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Comment by hammerdr | Hacker News Reader

This is something that is very close to my family so I have a bit of experience with how the Postal Service is going.

The big sell of the postal service is that it costs the same amount to send a letter from San Francisco to Los Angeles as it does to send a letter from the bayou in Louisiana to Honolulu, Hawaii. In this, physical mail is the big equalizer.

The USPS is also required to deliver mail to even the most remote of places because if the mail system did not work for everyone then several things would start to break: collecting taxes or votes or anything that a normal citizen should require can be done through mail, at minimum.

Really, the only way to replace mail is to provide the same level of reliability and free-to-receive service for another communication medium such as telephone or internet.

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I think you're missing the OP's point. He isn't suggesting ending postal service, but coming up with new and better services instead of trying to scare people away from email.

For many people, the post office is just an incredibly slow, junk mail delivery system. If you care about the USPS, I'm surprised you don't agree with the OP that new ideas are needed.

(One idea i'd like to see is a registered email service, so you know an email was received. The post office has the public's trust to pull this off.)

> The big sell of the postal service is that it costs the same amount to send a letter from San Francisco to Los Angeles as it does to send a letter from the bayou in Louisiana to Honolulu, Hawaii. In this, physical mail is the big equalizer.

That's also true of the internet. It doesn't cost anything to email someone who's right next to you or who is across the globe. There is very little demand for mail these days and that's pretty obvious from watching the linked USPS advertisement.

To send and receive USPS mail, you need... a mailbox. To send and receive email you need an internet subscription and a computer. Internet access can be impossible to find, or very expensive, in many areas that are serviced by USPS. Saying "It doesn't cost anything to email someone... who is across the globe" is only true if you both have the infrastructure, equipment, and service necessary.

Well, to receive USPS mail you need an address. Permanent travelers, the homeless, people in the process of moving, moving- these people are difficult or impossible to reach by mail, but any time they pop into a library or internet cafe, they have an email address. I would say that /that/ is the great equalizer, more than remote people with mailboxes in this day and age.

Permanent travelers, the homeless, etc. can receive mail at the post office by general delivery. (Letters addressed to

J. Doe

GENERAL DELIVERY

Anytown, Anystate 12345

are held for pickup at the post office for 30 days.) This was once common knowledge, but seems to be less so these days.

So just by writing GENERAL DELIVERY instead of a street address, it gets held? I suppose the kick here is that the person needs to know they're getting mail. Do they need an ID to pick it up?

Maybe going to the post office was a daily routine? I wouldn't know.

Wow. I didn't know they still did that.

It's rapidly becoming that you only need a cell phone, which would potentially make the internet much more feasible than snail-mail; owning a cell phone is far easier than owning a house and staying in a single location.

I'll grant that it's not there yet - plenty of places aren't covered by cell towers. But they're diminishing, and plenty of places aren't on postal routes either. If anything, cell towers will soon cover more area, as I can get reception miles from any road, but USPS won't deliver to where I'm standing.

>The big sell of the postal service is that it costs the same amount to send a letter from San Francisco to Los Angeles as it does to send a letter from the bayou in Louisiana to Honolulu, Hawaii.

That's not a big sell if you're sending a letter from San Francisco to Los Angeles. I don't see any reason for rates not to reflect costs - why am I subsidizing other people every time I send a letter?

Because, in theory, you care that they can vote and mail in their taxes at a reasonable price, even from places that are economically unfeasible to have a mail delivery system. Whether you actually care is up to you, but the US government has decided US citizens care.

It's similar to the gov't money that was paid to run telephone lines to rural areas (ref: freeconference.com article from the other day).

>Because, in theory, you care that they can vote and mail in their taxes at a reasonable price, even from places that are economically unfeasible to have a mail delivery system.

