431–440 of 575 posts
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Doesn't the US healthcare system, when compared to other countries, stand as a direct example of how private companies aren't inherently better at equitable essential service provision?
Many European countries have largely privatized healthcare providers.
If you want to mentions specific countries we can compare them to the US.
There are various advocates for allowing the USPS to return to the banking business. They would put the exploitative check cashing stores out of business. Ellen Brown's has written a copy pieces advocating for postal banking. What We Could Do with a Postal Savings Bank: Infrastructure that Doesn’t Cost Taxpayers a Dime - https://ellenbrown.com/2013/09/23/what-we-could-do-with-a-po... (2013) This piece concludes by su…
I don't think the Federal Government has any mandate that allows it to start a for profit business, on some whimsical political wind. The USA is designed to allow people to make a living, and it has limitations that prevent it from getting in on someone's lucrative business. Laws supporting free+fair markets on the other hand, are meant to make it possible for private citizens to compete...
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It’s not worth spending 55 cents to mail it?
> Marketing mail volume for 2019 was 75 Billion https://facts.usps.com/table-facts/ At a subsidy of 10 cents per envelope shipped, the US government is funding a $7.5 Billion / year worth of marketing operations for private companies and scammers of all sorts. Also, according to those stats less than 10% of the mail throughput is used for the benefit of the citizens. Where you informed on this before engaging?
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There's two separate things here: (1) Book profit: it appears that they're arguing if you ignore pension cost the USPS is profitable. But that's a meaningless point. Its like saying if you ignore what they spend on gas then they'd be profitable. Obviously you can't just ignore costs when calculating profit. These pension obligations are real costs that have to be accounted for. (2) Cash flow: This is where pension pr…
> it appears that they're arguing if you ignore pension cost the USPS is profitable. Its like saying if you ignore what they spend on gas then they'd be profitable. Obviously you can't just ignore costs when calculating profit. You're skirting the primary issue. This "cost" is manufactured and is a burden that no other entity (private or governmental) even comes close to having to bear. It's all in the submitted arti…
It's not manufactured. They are making promises that have a net present value of X dollars. That's a real cost they are incurring and it has to go on their profit/loss statement.
>Up until 2006, the USPS funded those obligations on a pay-as-you-go-basis,
No company is allowed to do that. All companies are required to fully fund their pensions:
>The funding requirement under PPA is simply that a plan must stay fully funded (that is, its assets must equal or exceed its liabilities). If a plan is fully funded, the minimum required contribution is the cost of benefits earned during the year. If a plan is not fully funded, the contribution also includes the amount necessary to amortize over seven years the difference between its liabilities and its assets. Stricter rules apply to severely underfunded plans (called "at-risk status").
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Employee_Retirement_Income_Sec...
> But it probably would've spent at least part of the last decade making comfortable profits.
You have to keep cash flow and profit clear. The prefunding requirement does not change their profitability. It changes their cash flow.
> If the prepayments required under PAEA were never enacted into law, the USPS would not have a net deficiency of nearly $20 billion, but instead be in the black by at least $1.5 billion.
Again, not in the black. They would have $20 billion dollars more in the bank but they would not be profitable. Simply put, they'd have a larger pile of cash to burn before the day of reckoning came.
An analogy would be someone jumping off a very tall bridge. They're dead the moment the feet leave the bridge. Saying that they would survive longer if they jumped off the top of the bridge is technically true but doesn't appreciably change anything. They're still dead. It will just take a bit longer and the splat at the bottom will be more impressive.
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because you're only considering short term monetary cost at the cost of long term benefit
how so
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How do I do mail in voting via Amazon, FedEx, DHL?
I agree with what I think your point is, that having mail for all is a requirement of a civilization. (Sorry if this was not your point.) However, elections alone are obviously not enough to sustain a mail operation. [Edit: I had a double-not, hopefully everyone understood my meaning before.]
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Yes? I think lots of government agencies that deliver services to paying customers are expected to cover their expenses. It's true that some government activities provide, say, non-excludable public goods using tax money, and so are not expected to collect sufficient revenue through distribution, but other government activities are intended to provide a service that can be valued and efficiently purchased by consumer…
> Yes? I think lots of government agencies that deliver services to paying customers are expected to cover their expenses. The big-ticket items I pay for as a taxpayer include schools (via local taxes), defense, retirees, and healthcare. None of those cover their expenses, and basically everything else combined is a tiny minority of government expenditure. (I believe we should more fully fund the non-defense parts of…
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Altavista had access to the same web that Google had. Google created a better mousetrap and the world beat a path to its door.
I agree entirely, but the premise was that more labor went into Altavista’s indexing than Google’s, which is inaccurate. Google was better at capturing the value of labor external to itself, which was far more labor than was ever used to build Altavista.
is it really capturing value or is it creating value? people made links because they wanted to make links anyway. the value of links to a search engine doesn't exist without a search engine, and the existing value of links isn't diminished by that (except for the specific case of a manually curated link directory, e.g. the original yahoo).
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UPS ships more parcels than the USPS despite having to pay income tax, property tax, higher wages, and not having access to low interest loans. The UPS is more efficient and also loses less mail. For some reason, we're better off with the USPS. At the very least, they should have their entitlement to monopoly removed.
Honest question: when has the postal service ever lost a package of yours? I have used the postal service in some fairly uncommon ways, and I have never had a package go missing or not meet their SLA for Priority Mail. You can send a package to pretty much any town in the country for <$20 and expect it to be there in 3 or 4 days. It’s the next best thing to teleportation, unless you wanted to get it on a Sunday.
They've lost plenty of other things besides. I once sent $100 cash in a fun colored envelope containing a birthday card. The card arrived scotch-taped closed with the money gone. I know it wasn't an accident where it got ripped open by a conveyor belt or something because they re-seal torn envelopes in a plastic bag when that happens. That was more an annoying than headache inducing, but UPS has never caused problems for me like those and I use them by an order of magnitude more than USPS.
The worst part isn't that those things happen. Theft and accidents can happen anywhere. The worst part is that the USPS takes no responsibility and could not care any less. So what if a postal employee stole money from a birthday card? Sucks to be me. I can't send letters any other way. The USPS has a legally protected monopoly on letter delivery. So what if the hold time is 9 hours? Who else am I going to go to? The post office is built on bureaucracy and you and I pay the price for it.
The amount of narcissism these people (the Koch's, for example) have is just astounding. If you're a billionaire, what could possibly be a reasonable explanation for why you even care about the post office? Why are these people so hell bent on hurting people to feed their own narcissism? The USPS could be improved but struggles primarily due to active efforts to kill it off. But it's a wonderful idea of a service tha…
> What's next to kill off? Libraries? Public schools? I would vote for this. Whatever we spend on public libraries, that money could be used to bring every residence land-line high-speed internet access. I would also defund all public schools. Charter schools seem to be the future, but the legion of bureaucrats don't want to let go of their communist indoctrination pipeline. As a tax payer, I don't want to subsidize…
Librarians also provide expertise in sourcing knowledge that isn't available online; particularly with the way that Google search has evolved.
Larger libraries also provide archivist roles and even small libraries may serve to archive local news and history.