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Comment by furyofantares | Hacker News Reader

> For reference the USPS delivers over 100B, yes billion, parcels per year.

This must be pieces of mail per year? To me "parcel" means more like a package.

Some web searching confirms this and also says a little over half of that is marketing mail. 60B pieces of spam per year. And I don't know about you, but excluding marketing mail, I'd say about 90% of the remainder still goes directly in the bin for me. And even though I open probably less than 5% of what is sent to me, maybe less than 1%, STILL much of that could have been an email.

I don't doubt the USPS provides a whole lot of value and I don't want them to go down to 1 day per week or anything. But that 100B number looks like it includes a whole lot of negative, zero, or low value items.

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that 100B number looks like it includes a whole lot of negative, zero, or low value items.

Clearly not an American, or an adult, or he would have needed the mail for things like:

- Receive unemployment tax statements from the state

- Life insurance forms. Especially converting a group policy into an individual policy.

- IRS notices

- Utility company refunds

- Receive insurance policy documents

- Receive notice of security breach at hospital

- Receive bills for unexpected services like ambulance and medical

- Receive license plates

- Receive vehicle registration

- Auto and homeowners insurance policy documents

- Receive checks for credits from utilities after you move

- My company got a check for $95 million in the mail from the IRS

- Reimbursement checks from insurance companies

- Certain correspondence with the I.R.S. can only be done by letter. No phone calls. No online.

- Get hurt at work? Paperwork from insurance and from the state comes in paper form, not TikTok.

Does any of that mean we need to lie and pretend that there's 100B pieces of useful mail being delivered? Just because there's a lot of useful mail doesn't mean there's 100B of it. That number shouldn't pass anyone's sniff test.

Does any of that mean we need to lie and pretend that there's 100B pieces of useful mail being delivered?

I haven't seen any indication that it's a lie. Please post a link to the proof.

Is not a lie simply because it doesn't align with your political view.

Note that what you consider junk mail, other people may find valuable. I know someone who digs those ValPack coupons.

It actually does align with my political view.

Someone else posted some links in this thread already. But OK here: https://www.uspsoig.gov/sites/default/files/reports/2024-09/...

I don't know if it's correct or not, but it doesn't fail my sniff test. It's an average of ~1 piece of mail per person per day. Most people probably don't get more than one piece of useful mail per week, but there are also people conducting business through the mail that might send or receive far more than that.

Does the postal service only have value to you if it delivers 100B pieces of "useful" mail a year, according to some metric of useful? Even if I somehow thought the same way there is no version of a plan where I trust someone in government (or not in government) to decide what mail has value to me. This seems like such a dead end take. Yes junk mail is crappy, just like lots of other worthwhile tradeoffs when designing massive scale policy.

> Does the postal service only have value to you if it delivers 100B pieces of "useful" mail a year, according to some metric of useful?

No, and nothing I've said implies any agreement with the person whose nonsense you were countering. But you were countering it with more nonsense.

Just because your email is 90% junk doesn't mean delivering it once a week is an acceptable tradeoff. Those are 100B items paid to be sent.

Yeah I said exactly that.

Is there anything on this list that is so time critical that it would be hurt by postal delivery being dropped to, say, twice a week? I'm not seeing anything obvious, but might see it differently.

As an American adult, I find your list extremely ucompelling. For the average person, that entire list probably accounts for a handful of pieces of mail per year on average. Several of those items are things I've never received by mail and several others are things I'd prefer to receive by email and immediately throw away if I do get them in the mail.

Maybe it's not all about you and there are a lot of people that are not technically savvy for whatever reason and need to receive things by mail?

I'm not saying the post office shouldn't exist, only that

>Clearly not an American, or an adult, or he would have needed the mail for things like:

is bullshit.

Several of those items are things I've never received by mail and several others are things I'd prefer to receive by email…

this is how government should work, we get one person’s opinion on how they operate and how they use said utility and that ought to do it - problem solved

Email is also a thrash heap. My country has an official "inbox" app that aggregates messages from all agencies.

Yes this is mail: https://www.statista.com/statistics/320234/mail-volume-of-th...

Parcels is 6-7B: https://www.pitneybowes.com/content/dam/pitneybowes/us/en/sh...

Is the USPS creating that junk mail? Or are they just delivering it?

Put another way, if you kill the USPS, don’t you think that junk mail will still find a way to get to you?

It would become substantially more expensive and thus substantially less in volume.

Which indirectly shows the efficiency and value of the USPS. The fact that they can get stuff to people so cheaply is something nobody else can replicate.

It's true that the average flat paper mail I get is probably trash, but the percent that isn't trash tends to be quite important, and when you add packages delivered to that, the number of days per week that "real" mail is delivered to our address has gone up over the last twenty years, not down. (Not saying that's normal, but lot of deliveries.)

It would be lovely if you could have the USPS scan and send all physical mail electronically (as a paid Mail + Pro fee) --and have it piped directly to a GPT who reads all the mail, logs the data into Sqlite3 and then have summaries, reminders, due dates, amount, budget hits, as daily summaries from your GPT of choice..

And then you can block marketing mail thats sent to you, and the USPS can encrypt the images that are sent to you...

But you still need to receive things that are physical (like credit cards)

There used to be mail services that people could have their mail routed to...

But yeah, we still need mail - but we need "Mail+Pro" Subscription - And now the "You have mail" guy can be replaced by AI...

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