"A reasonable price"? A reasonable price, in the long run, is what the service costs. And there aren't any areas that are economically unfeasible to deliver mail - just not for less than a dollar. I'm okay with people out in the sticks paying, say, $2.50 to send a letter. Are you trying to tell me there are people who can't afford, say, five bucks a year to send two letters (even assuming they do vote by mail)? If money's that tight in rural Nowheresville they can move to the city and get a desk job like everyone else.

>Whether you actually care is up to you, but the US government has decided US citizens care.

Sure, because rural voters have proportionally more voting power. There's no secret why the system is the way it is.

>It's similar to the gov't money that was paid to run telephone lines to rural areas (ref: freeconference.com article from the other day).

Yes, the telephones, the roads, airports, mail... still don't see why people can't pay their own way. Look, there are things I pay more for where I live. Housing, for instance. Why aren't they paying part of my rent?

In the ideal libertarian world, there is a free movement of peoples. People are free to move from one location to another in order to best optimize the system. This is great in theory but breaks down in practice. There are physical, bureaucratic and psychological barriers that keep people in one place. For instance, my father's family is largely from rural Indiana. We have had a family farm for several generations. In fact, my family has a road named after it (Hammer Road) because it was mostly occupied by members of my family that had lived there for so long. There are members of my family that will inherit that land and for several reasons will continue to farm that land for generations to come.

My family has every right to vote and do so proudly. A callous wave of the hand and saying "they should pay their own way" in order to be an equal citizen in this country is .. well, elitist, immoral and just plain wrong.

P.S. If you want to give everyone free internet or free phones (with the appropriate legislation to make contracts entered over said mediums binding, of course) then do away with the USPS. Until then you're going to have to pay for everyone's right to be a full citizen of this country by subsidizing the postal service.

>A callous wave of the hand and saying "they should pay their own way" in order to be an equal citizen in this country is .. well, elitist, immoral and just plain wrong.

There sure doesn't seem to be any shortage of people with their hands in my pocket who get indignant when I point it out. There's nothing elitist, immoral, or wrong in saying people should pay their own way. People of sound mind and body shouldn't be freeloading off their fellow citizens. I realize there's a certain lifestyle people enjoy when it comes to rural living. That's tough.

Before automation something like 95% of the population was involved in agriculture. My family was all farmers, if you go back far enough. And yet they all ended up moving where there was work when farming wasn't working out. What makes your family so special that you think I ought to be paying to maintain their chosen lifestyle?

There is a very reasonable solution to this. Offer special rates for civics activities like voting and taxes. AFAIK, a special rate with return receipts already exists for filing taxes.

1. You always know how much a standard letter will cost, no matter where it's going. If you're mailing 100 letters to 100 locations, they all cost the same. Standard exemptions apply for rate changes every few years and for heavy items.

2. Based on the cash flow of the USPS, you're not subsidizing anyone by buying stamps :)

>1. You always know how much a standard letter will cost, no matter where it's going. If you're mailing 100 letters to 100 locations, they all cost the same. Standard exemptions apply for rate changes every few years and for heavy items.

Computers can figure this stuff out pretty quickly. People who mail 100 first class letters to 100 locations already either use an automated stamping system or they take the letters to the post office.

>2. Based on the cash flow of the USPS, you're not subsidizing anyone by buying stamps :)

Well, okay, but how do you think they're going to plug that hole? I'll be paying for it eventually, either through income taxes or through higher postage rates.

You're not subsidizing other people in that case anyway. First class mail is subsidized by the bulk mailers.

Well, until now. But it's starting to look like that won't be the case any longer, given the deficits they're projecting.

Right, I wasn't saying anything at all about replacing mail. I was saying quite the opposite. How can the USPS succeed at getting more mail sent? And I pointed out a bunch of examples of people improving mail and using mail to send tons of awesome things. If those businesses improve, the USPS will improve.

USPS needs to not define success as getting more mail sent. The only mail I receive is junk mail, and things from the government.

If I could turn my mailbox off, I would.

> The only mail I receive is junk mail

Guess what the USPS admits is subsidizing them now.

How about this: "You send more legitimate mail, we can afford to send you less junk!"

