retirement account is the only way a private retirement account is ever funded. Normal people call it "set aside" or "fund". The alternative is to

1) not have a retirement benefit,

2) a social security pay-as-you-go system, which is not legal for any private company to have. In a pay-as-you-go system, there is no pension fund but workers get paid benefits from the company's general revenue. You can understand why that may be legal for the government, but not a private business (which can go bust). Private businesses are forced to set aside money for retirement benefits as the liabilities accrue. Obviously this creates a pain point when an arm of the government is privatized. But that doesn't mean we allow private companies to pay pensions out of general revenue just because they used to be public in the past.

Even those companies which no longer offer defined benefit plans but only make some 401K contributions still make those contributions to a fund in the worker's name each year, before the worker retires. They "prefund". All private companies "prefund". Have you heard of the phrase "pension fund"? That's the fund into which companies must make payment ahead of retirement when a worker is working and then the worker draws those down when he retires. Forcing companies to set those funds aside ahead of time for each worker is how we fight the temptation to skimp on those contributions and kick the can down the road. Companies that do skimp on pension fund contributions are committing fraud and this creates a big mess as the government has to bail them out or workers end up not getting their retirement checks.

What's interesting is where this misinformation came from as it's so popular on the left. There are all sorts of conspiracy theories about "gutting" the post office, but what I think is the key problem is the refusal to acknowledge there might be a tension between the generous retirement benefits negotiated by the postal workers union and the fact that the post office is facing financial shortfalls. And instead of acknowledging these real trade offs, it is some supposed unfair accounting rule that is causing problems for the post office and not, you know, all the money they are promising to pay workers when they retire.

Right. Generous retirement benefits for public sector employees are a trick played on taxpayers by politicians and those responsible for negotiating the contracts (those representing the govt, and unions representing current govt employees).

Most people think government employees are paid much less than they would be in the public sector, but that's because it's not obvious to most of us:

a. just how much it costs to fund a defined-benefit pension scheme, when asset yields are so low

b. how early people can retire with a 'full pension'

c. the low performance bar and difficult of firing a govt employee, even for cause

What does not pre-funding a retirement account look like? Social security I guess? And we all know that's a great system.

Japan postal service stopped shipping to most of the world last year and are still (I believe) not fully back to world-wide shipping. Supposedly because of JAL contracts and a lack of commercial flights on which they'd usually piggyback.

I was going to comment about this as well. We've been unable to ship packages from Japan to the US for the past 20 months. I heard that as of yesterday we are now able to ship again, but all custom forms & address labels must be printed rather than hand-written.

Is that for legibility or are they fearful that you might smudge covid-19 onto the labels? (Which is pretty backwards given how rare contact transmission is).

My assumption is legibility, should be a nice cost savings when you don't have to read handwriting.

My guess is that it is because electronic customs info is now mandatory (e.g. US STOP Act), and the printed labels come from a system that can transmit this info.

With handwritten labels the postal service at the shipping end would have to read them and push the data to an electronic system manually.

In Finland handwritten customs labels are still allowed, but you need to register the customs data online since Dec 2020 (or the cleark can do it at the counter).

This is correct: https://www.post.japanpost.jp/int/ead/index_en.html

I have had no problem sending packages to the US the last month. You need to use the new online tool to create the label though.

I think that this has mostly been US (and maybe other countries as well?). From experience with me and friends, Europe and Asia has mostly been fine (though sometimes in periods with exceptional delays and a small number of lost/disappeared ones).

Finland had around 70 entries on the list of unreachable countries about a year ago. Haven't checked recently. But I noticed that letters to central Europe which took 2-3 days pre-pandemic, nowdays regularly take close to 2 weeks.

Back in March 2020 the Posti allowlist was 32 countries, the rest were suspended. The list was gradually expanded with more countries (with 64 allowed countries in Oct 2020), and the allowlist was replaced with a list of unreachable countries early this year.

Currently (https://www.posti.fi/en/customer-support/sending/country-inf...) there are 20 unreachable countries due to COVID-19 (AU and NZ are not among them).

Your experience with letters matches mine, they take 2 weeks to Europe regularly now.

I run a small online shop in Switzerland and from my POV it's only the US. We have lost more than 50% of shippings to the US about a year ago. Typical arrival time was way over a month even thought its quotet at 10 days for light letters.

As we mostly ship letters we just sent to every place, even if they are currently not 'open'. ~95% arrived within 1-2 months or so in those critical places.

