Hacker News Reader

Comment by cobertos | Hacker News Reader

Doesn't USPS also play a key role in a lot of other services?

* ID verification

* Vacant home notifications

* Registered mail

I have a hard time seeing a private company scrupulously handling these operations when the incentives to manipulate them could be very large.

View on HN

Also voting.

If you privatize the post office, then either mail-in voting stops completely, or else a private company can control which mail-in ballots get delivered, and which ones don't.

That'd be mostly a net-positive since mail-in voting seems to be hard to get right in your country. Better to get rid of it in all but the most pressing cases - those who can not leave the house, overseas military and such - and have people go to the voting booth themselves, show their ID, get a ballot and fill it out using a writing implement. Do the count locally at the end of the day and send the ballots to a central location for another count. You'll have a "paper trail" in case the count is questioned, you get the results the same day, you call make sure only those eligible to vote do so and more. If it can be done in places ranging from rural Sweden (population density < 1/km2) to urban India it surely can be done in the USA.

> That'd be mostly a net-positive since mail-in voting seems to be hard to get right in your country

Strawman. You might have the belief that it’s hard to get right, but that seems based on the American news sources you are consuming from your spit in the world. In reality, there are very little issues with this.

Well... there are very few documented issues with this. There are many claimed issues with this. While there is certainly the opportunity for there to be issues, the evidence doesn't match the claims.

It can be done mostly right but isn't in many places in the USA where ballots are sent to everyone on the voter records no matter whether they still live there or even live at all. Where there are no or insufficient checks on whether the ballots are filled out by the registered voter or by someone else. The is plenty of documentation on this, if the news sources you follow don't report on this you're missing part of the picture.

The real strawmen are the reasons given for not requiring ID when casting your ballot. Here in Sweden there is nobody who complains about having to show ID when casting your votes, nor was this ever a problem in the Netherlands.

Unfortunately, for the people seeking to privatize the post office, that's seen as a feature, not a bug.

Also passport services, there is a separate line in my USPS office for that (by appointment). The folks working at mine (FL, 33009( are very customer service oriented.

And general delivery*, media mail**, passports, money orders, stamps, and collectables. Furthermore, nation-state post offices should provide free basic banking services to everyone to eliminate unbanked status.

* Delivery to a post office for an individual without a delivery address

** Low cost media shipping excluding comic books, games, and magazines containing advertisements

Yes, it also had a mandate to deliver mail. So people living in the middle of nowhere New Mexico can do something like run a small business through delivery (this was on the radio the last time this nonsense was floated). It's actually kind of beautiful, something that I can't imagine would work with a privately owned system.

The beautiful thing is a society deeming universal (gasp!) access to mail to be important.

The ugly part is profit driven mindset, and a “you live in an unprofitable area to mail to, sorry” obvious outcome

They'd end up charging you the amount of money you'd make sending the package, that's how all these forms of rentierism work: Uber, Amazon, Apple, Shopify, etc. Private taxes they want to force onto people.

Must fight it at any opportunity. I can't imagine the economic value something like USPS brings to the country, likely trillions of trillions over it's lifespan. Something the corpos would never admit.

I still think the USPS banking idea would be a really great one.

Easier profit than a regular bank because the “branches” already have to exist, closes banking gaps for underserved populations, perhaps some other benefits I haven’t even considered.

It shouldn't be done for-profit, it should be equivalent to a credit union open to all.

That’s essentially what I mean, but I stated it poorly. The proceeds would fund the service though.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com