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Mail delays hit Philadelphia residents, short staffed USPS struggles to keep up

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Re: Mail delays hit Philadelphia residents, short staffed USPS struggles to keep up

#181

Post by AndrewBissell »

AnimalMuppet wrote: post #140
AndrewBissell wrote: post #47

Earlier 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.

There was this incident a while back. Some psychopath sent letters threatening to kidnap young females, rape them, and kill them. He talked about how he had rigged out a van to facilitate this. His letters got turned over to the FBI, since they would up in different states. Turns out that each stamp has microprinting on it that identifies it. Given the stamp, they were able to identify which post office it was sold a…

Private entities will just have terms of service which say they're entitled to open and inspect your mail for any reason they see fit. mindslight's comment above does a good job of touching on some other ways it will enable more surveillance.

But yes, the postal service has already been turned to this purpose in many ways and the days of "gentlemen don't read each other's mail" are largely over.

Re: Mail delays hit Philadelphia residents, short staffed USPS struggles to keep up

#182

Post by lotsofpulp »

agustamir wrote: post #167
lotsofpulp wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Retirement benefits should be funded as they are accrued. That is not the problem. The problem is the USPS doesn’t have the power to price their products appropriately in order to pay for their expenses (including payroll which includes retirement benefits). If anything, all entities promising retirement benefits should be forced to do it the way USPS does. In fact, non government entities were forced to via the Pens…

Trying to ELI5 this to myself - USPS has to fund their pensions and is forced to keep money aside for it. They are unable to make price increases to account for all this extra money that they have to keep aside since they are a public service. Their competitors UPS, FedEx are not being held to the same standard, and so USPS is losing out? And this makes a convenient excuse to show USPS as a failed org?

Almost. Non government entities don't offer the kind of unaffordable benefits such as defined benefit pensions and retiree healthcare anyway as they became more and more unaffordable.

The whole deferred compensation scheme known as defined benefit pensions and retiree healthcare morphed into a way for politicians to push payroll expenses into the future so that they could get elected on "low tax" platforms. They can get away with this because the laws requiring saving for deferred compensation don't apply to government entities.

Re: Mail delays hit Philadelphia residents, short staffed USPS struggles to keep up

#183

Post by stjohnswarts »

nemothekid wrote: post #10

Incredibly 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

It's a double prong attack on the USPS via saying they can't handle mail, let alone all the mail in ballots as well as an attempt to bankrupt them before the election to keep it in court for a while as well as give the Trump base an out and say "I told ya so"

Re: Mail delays hit Philadelphia residents, short staffed USPS struggles to keep up

#184

Post by nxc18 »

lopmotr wrote: post #149
nxc18 wrote: post #51

It’s frustrating that we have to discuss the current administration as if we assume they are acting in good faith. It is frustrating to have to have a ‘but both sides...’ and ‘actually they just care about market efficiency’ arguments when the current administration, acting against all expert advice, has taken action to create the worst outcomes we’ve seen in decades, at least as long as I’ve been alive: unmanaged gl…

> create the worst outcomes we’ve seen in decades Do you really believe all that is worse than the Iraq and Afghanistan wars which caused millions of people to be killed? It sounds like you're just a nationalist who thinks their lives don't matter because they're not Americans. If millions of Americans were killed in a decade-long internal war, you would probably rank it worse than the mail being slow, fear for your…

Americans have been destabilizing foreign countries almost continuously since the end of WW2, it’s the baseline state and hasn’t changed significantly under the current administration.

If Trump actually delivered and extricated the US from the Middle East you might have a point, but he hasn’t. At best he’s ceded control of important areas to anti democratic regimes (Russia, Turkey) while abandoning US allies: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/13/world/middleeast/syria-tu...

edit: If you care about civilian deaths, you might be particularly interested in recent policy changes made by the Trump administration: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-03-06/trump-can...

Another article describes the state of US murder of civilians in the Middle East: https://theintercept.com/2019/10/02/trump-impeachment-civili... - I totally forgot that Trump had promised to murder the families of suspected terrorists; perhaps is delivering on that.

