You probably are unaware that both UPS and FedEx both contract USPS to deliver their parcels. Both last mile and long distance as well. A lot of packages are picked up by USPS their UPS store, and delivered to another UPS store, after a nice markup.
Also neither UPS or FedEx deliver or have any interest in delivering to every address I the US and its territories.
Very well aware of both SurePost and SmartPost. You’re not telling me anything new. Both of those services rely on the fact that the USPS subsidizes their delivery services through trash distribution. They charge businesses to transport trash to mailboxes, where it ends up in a wheely bin > trash truck > landfill.
As I’ve mentioned in other comments, I don’t want USPS privatized. I am only pointing out that their core competency is not delivery. They are trash distributors. Garbage providers.
The old “every door, every day” model is propped up by hundreds of pieces of trash for every actual delivery. It is not sustainable.
USPS needs a presence throughout the country. Every residence should, indeed, be served by the postal service. But, that doesn’t mean they need to go everywhere, every day. They should retire the trash delivery model that props up their package delivery service, and switch to universal access banking services as their core competency.
They should retire the trash delivery model that props up their package delivery service, and switch to universal access banking services as their core competency.
They don’t need to switch to anything so long as they’re properly tax funded like they’re supposed to be (they aren’t, Republicans have been bleeding their finances for decades). For instance, the Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act (PAEA) required the USPS to create a $72 billion fund to pay for the cost of its post-retirement health care costs, 75 years into the future. This burden applies to no other federal agency or private corporation.
Remove R oversight of the post office and roll back their ridiculous demands and your problem is already solved. Postal struggles are a problem manufactured by conservatives in an effort to sell you a solution to the problem they caused.
Not having to finance that overmassive backlog of cash, combined with a little bit of updating advertising law to the modern age, solves your problem three ways over.
But naturally this will never happen because that $72B is specifically earmarked to be looted by the government once they finally manage to kill and privatize the USPS. That’s the real reason that pension fund exists.
The problem I am talking about is with their basic business model, and has nothing to do with how badly the Republicans are managing (bungling) their operation. The problem I am talking about is not at all related to their pension fund.
If the USPS operated on the internet the way it operates in the physical world, they would be immediately added to the blacklists on uBlock Origin and PiHole. That is the problem. They exist primarily to serve the needs of marketers rather than the general public.
The real problem with the postal system is that the telegraph and phone systems were not placed in their purview 100+ years ago. The FCC is now performing the role that the postal service fulfilled at the nation’s inception, and the postal service is being squeezed out of relevance. They are no longer the primary route of public communication that they were 250 years ago.
To re-attain the original role for which they were created, the postal service should also be a universal access internet and phone service provider. Which, like universal banking access, is desperately needed in the public space.
The postal service is being forced to use same business model today as at the time of the nation’s inception. The only thing it is being allowed to do is convey physical media to the public’s door. It has not been allowed to explore natural extensions of that, such as banking and telecoms.
Ehh, personally I don’t really see banking as being a natural extension of the post, but I can kind of see where you’re coming from with that in context of the rest of the argument.
However, USPS is not a business. It is a tax funded service. It was never intended to be profitable, it was intended to perform a necessary service for citizens. You cannot have a functional society without a way to transfer mail. Therefore, it is a responsibility of every government to provide a postal service.
The fact that USPS has been forced to become profitable in order to survive, largely because of their federally mandated $72 billion money pit, is exactly why they have to accept a bunch of money to deliver you a bunch of garbage. If they weren’t beholden to draconian financing rules that literally no one else is subject to, the cost of stamps alone could power the entire USPS (and did, for over a hundred years).
