Hacker News Reader

Comment by tomrod | Hacker News Reader

Aye, and the Postal Office can also be a solution here. Personnel distribution, processes, etc. would be fairly straightforward to re-implement.

https://www.aarp.org/money/investing/info-2022/restarting-po...

View on HN

The usps is the only well functioning government organization left and Republicans are set on kneecapping it so they can privatize it

well-functioning? 95% of the mail in my box goes directly to my recycling bin

literally a no-op...junk mail is printed, USPS delivers it against my will, I put it in my recycle bin...another truck comes and empties that bin

this is well-functioning?

Indeed. That they are underfunded and thus need to support the spam mailers is another issue entirely.

But as far as central non-digital services centers go, the USPS is top notch. It can be improved, sure, and it suffers from the same issues many government services handicapped by the misplaced, accumulated "starve the beast" policy cruft. Despite this, it remains a fantastic resource.

I really wish certain political ideologies would recognize when they are shooting themselves and their fellow citizens in the collective foot.

Calling "starve the beast" a misplaced policy is a pretty heavy watering down of how insidious it truly is

To be fair, I'm trying to avoid being heavily political on something that seems like a win-win-win policy for all sides.

The USPS's unique financial burden is that they are forced by congress to pre-fund their pension obligations so they can't pull a Chicago, calculate things based on insane assumptions of returns and go "whoops we're bankrupt" at some unspecified date in the future as many a pension system has done.

In literally any other context you would be cheering this on.

Congress has done a lot of terrible things but the burden they have placed upon USPS isn't one of them.

That's one of the budget issues, yes, but not the only one.

You're forgetting the NIST. They operate at a net profit, selling things like Standard Jars of Peanut Butter for equipment calibration ($1,069 per unit).

There's a cool Veritasium video on it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=esQyYGezS7c

Close! NIST is under the Department of Commerce. They do operate with net profit (or attempt to do so). My understanding is USCIS is set up similarly for immigrant benefit processing.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com