P.S. Let the post office do banking too so we can take some wall street's pie as well.
Personally im happy we at least have one company who can get me stuff in a decent amount of time. But i gets it’s fun to throw out f the big company the government should do that. It’s not like it took thousands of well paid people years and years of work to develop that supply chain so im sure it’s as simple as “let the government do it”.
It’s the same in every Uber/Lyft comment thread. “It’s just a simple backend app why do they need so many people”. “I could do that in a year with a small team”. Yeah have fun dealing with every single state, city, country’s different regulations and requirements. “It’s JUST an app”.
I realize a lot of engineers have this problem. They oversimplify everything except the code they are working on and dismiss it as easy or unnecessary. I did early in my career as well but im surprised how prevent it is here.
> tried to solve this problem for everyone
It doesn't sound like the GP was oversimplifying the problem, quite the opposite - wanting to spend a "fuck ton of money" to try to solve something implies that it is a complex problem that may not be solved with a "fuck ton of money".
Most of the people here have never run or attempted to create a business. That's true about the general population as well. As you hint at, it comes from lack of life experience at doing a thing.
You get a similar naivety from the average consumer that fantasizes about starting a restaurant because they have strong opinions about food; they've eaten at many restaurants, they've made food at home thousands of times, how hard could it be.
That's not, to be clear, for reasons of technical capacity. The vaccine drive that started in ~February or so of this year was pretty good evidence that the government is still capable of doing big things.
For testing, I've been to many facilities. The county run facilities have been efficient and organized, whereas the private ones were not set up as efficiently to get tests issued and results returned.
That said, my primary care office is now set up to return results quickly, so private seems to be catching up.
Speaking from a Maryland PoV.
Imagine the nightmare of Pete Buttigieg sending down dictates to the post office as he tries to build political career. Look at what’s happening in CA right now: just park the ships far enough offshore that you can’t see them and then claim the problem is solved because there aren’t as many ships waiting, charge the people who are already losing money because they can’t get their containers out of the port fines, and punish them further, claiming this as a political win because it punishes the businesses.
Absolutely no thank you. This is an actual problem that needs real solutions, not politicians grubbing power.
If you think your elected leaders are not competent and professional, then fire them and elect leaders that will improve the government. If you want a better post office, we need to FIX the post office, not destroy it.
This sort of argument is the one that leads to hypocritically de-funding the post office by playing politics, then since it's too political pointing to it and saying "See? The government can't do anything right", then completely dismantling it.
Other countries manage to have public services that actually work. I don't believe that the American people are somehow genetically predisposed to having a bad government.
Which countries have something competing with Amazon?
> I don't believe that the American people are somehow genetically predisposed to having a bad government.
All governments are bad. The American people just happen to have alternatives that have revealed how bad some of the overlapping government orgs are so they make a lot of noise about how bad government departments are.
> If you think your elected leaders are not competent and professional, then fire them and elect leaders that will improve the government. If you want a better post office, we need to FIX the post office, not destroy it.
The whole thing is fucked from an incentives perspective. No government employee has motivation to try hard or innovate. There is no shared bonus structure to bring that on in any branch of the government.
When government is competing with an industry, it’s either going to need to run at a loss and live off of other tax revenue or it just won’t be competitive for whoever the customers are.
I worked as a lifeguard many years ago, first for a private company and then for the local government. I tried hard at both jobs, but I was more motivated working for the gov and more importantly much better trained.
The private company worked to maximize revenue which meant minimize training costs, aka one training class every 3 years. In an emergency we would have been totally unprepared.
The local gov trained us every 2 weeks (2 hours on a Saturday) plus random spot testing (threw a dummy somewhere in the pool, you would have to notice it and respond as if it were an actual drowning person). We were extremely prepared.
I certainly have my gripes with the gov (dmv I am looking at you). But the idea that no profit motive equals no one tries hard is so annoying because of how simplistic is. And I constantly hear it from otherwise smart people.