However I’m not sure that’s the entire problem though. I don’t believe that USPS has the legal right to just decide not to deliver mail to you that they don’t like. If Capital One wants to mail you a credit offer and they spend the money to send it, I’m pretty certain that the post office is legally obligated to deliver it. So even if they came out and said officially “we will no longer deliver spam” I don’t think that’s a thing they’d be allowed to do. And that’s a good thing! Just, as usual with most things now, corporations are abusing it to death. Effectively outlawing paper spam would reduce a lot of the USPS’s active income, but it would also massively reduce their workload. No longer requiring USPS to be profitable enough to build a nest egg should go the rest of the way to pretty much even that all out in the wash, I think. But this is legislation that would need to take place on the corporations’ side, not the post’s side. The post is legally required to deliver all mail that is legal and deliverable, and this is good and right. Making spam undeliverable is a better solution than making the post office decide what they want to deliver or not.
The real problem with the postal system is that the telegraph and phone systems were not placed in their purview 100+ years ago. The FCC is now performing the role that the postal service fulfilled at the nation’s inception, and the postal service is being squeezed out of relevance. They are no longer the primary route of public communication that they were 250 years ago […] To re-attain the original role for which they were created, the postal service should also be a universal access internet and phone service provider. Which, like universal banking access, is desperately needed in the public space.
Absolutely agreed here, 10/10 no notes. The fact that much of our important communication has now moved to the internet is a brilliant argument for expanding the USPS to also become a federal universal internet provider. I think that’s an excellent idea. 99% of phones are VOIP now anyway so they barely, if at all, even have to worry about a telecoms department specifically.
I think we’re both mostly on the same side here, I’m just under no impression that the post office needs to be profitable. It is a public service, it’s by definition an expense that taxes are intended to cover - and one that I’m happy to put my tax money into, even now. I’m also upset at the sheer volume of waste of postal garbage that is going around, but I’d rather have a post office with some trash in it than some trash with no post office in it.
It is not. Nor should it be. I’ll get back to this is a second.
Capital One wants to mail you a credit offer and they spend the money to send it, I’m pretty certain that the post office is legally obligated to deliver it.
They are, indeed. The problem is not that Capital One wants to spend money mailing that offer. The problem is that Capital One is getting a deep discount on postage, to encourage them to send that offer physically, by mail, instead of through a more appropriate channel. The postal service needs Capital One to do that, because they need the postage revenue to justify the cost of sending someone to every door, every day.
Going back to your last point about taxpayer funding: should Capital One’s choice to send you an offer be subsidized by the taxpayer? Should they pay less for a stamp because the federal government will be picking up the tab?
The postal service either needs to be entirely self funded, or access to that service needs to be restricted to “acceptable” senders, which opens an entirely new can of worms.
As you pointed out, the USPS can’t simply reject Capital One’s mail; they are legally required to deliver it. Any operational subsidies to the USPS are funding Capital One’s marketing budget. With the tax-funded model you are talking about, we are paying for Capital One to send that junk mail. That’s simply not feasible.
Effectively outlawing paper spam would reduce a lot of the USPS’s active income, but it would also massively reduce their workload.
Not really, no. Yes, they are handling fewer pieces of mail, but their workload isn’t really based on that. The principal factor affecting their workload is the number of doors they have to visit. (Even if they dont have a delivery, they might have a pickup, so they still have to visit the door and look for the outgoing mail flag.)
Eliminate all the junk mail, and your mail carrier’s bag is a little lighter, but she is still taking the same number of steps on her route; he is still racking up the same number of route-miles on his truck’s odometer.
I did in fact think that USPS was at least partially tax funded, and despite your (rather good, actually) arguments I do still think it is a good idea to help subsidize them with taxes. They are still a necessary office after all, and as you’ve said, even if people aren’t receiving mail they might still be sending it, so the post office has to check. But if most people haven’t sent any mail that day that’s a huge operating cost that isn’t being returned on stamps.
Going back to your last point about taxpayer funding: should Capital One’s choice to send you an offer be subsidized by the taxpayer? Should they pay less for a stamp because the federal government will be picking up the tab?
