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Comment by pfannkuchen | Hacker News Reader

I don’t understand why there isn’t more outrage over USPS based advertising. You are, basically, legally required to have a box where they deliver physical ads. Besides the annoyance factor, it also generates a huge amount of pointless waste which is bad for the environment.

Why aren’t more people angry about that?

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I'd love to be able to pre-reject anything sent standard class, but there are limits to how much time I can spend on activism and how much I can afford to spend bribing politicians.

Whatever I get junk mail, I check to see if it has one of those "business reply mail" prepaid envelopes.

I then shove as much of my other junk mail into that envelope as I can, and mail it back to the company on their tab.

This is surprisingly effective at reducing junk mail.

I did the opt-out linked below and the volume of junk mail dropped significantly.

https://consumer.ftc.gov/articles/how-stop-junk-mail

Amazing that instead of fixing the problem, the government actually requires I pay some third party to handle this for me.

My understanding is that bulk mail essentially subsidies individual mail to a large degree.

I do dislike getting ads in any form though. They have recycle bins in my P.O. Box building so I toss any flyers right then and there. When I used to get delivery it always annoyed me having to bring trash from my mailbox into my house to recycle it.

It's also an excellent vector for scamming the elderly. There are literally legal businesses who's entire model is fooling seniors into buying stuff (sending money) by making their communication look similar to government agencies and other legitimate bussinesses.

The alternative would be to properly fund the system with tax money instead of ad money. When you bring that up most Americans start acting like a toddler, cover their ears, and shout “bla bla bla that’s communism”.

Physical paper mail is pretty clearly a legacy system at this point, no? Seems straightforward to delete it and replace it with an email service where each physical address gets an email handle that gets transferred between residents when someone moves in/out. For very old people and Amish there could be an opt-in physical alternative but you need to pick it up at a central location, or pay to have it forwarded by a private package delivery service. Am I sounding like a toddler?

This will be hard to implement. If I got an email because I live on xx then I moved to xxx what will happen to my old email? and would I be getting a new email for the new address. Privacy issue a side as you don't want the next resident to know your history of stuff you got... bla bla. We can solve it by requiring dynamic mapping between email address and physical address. But then your email will be tied to you as a person. Which ironically will mean that whoever got hold of this email will always be able to send you ads.

It would much harder to get an email for each address you have and preventing re-using it will require some effort.

I don't think a universal email will work in the US. The US does not even have a national ID and many Americans does not have passports (because a lot of then will never need one).

The US does have a national ID card: The US Passport Card. They should strive to make it free of charge and compulsory.

I understand that. And I mentioned the passports already in my comments. But in the context of my comment. national ID would be required and must issued for every citizen (adult), which is not the case. So hence there is not effective national ID in tue US.

The passport card acts an internal passport, between the 50 subject states and dependent territories.

Thank you for acknowledging Canada’s true status.

This is disinformation. US citizens do not require any form of passport to travel to US territories (let alone states). https://www.usa.gov/visit-territories

> This will be hard to implement.

Sure, we do need to think about it for more than 30 seconds, but I don't think it makes any sense to punt to personal addresses.

Physical mail doesn't have a history, so why should "housemail"? It expires after k days, you need to forward it to a personal address if you want to save it.

"Housemail" doesn't need to receive arbitrary information, only information that can't be shifted to personal email because there is no registration step. So e.g. things that aren't opt-in, and things where you are legally expected to check what you receive. So, traffic tickets, backup communication from utilities (e.g. water is getting turned off), etc.

I think constraining it to only the necessary use cases makes it a lot simpler than what you are imagining.

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