41–50 of 61 posts
1) Demand for mailing of common letters and documents has dramatically decreased, so it makes sense to defund the mail system. Economies of scale also suffer, further compounding inefficiency
2) In the times of the Pony Express it was probably ok to accept the death of a few riders here and there. Labor standards and thus costs are a major factor in this segment, and they have risen a lot
The article makes a claim that it is no better in Canada and proceeds to remark about financial conditions. The mail is being delivered just fine, just not profitably. I've not had issues with the USPS, but I don't doubt that it is getting worse. Private delivery (Amazon and the like) has been pretty much flawless. Order from McMaster, and it almost invariably arrives within two days (continental US) I just don't exp…
The USPS is in year 4 of a 10 year overhaul of its infrastructure. New facilities with new equipment optimized for the current mail mix. Magazines and catalogs used to be huge. Now they are a fraction of their volume. First class letter volume is crashing as everyone goes paperless. Where there use to be separate facilities for processing first class, bulk mail, and packages; the new facilities deal with everything.…
The simple "elimination" of nightly mail pickup from rural post offices has resulted in multi-day backlogs just getting anything out of your local Post Office. If I walk into any of my local POs in the county this morning to ship a Priority Mail Express letter overnight, they will not guarantee that it will be received tomorrow. The envelope will sit for nearly 24 hours locally for tomorrow morning's mail truck before it is brought back to a processing center tomorrow night to be introduced into the mailstream and finally processed outbound.
Basically anything being shipped cross-country is going to be snared in Rural Delay Hell and it absolutely sucks. Combine this with the recent postmarking changes and we're in for an absolute fun treat when it comes for mail-in-voting time.
It's not just logistics. It's the same with big corporations all across the economy. Service or product quality going down, stock prices going up.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Sea transport isn't going to get any faster - probably ever. Sea transport could be sped up by 50% with current ships just by turning the engines to full, but that increases the fuel cost dramatically. With an EV ship that fuel cost increase would probably be negligible. The issue with speeding up sea transport is that the ports at either end are already running close to or at capacity, so increasing the number of…
> With an EV ship that fuel cost increase would probably be negligible. The batteries are still charged by fuel onshore. The cost increase would double, plus engine fatigue would increase. How is that negligible?
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Agreed. The author seems to think that logistics should be like memory and Moore's Law, but in fact there are very rigid limits on the system. Sea transport isn't going to get any faster - probably ever. Air transport is subsonic. Ground transport is limited to highway speeds for trucks, and about the same in the US for rail (because we suck and can't have nice things). These hard limits mean that the improvements in…
Fair points, but I think you're responding to an argument my piece isn't quite making. The complaint isn't that logistics should follow Moore's Law or that we need same-day delivery for everything. It's that we're paying more for objectively worse service than we had a decade ago. Services aren't "adapting to consumer needs", its just objective decay being masked as optimization. The Lettre Verte example actually rei…
Well, it did indeed become inconvenient... for the customers!
Rule no. 0 of economics states that a decreasing demand yields decreasing prices, but rule no. 1 concerns fixed costs: when demand is too low, each customer has to bear a larger share of them.
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This is not it. Services are bad because month by month year by year, capitalism demands that they produce endless growth. When there's nothing legit left to strip down then they start taking out the floorboards. Exact same thing as shrinkflation; make the product smaller for more money because there's no other way that the execs and shareholders get to jerk each other off this year. And then the next year, and the n…
> make the product smaller for more money because there's no other way that the execs and shareholders get to jerk each other off this year. That's an amusing image but the real reason they're doing it is that often those assets are used as collateral to acquire debt and cannot, under any circumstances, decrease in value. It reached a point where it doesn't matter if the service is shitty or not rendered at all - as…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> make the product smaller for more money because there's no other way that the execs and shareholders get to jerk each other off this year. That's an amusing image but the real reason they're doing it is that often those assets are used as collateral to acquire debt and cannot, under any circumstances, decrease in value. It reached a point where it doesn't matter if the service is shitty or not rendered at all - as…
Milton Friedman argued that the sole purpose of a company is to serve its shareholders and lampooned the idea that business has any responsibility for, and I quote, "providing employment, eliminating discrimination, avoiding pollution and whatever else may be the catchwords of the contemporary crop of reformers."
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The USPS is in year 4 of a 10 year overhaul of its infrastructure. New facilities with new equipment optimized for the current mail mix. Magazines and catalogs used to be huge. Now they are a fraction of their volume. First class letter volume is crashing as everyone goes paperless. Where there use to be separate facilities for processing first class, bulk mail, and packages; the new facilities deal with everything.…
Where can you read more about this?
User guides on PostalPro are probably the best place to start. The Domestic Mail Manual is highly recommended if you have trouble sleeping.
This stuff gets discussed with industry via MTAC (Mailer’s Technical Advisory Committee) and the various special topic User Groups.
I'm surprised someone registered a .ph TLD for a blog, it costs minimal almost $50/yr if not a bit more afaik.
I think two phenomena are at play here, other than plain-old enshittification: 1) Demand for mailing of common letters and documents has dramatically decreased, so it makes sense to defund the mail system. Economies of scale also suffer, further compounding inefficiency 2) In the times of the Pony Express it was probably ok to accept the death of a few riders here and there. Labor standards and thus costs are a major…
That made me curious so I looked it up: "There is historical documentation that four Pony riders were killed by Indians; one was hanged for murder after he got drunk and killed a man; one died in an unrelated accident; and two froze to death."