Amazon have tried to enter the Swedish market and it has been a complete train wreck. The other businesses who were initially worried ended up just confused over how they could screw up as bad as they did.
Mattei took over the relatively small national oil company in Italy, expanded it aggressively until it was able to compete with the Seven Sisters (Exxon, BP, etc, all not state owned). State owned companies can definitely compete.
Should I add that Mattei died under mysterious circumstances?
All of them? Mail-order catalogs preceded the Internet, even! If you're referring to which other countries have let capitalism run amok to the same degrees - none, we're the only ones that stupid.
The argument is specific to logistics. Our government has a poor track record in that domain outside the military.
Instead of doubling down on a concentrated bet, increasing competition would seem to be the solution. For example, the federal government could grant porting rights on its property, thereby breaking the Ports of LA & Long Beach’s monopoly.
US public services have a long track record of being actively sabotaged by governments. See the US Post Office being undermined by Trump's appointment of DeJoy.
Why they have a poor track record is a separate discussion.
The whole point is that if you're trying to dismiss an obvious option for it's track record, even though it is quite capable and able to do the legwork, then being aware of the root cause of that problem, and the fact that it's an artificial constraint with ideological roots, is very much central to the discussion.
It's proximate, not central, to the question of whether centralising logistics will improve outcomes.
The central question is whether the USPS, as a centralized, federally-controlled logistics network, works better than its privately-owned, de-centralised freight counterparts. It doesn't. That it's being sabotaged is good to be aware of. But it's not super relevant to the core question, and frankly, an argument against centralization since it suggests moving from a domain where they're being neglected by one set of parties to one where it's being sabotaged by another.
It can work and be efficient just fine if it weren't purposefully hamstrung by people trying to ruin it so it can be privatized.
You're never going to get innovation from people who are just trying to work a job for a wage and pension. That's why Amazon is disrupting everyone with their logistics network.
I sure do. Nothing is going to change until rejection of authority is no longer foundational to the culture. We literally convinced ourselves that dysfunction and gridlock are features of the system, not bugs.
[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-11-04/labor-sho...
Their last mile drivers are contracted companies that treat their employees so poorly that it’s somewhat typical for them to leave their keys in the van and quit on the spot.
like what? The ones I heard of were prefunding the pension plans, but I’m not sure how that benefits any of “their donors”
You can't see how kneecapping the USPS might help FedEx, UPS, and Amazon?
The point of making the USPS pre-fund their pension obligations was to be able to turn around and say "look at the horrible state of their finances, government is clearly so inefficient, we should privatize it".
The reason governments can offer ridiculous post employment benefit obligations, such as above average defined benefit pensions and retiree healthcare, is that the laws governing funding for these benefits only applies to non governmental entities.
Not a surprise that politicians exempted governments from the same funding rules, opting instead to kick the can down onto future taxpayers and opt for offering voters lower taxes now. The real question is why only the USPS was asked to fund accrued benefits, and not every single other governmental entity in the US.
> Unlike any other public or private entity, under a 2006 law, the U.S. Postal Service must pre-fund retiree health benefits.
>Other federal agencies and most private sector companies use a “pay-as-you-go” system, by which the entity pays premiums as they are billed.
There are very strict rules about how non governmental employers have to calculate deferred compensation liabilities, and how much funding they have to have. The relevant laws are ERISA 1974 and PPA 2006. Once the deferred compensation is accrued, the employer must value the liabilities using certain yield curves for high grade corporate bonds and maintain certain funding levels. It is why private employers stopped offering pensions, it is exorbitantly expensive if you properly account for it, especially with increasing lifespans.
I do not know what USPS means when it says "pre-fund", but the text of the USPS funding law is here in section 802. To me, it indicates that money needs to be set aside for accrued benefits (from the wording "future payments required"). I also do not know if USPS is true in its claims that non government entities do not have to fund retiree healthcare benefits. I am pretty sure it would be covered by ERISA and PPA 2006, just like defined benefit pensions are, OR retiree healthcare benefits are not protected by law and if a company wants to stop paying them, they can.
https://www.congress.gov/bill/109th-congress/house-bill/6407...