If anything I think I lean toward the idea that civilian mail should be free and business mail should require stamp fees. I admit I’m unsure how to balance the cost of a stamp with tax income to the post office, however. But if businesses want to spam you they damn well better pay for it, and high stamp fees on nonessential commercial mail could be an effective stopper for it. But then we run into problems of how to identify essential vs nonessential commercial mail, or solicited vs nonsolicited if you prefer, and ways to prevent abuse of that system… Companies already write “URGENT!!” all over the outside of their spam envelopes so it’s not like that’s going to be a useful identifier. I’m unsure how to solve this problem.
There are multiple ways to solve the “USPS has to visit every house every day” problem though, but unfortunately none that I see being realistically implemented. Just off the top of my head here I’m thinking:
A) Mail pickups only happen on one, or several specific, days of the week, thereby allowing them to shave off a lot of route for deliveries on non-pickup days. We could even alternate mail pickup and mail drop off days, 3 of each in a week with no post on Sundays. This is completely viable but everyone will removed and complain loudly about this and blame me when they’re late on payments or the like.
B) Mail pickups only happen at specific drop off locations. Every neighborhood would essentially need a mail drop off box like an apartment complex has. I’m less thrilled about this idea because it might make it easier for people to steal your outgoing mail - though it’s not like this is difficult as it is. This combined with option A could lead to massive efficiency gains. Everyone will also removed and complain loudly about this because they have to walk a block or two to drop off a letter.
C) Start putting solar powered signalers in the mailboxes that tell when they have the flag up. You could piggyback this off of cell phone towers or build your own separate infrastructure to prevent bandwidth issues. That way the post office knows remotely who has a flag up or not and adjust the routes accordingly, even adjusting with live data if you want, we definitely have all the technology to do this. This is by far the most expensive of my half baked options, but it isn’t like we couldn’t do it if we wanted to, we’ve had all the tech required to do this for 20 years. Once again, everyone would removed and complain about this for various reasons, but they’d get over it pretty quick. I view this in the same light as when we cut over from analog TV to digital back in 2009. Everyone gets upset that A Change Is Happening and talks about it for 6 months and then it’s just life as normal.
Unfortunately all these things cost some amount of money and are likely to be initially unpopular with voters so I don’t really see any of it actually happening. Most people would rather limp along with a half-broken system than replace it with something new. I’m also quite confident that anything I could invent to address these problems will be soundly abused by corps with little trouble.
Seriously though, great points, good discussion, thank you. You’ve given me a lot to think about.
You probably are unaware that both UPS and FedEx both contract USPS to deliver their parcels. Both last mile and long distance as well. A lot of packages are picked up by USPS their UPS store, and delivered to another UPS store, after a nice markup.
Also neither UPS or FedEx deliver or have any interest in delivering to every address I the US and its territories.
Very well aware of both SurePost and SmartPost. You’re not telling me anything new. Both of those services rely on the fact that the USPS subsidizes their delivery services through trash distribution. They charge businesses to transport trash to mailboxes, where it ends up in a wheely bin > trash truck > landfill.
As I’ve mentioned in other comments, I don’t want USPS privatized. I am only pointing out that their core competency is not delivery. They are trash distributors. Garbage providers.
The old “every door, every day” model is propped up by hundreds of pieces of trash for every actual delivery. It is not sustainable.
USPS needs a presence throughout the country. Every residence should, indeed, be served by the postal service. But, that doesn’t mean they need to go everywhere, every day. They should retire the trash delivery model that props up their package delivery service, and switch to universal access banking services as their core competency.
They don’t need to switch to anything so long as they’re properly tax funded like they’re supposed to be (they aren’t, Republicans have been bleeding their finances for decades). For instance, the Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act (PAEA) required the USPS to create a $72 billion fund to pay for the cost of its post-retirement health care costs, 75 years into the future. This burden applies to no other federal agency or private corporation.
Remove R oversight of the post office and roll back their ridiculous demands and your problem is already solved. Postal struggles are a problem manufactured by conservatives in an effort to sell you a solution to the problem they caused.
