> carriers drive miles of lonely routes in their *personal* vehicles
> Routes meant to take eight or nine hours are stretching to 10 or 12.
> post office has banned scheduled sick days
That country is so foreign and bizarre to me.
They work 12 hours shifts in their personal car. And what are "scheduled sick days"? Looking it up those are paid sick days? Are there non-scheduled sick days?
Maybe I'm just weird and and specific, but I've found that often Amazon is the only place to get specialty items. Walmart and gang killed a lot of businesses and what's left often only sell via Amazon. Mail order has been the name of the game in rural areas forever. I don't agree with what's happening in the article, but realistically I'm going to keep ordering my high quality supplements that keep the brain fog from covid away and other stuff.
Also there must be other ecommerces around that dont exist the same way amazon exist and serve rural areas?
So did you borrow someone else's device to post this?
That's a very extreme Hobson's choice. Sure there's no "doctor's order," but you can't actually do that without being a subsistence farmer or hunter-gatherer. And you'd have to be a squatter, because if you own land you'll have to pay taxes on it, and there's no way you're going to be able to do that without buying anything in the broader economy.
Now we can always think about the origin of that political problem as cultural. The free markets, trickle down economics, "pull yourself by your own bootstrap", labor union as a greedy mafia etc. All this encouraged the thinking that regulation and worker protection must be eliminated.
Shaming people is not going to work. Informing them and encouraging common political action will.