>`(d)(1) Not later than June 30, 2007, and by June 30 of each succeeding year, the Office shall compute the net present value of the future payments required under section 8906(g)(2)(A) and attributable to the service of Postal Service employees during the most recently ended fiscal year.
Section section 8906(g)(2)(A) is:
https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/5/8906
>(A) The Government contributions authorized by this section for health benefits for an individual who first becomes an annuitant by reason of retirement from employment with the United States Postal Service on or after July 1, 1971, or for a survivor of such an individual or of an individual who died on or after July 1, 1971, while employed by the United States Postal Service, shall through September 30, 2016, be paid by the United States Postal Service, and thereafter shall be paid first from the Postal Service Retiree Health Benefits Fund up to the amount contained in the Fund, with any remaining amount paid by the United States Postal Service.
> Rather, pursuant to OPM’s methodology, such payments would be projected to fund the liability over a period in excess of 50 years, from 2007 through 2056 and beyond (with rolling 15-year amortization periods after 2041). However, the payments required by PAEA were significantly “frontloaded,” with the fixed payment amounts in the first 10 years exceeding what actuarially determined amounts would have been using a 50-year amortization schedule.
> We also reviewed the prefunding requirements for other organizations that offer retiree health benefits to their employees: private sector entities, state and local governments, and other federal entities. Although other federal, state and local, and private sector entities generally are not required to prefund retiree health care benefits, a few do prefund at limited percentages of their total liability.
> For example, Standard & Poor’s (S&P) reported that 126 of the 296 companies in the S&P 500 that offered “other post-employment benefits” (OPEB)64 prefunded some percentage of the associated liabilities, while the USPS OIG has reported that 38 percent of Fortune 1000 companies that offer retiree health care benefits prefund them, at a median funding level of 37 percent.
I would agree that politicians did try to handicap USPS probably to benefit UPS/FedEx. I would also say every entity, government or non government, should be required to fund future promises today, otherwise it should be listed as debt on the balance sheet.
Deferred compensation is used too easily to shift costs from today into the future and keep those costs off the books, either by not accounting for them at all or undervaluing them.
Is there a sector/program in the gov't where that isn't the case? Every entity that is created is just a new fiefdom to expand and lord over from the time it's created to infinity.
USPS is profitable because we all accept the idea that companies are allowed to pay somebody to load literal trash through a hole in the side of my house.
It is interesting, because shouldn't the expectation be that a pension be funded as the benefits accrue? That seems like the safe sustainable way to run things.
This can be fixed. In France for example, it’s illegal to put junk mail in a mailbox that has a “stop pub” (= no junk mail) sticker on it. I have one, and as a result <5% of my mail is junk mail.
Was curious: "marketing" mail was 18% of USPS revenue[1] (2020) and dropping. Low share of total earnings compared to Meta, Google, and soon Amazon's ad revenue.
[1] https://about.usps.com/newsroom/national-releases/2020/1113-...
Give it 10 years when Amazon is looking for new ways to increase profitability and shit's shipped to your door that you have to schedule a ship back or you'll end up being charged for it.
Now I just bin everything that's not first class, directly addressed to me by name before I even bring it into the house.
Its incredible how many people support this horrible service and think selling stamps makes it profitable.
It did to me! I received about a dozen packages ordered from Russia/China and this stopped only after escalating with customer support to the point of cancelling my Amazon account.
> also have the protection of law to keep them going.
The law is actually what makes them weaker. Do some light research on why the USPS is not 'profitable'.
> More than 95% of my mail is junk mail and there's nothing I can do about it.
There is something you can do about it. See https://www.consumer.ftc.gov/articles/how-stop-junk-mail.