Not having to finance that overmassive backlog of cash, combined with a little bit of updating advertising law to the modern age, solves your problem three ways over.
But naturally this will never happen because that $72B is specifically earmarked to be looted by the government once they finally manage to kill and privatize the USPS. That’s the real reason that pension fund exists.
The problem I am talking about is with their basic business model, and has nothing to do with how badly the Republicans are managing (bungling) their operation. The problem I am talking about is not at all related to their pension fund.
If the USPS operated on the internet the way it operates in the physical world, they would be immediately added to the blacklists on uBlock Origin and PiHole. That is the problem. They exist primarily to serve the needs of marketers rather than the general public.
The real problem with the postal system is that the telegraph and phone systems were not placed in their purview 100+ years ago. The FCC is now performing the role that the postal service fulfilled at the nation’s inception, and the postal service is being squeezed out of relevance. They are no longer the primary route of public communication that they were 250 years ago.
To re-attain the original role for which they were created, the postal service should also be a universal access internet and phone service provider. Which, like universal banking access, is desperately needed in the public space.
The postal service is being forced to use same business model today as at the time of the nation’s inception. The only thing it is being allowed to do is convey physical media to the public’s door. It has not been allowed to explore natural extensions of that, such as banking and telecoms.
Ehh, personally I don’t really see banking as being a natural extension of the post, but I can kind of see where you’re coming from with that in context of the rest of the argument.
However, USPS is not a business. It is a tax funded service. It was never intended to be profitable, it was intended to perform a necessary service for citizens. You cannot have a functional society without a way to transfer mail. Therefore, it is a responsibility of every government to provide a postal service.
The fact that USPS has been forced to become profitable in order to survive, largely because of their federally mandated $72 billion money pit, is exactly why they have to accept a bunch of money to deliver you a bunch of garbage. If they weren’t beholden to draconian financing rules that literally no one else is subject to, the cost of stamps alone could power the entire USPS (and did, for over a hundred years).
However I’m not sure that’s the entire problem though. I don’t believe that USPS has the legal right to just decide not to deliver mail to you that they don’t like. If Capital One wants to mail you a credit offer and they spend the money to send it, I’m pretty certain that the post office is legally obligated to deliver it. So even if they came out and said officially “we will no longer deliver spam” I don’t think that’s a thing they’d be allowed to do. And that’s a good thing! Just, as usual with most things now, corporations are abusing it to death. Effectively outlawing paper spam would reduce a lot of the USPS’s active income, but it would also massively reduce their workload. No longer requiring USPS to be profitable enough to build a nest egg should go the rest of the way to pretty much even that all out in the wash, I think. But this is legislation that would need to take place on the corporations’ side, not the post’s side. The post is legally required to deliver all mail that is legal and deliverable, and this is good and right. Making spam undeliverable is a better solution than making the post office decide what they want to deliver or not.
Absolutely agreed here, 10/10 no notes. The fact that much of our important communication has now moved to the internet is a brilliant argument for expanding the USPS to also become a federal universal internet provider. I think that’s an excellent idea. 99% of phones are VOIP now anyway so they barely, if at all, even have to worry about a telecoms department specifically.
I think we’re both mostly on the same side here, I’m just under no impression that the post office needs to be profitable. It is a public service, it’s by definition an expense that taxes are intended to cover - and one that I’m happy to put my tax money into, even now. I’m also upset at the sheer volume of waste of postal garbage that is going around, but I’d rather have a post office with some trash in it than some trash with no post office in it.
It is not. Nor should it be. I’ll get back to this is a second.
They are, indeed. The problem is not that Capital One wants to spend money mailing that offer. The problem is that Capital One is getting a deep discount on postage, to encourage them to send that offer physically, by mail, instead of through a more appropriate channel. The postal service needs Capital One to do that, because they need the postage revenue to justify the cost of sending someone to every door, every day.