No idea what's going on over there. The rest of our shipping just got a few cents more expensive but on average just got faster the last 2 years.

I ship to Switzerland (for one) from the US. Never lost a shipment and delay is about one week. This is including this past year, when other shipments to other countries were delayed (though not lost). Completely understand it may work differently in reverse but just wanted to put a data point out there.

Are these all tracked? Because when I buy something from the us it's always expensive shipping and tracked. Some sellers told me it's necessary so it would actually arrive. (It was mostly art, so I am not sure if this is actually normal).

Tracked letters are like 4-5 times as expensive for me, which doesn't make sense for an average order of like $20 :/

This was First Class International Package service, which is tracked by the customs form number.

> Effective October 1, 2021, the Postal Service™ will stop selling international postal money orders destined to Anguilla, Antigua and Barbuda, Bahamas, Barbados, British Virgin Islands, Dominica, Grenada, Jamaica, Montserrat, Saint Kitts and Nevis, Saint Lucia, as well as Saint Vincent and the Grenadines. A customer who wishes to purchase an international postal money order destined for these countries must do so before October 1, 2021.

I know there's a lot of talk in this thread about commercial flight disruptions and supply chains, but what's up with this? That's almost the entire non-US Caribbean that you can't send money to through USPS.

They have also suspended deliveries to Australia.

Yeah I couldn’t figure out why my US deliveries were failing to show up until I checked my junk mail and noticed messages saying all my orders had been cancelled (from multiple online stores) and I had to contact each one separately to arrange refunds.

Online shopping is a clusterfuck lately of no stock and shipping issues, and unrelated-but-relevant, Gmails spam filtering lately is atrocious.

More data points from New Zealand, 2021:

36 parcels delivered, 11 parcels undelivered

Packet loss rate: 23%

From the US, 3 months: SparkFun: I placed an order on 2021-05-23, it arrived on 2021-08-16. Worse, the NS73M FM transmitter and the Raspberry Pi Zero W inside don't even work.

From the US: Nooelec: I ordered an SDR on 2021-06-09, and it still hasn't arrived.

From the US: 4 parcels from eBay sellers were delivered.

From China: From AliExpress, out of 31 orders, 5 of them have not been delivered. I tried to appeal one of them, AliExpress insist that it was delivered and refused to refund. Therefore I now have no recourse but to write negative feedback when parcels aren't delivered before the 90-day feedback deadline.

From China: From eBay: 4 undelivered (order dates between 2021-07-31 and 2021-08-14), 2 delivered.

From Hong Kong: From eBay: 1 undelivered (order date 2021-06-28)

From Germany: From eBay: 1 undelivered (order date 2021-07-06)

From Lithuania: From eBay: 1 delivered (order date 2021-02-05, delivered before 2021-03-19)

From Taiwan: a Christmas present arrived from my girlfriend in about 3 weeks. A birthday present from my girlfriend arrived very quickly, in about 10 days!

From France: a birthday present from parents arrived after about 3 weeks, thankfully just in time. Another parcel from them included an eBay order from France to France that was delivered quickly.

From Switzerland: another birthday present from parents, arrived after 6 weeks. They'd taken it to Geneva airport because they thought it would be quicker.

Probably gmail wants you to click on "not spam" for each, so they can verify you actually have a relationship with each miscategorized(on purpose) email sender.

> Gmails spam filtering lately is atrocious.

I've gotten 3-4 emails in my inbox in the last week that all are 'from' a different Russian / eastern European woman, have body text == the very short subject line, and have a pdf attachment. It feels like 2003 levels of spam filtering, but I haven't looked in my spam folder to see what it is blocking.

Same case here. Also as if they shared a Google Doc with me and left a comment tagging me and so I received an email.

This is because Australia currently prohibits Australian from leaving and drastically limits the number of people allowed to enter, meaning that flight capacity has been slashed accordingly.

They're planning to finally start opening up (to citizens only for starters) in November.

Correct.

This is just cost control.

I just had FedEx deliver a package from the US to Australia, it took 48 hours (and four days for the warehouse in Sydney to send me an email about customs inspections fees) and cost US$32 for several kilos of electronics. So freight is expensive but the expense depends more on the volume of the shipper.

Where is your proof? This has been like this since COVID started. Dejoy is destroying usps but this ain’t his doing.

Do you want a receipt? A tracking number?

This is due to supply chains choking. Lack of truck drivers, containers spots on air cargo. If they is choice to pick up food or mail, I guess is other contractors and logistics partners are picking transporting food and medicine instead of mail.