The USPS is a service, not a corporation, it shouldn't turn a profit. Does the army turn a profit? Or the navy? Why isn't anyone talking about the ATF 'losing' 1.2 billion a year while having overlapping responsibilities with countless other TLAs? How much money is our Coast Guard making us? Perhaps we should privatize the Coast Guard. Just saying..
As someone who didn't grow up in the US I never really understood the hate the USPS is getting. They've been systematically fucked by both sides of the political 'divide' and yet they still deliver my election ballot on time. They aren't even allowed (see both sides of the political divide) to set their own package prices, yet there is this continuous annoying stupid propaganda that they need to be profitable.
It's fine. in 20 years (if we survive as a country by then) when A-Z Epistle™ by Prime™ will be the only mail carrier for $9.99/month (or bundled with your Prime membership). They'll definitely find a constitutional loophole to make that happen.
Next time someone asks why the USPS isn't profitable, I'd gladly invite you to explain to me what is our ROI for the $83 billion spent sustaining the Afghan government.
Their equivalent are the ads you get on their home page or when you search for things.
International logistics can't really be solved at the national level, because the interests involved aren't national/unilateral — they're international/multilateral.
(You could maybe make an argument for treatied multilateral investment into public logistics infrastructure tied to said treaties, maybe led by the Universal Postal Union — something similar to the Paris Agreement, but with global-economic goals rather than global-ecological ones. But that's a very different thing from just saying that one country's citizens should demand their own government nationalize a particular service.)
Amazons incentive, whether you agree with it or not, is to grow their company and show value to stakeholders. It’s quantitative numbers. They can certainly lie, but at the end of the day the market will punish them.
The USPS is driven by what incentives? Politics? Future pension obligations?
In reality, government ends up being a bloated mess, waste of tax payer dollar. Don’t believe me?
How many campaigns have we seen just in our own lifetimes of candidates promising “change”, “making America great”, fixing healthcare, infrastructure, reforming education. One of the two parties does win every election. Fundamentally, what has changed?
Regulating private companies might be the answer. But government has proven itself to NOT be the answer.
I never understand this argument, take Amazon now. Pay everyone the same to do the same job, but don't pay dividends, reinvest profits (or pay them as if taxes). How does it suddenly become everyone is incompetent and can't do their job?
Why is it capitalists think people can only work if there's a rich person creaming off a profit?
Explain, please.
I would say the burden of proof is on anyone who thinks they could fund or create an org that can match Amazon’s.
The federal pay ceiling in 2021 is $172,500 per year. That’s about what a SWE new grad at Amazon makes in their first year out of college.
That’s the crux of the issue. Government employees across all branches are capped into pay scales that don’t compete with private. More importantly, that absolutely cannot get anything like profit sharing or stock grants so nobody is invested in the financial success of the operation.
> Why is it capitalists think people can only work if there's a rich person creaming off a profit?
Because in the real world, all of the employees are benefiting from the profit as well. Every company has bonuses/promotions for exceeding performance doing good for the company.
Why is it that socialists thing working for a company produces the same incentives as working for the government?
You would have very different results if you took the same people, removed performance bonuses, removed merit promotion, instituted seniority promotion and seniority pay scales.
You remove all incentive to take risks, perform, or innovate.
In such an environment, there is only downside to do anything more than the bare minimum. Because nobody is ever fired, the minimum is very low indeed
This is literally what Amazon is already doing, right? They don't pay dividends, and are just re-investing all the profits already, with no profits being skimmed off at all.
Amazon doesn’t pay dividends on their shares. They reinvest profits. Bezos was known for thinking about the long term, as opposed to politicians who think about the next 2-4 years, or whatever it is that will get them re elected. Did you not know that?
An Amazon SDE 1 earns over $165-170K fresh out of college. An SDE2 earns $200+. SDE 3 earns $300K. A regular software engineering manager earns $350k. The higher you earn, the more they (and other tech companies) pay on company shares. I’m not even talking about directors or VPs who make significantly more.
