In the UK politicians also send out these kinds of flyers in bulk (never mind the inundation of flyers for takeaway food, Domino's Pizza, Papa John's, etc.)
For any single piece of legitimate mail (which is vanishingly small as most stuff is paperless now), there are perhaps 20 or 30 pieces of junk that come with it over the course of a few weeks.
I honestly wish it got legislated against. Junk mailers aren't entitled to offload their waste through my letterbox. I don't understand why they have the right to shove advertisements into my own home.
[adndm] no posties cant [as in not allowed] remove anything, even if they just put it in there and realized its the wrong address
Allowing bulk spam mail to use that channel of contact is contrary to its purpose. It's not a place where I get high priority messages with delivery confirmation to make sure I get them anymore. It's a place where random flyers get stuffed, and the government insists on mixing their messages into that stream of crap.
USPS should stop bulk delivery entirely and have FedEx and UPS do it. They're not allowed to put stuff in my mailbox (and literally can't, because they don't have keys). At least then we restore the line. Things in the mailbox are important. Things that get left on my doorstep might be, but probably aren't.
I've never lived in the US and I do hear that perhaps it isn't particularly efficient with tax money, but still, if you looked at the average tax paid instead of your own it might not be nearly so amazing?
https://countryeconomy.com/taxes/tax-revenue
I'm not sure what other things to take into account. For example it says tax collected in Luxemberg is $44k per capita. Vs USA at $16k per capita. I'm sure another issue is 20% of USA taxes going to military?
Of othe places I've actually spent significant time, Singapore and Japan seemed to have pretty great government services and their taxes collected per person are lower than the USA. But I also know their cultures are different and that there are less people that need government support
I would happily pay (napkin maths) $40-50 more in taxes per person per year to make this fucking stop.
Shit, it'd save my city some money. Less trash.
No, this won't eliminate it. It will give you less of it, though, and give the USPS more money. Win/win, even if we don't win as much as we would like.
Bulk mail currently gets a discount compared to individual letters. Eliminate that, and we'd see less bulk mail.
Genuine question, is it even an option to pay $X more and get an otherwise identical TV with no overlay ads? It's admittedly been 7 or 8 years since I last purchased a TV, but I don't remember such an option being available at the time, and the only time I can ever remember seeing that sort of choice being available was with the kindle, where it's very explicit that the ad-free (but otherwise identical) version is like $20 more (or, was when I bought my kindle, which again was many years ago).
That being said, I'd be extremely curious to see sales numbers for ad-free vs ad-laden kindles, although I sort of doubt I'll ever have the chance to.
I have lots of problems w/crypto, but one thing they've gotten right is the credibility of self-binding. Without that, it's just hard to trust any actor on their future behavior---from Reagan's immigration amnesty, to cable tv's ads, to funding government agencies that ("this time") will fix a problem.
(None of this is motivated by any dislike for USPS, which I generally like. I'm just talking about people's (imo justified) reluctance to trade the known for the unknown).
Unfortunately, it's high maintenance, and it doesn't take too much of a lapse to get back up to the usual junk load. But I occasionally like to daydream that, if we could get enough people in the USA to do this, the junk mail industry itself might become financially untenable.
Actually, returning an unopened USPS-shipped letter or package doesn't cost postage at all. They probably removed you since you essentially took the time to communicate that they're not going to succeed with any future mail.
- slap “refused — return to sender” stickers on all the junk and drop it in bins for USPS
- bundle your actual mail and deliver it
Once a month, a service pickes it up, then leaves a dumpster of spam next to the local USPS mail drop. (Or shovels it over the counter at the post office.)
Also, provide a list of houses subscribed to the service to the USPS. The ball's in their court now!
- postal worker comes every day, with pre-sorted bins and leaves with outgoing bins; businesses already do this.
- first you re-sort the pre-sorted personal mail to remove spam, preserving the post office sort to keep it by customer
- then you sort all the removed junk by sender you’re returning to
— and when your next mail arrives, you give the USPS worker the pre-sorted outbound mail of returned junk
- keep a Instagram of your piles of returned junk mail, every day
This already happens with, eg, university or large office mailrooms. So you’re not asking anything new if USPS to make it work.
It seems like they could just get everything about you. Total and complete identity theft
EDIT - can't get the form to submit without an error anyways. We're sorry!
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Same thing happened to me. I just refreshed the page, confirmed form resubmission, and it worked.
But really, it shouldn't be on senders to care about how their messages are routed at all. USPS should be able to accept a message, digitally, addressed to a specific individual, and then route it either to an email address or a physical address, per the recipient's preferences.
I agree, that it's annoying in the meantime though.
Don't rely on email for important things.