The linked article focuses on New Zealand because it's from a New Zealand publication, but service is actually being suspended to 22 countries.

It would probably be better to link to the USPS notice directly, which is mentioned but unfortunately not linked to in the RNZ article: https://about.usps.com/newsroom/service-alerts/international...

https://about.usps.com/newsroom/service-alerts/international...

Afghanistan

Guadeloupe

New Zealand*

Tajikistan

Australia *

Laos

Reunion (Bourbon)

Timor-Leste

Bhutan

Libya

Saint Pierre and Miquelon (Miquelon)

Turkmenistan

Brunei

Martinique

Samoa

Yemen

Cuba

Mayotte

South Sudan

French Guiana

Mongolia

Syria

How much of this has to do with Australia and New Zealand maintaining closed borders?

Outside of Australia and New Zealand, I can understand most of these (gee, I wonder why Afghanistan?), but what is going on in Samoa that prevents mail delivery?

Very few flights due to COVID and no vaccines.

Saint Pierre and Miquelon is less than 20 km from the coast of Newfoundland (Canada). It shouldn't be that hard to get stuff delivered there.

Also Samoa is right next to American Samoa, which is a U.S. territory.

American Samoa has had tight border restrictions, including from the US mainland.

Samoa even more so, given they had a high death toll from a measles epidemic there two years before covid struck.

More directly, Samoa is only allowing one cargo flight per week right now and it doesn't go to American Samoa.

That doesn't make much sense. USPS can just deliver to France and let them deal with it. Or drop it off in Canada and they can forward it.

There's a ferry that runs between St. Pierre and Newfoundland a bunch of times every day. It's still running. Regular flights to St. John's, Newfoundland, even Paris, France are still happening.

I don't understand this at all -- it's not like USPS was literally flying a plane to St. Pierre, was it?

I am Canadian and I just learned about this, wow

People always think Canada has only one international border: with the US. But in reality, Saint Pierre et Miquelon is so close to Newfoundland that there is no international water between them. So in addition to our land and maritime borders with the US, we have a maritime border with France. Also one with Greenland (Denmark), but that's too arctic for anyone to care about.

When Prohibition was active in both the US and Canada, St. Pierre & Miquelon was the place buy smuggle booze into Canada (and the USA).

In recent times, it was the source of tax-free, cheap Canadian cigarettes and Canadian booze. Neither of which the local French population consume, but are more than happy to sell it to Newfoundlanders visiting :-)

I doubt that "too hard" is really the issue here. yeah, if USPS wanted to figure it out, i'm sure they could. but what actually happens is that the USPS contracts somebody else to figure it out for them, and that contractor charges USPS a price for that.

if the price is worth it, USPS pays. if the price isn't worth it, then USPS stops delivering there.

I guess the closed borders mean significantly less flights into those countries, therefore significantly less room in the cargo holds for mail. My guess is cargo planes are still flying in goods, but they cost a lot more so that USPS has decided it's losing too much money...

As far as I know, passenger flights find out the weight of their passengers and luggage, and then sell the remaining space/weight allowance for cargo, I wonder if that's how most overseas mail are delivered. For time-critical or heavy stuff this system is a bit random, obviously, so if you want to deliver something heavy you'd buy space in a cargo plane instead...

French Guiana is where ESA launches rockets from. Anybody willing to bet if JWST is going to get a tiny little extra delay because the US can't get paperwork down there?

Australia has to do with Australia Post and the backlog. They've closed down intake for October, to try and clear the backlog, and introduced new customs requirements.

Domestic delivery for Australia Post is backlogged significantly[1]

There's reports that AusPost's parcel facilities have so many packages to process, that they're queued up outside (in some kind of undercover area) waiting to be processed.

I only have anecdata to support this, but my own parcels from even one or two suburbs away have taken over a week. A parcel from Newcastle to Sydney sat for two weeks in one of the major parcel facilities with no updates, presumably in the aforementioned pile-up.

A parcel from Germany showed being processed outbound in Germany in late April, and then complete silence until it turned up in an AusPost facility in early September.

It's all very random, though, and not consistent - two packages from the same seller in Melbourne sent two weeks apart arrived in reverse order one day apart - one taking one week, the other three. They passed through the same processing facilities in tracking.

I've now given up having any idea how long things will take to arrive.

[1] https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-10-01/expect-parcel-delays-...

