Just one of many signs that say "Yes Martha, the internet really has changed a lot about our lives" |
Just one of many signs that say "Yes Martha, the internet really has changed a lot about our lives" |
... And it would receive much less than that if the USPS wasn't mostly a delivery network for spam.
That was a pain but here's the question: How did they (advertisers) know this box was open and active? If mail was going to it before I opened it, what did they do with it? I tried complaining but got the "we have to deliver every piece of mail regardless of the originator". My best guess is mail was being sent there from a previous user and while it was vacated they just threw it away or something. Once the new user (me) opened it back up I just started getting it all.
At one point I just let the junk accumulate to see what would happen. I'd get the "real" mail but the junk (which could no longer really fit) stopped showing up. Then I got a note that I need to clear it out more often or they would close it though :(
The post office told them -- hey sell their customer list.
:(
I guess this isn't as bad as people that break into my building and shove their ads under my door. That really annoys me.
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 implement an effective spam filtering mechanism, I'm willing to bet my taxes would go up by more than the value I loose doing the filtering myself. More broadly, the nation as a whole looses value if the USPS takes on the filtering problem.
-Stop credit card offers: https://www.optoutprescreen.com
-Stop supermarket coupon packages: Redplum (aka Valassis) by calling 888.241.6760
-Stop PennySaver: 1.714.996.8900, press 3, leave a voicemail message with your name & address, be sure to tell them you're trying to "stop".
Most of those coupon packages come from the same place. Hunt down the fine print phone number and you'll be off the list in no time.
I did this a few years ago and have been enjoying a relatively empty mailbox. I still get junk mail but very seldom.
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.
(Although when there is a budget shortfall the government helps pay its bills.)
A few years ago, I lived in Boston and traveled a lot of short trips for work. When I'd get back, my mailbox would always be crammed full of junk, crushing my mail.
One day, I ran into my postman, and I said, "Hey there, I travel a lot, I'm not gone long, but my mail gets crushed. Can I just leave a sticky note here and ask you not to deliver the ads to me? I don't want them."
He said, "Sorry, the post office is paid to deliver the mail, and that's what we do. We deliver all mail. You can ask the post office to hold your mail for you and go pick it up at the post office when you get back from traveling, though."
I was kind of stunned. Can you imagine a private business delivering you junk that you don't want and you can't refuse it? How outraged would people be if FedEx dropped off samples of cleaning products and miscellaneous junk and refused to stop, thus damaging your regular packages in the process?
Using your logic it would follow that email spammers are doing some good because they're using bandwidth (jobs for everyone from Cisco to ditch diggers) and create a market for people to combat spam. Stimulus!
http://www.usps.com/communications/newsroom/2009/pr09_066.ht...
I would say 80-90% of the mail I get is spam.
In Canada, we have a huge union called CUPE. They support an incredible variety of workers (including health care, university staff, airlines, public utilities, non-profit organizations, etc.). Each division contributes to a "national strike fund."
In my mind, this allows unions to act as a cartel. It doesn't make sense for workers in one company to be able to offset the cost of a strike in a completely different one. Of course the workers will always be able to afford a strike as long as they do it one company at a time, and wages will slowly be pushed to unsustainably high levels.
If I'm wrong on this, please correct me, because although it seems completely unintuitive, it is my understanding of the situation (Article XIV of the CUPE constitution outlines revenue collection).
They also discourage innovation to the extent that they limit businesses' ability to fire unneeded workers. There is little doubt in my mind that the transit system in Toronto uses human fare collectors because they are not allowed to replace them with machines. These folks can cost up to $40/hour. We wouldn't have had the industrial revolution if we couldn't fire the people who were no longer needed.
This whole report from USPS (1) is worth reading but some notable excerpts:
"In 2009, 84 billion pieces of first-class mail and 83 billion pieces of direct mail were handled."
Invoices and bills constitute a large part of first-class mail (and they continue to move online, become paperless)
"One top marketing agency observed companies moving one-third of direct-mail acquisition spending online"
Imagine UPS/DHL/FedEx's profits if they went from deliver-on-demand to deliver-to-everywhere-regardless-of-demand:
"A key driver to the costs of delivering mail is the obligation to deliver to virtually every mail address, regardless of volume, 6 days a week... These costs are largely fixed so they grow with the size of the network, which has been grown by an average of 1.4 million addresses every year"
"Wages and benefits account for 80 percent of operating costs." (And they are directly tied to the people infrastructure required to meet the obligation to deliver mail to virtually every mail address)
Obviously, you can't make it up on volume alone:
"A First-class stamp costs 44 cents, while other major posts charge an average of 78 cents."