And Amazon has a reputation for being fast moving, with many people actually complaining that it’s too fast, that people burn out, etc.
That’s how Amazon operates. Whether you like their business model or not is besides the point. They enter new business verticals, move at a lightning fast pace, etc. and that’s how you order something and get it delivered within hours.
Please explain to us how Amazons equity compensation model will work under a system that isn’t capitalist and doesn’t pay these engineers equity. You want them to have a 9-5 work schedule, no on call, no extras - great.
And show me one example of a US government agency even a quarter efficient as Amazon. This isn’t a rhetorical question.
The government never really re orgs or changes it’s mission. It never evolves its practices. It never tries to compete. When the government doesn’t work or when tax payers wonder where’s their money going, the government just says, “we need to raise taxes! It’s not that we’re doing any wrong or have low performers. We just need more money!!”
Government programs are frequently and mysteriously hamstrung by not having enough money as the sole explanatory variable for why they failed at X or why business Y performs more efficiently. It's never an organizational failure, the wrong people, the wrong incentives, just more money is all that's needed. If we'd properly funded the USPS 20 years ago, surely we'd all have same day shipping for pennies, right...? Money would've enabled that?
Amazon solved a problem and reaped a reward.
Your response to that is to take everyone’s money, and give it to someone else in the hopes that they can solve the problem. Sure, I suppose, no reason for it not to work.
On the other hand “why don’t we just enable remote commerce like this for everyone as a societal good” is beyond simplistic and naive. Amazon is very good at what they do and what they do is not easy.
I think there should be an even more general effort made to remove the competitive advantage that comes from simply being big. Small enterprises suffer from the lack of economy of scale. As a private individual or sole trader it is more expensive for me to send a parcel than it is for a large company, this gives the incumbent an advantage.
That’s ridiculous because you completely disincentivize automation and efficiency with those types of rules.
There is no reason to ensure that two guys spending 5 years to hand build one car need to be subsidized to continue that way.
Of course not. But it might be wise to subsidize them so that they can get started and disrupt the existing players that have become lazy and inefficient.
Needless to say, the overnight/next day delivery options that you'll see for suburban neighborhoods are nonexistent in many other places.
They did that for a while. Wall Street ate the Post Office's pie, rather than the other way around. Which is why the US postal system's banking service shut down.
Which is not to say postal banking is a bad idea, but that perhaps we should be careful with our expectations.
Bulk and container ships are extremely efficient. Most of the carbon emissions are from the last few miles.
Also, cargo shipping voluntarily uses fuel ("bunker fuel" — the dregs of the petroleum distillation process) that's absolutely awful for the environment per watt generated compared to any other fuel (including any other petroleum distillate.) They do this because it's the cheapest [liquid] fuel to buy per watt generated, and because they "can" — cargo-ship engines are designed to deal with the low quality of bunker fuel, and ships at sea under most of the common charters [e.g. Bermuda] aren't subject to any ecological regulations restricting them from burning it.
Bunker fuel shouldn't be marketable for sale as a fuel at all. We (= OPEC, in this case) could still sell it to chemical companies, but the rest, we should just be sticking back in the ground. This would reduce global greenhouse gas emissions by such an extent it's not even funny.
This would naturally make shipping more expensive, since their next-cheapest fuel would be slightly more expensive. (Probably not for long, though; some capital investment into ship engine design, using modern engine technologies like Cylinder Deactivation, could probably claw most of this cheapness back.)
Bunker fuel is responsible for ~3% of CO2e emissions? OK it may have a greater impact on air quality, but in terms of carbon it is not exactly a stand-out item.
Bunker fuel contains a lot more light-molecular-weight things that aren't hydrocarbons (e.g. nitrogenous molecules), and so when they burn, you end up with toxic GHGs being produced, rather than just bad for climate change GHGs. (And, as you mention, the fact that we're burning it mostly at the beginning and end of the trip, means we're burning it near ports, and therefore making the air at port cities — and nearby estuaries — toxic.)
