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Comment by paulkrush | Hacker News Reader

I love parcels. Always have. My mom worked at the post office.

Cheap postage hack: Nearly all U.S. stamps issued since World War II don’t have value. You can buy old stamps on eBay for about 60–75 % of face value as “face” stamps—and they’re perfectly valid for mailing.

Unconventional postcards: A thin sheet of plywood with a Sharpie address label is a fun postcard. (it just costs a lot more than a normal postcard)

Small Flat Rate Box physics: With a 70 lb limit, you’d need something exotic—say, a primordial black hole—to exceed the weight cap.

Spare the carrier’s back: A Medium Flat Rate Box packed with 10,000 pre 1982 copper pennies tips the scale at roughly 68 lb. Maybe ship the coins another way—your postal carrier will thank you!

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On the opposite of the spectrum:

From a set of year 2000 USPS experiments:

> Helium balloon. The balloon was attached to a weight. The address was written on the balloon with magic marker; no postage was affixed. Our operative argued strongly that he should be charged a negative postage and refunded the postal fees, because the transport airplane would actually be lighter as a result of our postal item. This line of reasoning merely received a laugh from the clerk. The balloon was refused; reasons given: transportation of helium, not wrapped.

https://improbable.com/airchives/paperair/volume6/v6i4/TMP-1...

Image links are dead, including on archive.org :(

Now you know the reason why courier services often include both weight and volume in their pricing calculations.

And for freight... density, stackability, and durability.

I remembered and searched for the same article. I found this version (on the same domain) with images and better formatting.

https://improbable.com/annals-of-improbable-research-july-au...

I would like to understand how this works. Did they hand off the to-be-mailed uwrapped, say, lemon or a hammer or a deer tibia to a person at a post office? Wouldn't the post office clerks just say "sorry you gotta box that, we sell one of these here options"?

The article has lots of info about what clerks said and did at delivery, but little about when they were sent, which suggests to me that there's something about how USPS works that different from how it works where I live that's assumed to be obvious to the reader. You can't just drop a deer bone or a lemon in a mailbox right? It wouldn't fit, would it?

From the link: > mailed at public postal collection boxes (when possible to cram the object through the aperture) or at postal stations (if possible).

In the US, post offices generally have drop boxes outside for letters (since you normally just need a stamp), and a larger drop box for packages inside, since you can often get pre-paid labels for stuff like item returns.

Thanks!

> Never-opened small bottle of spring water. We observed the street corner box surreptitiously the following day upon mail collection. After puzzling briefly over this item, the postal carrier removed the mailing label and drank the contents of the bottle over the course of a few blocks as he worked his route.

I'm pretty sure that's a very serious crime, given all the strict laws about mail.

https://time.com/archive/6712646/shipping-the-cement-is-in-t...

TIME

July 4, 1988 12:00 AM EDT

What is the cheapest way to get 6,000 concrete blocks and 4,600 bags of cement to a remote Eskimo village? Answer: mail them. Sam Krogstad, a construction supplier in Anchorage, is sending the individually addressed blocks (postage: $4.33 each) and bags ($4.27) about 700 miles north to Wainwright, where they will be used to build a small harbor on the Arctic Ocean. Krogstad’s bill for stamps will be about $45,000, less than what other shippers would charge.

The Postal Service is not pleased about the shipment, which will cost about $180,000 to deliver by truck and plane. But the agency can find nothing illegal about Krogstad’s parcels, which weigh a few pounds less than the 70- lb. maximum for regular mail.

Mr. Krogstad forgot to check international mailing regulations just as asiduously.

We could have had our own homegrown Temu, in America.

I moved to Juneau mostly via USPS. It was fairly inexpensive.

It helped a bit that my apartment was directly above the Auke Bay PO.

Back when flat rates originally came out I don't think they had an actual weight limit.

A buddy of mine used to cast and paint figurines. Well, someone ordered a bunch of lead ones and they used a flat rate to ship it. The box weighed something like 80lbs. It was basically just a block of lead

It's probably coincidence but a few months later a weight limit was placed on flat rate boxes. It's still crazy high. We always thought the timing was funny.

I don't think it was a coincidence. Basically everyone who shipped raw metals in quantities that would reasonably fit in those boxes, did so.

The weight limit is 70 pounds = 31.8 kg. Lead is 11.35 g/cm^3.

Small flat rate box, 21.9 x 13.7 x 4.12 cm = 1236 cm^3 = 14kg; you can fill 100% with lead and mail it. Tungsten is also allegedly fine, but it will weigh 23 kilos and be quite difficult to pick up (can't get a finger under an edge...)