(meta: parent comment is _exactly_ the type of bad faith, 'both sides' argument that I was referring to above; such arguments don't hold up under inspection or review of facts, but sadly people don't always take the time to point that out)

Re: Mail delays hit Philadelphia residents, short staffed USPS struggles to keep up

#185

Post by stjohnswarts »

lotsofpulp wrote: post #161
learc83 wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>FedEx and UPS are subject to the same pension and retirement benefit funding requirements as USPS. No they FedEx and UPS were required to prefund pensions in the 1970s, but they were given 40 years in which to do it. USPS was given 10 years. In addition USPS was required to prefund retirement medical benefits, and unlike a private company who can cut retirement medical benefits at any time, USPS requires an act of c…

I agree the exact terms of funding requirements (10 years) for USPS were politically motivated to weaken it, but the philosophy of funding accrued benefits is sound, and it was long overdue. The same should be required of all entities issuing defined benefit pensions and retiree healthcare. Also, I find it ridiculous that retirement medical benefits can just be cut anytime, as they are part of the compensation agreem…

It's another good idea in theory, but the implementation is being controlled and kneecapped by a party/administration that wants it dead, while throwing up their hands and saying "not our faults". A good idea with a bad implementation is in the end just another bad implementation, forget every word before "bad". Good intentions were claimed but they have no basis in fact. The GOP as a whole is corrupt to its core.

Re: Mail delays hit Philadelphia residents, short staffed USPS struggles to keep up

#186

Post by pstuart »

throwaway5752 wrote: post #110
lotsofpulp wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Retirement benefits should be funded as they are accrued. That is not the problem. The problem is the USPS doesn’t have the power to price their products appropriately in order to pay for their expenses (including payroll which includes retirement benefits). If anything, all entities promising retirement benefits should be forced to do it the way USPS does. In fact, non government entities were forced to via the Pens…

I wish I hadn't mentioned the pension, because it takes away from the immediate and much worse problem that the governing party is trying to stay in power by preventing members of the other party from voting.

If voting is effectively curtailed, everything else is moot. This election is a referendum on (American) democracy.

Re: Mail delays hit Philadelphia residents, short staffed USPS struggles to keep up

#187

Post by mike_h »

maxerickson wrote: post #35
mike_h wrote: post #31

This is a critical threat to democracy given the circumstances of the upcoming election.

So get the word out that mail in ballots can be dropped off in person ahead of time. This is likely the sensible thing to do within a few weeks of the election anyway. Even without the problems at the post office, dropping it off directly really reduces the chances of it getting lost.

Yes. And the harder problem (if this weren’t hard enough) is getting the ballots delivered to voters in the first place.

Re: Mail delays hit Philadelphia residents, short staffed USPS struggles to keep up

#188

Post by minerjoe »

graeme wrote: post #134
xhkkffbf wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

This would be more credible if US in person voting didn’t often involve electronic voting machines with closed source software, no paper trail, and proven exploits. That’s what mail in voting compares to.

I voted in the first election in the US to ever use the Dibold [1] [2] machines, in Atlanta Georgia.

It was obvious to anyone with a single honest neuron that there was no way to trust these machines.

I've never voted since. There is no point in pretending like the system has credibility or accountability.

[1] https://columbusfreepress.com/article/diebold-indicted-its-s...

[2] https://whowhatwhy.org/2020/05/27/touchscreen-voting-makes-e...

Edit: Toned it down a bit. How many downvoting cowards do we have out there? Respond or GTFO.

Re: Mail delays hit Philadelphia residents, short staffed USPS struggles to keep up

#189

Post by johnchristopher »

pstuart wrote: post #186
throwaway5752 wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wish I hadn't mentioned the pension, because it takes away from the immediate and much worse problem that the governing party is trying to stay in power by preventing members of the other party from voting.

If voting is effectively curtailed, everything else is moot. This election is a referendum on (American) democracy.

Hmm. Wasn't that referendum settled in 2016 ? Trump is 30 years in the making.

Unless there's a swing back to restoring democratic norms there's no reasons the coming years are going to be much different, no matter who is elected president.

Re: Mail delays hit Philadelphia residents, short staffed USPS struggles to keep up

#190

Post by jb775 »

throwaway5752 wrote: post #110
lotsofpulp wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Retirement benefits should be funded as they are accrued. That is not the problem. The problem is the USPS doesn’t have the power to price their products appropriately in order to pay for their expenses (including payroll which includes retirement benefits). If anything, all entities promising retirement benefits should be forced to do it the way USPS does. In fact, non government entities were forced to via the Pens…

I wish I hadn't mentioned the pension, because it takes away from the immediate and much worse problem that the governing party is trying to stay in power by preventing members of the other party from voting.

> by preventing members of the other party from voting

This is so absurdly dramatic. Just about everything is back open and ppl agree that wearing a mask basically removes all risk. If ppl want to vote, they can get off their ass and go vote.

And from a security standpoint, how can you say this with a straight face? Some of the hardest modern struggles in the tech industry revolve around security...and you're over here acting like mailing in paper ballots, with no authentication/encryption/verification is a secure practice. All it takes is one or a few bad actors to skew the results. Look up cognitive dissonance, I think it's hitting you hard here.

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