But even then, the concern with bunker fuel in particular isn't really the GHGs (i.e. the low-molecular-weight products of combustion that stay airborne), but all the high-molecular-weight stuff that's mixed in there, that doesn't stay airborne, but is temporarily put into the air during combustion.
Bunker fuel is "dirty fuel", using a similar sense of "dirty" to a "dirty bomb" — not that it's radioactive, but that it "salts the earth" where it goes off. Except that a bunker-fuel "bomb" goes off over water, and all the resulting heavy-molecular-weight vapors that come off the combustion then fall into said water, contaminating the oceans+estuaries with these chemicals. Bunker fuel salts the sea.
On the other hand, they'd be happening over land, where people live; instead of over water, "merely" killing marine life, so that might be a wash in policy-makers' minds.
To be clear, though, I'm not arguing against using cargo ships for domestic logistic as a concept; just the current implementation. Cargo ships that didn't use bunker fuel would be an unalloyed ecological win compared to both domestic ground logistics, and the current implementation of domestic marine logistics.
Government employees don’t (and can’t legally) get bonuses for doing well or beating expectations.
The entire post office org gets no bonus (or punishment for that matter) by impacting the cost to revenue ratio.
Both of these are the reasons it never works to throw a pile of money at a government org and expect something sustainable monetarily and good to come out of it.
We don’t really care about businesses operating private militaries so the army isn’t a good comparison.
Postal supervisors, including local supervisors at your local office can and do get performance bonuses.
Mailmen and clerks can not due to their union contracts.
If supervisors could hire and fire mail carriers for performance and pay them market rate wages then the service would be drastically different.
How it is now supervisors have very little control over local branches. They can not control who to hire, in my district interviews for hourly workers were not even a thing, they can not control what to pay staff or what staffing level they need. They can not control the volume of mail they receive. While FedEx or UPS can refuse work if they lack capacity USPS has to accept the over flow.
Almost all new hire mailmen are hired "part time" with no set schedule for a low nationally uniform annual wage. The entry level wage for a mailman is the same in both small towns and big cities.
The union contract sets a certain percentage quota for "part time" workforce so under-staffing is the norm.
The senior mailman gets a solid middle class wage, while the entry level barely makes enough to live on in some cases or in others gets absurd mandatory overtime.
Then how do we pay for it? You’re either making the customers pay the true cost or you’re just stealing it from the entire tax base.
If you do the latter then it’s unfair to any business competing in the same category and they will all eventually go out of business because they have to be sustainable.
So we end up with less efficiency and absolutely no other options.
Splitting things into different siloed entities just leads to inefficiencies.
Republicans specifically blocked the Post Office from doing these things with legislation.
Why hasn't this happened already? What makes you think it would actually happen?
The problem is that nobody gets political credit for improving existing systems. That money will instead be pissed away on other political gifts and novelties.
Politicians absolutely do get credit when they improve actual systems and improve people's lives. People like it, and will vote those politicians back into office. But it has to be actual, felt, day-by-day changes in their lives (such as fixed roads, the USPS offering free check cashing, or even a friggin relief check in the mail with the president's signature on it). The current infrastructure bill(s) promise that real support, but they didn't fund it enough imo and it's far from clear that they'll be able to use the money they did get to make meaningful changes in people's daily lives.
Not a fun outcome but the fight isn't over, yet.
https://www.govexec.com/management/2021/10/postal-service-la...
By arguing that effective, innovative companies get rid of dead weight, anyone making the argument needs to confront that there are obvious cases where this isn't true, and that it creates perverse incentives.
As for the topic in general, I'm of a mixed opinion about similar government services. The mail service in Canada is overpriced and feels poorly run (like most everything that is Federally run in Canada), but Japan Post was excellent the whole time I lived in Tokyo. Finding what works and reproducing them makes a lot of sense to me.
