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Comment by jstummbillig | Hacker News Reader

That's what was supposed to happen, right?

There has long been a desire to privatize the USPS, so this also fits neatly into the narrative that the USPS should not be a public good.

This is affecting private carriers as well.

Friend ordered a widget from China. Needed for a project he was prototyping.

Widget $30

Shipping $60

Shipped via DHL which did have the mechanisms in place to declare contents and pay the tariffs, but not for free.

For people ordering tube socks off of AliBaba, the economics is entirely different and the result is not unexpected.

When Alibaba first became big I remember ordering stuff from there and it taking about one month and a half to arrive in Brazil. Turns out they packaged a lot of shipments together into a single cargo container and then distributed them internally within Brazil.

IMO it should go back to been that way. It is ridiculous to ship these small packages by air. I am not in favor of tariffs, but the shipping needs to be included in the bill.

There's no goal for the privatized USPS to actually be successful, only to destroy the public good. It's government, it works, so therefore it must be destroyed. This is really how Republicans think.

> it works, so therefore it must be destroyed. This is really how Republicans think

I've been living here four years and met some really wonderful Americans, both Democrat and Republican, yet I don't think I've met a single one who thinks the way you're presenting. This seems like a pretty bleak way to view your country's politics, respectfully.

What voters think is largely irrelevant. Republican politicians campaign by claiming everything government does doesn't work, and once in office they do everything possible to ensure those claims become true.

Yeah, I basically agree. The goals of republican politicians are to satisfy the wealthy elite (corporations mostly). Public services, almost by definition, do not make large profits and make it much harder for a private corporation to compete while making large profits themselves. Privatizing public services is a great way to make the rich richer.

The republican politicians then have to craft a message that will get enough normal, not rich people to vote them into office. So they talk about hot-button culture war issues, selecting the positions they must take to get numbers they need (abortion, gun rights, "freedom of speech," gay marriage, immigrants, vaccines, etc etc), all the while reminding their base that the government (except the military and police) is bad.

So that is say, normal people who vote republican can be very nice and reasonable, and they have one or two things that strongly motivates them to vote for a terribly harmful platform.

All you have to do is look at all of the impositions that republican administrations and politicians have placed on USPS and the heaps of denigration they've piled on it to see the truth of the matter.

From forcing them to fund all future retirement funding in a way that no other government agency is (the PAEA) to all of the attacks on it around "mail-in vote fraud," to the constant attacks on the budget issues that they created, it's plainly apparent that the Republicans desire USPS failing and being privatized.

Many of them have also literally said as much. AEI and Cato are big proponents of privatization, Trump has talked about it many times, Wells Fargo has created some proposed frameworks, etc., and the worse it performs as a public entity the better they can make the argument for privatization.

I'm Canadian so I can't speak to the issues surrounding the USPS.

However, in Canada we remain in the midst of a long work-to-rule strike by the Canadian Union of Postal Workers (CUPW) against Canada Post (CP). The biggest issue in this strike is that there is a very wide gap between what CUPW is demanding (in terms of pay increases, protection of workers, maintenance of routes) and what CP is offering.

CP had been losing billions of dollars (even prior to the strike) and the situation continues to worsen as consumers lose confidence in the reliability of CP's parcel service, due to the strike. CP wants to close a lot of post offices, complete the phase-out of door-to-door postal service in favour of community mailboxes (which are already in use for more than half of households), and even reduce delivery frequency to less than 5 days per week.

I actually support these cost-cutting measures by CP because I, like many other Canadians, receive almost zero useful mail by post these days. Almost all of the mail I receive is advertising (junk mail), with the few exceptions being bills and statements from banks and the like (the latter of which ought to be phased out to fully electronic since I only bank through mobile apps anyway).

And so I'm left wondering what exactly is the public good in the postal service anyway? It seems more like a subsidy for a handful of advertisers and banks as well as a jobs program for postal workers. I send actual letters by mail so infrequently that I wouldn't mind paying $10 to send one by courier. But that isn't even within the space of proposals (shutting down CP completely)!

The most extreme proposal would be for CP to eliminate door-to-door service (community mailboxes only) and to switch to weekly delivery only, instead of daily. That would not affect the vast majority of Canadians in the slightest. The only ones who would be truly affected are those with mobility issues (disabilities or the elderly) who are unable to walk down the street to the community mailbox. Fortunately, there is already a service in place for providing mobility assistance to these people!

> CP wants to close a lot of post offices, complete the phase-out of door-to-door postal service in favour of community mailboxes (which are already in use for more than half of households), and even reduce delivery frequency to less than 5 days per week.

Honestly that sounds like some good ways to reduce costs and carbon emissions. For the elderly there would need to be some considerations made. I live in the US but in large apartment buildings here there’s a couple of mailrooms for hundreds of units, I imagine it’s significantly more efficient than delivering to each unit.

Here large apartment complexes get door delivery. For single family, unless resident is certifiably limited in mobility delivery is to communal array of postal boxes. Alternating 2 and 3 days a week. Running through a building is not too inefficient. Delivering between them is.

That still seems like a big waste of time. Having a postal worker walk door to door throughout a large building takes way longer than having them fill up the mailboxes in a single mailroom on the ground floor. I wouldn’t be surprised if it took ten times as many postal workers to deliver to apartment doors instead of mailrooms.

A public good is a good that is both non-rivalrous and non-excludable. Establishing a federal monopoly doesn’t turn the product of that monopoly into a public good. Likewise, a public good can be provided by a non-government entity.

It's public and good though. ( ๑ ´ • .̫ • ` ๑ )

Jokes aside, I getting hung up on that term in this context feels unnecessary, it was quiet clear what kaitai was talking about from the text he wrote.

It’s disingenuous to confuse the meaning of the term “public good” in order to justify government monopolies. Everybody knows that part of the role of the government is to provide “public goods”, but that’s based on how the term “public good” is defined, so it’s dishonest to use that to justify establishing a government monopoly over a non-public good.

Have you looked at your mail lately? The USPS is mostly shipping around recycling, like ads. I would happily pay $7 to send a letter 1 time a year if it meant I would see half as much spam.

Surely you see how the spam is subsidizing letters, and then “public good” isn’t so obviously black and white. I mean we could ban spam, tax to pay $6.50 of every $7 letter to enable wedding invitations be $0.50 to mail… but why?

Id rather get the spam and pay $1 for letters. Then lower income people have access to the public good, subsidized by industry. Otherwise sending mail becomes something only rich people do.

My mom lives out-of-state, and she sometimes sends little presents to my kid. My kid then draws a little picture on a postcard and sends it to his grandma.

The post office fucking rules.

Especially that underpriced postage advantage (the de minimis exemption) that so many were taking advantage when shipping small shipments from China (and others). Maybe maybe this means fewer items of dubious repute on Amazon.

It was a stupid exception I'm glad they did away with it. I have no idea who in their bright mind saw reason to increase the exception to 800 from 200). Stupid.

Suspension was talked about in April. Announced globally at the end of July and took effect at the end of August.

That's not the point under contention. Removing the de minimis exemption is a perfectly cromulent policy. It's not even particularly unpopular to remove it.

The problem is that the Trump Administration is plainly incompetent in handling these matters. There wouldn't be this shitshow of sudden haltings in postal services to the US if they'd done the normal thing of announcing the changes with an appropriate lead time for businesses to adjust, rather than suddenly implementing it alongside the constant ping-ponging between yes-tariffs and no-tariffs.

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