131–140 of 156 posts
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The irony here is the red Republican states are the ones voting for this who will be most impacted by it.
There's no irony because they'll never put two and two together and republican politicians will use the frustration to get reelected.
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I'm not who you're replying too, but I also live in a place with no delivery to the home, despite UPS and FedEx doing so. Everybody in our town gets a free PO Box - I suspect that's how the service obligation is covered. Once a year we have to prove that we still live here to keep the free box.
My rural PO Box rental is $120/year, for the smallest size. If there's a free option they must keep it quiet.
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USPS does last mile delivery for a lot of rural places. Besides that junk mail might actually increase if a private company was paid to take it to your house since they would have a profit motive - more junk mail delivered means more profits.
> USPS does last mile delivery for a lot of rural places. Not in the rural places I've lived, including my current one for 20 years. UPS and FedEx deliver to my porch. USPS has never been here. I drive to my PO box in the nearest town. I think that in this whole county they only deliver to post offices.
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.
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I don’t know anything about Germany’s postal service. In the US, what the parent comment was getting it, is why are we even talking about this in the first place? What problem is privatization trying to solve? As an American, I have zero complaints about our postal service or how much we pay for it. Apart from the fact that I wish there were more branch offices and a few more workers at most locations. I don’t think…
I think the problem being solved here is largely one of waste. USPS hides 9bn of unfunded pension obligations every year and underserves urban areas to subsidize rural areas. Mail volume is also generally falling as everything moves to email, so it is getting both less profitable and less critical. The US is a rich country, we can afford to waste a lot of money and not notice, and of course one person's waste is anot…
Why are we talking about the post office again??
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Elections still have consequences, right? I’d think the fallout between fall of 2024 and now illustrates that. And that was the choice of the electorate (unless someone can demonstrate results were tampered with). So voter choices count. There are differences in how individual congress members and coalitions handle policy, so who voters choose matters. Also, some of that research you’re invoking shows that most offic…
consequences isnt elected officials doing what voters want trump voters voted for no war with iran. their guy won, and yet, war with iran
People had 10 years to see what Trump is. I wasn’t excited about Kamala but between the two, it was a very easy decision for anyone that isn’t an imbecile
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Why not both? Yes, there are systemic issues in the US. But 70% of the US either voted for Trump or didn’t vote at all in 2024. (Let me pause to pre-empt any bothsideism by saying that I think that’s silly and I doubt you’ll change my mind on that, but you can try) Continuing on - liberals tend to point at systemic issues, but personal responsibility is a thing too. I’m a bit tired of the “education this, social medi…
>Why is everyone so stupid, selfish and easily misled? The hundreds of billions of dollars spent on conditioning them to be that way
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You’re correct that time is the fundamental challenge. It’s also really what the money is always a proxy for at some level. Meetings in DC are probably not the right focus. Every congressional officeholder has offices in the region they represent, most have multiple. Most people don’t use them for the same reason they outsource their understanding of current events to Fox News or Rogan & guests. Some people do contac…
While I agree that more people should do this, past evidence shows Congress often goes into hiding when there is too much attention to an issue, tasking staffers to give generic, dismissive non-responses or holding pressers with limited, selected audiences to make it appear that public opinion is different than reality. That’s not a reason for non-engagement, but it’s wrong to shift the burden onto the public. Congre…
People's stated preferences are as you say. Most agree we'd like responsive representation that's conscientiously engaged in opinion gauging and fact-finding to determine what the people want and need. We can even select for those preferences, and be consistently unkind to those who are evasive. Yet we're not always consistent about that, and different preferences are often revealed at the ballot box.
This is the inescapable fact of the electoral system: officeholders are selected by voters in elections. There is no other mechanism for selecting them. That's a key difference between your other "is like" examples and elected representation. Pollution and health care are interesting problems to consider in their own right, they even have collective action components, but they also both actually have other identifiable agents and dynamics to whom more of the responsibility can be assigned. When it comes to elected representation, not only are there no agents with more responsibility, there are no other agents with power to select representation. Who else can bear ultimate responsibility for who is selected and how they govern?
You can identify things that make it difficult for people to meet that responsibility productively, and that's reasonable enough, all my comments here are essentially identifying the psychological barriers that assign agency elsewhere, and I'm happy to talk about others.
But there is no other place responsibility lies. The hands on the levers are ours collectively. No one else is coming to save us but us. No system fix will let us run on rote habit and get better results (and also, to fix the system, you have to work to win big under the system as it is).
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Charging people a price relative to the cost of a service is not discrimination.
> Charging people a price relative to the cost of a service is not discrimination. Yes, it is discrimination. Treating people differently on any basis is discrimination on that basis. It may or may not be illegal discrimination depending on the specifics and the governing law, and it may or may not be unjust discrimination depending on the specifics and the applicable moral framework, but all discrimination means is…
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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.