Medium flat rate box = 95kg; you can fill it 33% with lead, or ~45% with steel and mail it.

Large flat rate box = 144kg; only 22% lead.

(CGS units give me nightmares, so I'll swap to SI.)

For solids at room temperature and pressure the best you could do seems to be osmium or iridium, unless you have access to heavy transactinides.

  mass/kg substance
  2.57e5  small flat rate box
  2.26e5  osmium 
  2.25e5  iridium
  2.65e5  meitnerium (theoretical)

Considering the expense of synthesizing meitnerium and the half-life which is measured in seconds, I would recommend getting insurance as well as express shipping if you do try.

Less than a second for all known isotopes I can find [0] So by the time you get to the post office it's under the weight limit (and you and everyone nearby are dead from the massive radiation dose probably)

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meitnerium#Stability_and_half-...

What's wrong with 278Mt? That should give you a lesiurely 4.5 seconds.

The problem is I missed it wasn't ms like the rest of them. Still stands though you'll lose too much density by the time it's weighed even assuming you could mass create the Mt all at once.

Not with that attitude.

If you've got a particularly slothful postal worker you might consider topping up your meitnerium with a similarly sized sample of roentgenium-282. If you don't have any to hand then perhaps you'll have better luck producing tennessine-294 and waiting a couple of minutes. Amusingly your trip from Tennessee to x-ray land will take you via Moscow and Japan.

(Beware that you might end up making the box bulge a bit, since you'll necessarily go over the size limit by including less dense materials as well as necessary apparatus.)

My dad once got a package in a decently sized box which was covered in 80 year old US stamps with face values from 2 to 15 cents. There were probably 150 or so stamps in total, enough to cover the few dollars or so of postage.

However, the post office apparently forgot to void the stamps (usually they draw over them with a pen), so his next step was to commit mail fraud. He steamed off 60 cents or so worth of unvoided stamps from the box and sent me a letter at school. That one went through just fine too.

It's not uncommon that letter mail within the same city in Canada doesn't get the postage marked, and you can reuse the stamps; my parents and grandparents sent a letter back and forth with the same stamp for more than a year!

Just because you can do it doesn't make it legal.

USA: https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/26/7208 U.S.C. 7208.4

(4)Reuse of stamps

(A) Preparation for reuse

Willfully removes, or alters the cancellation or defacing marks of, or otherwise prepares, any adhesive stamp, with intent to use, or cause the same to be used, after it has already been used; or

(B) Trafficking

Knowingly or willfully buys, sells, offers for sale, or gives away, any such washed or restored stamp to any person for use, or knowingly uses the same; or

Knowingly and without lawful excuse (the burden of proof of such excuse being on the accused) has in possession any washed, restored, altered stamp, which has been removed from any vellum, parchment, paper, instrument, writing, package, or article; ... shall be guilty of a felony and, upon conviction thereof, shall be fined not more than $10,000, or imprisoned not more than 5 years, or both.

https://www.law.cornell.edu/cfr/text/27/479.163#:~:text=prev...

§ 479.163 Reuse of stamps prohibited. A stamp once affixed to one document cannot lawfully be removed and affixed to another. Any person willfully reusing such a stamp shall be subject to the penalty prescribed by 26 U.S.C. 7208.

Canada:

Section 55 of the Canada Post Corporation Act deals with evading payment of postage, and it is an indictable offence under Section 60, punishable by up to 5 years imprisonment. This means that individuals who intentionally avoid paying for postage or who use the postal service without paying are subject to legal penalties, including potential incarceration.

https://laws-lois.justice.gc.ca/eng/acts/c-10/FullText.html Evading payment of postage

55 Every person commits an offence who, for the purpose of evading payment of postage,

(a) encloses a letter or any writing intended to serve the purpose of a letter in mail not paid at the rate of postage for letters;

(b) uses in payment of postage any previously used postage stamp;

The poor phrasing is a bit concerning. In headings or prior sentences sections talk about _reuse_ as a category. However they go on to enumerate individual actions that might occur in legitimate circumstances.

E.G. If a letter is prepared to be mailed, but it's realized the address is wrong before it's mailed, would it then not still be the first use if the to be sent envelope had it's stamps removed and placed onto a corrected envelop for the first use of the stamps? (Yeah, this would make no sense today with the cost of labor and general stuff, it's a hypothetical.)