So you're a fan of stack ranking, huh? I thought that was pretty widely discredited, and "truly innovative companies" know better by now.
Name the truly innovative companies that have this as a policy right now.
it shouldn't be consider a 'quota' to give equitable access and try to catch up the the actual balance of diversity in this country.
Tech I get is harder because of the century of lack of education and lower opportunities.
But you can't write off entire races as less performant.
Skills give value to an organization making it more competitive and productive, your appearance does not. If you make decisions on who to hire based on the former you're basically saying "Guy X is better than guy Y but I'm gonna hire Y because some people are offended by the fact that we're not 50/50", which is obvious in every single part of life.
Also, I know a lot of friends that are saddened by their hiring process and they feel like they've been hired just because the HR had to and not because they were the top choices.
But yeah, this is controversial nowadays so I don't really try to put it out there at all and let it be.
SpaceX looks like a very savvy, competent investment made by NASA to me.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceX#2005%E2%80%932009:_Falc...
> The first two Falcon 1 launches were purchased by the United States Department of Defense under a program that evaluates new US launch vehicles suitable for use by DARPA. The first three launches of the rocket, between 2006 and 2008, all resulted in failures. These failures almost ended the company as Musk had planned and financing to cover the costs of three launches; Tesla, SolarCity, and Musk personally were all nearly bankrupt at the same time as well; Musk was reportedly "waking from nightmares, screaming and in physical pain" because of the stress.
> However, things started to turn around when the first successful launch was achieved shortly after with the fourth attempt on 28 September 2008. Musk split his remaining $30 million between SpaceX and Tesla, and NASA awarded the first Commercial Resupply Services (CRS) contract to SpaceX in December, thus financially saving the company. Based on these factors and the further business operations they enabled, the Falcon 1 was soon after retired following its second successful, and fifth total, launch in July 2009; this allowed SpaceX to focus company resources on the development of a larger orbital rocket, the Falcon 9. Gwynne Shotwell was also promoted to company president at this time, for her role in successfully negotiating the CRS contract with NASA.
We'd have to be willing to let the USPS operate at a significant loss for a decade, kinda like Amazon.
I would vote so hard against Post Office handling banking. It is incalculable that this kind of stuff gets upvoted by the intellectual diaspora of HN.
Also, absolutely agree with anyone suggesting that we eliminate “bulk rate”—unsolicited mail should cost as much as first class—both to avoid real world spam, and to save trees.
I pay extra for my carrier to block spam calls—I world gladly pay the post office to do the same—like PaperKarma.com but last mile…
I'm also fascinated when can this sentiment expressed when there are so many posts along the lines of {Apple,Amazon,Facebook} deleted my account with no warning or explanation, and I can't help wondering if the folks saying this is why you're an idiot if you don't run your own email server are the same as the ones saying you're an idiot if you don't trust Amazon to be your sole postal provider.
Or the post office could find a sustainable and growth economic model . . . at which point it might be indistinguishable from Amazon/Walmart/Safeway/etc.
Compare that to same-day or next day delivery from Amazon, it's night and day.
I'd rather not dump more tax money into that mess.
EDIT: I find it interesting that 90% of the responding comments in this thread are seemingly against the parent comment's ideas yet all are being heavily downvoted now with practically no answers to justify the downvotes
I think that's because many of the comments are posting regularly debunked misinformation.
Personally, I like the USPS more than Amazon. Because while Amazon frequently gives me great service, they can terminate that relationship at any time and then I'm completely stuck. Because the USPS is quasi-governmental, they can't just decide I'm no longer allowed to be a customer.
Such as?
Most of these faded out comments are talking about how the USPS is a government org so it has no incentives to efficiently fix things regardless of money. How do you debunk that? It’s true of the incentives of every government agency.
It’s the difference between life changing money (early retirement, vacation anywhere any time, etc).