(1) http://www.usps.com/strategicplanning/_pdf/Ensuring_Viable_U...
(2) http://www.usps.com/postalhistory/PiecesofMail1789to2009.htm
(3) http://www.usps.com/householddiary/_pdf/USPS_HDS_FY08_FINAL_...
(4)http://www.usps.com/directmail/resourcecenter/research.htm?f...
But UPS and FedEx already have something similar that occasionally leverages the USPS for the final leg of delivery. The FedEx version is called SmartPost.
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.
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 come up with smart business solutions for sending secure, certified email to customers, they'd still be capturing that money (and possibly more.)
I still get paper statements because it makes things less scary!
With 36,000 retail locations and the most frequently visited website in the federal government, the Postal Service relies on the sale of postage, products and services to pay for operating expenses. Named the Most Trusted Government Agency five consecutive years and the sixth Most Trusted Business in the nation by the Ponemon Institute, the Postal Service has annual revenue of more than $68 billion and delivers nearly half the world’s mail. If it were a private sector company, the U.S. Postal Service would rank 28th in the 2009 Fortune 500.
Lots of this data isn't available though (which is why I have my job)
OK, so I didn't have my coffee yet... =)
Not enough mail to deliver suggests less mail volume, so less need for throughput, therefore we can hire fewer postal workers per post office.
Cutting out one day of deliveries reduces throughput and increases latency. For example, Netflix becomes a worse deal. A power user could once cycle 2 roundtrips of DVDs in one week and is now down to 1.5.
Government program names just kill me sometimes.
This new, improved system was called "Frequent Cleaning".
It's not the government types so much as the B Ark types.
Can't have a Constitutionally-mandated service wrapped in third-party advertising.
The only stuff I get in the mail these days is some envelope warning me that I will go to jail if I don't tell the government my phone number.
Personally, all my bills come online. If I lose my credit card, I get it via FedEx or UPS. When I order some physical goods, it's a package (so "small piece" is not relevant).
Basically, there is not much value is sending small pieces of mail anymore. I just want to order stuff from Amazon on Friday and have it on Sunday :)
i now live in a place that delivers and picks up mail twice a day, including saturdays.
i don't notice any difference.
Even one a day a week home delivery would be better for me. Stuff is rarely time sensitive, and we don't make it to the PO Box that often anyway.
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?
Surely this is a universal and solved problem though? Most couriers (e.g. for most larger/heavier items you'd buy online) will not deliver on Saturday unless you pay quite a bit extra, so weekday-only delivery is already an institution of sorts.
That aside, maybe your issue is, secretly, USPS's primary motivation. If they don't have a Saturday service at all, people like you can't request Saturday delivery and will need to go pick up your packages from the depot. That'll save them a lot of time and money.
"It also will save more than $3 billion a year"
If both of those are true, the change is reasonable.
It ain't linear, buddy.
You can't do this on the Internet, though, because computers are magical and Someone Could Copy It!1111!!
The other downside of physical DVDs is that often, the discs we received are scratched or damaged beyond usability.
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 slowly pre-download Watch It Now movies during sleeping hours.
I still only check the mail on Saturdays when I know a movie will be waiting for me.
This change might hurt them in the short run, but I would think Netflix would love to be a streaming only company!
If they can keep the USPS afloat by cutting expenses instead of using taxpayer money, I'm all for it.
These aren't exactly archetypes of free market competition, being oligopolies, at best. I can't speak for NJ, but, in California, I consider it telling that they all have a state regulatory agency.
Number portability has improved telephony competition, but I don't think we're yet free of the effects of the old A/B cellular duopoly in the US.
Also - 39 cents to send a letter anywhere in the country? Still a pretty good deal.
As a rule of thumb, if your gut tells you that a particular service is essential to a civilized society the service belongs in the public sector. As a nation we've decided the ability to affordability correspond with others around the country is such a service. Education is another. These two examples are extraordinarily complex problems which the US public sector solves well, all things considered. Yet every time we discuss these services someone always wants to privatize them.
For the most fundamental components of our society, privatization is never the answer.
If we haven't quite reached that point yet, can't you see we will?
Like health care, manufacturing, transportation, agriculture, indeed everything? Welcome to the World Soviet, comrade!
How do you explain FedEx and UPS?
I can see both sides of this argument.
Actually, such polices are usually quite easily explained by the simple logic that there isn't any money in caring too much about edge cases.
Well, come to think of it my account with Consumer Cellular is 100% paperless, that's probably their default and I'd probably have to pay to get paper from them.