If you keep going down the page, you get actual narratives about the problems. For Australia, for instance, Australia Post has closed the office that handles incoming mail. New Zealand is more vague, but is basically turning down mail processing due to COVID restrictions.

USPS implies it is because of COVID restrictions. NZ Post is accepting mail, but there is a shipping capacity crunch and very little air cargo capacity.

Another way to look at it is USPS did not anticipate a crunch by buying capacity in advance.

NZ Post allows us to ship packages from the US to a US warehouse which then ship to NZ. This is still operating with delays. Amazon seems fine with deliveries not being delayed at this point.

International AirMail mostly travels in the holds of international passenger planes - those are just not flying - package deliver to NZ (DHL/Fedex/UPS) is mostly OK, but plain old mail, not so much

I count four widebodies between Auckland and California (LAX/SFO) in the air just as a random check on FR24 as I write this, so there's certainly capacity for some mail if USPS want to buy it.

Do people in NZ normally buy stuff through the US Amazon website? Is that because there are more options/better pricss?

Amazon just isn’t that good here. The shipping is either impossible and requires you to use a third party service which gives you a US postal address, or shipping is outrageously expensive.

It’s one of the things that happens when you live too far away I guess.

Last few orders I made was something like 8.99 for some random shoebox size of items (worth maybe 50-100 usd). So basically far from expensive. NZ local shipping is probably half that price.

The cost of living here is very high. Goods, especially electronics, cost a lot more than the USA. Electronics costing 50% more here than in the USA is common.

I disagree with the comment left by lostlogin, I have found most products on Amazon ship to New Zealand, including products sold by third parties, though I would agree fewer independent stores are shipping to New Zealand. I think this is partly due to prices increases from the likes of Fedex and USPS.

Amazon Australia ships to NZ but the product selection is very poor.

AusPost has a similar service which I've found to be basically useless since most of the packages I want to use it for don't come from a retailer and instead are sent by family.

The asterisks for Australia and New Zealand indicate that mail sent using "Priority Mail Express International" (the service that essentially the entire rest of the world outside the US calls "EMS") is still going through. If anyone really needs to get something from the US to those two countries, at least it's an option, and IMO it's much more reliable than typical mail.

there was an announcement earlier this week saying domestic delivery will be delayed in some areas as well. if i recall correctly, this is due to some internal changes and not entirely due to the pandemic.

I was about to ask "why Timor-Leste?" but answered my question by checking the state dept page:

> Country Summary: Timor-Leste has seen isolated instances of police responding to protests with force and the use of tear gas. Stone throwing attacks on vehicles can occur during gang conflicts and periods of unrest. Gender-based violence is high in Timor-Leste, and sexual harassment is fairly common.

https://travel.state.gov/content/travel/en/traveladvisories/...

That's not normally a reason to suspend delivery. It's Timor Leste's postal service's problem to do the final delivery.

I can still send mail there from the UK (which seems to have no restrictions) or Denmark.

https://www.postnord.dk/en/service-interruptions/reopening-o...

The list has been updated to include New Zealand but service to many of these countries has been suspended for quite a while.

Originally linked article: https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/national/452764/united-states-pos...

do we need the USPS anymore?

Do you still want mail? USPS is obligated to provide mail to every place in the USA no matter how far away or small the communities might be. So yes we still need them.

Honestly, I don't know that I really do want mail any more. It's pretty mind boggling that for <$1 I can send an envelope anywhere in the country in a matter of days. That's cool and all, but I can't think of the last time I even thought that would be necessary. Important bills are electronic now a days, and I haven't received a holiday/birthday card with $5 from relatives in decades. I frequently forget to even check the mail box, and when I do, it is filled with traditional junk mail and the random politician solicitations. Oh, and the random mail for previous residents at this address.

I think this is an extremely bubbled view of how mail works in the United States and the relative access of the internet. A good chunk of the United States doesn’t have reliable internet, but will have consistent mail service.

The question posed: Do you still want mail?

I responded no. You come back with some out of scope non-sense about thinking outside of me. That's not the question.

If the question was "should the mail system be abolished", we can have the discussion you want, but maybe you should ask that question. The original question as actually posted followed with "yes we still need them".

Wow cute response.

I love when people ask me a question, and then someone tells me that's wrong because I had a different response than theirs. It's not a "what's your opinion" type of question. It was a simple yes/no question directly targeted to the reader. My no response in no way suggested that nobody else anywhere ever should no longer receive mail. The response I received was just trying too hard to twist things.