> Unconventional postcards: A thin sheet of plywood

Can confirm, I laser cut wedding invitations out of 1/4" plywood and mailed them out like that. I think it required some "non-machineable" stamp or similar, but they all arrived at their intended destinations.

> Unconventional postcards: A thin sheet of plywood with a Sharpie address label is a fun postcard. (it just costs a lot more than a normal postcard)

I've got a bunch of water color paper post cards from my days of random vacations and a large format camera. I recall that they also had a slightly more than post card rate postage on them (though not excessively so).

I used Polaroid type 59 film (peel apart) in the field and did a transfer right there. Take a picture in Yosemite? Pull it out, roller it on to the paper and drop it in the mail box. It was a one of a kind. The damage incurred while mailing (blunted corners, scuffs and such) was part of the nature of the art.

There were also families who were curious about the process and I'd sell them a sheet of film at cost for them to do what they wanted - be it have a photograph or go through the process of making a post card themselves. There was also the "this is what an old time camera looks like and how it works" that interested some of the younger children - the heavy black cloth and the upside down image.

> Nearly all U.S. stamps issued since World War II don’t have value.

That's true of pretty much all stamps from all countries since WW2. Postal agencies have discovered that collectors will buy new issues and never mail them, preserving them as "mint". So it's pretty much free money for the Postal agency. Many countries (including the USPS) constantly come up with new designs to sell to collectors.

I noticed that when I began collecting as a boy, thinking the post WW2 issues were all just "soup can labels" and had zero interest in them.

Your comment made me think of the Terry Pratchett book "Going Postal" in which a conman is put in charge of the post office and quickly realizes what you said: selling stamps is free money. One of my favorites from his later discworld books.

Yeah, they are little more than the sticker books you buy for kids.

And I had a 3-year-old who proudly showed me the toy covered in "stickers" after he found a book of 100 $0.48 stamps!

ouch!

> Nearly all U.S. stamps issued since World War II don’t have value

"Forever stamps" were introduced in 2007. What other stamps before then didn't have a face value? I don't remember any.

I think the idea is you can buy old stamp collections for less than face value.

E.g. this collection of 8000 stamps is $75: https://www.ebay.com/itm/396477663178

Looking at the pictures, many are more than $.01 value.

Assuming they’re uncancelled, you’ll end up multiples of your money ahead if you rip the collection apart and use it to mail stuff.

The challenge would be having enough surface area on your package to plaster on 6-cent stamps.

> The challenge would be having enough surface area on your package to plaster on 6-cent stamps.

It’s not too hard if you mail paper that can’t be folded.

Can also cover what you can and get the clerk to print you a label for the rest.

It is "legal enough" to stuff whole sheets of stamps into a pouch and attach the pouch to a parcel, if you do it at the post office and have them cancel the stamps at the counter. Let them know they can just use a Sharpie to cancel whole sheets at a time. Legal enough in the sense that my local post office lets me do it, and the local postmaster has okayed it, and the packages always make it, but I'm not entirely sure if it's 100% above-board. My record is over 800 stamps on a single Priority Mail box. Way, way more than would fit on the surface area of the box, and certainly way more than anyone could reasonably use if they actually had to apply the adhesive on the stamps.

I couldn't parse that at first either, but I think what they mean is that they don't have value as a collector's item. They still have face value, but they sell for less than that because they're not perceived as actual legal postage any longer, even though they actually are.

I taped a quarter to an envelope and it went through (obviously when postage was 25c).

I asked if anyone had a stamp and someone suggested I just do that.

Good thing it worked, it was my rent check.

Several friends and I have been tossing around the idea of sending a solid billet of osmium in a small flat rate box, matching its size. "One rate, any weight," right?

Sadly this experiment would cost in the high tens of thousands of dollars. We may try with titanium some day. That would only be ten thousand dollars.

Titanium is 4.51 g/cm³, vs osmium at 22.5 g/cm³. Did you mean tungsten at 19.3 g/cm³?

This is the HN comment I didn't know I needed.

Midwest Tungsten sells a 1.5" cube (1 kg) for $200. I have one, as well as a magnesium cube of the same size. They look identical but the Mg cube weighs 1/10 as much. It's fun to let someone hold the W cube to feel the weight and then toss them the Mg cube with "Here, catch!"

https://shop.tungsten.com/tungsten-cube/

I want that 7" cube, but $35k is well out of my price range.

Where'd you get the magnesium cube?

Not sure where they got it from, but the same folk have https://shop.tungsten.com/magnesium-cube/

I have both too! It’s a really fun talking piece when I have friends over.