Going back to your last point about taxpayer funding: should Capital One’s choice to send you an offer be subsidized by the taxpayer? Should they pay less for a stamp because the federal government will be picking up the tab?
The postal service either needs to be entirely self funded, or access to that service needs to be restricted to “acceptable” senders, which opens an entirely new can of worms.
As you pointed out, the USPS can’t simply reject Capital One’s mail; they are legally required to deliver it. Any operational subsidies to the USPS are funding Capital One’s marketing budget. With the tax-funded model you are talking about, we are paying for Capital One to send that junk mail. That’s simply not feasible.
Not really, no. Yes, they are handling fewer pieces of mail, but their workload isn’t really based on that. The principal factor affecting their workload is the number of doors they have to visit. (Even if they dont have a delivery, they might have a pickup, so they still have to visit the door and look for the outgoing mail flag.)
Eliminate all the junk mail, and your mail carrier’s bag is a little lighter, but she is still taking the same number of steps on her route; he is still racking up the same number of route-miles on his truck’s odometer.
Good points to think about. Thank you.
I did in fact think that USPS was at least partially tax funded, and despite your (rather good, actually) arguments I do still think it is a good idea to help subsidize them with taxes. They are still a necessary office after all, and as you’ve said, even if people aren’t receiving mail they might still be sending it, so the post office has to check. But if most people haven’t sent any mail that day that’s a huge operating cost that isn’t being returned on stamps.
If anything I think I lean toward the idea that civilian mail should be free and business mail should require stamp fees. I admit I’m unsure how to balance the cost of a stamp with tax income to the post office, however. But if businesses want to spam you they damn well better pay for it, and high stamp fees on nonessential commercial mail could be an effective stopper for it. But then we run into problems of how to identify essential vs nonessential commercial mail, or solicited vs nonsolicited if you prefer, and ways to prevent abuse of that system… Companies already write “URGENT!!” all over the outside of their spam envelopes so it’s not like that’s going to be a useful identifier. I’m unsure how to solve this problem.
There are multiple ways to solve the “USPS has to visit every house every day” problem though, but unfortunately none that I see being realistically implemented. Just off the top of my head here I’m thinking:
A) Mail pickups only happen on one, or several specific, days of the week, thereby allowing them to shave off a lot of route for deliveries on non-pickup days. We could even alternate mail pickup and mail drop off days, 3 of each in a week with no post on Sundays. This is completely viable but everyone will removed and complain loudly about this and blame me when they’re late on payments or the like.
B) Mail pickups only happen at specific drop off locations. Every neighborhood would essentially need a mail drop off box like an apartment complex has. I’m less thrilled about this idea because it might make it easier for people to steal your outgoing mail - though it’s not like this is difficult as it is. This combined with option A could lead to massive efficiency gains. Everyone will also removed and complain loudly about this because they have to walk a block or two to drop off a letter.
C) Start putting solar powered signalers in the mailboxes that tell when they have the flag up. You could piggyback this off of cell phone towers or build your own separate infrastructure to prevent bandwidth issues. That way the post office knows remotely who has a flag up or not and adjust the routes accordingly, even adjusting with live data if you want, we definitely have all the technology to do this. This is by far the most expensive of my half baked options, but it isn’t like we couldn’t do it if we wanted to, we’ve had all the tech required to do this for 20 years. Once again, everyone would removed and complain about this for various reasons, but they’d get over it pretty quick. I view this in the same light as when we cut over from analog TV to digital back in 2009. Everyone gets upset that A Change Is Happening and talks about it for 6 months and then it’s just life as normal.
Unfortunately all these things cost some amount of money and are likely to be initially unpopular with voters so I don’t really see any of it actually happening. Most people would rather limp along with a half-broken system than replace it with something new. I’m also quite confident that anything I could invent to address these problems will be soundly abused by corps with little trouble.
Seriously though, great points, good discussion, thank you. You’ve given me a lot to think about.
We should just have them take on the additional role of rolling out a nationwide, subsidized, high speed fiber network.