Nicest protection racket ever.

Nearly all my mail ends up at addresses from my past. If it wasn't for e-bills, I would never receive (my own) bills. And I have received mountains of mail from countless former tenants at every place I've lived, mail they will never see. The post doesn't seem very reliable to me.

USPS needs to implement a form of indirect addressing. The basic premise: Assign recipients a unique ID. The physical address is then a single indirect lookup (ie. from a database, which can be altered by the recipient ad nauseum).

For obvious reasons, SSN as a unique ID is out. Given the (relative) portability of phone numbers, these might be a good option. Alternatively, allowing users to employ their email address as the unique ID would be awesome! I'd pay an annual fee to USPS if senders could just write my email on an envelope and it would get to me (bonus points for selective digitization).

I think this is one of the beauties of Google Voice service: It's indirect addressing for my phone number. If USPS took some initiative, they could really invigorate their service and bring it into the technical age.

a database, which can be altered by the recipient ad nauseum

They already have this, of course. You can send USPS a change-of-address form and they'll send mail addressed to you at your old address to your new address. https://moversguide.usps.com/icoa/icoa-main-flow.do?executio...

I did this just last month. The postal worker informed me that the forwarding only lasted for a period of one year -- that's not a very good long-term solution.

That's kind of your problem.

If you used an old email address, you wouldn't get e-bills either.

The difference is I don't change my email once every year or so.

...but that's less about the postal systems than it is about people updating addresses or forwarding mail on.

I have some rubber stamps made with

    ADDRESSEE GONE AWAY
     RETURN TO SENDER

and that seems to cut down the amount of repeated post. You can dump all the post for one person in a big envelope and dump that in a post box once a month.

And how it works after that? USPS just return mail to sender with no questions asked? I recently bought a house and also receiving bunch of mails. Once - check for few hundreds of some refund from some utility company. Thanks I had contact info of previous tenant, so I could mail it to him (never got a thanks letter :))

>>And how it works after that? USPS just return mail to sender with no questions asked?

Yes, of course.

Oye, no joke. I get more mail for former residents of my home than I do for me. We have filled out the form to stop delivering that mail. Didn't work. We have called the mail annex the carriers leave from. Didn't work. We have left the carriers a friggin note. Didn't work. Also, my sister-in-law just sent us something she made for my daughter, which USPS promptly lost and did nothing to attempt to find. Granted she didn't add delivery confirmation on the package, but should I really have to pay extra to make sure my package will actually get there? If that is the case, raise the price of stamps to cover it.

They only forward mail for a year. That should be plenty of time to change your addresses. It seems that you don't though.

It is reliable if the address that's on the piece of mail is where it was sent to. The issue then is whoever's maintaining the address and paying to postage for sending it there.

Also mail forwarding's worked pretty well for me. Just fill the info online or drop the card in the mail.

The benefit of this is outrunning junk mail.

No. They charge the same amount to send those two letters. It does not cost the same amount, however. Regular physical mail delivery at current prices is unsustainable. Period.

Just interpret "it costs" as "it costs the user" and use the plain English definition of cost as "asking price, market price, or selling price" and you'll arrive at the original poster's intended meaning.

I assume that for the second part of your comment, you consider "Regular physical mail" to be letter post, because we will always need packages to be delivered.

Regular physical mail delivery at current prices is unsustainable.

But it was sustainable when bulk mail and junk mail made huge profits for the postal service and subsidized the first-class prices.

It is still sustainable. The USPS is being forced to prepay its retirement benefits 75 years into the future (i.e. for people that aren't even alive yet or are just being born).

It has been profitable to the tune of a couple hundred million a year. The issue is that it can't afford to pay 5.5 billion that congress mandated that it pay each year. It is 20 billion in the hole, but only because congress made a ridiculous demand of it that no other organization, public or private would be required to make.

Citation: http://www.cnbc.com/id/45049636/Fixing_the_US_Postal_Service...

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