121–130 of 179 posts
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I think you're confusing outsourcing with deregulation. A private contractor would happily do that for enough subsidy.
(subsidies without regulation) == Corruption
In either case, I agree that the two go together. Perhaps there's just too much ambiguity in the term "privatization."
> Ten years ago, the average household received five pieces of mail every day. Today, it receives four pieces and by 2020, that number will fall to three. ... And it would receive much less than that if the USPS wasn't mostly a delivery network for spam.
I think the current solution for snail mail spam is the optimal one. Consider the two possibilities: (1) the government raises taxes in order to increase the USPS's ability to handle spam or (2) the USPS offloads the majority of the filtering process to the recipients (the current solution). On days I receive spam in the mail, I waste approximately one second when I have to pause to throw it away. If the USPS were to…
I tried going through the process of unsubscribing and opting out of everything I could find, and while it slowed for a few weeks, it eventually picked up again (just like email spam, when you make use of "opt out" options). J. Crew were the most damnably aggressive spammers...after repeated attempts to opt out, they were still sending me two catalogs a week. I'll never make the mistake of buying someone a gift from J. Crew again.
Anyway, I needed a mail forwarding service, anyway, since moving into an RV, but this turned out to be an awesome bonus and I wish I'd set it up years ago. I will never be without a mail forwarding service again...for less than $20/month it's just too convenient to have someone else sort and scan my mail, and get rid of the garbage.
Why can't I get/pay for a USPS.com email address of my physical address? 123MainSt.MyCity.State.Zip@usps.com? Anything that is emailed to this address must pay postage, but the message body or attachment can be printed, certified and delivered to my physical location? Maybe this isn't the perfect idea, but if the USPS would just embrace technology and innovate a little, they could really increase their revenues.
Agreed. The late 90s really presented an opportunity to the USPS, in that the postal service could have launched an ISP service to profit off the mail that was beginning to be sent online. Today, most of the companies that send me bills or statements encourage me to get e-statements instead of paper statements, which saves the companies money -- money that used to go to USPS. If the postal service had innovated and c…
I still get paper statements because it makes things less scary!
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The essential service here is mail delivery, not mail delivery "under a dollar."
No, the essential service is mail delivery under a dollar to anywhere in the United States. That is a fundamentally different service than what is provided by Fedex or UPS.
Why can't I get/pay for a USPS.com email address of my physical address? 123MainSt.MyCity.State.Zip@usps.com? Anything that is emailed to this address must pay postage, but the message body or attachment can be printed, certified and delivered to my physical location? Maybe this isn't the perfect idea, but if the USPS would just embrace technology and innovate a little, they could really increase their revenues.
Agreed. The late 90s really presented an opportunity to the USPS, in that the postal service could have launched an ISP service to profit off the mail that was beginning to be sent online. Today, most of the companies that send me bills or statements encourage me to get e-statements instead of paper statements, which saves the companies money -- money that used to go to USPS. If the postal service had innovated and c…
Awesome. I never saw why the mail system should work longer than the normal working week anyway. Hopefully the UK will go the same way sometime soon. The threat of having mail turn up on a Saturday (that you might need to wait in for) isn't worth it.
This wouldn't be such an issue if the postal service operated like a business instead of an institution. Why not commercialize it more? Where are the Coke stamps and IBM Express Mail envelopes? Why isn't the mail truck wrapped with an American Idol promo? Seems like the USPS could be a huge advertising vehicle. Why is this sacred?
Because the Postal Service is provided for in the Constitution: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postal_Clause Can't have a Constitutionally-mandated service wrapped in third-party advertising.
"It’s five days of delivery, six days of service and Express Mail seven days a week" "It also will save more than $3 billion a year" If both of those are true, the change is reasonable.
They still deliver 177 billion pieces of mail a year. By raising the price of delivery by 2 cents, they could make up the difference.
I saw the chairman of their board speak not long ago, and it turns out the biggest problem is that USPS can't fire any of their union employees, who consistently get awarded UPS salaries + 15-20% in arbitration.
This is a huge problem, and we need to shift the power balance away from unions. The original purpose of unions was to compensate for the imbalance of power. I don't have a problem to the extent that they merely divert executive pay down to the workers, but where they significantly increase the cost of doing business, unions are economically inefficient. In Canada, we have a huge union called CUPE. They support an in…
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Every time the US postal service comes up in discussion, someone invariably mentions how life would be so much better if the service was privatized. I think this argument represents a fundamental misunderstanding of public services; the post office is perhaps the canonical example of an extremely important service that only can exist in the public sector. As others have mentioned already ( http://news.ycombinator.com…
I would argue that the most essential service is 'grocery delivery'. And it's not run or subsidized by Government and we seem to be doing just fine. There is no reason what so ever for USPS to exist.
See the issue? The priority in the private system is on making profit and providing diplomas to people. The priority in the public system is on actual learning. The rampant grade inflation at Ivy League schools is a great example of learning taking a back seat in favor of producing graduates that look good on paper.
Don't make the mistake of thinking that "public" universities are any better. At my university (UIUC), research grants account for the vast majority of the funding for the engineering college. Consequently, research is the priority, not the education of the students. Simply put, the priority is where the money is. If the money is tied to the learning of the students, the students will actually learn. If it's tied to producing diplomas or publications, that's where the priority will be placed. UIUC can get away with it because its engineering graduates are still extremely highly paid. The prestige of UIUC's faculty is responsible for that, but it would be erroneous to attribute it to the educational curriculum. I can tell you from personal experience that the vast majority of graduates are average programmers at best and many haven't really internalized essential CS skills like algorithms, data structures, etc. One example that really sticks out in my mind: I went to a talk by Alan Kay last semester. Hardly any undergraduates attend, or even know or care who Alan Kay is. Alan puts up a few slides with pictures of McCarthy, Sutherland, Church, etc. Not a single undergraduate can name their primary contributions to the field. No one even knew the importance of Lisp! As Alan aptly put it, "you all are lucky your field isn't Physics; if it were you would be kicked out of the department and sent back to high school for not knowing the fundamentals of past research" (paraphrasing).
So why doesn't your grocery store example hold up? The success of a grocery store is strongly coupled to the quality of its product. Spoiled food is spoiled food. Education? Turns out the diploma, not learning, is what matters the most. The USPS is a similar situation, true value of the service (essentially free communication for all citizens everywhere) is only loosely coupled with the financial success of the service.