151–160 of 179 posts
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In the long run I don't see that as a problem. People should pay a premium if their lifestyle takes up more resources like that.
You are not subsidizing their ability to receive mail from you. You are paying for your ability to send mail to them . It's the same rationale as the universal service fund for phones. A network like the phone or mail network reaches it's full potential only when it connects everybody .
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Not really, I see mail as a temporary problem. If Netflix Streaming contained all the top titles, I would use that almost exclusively. There really would be no reason for mail, it's slow and inefficient.
I'm about to move from a place with 18Mbit down to a place with 2Mbit down. I expect my use of Netflix Watch It Now to drastically decline. Mail is only a temporary problem if you define "temporary" as "ten to twenty years". There are plenty of people still stuck on dial-up. Nobody is going to run fiber ten miles outside of a city of 20,000 people just for me, and apparently the movie studios don't trust me enough to…
So you're probably not doomed. That being said, I am against any reduction of USPS service and in favor of caching Netflix Watch It Now movies, as you have mentioned.
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…
Why Saturday? They should cut out a day in the middle of the week. This way, you'll have to wait up to two days longer for a given item. It's better to distribute that wait time.
Most businesses want delivery (and pickup) during working days.
Privatize the system and outsource it to UPS/FedEX,etc. (I know easier said than done). If I ever need to send snail mail, I just send it via those guys.
The problem is the mandatory requirements for full service in unprofitable areas. The USPS literally has a plane that goes weekly to the most isolated part of Idaho: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/30/us/30idaho.html There's no way a private contractor could/would do that.
If you want a government program to deliver mail to obscure locations at a loss, create a program to do that. There's no reason for the government to assume responsibility for delivering all mail, and especially no reason for it to make it illegal for others to deliver mail!
And especially, especially no reason to protect the program from being cut as mail slowly becomes obsolete.
Must government insist on solving 100% of the problem when it doesn't trust the free market to handle that 0.5% case?
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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've outsourced my snail mail spam handling to a mail forwarding service called St. Brendan's Isle (there are others like Paperless Mail). They shred and recycle junk mail for me automatically. I never even see it. 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…
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The problem is the mandatory requirements for full service in unprofitable areas. The USPS literally has a plane that goes weekly to the most isolated part of Idaho: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/30/us/30idaho.html There's no way a private contractor could/would do that.
Isn't that a bit like driving a nail with a tactical nuke? If you want a government program to deliver mail to obscure locations at a loss, create a program to do that . There's no reason for the government to assume responsibility for delivering all mail, and especially no reason for it to make it illegal for others to deliver mail! And especially, especially no reason to protect the program from being cut as mail s…
It's not like the free market doesn't compete. UPS and FedEx are still around, for example, just not on bulk mail and first class. It also connects with other postal services in other countries, and reciprocity agreements are governed by treaties, making a true free market solution incongruous with the rest of the world.
PS -- the post office is the second oldest institution in the US, and government-controlled postal services go back to (at least) Darius I in Persia. There's more precedent for a privatized military.
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15% price increase (39 to 44 cents) in 4 years is not unnoticed "in volume" and easily outstrips inflation.
You can cherry-pick intervals where stamp prices outstripped inflation, and I can cherry-pick intervals where stamp prices stayed well below inflation. A 12.8% increase (not sure how you came up with 15%) over a period where inflation was only around 7.8% (based on month-to-month consumer price index report) sounds pretty bad, but you seem to have missed the previous four years, where inflation was 10.1% and the pric…
Why go back only 4 years more - postal rates were 2 cents in July 19 and 44 cents in May 2009 - a 2200% increase. However, inflation was only 1129%.
So who is cherry picking?
Historical Postal Rates: http://www.usps.com/postalhistory/_pdf/DomesticLetterRates18...
Inflation Calculator: http://inflationdata.com/Inflation/Inflation_Calculators/Inf...
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I don't think anyone is saying they don't make money off of spam, just that they shouldn't be encouraging it. If spammers had to pay full price perhaps we'd see less of it, or if not then the postal service would make more money.
If there were no bulk-mail discount, though, there'd be no way to get them to follow the USPS's constraints. The discount is what gets them to presort their mail, put bar codes on it, etc.
We make things corporations do illegal all the time; it doesn't hurt corporate feelings, unlike restricting the rights of individuals. (And individuals, as far as I know, don't bulk-mail.) What would be the downside to this?
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I'm pretty sure they just pay the Post Office to put ads in every PO Box there.
Would there not have been an address on the mail?