You need to check out who is in charge of usps..
You mean the trump appointed anti-usps sycophant? That is significantly invested in private usps competitors right?
:-/
Mail delays hit Philadelphia residents, short staffed USPS struggles to keep up
61–70 of 325 posts
Re: Mail delays hit Philadelphia residents, short staffed USPS struggles to keep up
#62Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not giving employees benefits does not necessarily lead to a better service
The USPS is uniquely shackled by a ridiculous requirement to prefund 75 years worth of pension and medical benefits, and is also barred from raising rates the help pay for it. There is no way any organization can operate that way.
You are correct the problem is that they are now allowed to set prices, but incorrect in that USPS is not required to prefund 75 years of pension and medical benefits. It is required to save for accrued benefits. Which is how it should be. If you purchased, today, a $2,000 annuity starting when you are 65, wouldn’t you want the insurance company to start saving for it now?
https://www.cnbc.com/2011/10/24/the-truth-about-the-post-off...
> Although accounting rules require the postal service to calculate future liabilities, including those for projected future employees, the law only requires pre-funding of obligations to actual current and past employees.
Re: Mail delays hit Philadelphia residents, short staffed USPS struggles to keep up
#63Earlier quoted context omitted.
There are other reasons they want to disband the post office beyond just its impact on voting. If they replace it with private entities it becomes easier to surveil and censor the mail, for instance.
The USPS takes an image of the front of the envelope for every first class letter sent in the USA. It's a safe bet that they're doing OCR of the recipient/sender addresses and store it in a database. USPS Informed Delivery is just a customer-facing result of that long standing program.
Yes, the goal of surveillance is already being advanced in many ways under the existing structure of the USPS.
Re: Mail delays hit Philadelphia residents, short staffed USPS struggles to keep up
#64Earlier quoted context omitted.
You can return your mail-in ballot to a drop slot / drop box at your local election office, which saves them postage fees and gives you more certainty it arrived. If you can’t spare the time then the mail still works, but for those that are worried, it’s allowed.
I can't vote, but i can drive. Is it legal to drop someone else's ballot to the local election office? I'll drop it for people who can't go.
In Republican states there are many laws in place to make helping people vote extraordinarily challenging.
Re: Mail delays hit Philadelphia residents, short staffed USPS struggles to keep up
#65Earlier quoted context omitted.
The craziest thing about the whole situations is there actually isn’t much evidence that vote by mail favors republicans; and yet they’re willing to degrade postal service to a country more reliant on it than ever, just for a small hope of electoral advantage. Edit: article in case anyone isn’t convinced (I was skeptical at first, given the tone of the discussion): https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/10/us/politics/vote-…
The concern for the GOP isn’t that democrats favor voting by mail, it’s that the GOP has worked hard to make it as hard as possible to vote in person in targeted (eg non Republican) communities. Widespread vote from mail defeats that as it means that their selective polling closures, and arbitrary barriers to voting in person, go away
This is a great point. That makes a lot of sense.
Re: Mail delays hit Philadelphia residents, short staffed USPS struggles to keep up
#66Earlier quoted context omitted.
It’s not about privatizing the service, it’s about disrupting their ability to process mail in ballots for the election. If they wanted to privatize it, they could have don’t it at any time during the past four years.
> It’s not about privatizing the service, Yes it is. > it’s about disrupting their ability to process mail in ballots for the election. True, but those are complementary not mutually exclsuive motivations.
That’s like saying genocide is ok because we need to decrease our population. They are mutual exclusive motivations.