The problem is that rural USPS is _not_ reliable (source: have lived in multiple rural locations). USPS is reliable in cities. Internet is also reliable in cities.

Most people have phones. For those who don't, alternate infrastructure that leverages the internet could easily exist, and would be way more efficient than the USPS network.

Watch this get downvoted, because people really emotionally _care_ about USPS.

'Provide mail' can mean different things and its certainly not ever 'place'. It is very common in mountain towns to not have mailboxes at least not residential so you have to go to a post office 5-15 miles away. Meanwhile Fedex & UPS will deliver to your door.

That said the USPS is certainly an essential service and probably does serve certain niche locations better than UPS & Fedex.

USPS charges the same, low (55¢) rate to send to these remote locations.

FedEx won't tell me the cost without an account, but for UPS a domestic, ground letter (<1 lb) costs between $8.76 and $11.01, or $32+ for Alaska/Hawaii etc. Added to that, "remote areas" have a surcharge which is about $4 in the 48 states, $10 in Hawaii and $32 in Alaska.

https://www.ups.com/assets/resources/media/en_US/daily_rates...

https://www.ups.com/gb/en/shipping/zones-and-rates/area-surc...

How would we deliver absentee ballots without a postal service?

you'd go to the polling location and vote

This would disenfranchise many disabled and those who must travel for work.

My grandmother passed a few months ago, after a nearly year-long illness that left her bed-bound. There was no way she was getting in the car, load her into a wheelchair or gurney or something, then sit in a queue, in the middle of a pandemic, to vote. But she sure as hell was able to exercise her civil rights at home.

So somebody like her would have a very valid excuse to vote my mail (and could send it via FedEx or ups), but an able bodied person should walk to the polling place, show their ID, and vote. You get 4 hours off by law to vote

Uh no I don’t.

not really. Everything they offer, private industry offers a better version of. Who sends letters? Email is way faster and cheaper Sending a package? Amazon, ups, or fedex Need a passport? USPS shouldn't handle this, since they're so incompetent at handling passport applications

Private couriers have no obligations to provide service to anyone. One of the important things about the USPS is that they have an obligation to support the continued operation of basic public services, and they’re organizationally held accountable through their governance structure.

Public services that our government provides are done so without regards to people’s ability to use email, electronic banking, or drive to the nearest FedEx/UPS store in the closest city.

It's amazing how passionate some people are about the mail service. Any question like this _will_ get downvoted.

I always hated USPS when I lived in the US. Service at the post office was usually terrible, clerks were clearly coasting on the fact that they were hard to fire (customer service was poor), and delivery rates were hit and miss (whereas somehow the private carriers always managed to delivery.)

Now I live in a country with no mail service. It's fine. I do everything online. If I need to order something, I pick it up from the DHL store in town. The one time that something was sent via certified delivery, a motorcycle messenger delivered it.

It said military and diplomatic mail would not be affected, unless noted.

What a joke.

Someone can correct me, but generally I think the military receives mail in the US and delivers it via their own planes.

I'm also not sure why that'd be a joke even if it wasn't the case.

Relevant: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_mail#U.S._Military_...

The military and diplomatic service have their own couriers that handle their mail.

> It said this was due to "impacts related to the Covid-19 pandemic and other unrelated service disruptions".

I think it is time that the causality of the pandemic is re-evaluated. Covid-19 didn't cause any significant loss to the workforce. The cost-benefits analysis of the public-health measures needs a serious update.

So, something I’ve been wondering here. USPS cites an unavailability of transportation as the reason, and apparently rental car companies are having a rough time of it as well.

Is there a lot of deferred maintenance on vehicle fleets that’s catching up to us now? Lack of parts? Maybe some tie to the chip shortage of all things seeing as how automobile manufacturers are also having to shut down plants due to a lack of chips?

I doubt many cars are driving to New Zealand even for mail.

So whatever planes normally carry the mail must be unavailable, as it doesn’t appear to be saying the countries are refusing it.

This article [0] may shine some light on what is impacting rental car companies.

[0] https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2021-09-13/car-rental...

I liked how another poster explained rental car business models, and how the pandemic royally screwed them:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28568896

In most cars you don't often see anything that would require replacing a computer chip-enabled part. From BLS, "air-conditioning repair/electrical system repair" and "Vehicle audio and video equipment" accounts for <4.5% (presumably based on rounding to 0%) of all vehicle repairs, with <0.5% being attributed to audio/video equipment.

https://www.bls.gov/opub/btn/volume-3/americans-aging-autos....