(They're a great AT&T reseller for people who spend very little time using their cell phones.)
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.
Though I did, apparently end up on a Nationalist organizations mailing list, somehow (maybe through one of the various libertarian causes I've supported over the years; somehow there are ultra-right-wingers who think libertarians are sympathetic to their BS), so that's an annoying letter I've gotten recently that made it into the "look at the covers" phase. Since the word "Nationalist" was in the from address, I knew I could shred it immediately without opening it.
Oh, I just realized you might be theorizing that they might censor my mail. What they do is regulated by the federal government, and it takes roughly the equivalent of a power of attorney to let them open my mail. If they were ever caught tampering rather than acting as an honest agent, they'd be facing federal mail tampering charges. I don't have any reason to believe they would do that; they've been extremely polite, responsive, and they have excellent reviews. I can recommend them.
And I don't see a difference between whether USPS is directly funded by taxpayer dollars OR taxpayer are on the hook for unpaid USPS bills.
Unfortunately, I'm starting to think the only thing that's going to get consistent CC support in online video is a mandate from the federal government -- that was what it took in the early 90s to get caption decoders included in every TV 13" or larger.
E.g. they'd offer low low low rates for delivering snail mail on Manhattan Island and leave it to the USPS to handle mail in Eagle Butte, South Dakota.
Hmmm, didn't AT&T do the same back in the bad old days?
The USPS claims that bulk mail more than pays its way. In fact, there's a federal law requiring that.
Yes, bulk mail does pay a lower rate. However, it must obey certain constraints which the USPS claims result in significantly lower costs. In other words, bulk mail is supposedly profitable even though they charge less for it.
If you're going to argue that they screwed up the accounting, you should show your work.
Why should we enact your preferences instead of, say, mine?
Note that it's quite possible that spam is helping to keep first class postage prices down. (Eliminating 30% of the USPS's revenue does not eliminate 30% of their costs. FWIW, I suspect that direct mail is a greater percentage of their revenue than 30%.)
While you may willing to pay more to send USPS mail in return for getting less spam, other people probably aren't.
Which reminds me - you have gone to the very slight trouble of the first two steps listed at http://www.epa.gov/region1/communities/stop_spam.html , right?
The problem is that the post office exists mostly because most rural mail costs more to deliver than the price. It is in the government's interest to make sure that it can send and receive mail to and from all pieces of the country (for taxes, the census, and for general commerce for rural areas. )
As such, bulk mail is a subsidy.
Have you noticed the Netflix and Redbox release windowing? First sale, what first sale?
They view Netflix as more of an analogue to the "TV Syndication" stage of a property's life. Until Netflix has a 'premium' club paying more for early access to new material (so that Netflix can pay more in streaming license fees), they'll continue to see it as such.
I haven't used a land line in a long time, especially for long distance, but aren't the rates different by state?
Perhaps, like with electronic connections, when the price difference becomes small enough, they can make one flat rate because the simplicity pays off more via customer satisfaction. But international calls, for instance, still cost extra.
In either case, I agree that the two go together. Perhaps there's just too much ambiguity in the term "privatization."
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.
There's also friction issues. If I'm going to send out every month a set of bills to my customers, I know the cost will be X customers * the rate I pay (which I can decrease by making things cheaper for the USPS),
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?
I think GP's claim is not that private parcel services cannot exist, but rather that if they were to deliver first-class mail, they would charge more than $1 per letter.
They can afford ridiculously low postage because they have a government granted monopoly on mail so they can price their rates at a level to subsidize Remote, Oregon with profit from Portland. If they didn't have to deliver to the middle of nowhere they could probably lower prices significantly.
Which is why they need the monopoly, if I could set up a mail company in just the top 20 cities in the country I could undercut the USPS and then they'd suffer enormous revenue shortages because they'd still be mandated to deliver everywhere.
So if you believe that this sort of communication is a fundamental right for all citizens, than the service needs to be provided by the public sector. It's impossible to build a profitable business in the private sector out of it.
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.
Some government programs accomplish a useful goal, and the USPS is one of these. But many government programs accomplish goals which are orthogonal or counter to their stated, useful purposes.
Please don't even get me started on public education in United States. I would gladly allow 3 more USPS organizations to waste taxpayer's money if they get rid of public schools and adopt a school voucher system.
Please look for 'Stupid in America' show on YouTube and watch it. It will seriously change your opinion about public schools. Also, how many times have you heard people moving to certain district because they have better public schools? Have you ever heard anyone moving to certain district just because they have better grocery store?