Re: Mail delays hit Philadelphia residents, short staffed USPS struggles to keep up
#67This is problematic to voting in the same way closing polling sites is, framed as cost cutting or inefficiency reduction with the intention of reducing access to a subset of the population. This is just frustration, but the fact that we could pass a massive defense bill (again, I know), but are unable to fund basic services shows the integrity of our government. Moreover, it shows the culpability of most of the elect…
Voting in person the old fashioned way for all but those with a good physical excuse seems to be the best way to maintain the integrity of our voting process. Yes, in-person voting has the potential for fraud, but mail-in voting has all of the same problems and more. It's hard to find a mechanism for fraud that applies to in-person but not mail in. Furthermore, the issues with COVID seem overblown. I've waited in lin…
I voted by mail in Seattle for years and never had an issue or even heard of one. The ballot goes in a tamper-evident envelope, sealed within the mailing envelope. You also get online tracking to know your ballot was received and processed.
Re: Mail delays hit Philadelphia residents, short staffed USPS struggles to keep up
#68This is problematic to voting in the same way closing polling sites is, framed as cost cutting or inefficiency reduction with the intention of reducing access to a subset of the population. This is just frustration, but the fact that we could pass a massive defense bill (again, I know), but are unable to fund basic services shows the integrity of our government. Moreover, it shows the culpability of most of the elect…
Voting in person the old fashioned way for all but those with a good physical excuse seems to be the best way to maintain the integrity of our voting process. Yes, in-person voting has the potential for fraud, but mail-in voting has all of the same problems and more. It's hard to find a mechanism for fraud that applies to in-person but not mail in. Furthermore, the issues with COVID seem overblown. I've waited in lin…
Voting and going to the grocery store are pretty different in multiple ways.
For one thing, we give people exactly one day for in-person voting, and they don't get the day off from work - so they probably have a total of maybe 5 non-work hours available to them during which polling places are open, they go to one, stand in line with thousands of other people, then walk into a crowded place, interact up close with polling staff, and then interact up close with polling equipment. The polling equipment is not frequently sterilized (if at all), the polling staff might not have protective gear, and the polling places are cramped and poorly ventilated. It doesn't matter how many people need to vote there - 100k? 1k? same difference - you've all got to do it today, and in these specific hours.
Sounds really safe!
In comparison, you can go to the grocery store whenever is best for you (as long as they're open - and many are open 24 hours any day of the week), there are lots of locations to choose from, and if you go during off-peak hours the aisles are relatively empty and you have enough space to social distance from the other people in the store. At this point, the staff typically have masks+gloves and there's often hand sanitizer and cough shields. Some grocery stores explicitly limit the # of people inside at any given time.
Re: Mail delays hit Philadelphia residents, short staffed USPS struggles to keep up
#69Incredibly frustrating to get mail by USPS over the past couple months and even more frustrating to know this is an intentional kneecapping of the USPS by the administration in order "prove" government services are inefficient to privatize the USPS
USPS has a government granted monopoly on letter delivery end it and these problems will also go away.
Yes and no. It has a government granted monopoly on relatively inexpensive but relatively fast letter delivery. I can certainly send a letter overnight by FedEx if I want to but it will cost a lot more and FedEx can't leave the envelope in the mailbox almost everyone has.
I do tend to think the USPS should be allowed to increase their rates to sustainable levels. Individuals are not nearly as dependent on being able to regularly send letters across the country for well under a dollar as they once were.
Re: Mail delays hit Philadelphia residents, short staffed USPS struggles to keep up
#70Incredibly frustrating to get mail by USPS over the past couple months and even more frustrating to know this is an intentional kneecapping of the USPS by the administration in order "prove" government services are inefficient to privatize the USPS
Its not a point about government effectiveness or efficiency. They kneecapped the USPS when they forced prefunding of pension liabilities ( https://www.cnbc.com/2011/10/24/the-truth-about-the-post-off... ). They had more legislative leverage prior to 2018, so they could have done all this much earlier. It is not possible to honestly discuss this in a meaningful way without acknowledging it's 3 months out from a presi…
I can’t believe arguing that ACTUALLY FUNDING pension liabilities is a horrible thing - this is how every government pension should be funded! You should be screaming about how nearly every state and federal government pension is ridiculously underfunded!