I’m assuming transportation either refers to ocean liners (doubtful since they’re slow), but most likely air travel. Airlines sell unused cargo space. With decreased international travel I assume airlines have less unused cargo space to sell.

>Lack of parts

I'm not sure if the situation has improved or not since last month, but lack of replacement air lines required by trucks has been a brewing problem for the freight and transportation industries.

Previously discussed: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28476934

Lot of issues. Different countries , airports and ports have different vacination/quarantine requirements. That keep changing from day to day. Imagine most of your ships, planes, pilots or seafarers getting sick or stuck in quarantine somewhere or the other for almost a year now.

Things get better as govts wake up to such non uniform policies. In the mean time expect all kinds random break downs.

A lot of industries got hit by whiplash. They were assuming a pandemic would spark a massive recession and contraction in demand, so they cancelled orders for supplies, shut down production, and battened down the hatches. But due to truly historic government intervention, and reduced demand for in-person services, consumers actually had a huge amount of money to spend on manufactured goods and demand very quickly shot up. Combine this with ongoing disruption of the supply chains due to outbreaks, and we have an unbelievable clusterfuck in goods with deep, global supply chains.

> Is there a lot of deferred maintenance on vehicle fleets that’s catching up to us now? Lack of parts? Maybe some tie to the chip shortage of all things seeing as how automobile manufacturers are also having to shut down plants due to a lack of chips?

Lack of mechanics might be bigger than lack of parts; I haven't heard of any unusual service parts shortages (I had a long wait for a replacement door chime, but seems within the usual FCA tom-foolery), but my local dealer is down several mechanics. And my local independent service shop is booked out quite a bit farther than they were in 2019.

Peak oil predicted this sort of thing, given whats also happening in the UK atm with petrol availability and natural gas prices, this is smelling more and more like the 70s only without an OPEC to bribe our way out of it.

I don’t see how oil is relevant to post offices closed and air traffic stopped due to COVID restrictions

> Peak oil predicted this sort of thing, given whats also happening in the UK atm with petrol availability and natural gas prices, this is smelling more and more like the 70s only without an OPEC to bribe our way out of it.

There's a global pandemic disrupting everything, it's been in the news, maybe you've heard about it?

not sure that explains why saudia basically halved oil production in 2019 or north sea oil peaking in 2004 and now all but at zero production.

Saudia Lying about their oil reserves seems a lot more plausible to me.

You're the only one talking about oil, I never said it explains anything related to oil. TFA makes absolutely no mention of oil, you're completely off the map.

The port of LA had a queue of container ships 40+ deep waiting at sea unable to unload for weeks ~a month ago. Are you going to say peak oil caused that too? It's not like those ships were out of fuel.

It mentions "lack of transportation issues" It doesn't specify the cause, you know what causes transportation issues in New Zealand? 5 year high oil prices and no sign of increasing production with north sea oil down from 10mn barrels a day to 1mn a day and Saudia oil production down from 20s to 10s.

Im saying the whole thing smells like an oil crisis.

But yeah, downvote me for thinking just maybe there is a lot more to this story than we are being told.

don't forget how the biden administration is kneecapping domestic oil production because of politics

No ones Parking brand new airplanes in the desert because of a lack of gas, they’re doing it because of a lack of passengers

> Peak oil predicted this sort of thing

You very much haven't explained how.

> in the UK atm with petrol availability and natural gas prices

Petrol is cheaper than it was a decade ago.

I figured the gas prices were largely Russia pressurinh Europe to accept Nordstream 2.

Natural gas price increases are due to reduced delivery from Russia.

Reduced petrol availability in Great Britain (note: no problems in Northern Ireland) is due to Brexit.

That's not news worthy! I'm from the US, living in NZ, and let me tell you, unless the delay is more than 6 months, the average time it takes won't change significantly. My mother still sends me b/day cards and has learned to send them on my b/day, but for the following year !

I'm a kiwi and get things shipped from overseas all the time. Your post is simply untrue. Why are you spreading misinformation?

overseas? well that's a lot of places; USPS to NZ can be insanely slow, everybody knows that

It's normally about 2 weeks for me, USPS from east coast USA to NZ

I was only making a joke, because my experience is a shocker, but then again, I'm referring to letters being mailed, on a stamped envelope. If you look at something like shipments from Amazon, that's a whole different story. But I'm not sure they're the norm.

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