Slashdot Mirror
Finland To Try Scanning Snail Mail
will_die writes "In an effort to cut carbon emissions and reduce costs, Finland's postal company, Itella, has begun a pilot program wherein snail-mail letters are converted into PDFs and made viewable online by their addressees, instead or in advance of physical delivery. The effort is volunteer only — a little over 100 people and around 20 business as of last month — but it has already sparked concerns in Finland about privacy and government overreach. The volunteers will have images of all their letters viewable on a computer or phone. The postman will still arrive twice a week to deliver the scanned letters, as well as any packages or attachments. Additionally, the postal service will filter out junk mail."
How are emissions cut when the letters are still delivered? Wouldn't this actually cost more energy since they have to both hand deliver the original mail and use up power scanning and posting the copies? Not to mention the added labor hours required to do so. That looks like a cost increase, not a decrease. And, if they have enough spare employees to where they can actually spend time doing this, would it not be more efficient cost-wise to either just reduce those employees' hours(or move them to part-time) or lay them off altogether?
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
Don't everyone's grandparents put steganographic checksums for enclosed money in the text of their letter? :P
Who's your Grandfather? Alan Turing?
Oh wait...
http://michaelsmith.id.au
The comments on here referring to the UNITED STATES government are amazing. I know most people don't RTFA, I know most people can't even be bothered to finish reading the summary.. but the FIRST WORD OF THE TITLE OF THE POST IS FINLAND.
I would expect this kind of reading comprehension fail in a youtube comments section, but not Slashdot.