I fail to comprehend why you think profit motive is a bad thing. Just like a private school has a profit motive, the customer (parents in case of private schools) have an incentive to get best value for their money and trust me, they will.
I'm aware of the documentary, and as usual, it completely misses the point. I'm intimately familiar with the inner workings of America's public and private schools (both the best and the worst on both sides). For the past several years I've had daily exposure to pretty much all angles of this issue. I suspect you've simply watched a 45 minute Youtube video and liked how microfoundations sounded when it was taught to you in school. I could write for hours on the horrors of private school vouchers alone (did you know when they tried it in Arizona, 3/4ths of the money ended up going to students who were already in private schools? [1]). And lets not even get into the fact that private schools actually don't perform that much better than public schools [2] when you account for the diversity in public schools. Considering that private schools mostly teach to a homogeneous student body, they should be blowing the public schools out of the water. They're actually not that much cheaper either, when you consider that private schools don't need to spend nearly as much money on special education programs and psychological therapy [3]. If I was a school admin I could post the most impressive numbers in the country if I'm allowed to skim from the cream of the crop, but public schools by law are not allowed to do so. However, I suspect at this point expending any more energy on this issue wasted effort since you seem dead set in your ways.
[1] http://www.gregpalast.com/no-childs-behind-left/
[2] http://nces.ed.gov/pubsearch/pubsinfo.asp?pubid=2006461
[3] http://mjperry.blogspot.com/2007/10/private-school-tuition-1...
No, mail is not the fundamental component I've identified. As I said, the fundamental component is: "the ability to affordability correspond with others around the country".
If we haven't quite reached that point yet, can't you see we will?
Oh, we'll get there. I think it's high time the USPS started providing free email accounts to every United States citizen with no advertisements. The USPS can provide privacy guarantees for the data on their servers that private companies cannot offer. Plus, imagine the optimizations that would be possible in business and government methodologies if every US citizen was guaranteed to have an email address. Hell, in this day and age I'm far less likely to change my email address than my mailing address. If I had a government issued email, it would never change.
Private market has already found out the solution. Email, facebook, twitter.
And if you think that USPS (or any government organization for that matter) can do a better job hosting free email than Google, Yahoo or Microsoft (they all provide free email), I have serious questions about your sanity.
Yes I do. It's called the United States Postal Service. It was founded in 1775. Given its track record, I think the government could implement a digital system that will be good for another couple hundred years.
Private market has already found out the solution. Email, facebook, twitter.
The public sector has its share of successes as well. How about the postal service, the census, and national elections? The US government has been handling large scale projects since the 1700s.
And if you think that USPS (or any government organization for that matter) can do a better job hosting free email than Google, Yahoo or Microsoft (they all provide free email), I have serious questions about your sanity.
Hrm, well lets think about what happened when we privatized part of our elections (Diebold) or our defense (Blackwater). Let's compare that to the USPS which has been running successfully for over 2.5 centuries. Damn right the government can handle some problems better than the private sector. Diebold is an gross embarrassment to this country and you're fooling yourself if you think similar things wouldn't happen with a privatized postal service. The government doesn't need to have a technically superior product to Gmail, just as the USPS doesn't need to have a superior product to UPS (hint: UPS is better). The government simply needs to provide a reliable, stable service with the privacy and civil guarantees that can only be provided by a public entity. The government cares about integrity. Diebold cares about profits, and look where that got us. Untraceable election fraud in the world's most powerful democracy.
The USPS does what it does very well, and any naysayers should try living in a country with an unreliable postal service. That having been said, I wouldn't trust them to do anything innovative. That dog's too old to learn new tricks.
If you actually think about it, USPS has government granted monopoly on delivering first class mail and somehow they still manage to lose billions.
I completely fail to comprehend how USPS is a success. Could you please explain what is your criteria for success is? For me, success for any organization is when they create value (produce more than they consume).
Again, the programs you have mentioned (Diebold and Blackwater) are actually government run private programs. And I am not surprised that they have failed. Compare this with Google, Apple, Microsoft, Exxon and other businesses where they serve their customers extremely well and has produced billions of dollars of wealth.
Also, if you already accept that government is not able to produce a superior product, why should they be allowed to spend the taxpayer's money? In light of national wiretapping done by Bush administration, I would really question your stance that government will be able to maintain privacy of my emails.
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 price only went up 5.4%. For the interval between raising to 37¢ and raising to 44¢ (an 18.9% increase), inflation totaled 18.7%. If a difference of 0.2 points makes all that much difference, you probably shouldn't be using the first class rate anyway.
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...