Broken tungsten carbide drill bits are a much cheaper way to get dense weights (I made a running vest one time) if you can find a machine shop or online, etc.

Yes, tungsten. Oops

If you just used lead the billet would be 31lb, it'd be procurable and shippable for under $100.

Osmium is about twice as dense so yeah that would still be shippable at around 60 lb... I don't think that's even tens of thousands at that point? Isn't it going to be in the millions? I'm just thinking that like if you went for gold instead, 50 lb is 800 oz, at $3300/oz these days doing this with gold is $2.64M, no? And surely osmium blows gold out of the water by like 10x, right?

Jokes on you when the $100 of insurance is all you get back from the post office...

Edit: a sibling comment points out that you can probably do this under $100 with tungsten too and get up into that 50lb+ range.

Depleted uranium would be my first choice for this; we had big bars of the stuff laying around the lab that we used for door stops. (The lab was a place that designed nuclear weapons.)

DU is harmless unless you eat or breathe it but alas it's now illegal to possess more than a minute quantity of it.

Tungsten is actually slightly denser and it has the advantage of being obtainable.

Isn't DU heavy metal-dangerous, but not radiation-dangerous?

Yes

It's both. DU is never completely "depleted" because radiation falloff is asymptotic. DU is primarily an alpha emitter and alpha particles cannot penetrate skin, but they can cause damage if you breathe, eat, or inject DU dust.

That's why our use of big lumps of DU as door stops was considered "safe" (at that time several years ago) but in labs where people machined the stuff they were a lot more careful.

Sorry to be a downer, it’s a fun thought experiment – but also a good way to get a postal worker hurt, and possibly a nice lawsuit :)

How? Postal workers shouldn;t be carrying things that are too heavy. I suspect the USPS would have to arrange a special delivery.

> Nearly all U.S. stamps issued since World War II don’t have value.

Can you elaborate? I don't know what this means, and other commenters seem confused as well.

From your description, it sounds like they very much have value -- 60–75% as you say.

And what are face stamps?

I believe they mean collector value hence them being worth less than their face value (which should in theory be the rough floor for them since they're still valid postage).

I think they’re referring to “forever stamps”, which are worth whatever the cost of a first class stamp normally is. They were designed to deal with the fact that people would buy stamps at a certain face-value which would then become difficult to use when postage rates rise to some non-integer multiple of the older stamps.

Forever stamps were only introduced in 2007. Which is a long time after WWII...

Technically they are USA Forever, which is looking less and less like Forever.

I was able to quarter the cost of a whole shoebox of video-8 tapes under the media mail provision

For a few years, your money was better spent investing in Forever stamps vs the stock market..

This was more or less the plan behind the original Ponzi scheme. The problem is that it’s difficult, if not impossible, to convert stamps back to cash at anything close to face value.

fun fact. in federal prisons (and some portion of state prisons), books of stamps are essentially $5 bills. It's common to see people with huge wads of stamps in their pockets much like you would with cash. a few years ago, it became much more difficult to convert stamps back to cash, so a few companies popped up that would accept stamps in the mail for some value on the dollar and books of stamps are the currency of (most) US prisons to this day.

The jails and prisons are all shifting to a system where they will frank your mail with the correct postage and take it off your commissary to avoid people owning stamps.

I once sued because the jail was selling Forever stamps at 49c but Congress had reduced the price to 47c. The government's argument was that they had purchased 10,000 of them at 49c, so selling them at 49c was legal as they weren't "ripping anyone off." The appellate courts did not agree with that argument.

Also, funny thing in jails, the sticky leftover gutter parts of the stamp books had value because they could be used to repair torn things like books, photos and magazines.

In the '90s I corresponded with a prisoner whose facility did not allow them to have stamps; they could only send usps envelopes with the postage preprinted directly on the envelope.

Oh, I thought they were using cans of mackerel!

The old stamp trick is genius! There's something extra satisfying about mailing a letter covered in vintage stamps like it's on a time-travel mission

I used "media mail" to move myself home from Hawaii back to the mainland once. It was so cheap.

Leather postcards were popular for a few years, but were then banned because they jammed up the sorting machines.

Wait so what’s the point of the forever stamps? And what do you search for on eBay exactly?

A forever stamp is guaranteed 1st class postage for a letter, regardless of the current rate.

Before forever stamps were introduced people would have to add a 1 or 2 cent stamp next to the 20 or 25 cent stamp in order to reach the current rate for mailing a letter.

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