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USPS Ending Overnight First-Class Letter Service
New submitter cstacy writes "The United States Postal Service will be closing half of its processing centers this spring. Currently, 42% of first-class mail is delivered the following day for nearby residential and business customers. But that overnight mail will be a thing of the past, with delivery guaranteed only for 2-3 days. About 51% will be delivered in two days. Periodicals may take up to nine days. (Additional delays beyond this may come into play when Congress also authorizes USPS to close operations for some days each week.)"
That is going to be a pain for subscribers to Netflix, Gamefly, etc. I used to be able to validate the turn around time with local processing centers, but this is going to impact monthly turnover for those with DVD plans. I can see where this is probably going to do more to push consumers to use Redbox and Blockbuster kiosks, furthering the impact to the bottom line of USPS when more Netflix subscribers drop their service, decreasing use of traditional mail.
Ever heard of packages?
This means that getting a bill from my credit card companies will take 15 to 30 days, which means the check payment for that months current charges will be late and later with each billing cycle.
This will push the remaining people into e-payments, which will further decrease USPS revenue and further increase USPS expenses, a feedback cycle that the USPS will not escape from.
The USPS-Titanic is going under water on the 100th anniversary of the real HMS Titanic sinking. How poetic. How tragic. What will history say about the United States of America, a "Super Power" country that cannot maintain a functional national postal service.
What a disgrace.
They're going to encourage people to use their services by dramatically reducing the service quality they offer.
The sad thing is to hear people bitch about the raising cost of a First Class letter - sent *ANYWHERE* for how much? 50 cents or so? Oh yeah, that's WAY out of line...
People, the US Mail is a *service* to the public, there's no way it can every pay for itself and still move mail at the current rates. We fund this *service* with tax money, *not* postage.
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
What people are still reading paper books ?
Silly man, of course people still send non electronic messages.
Good old fashoined paper letters are PRIVATE.
e-mail is not private, and good luck getting your contacts to use pgp or s-mime.
e-mail is best effort, paper mail on the other hand is guaranteed delivery (and for registered mail it leaves a paper trail).
e-mail is so impersonal, hand written letters on the other hand are much more personal.
Congresspeople don't give a fuck about e-mail petitions, they hear on the other hand the power of hand written letters.
Etc....
TV didn't kill the radio, Internet didn't kill the radio; why do you think that email will kill paper letters ?
Of course if all you write is in sms-style then yes using paper is a waste of resources.
The last 10 non-bill mail I recieved were wedding invitations and birthday cards. It's trivially easy to find someone on facebook or similar and email them. I can't imagine why I would write a letter these days except for the novelty of it - in which case it's generally not time sensitive. It's not like people are writing to their doctor for twice weekly consultations on their condition and expect a response by mail.
It's been proven for at least a decade that if you absolutely, positively need it there tomorrow, people are willing to pay $13-25 to make sure it gets there through carriers like UPS and FedEx.
It's worth pointing out - kudos to the US Postal system for not taking taxpayer money to prop up a self-admitted outdated business model. It's sad to see those jobs disappear, but it's a real mark of leadership that they are taking initiative and solving their own problems. I wish the same could be said for other parts of our government.
moox. for a new generation.
it's time for the Pony Express to come back!
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
Reduce service to your customers when you are having financial problems? Of course, those are more related to pensions and health care than operations, but who's going to care that there letters will be intentionally delayed? What could go wrong?
Only the government thinks this way.
Let Google deliver all your stuff! Once Google has a 'Google Locker' ability to compete with Amazon Locker, all will be right with the world. Just have Google deliver all your mail that once went through USPS.
Is this further fallout from the republican bill that hosed the postal service?
Get Congress to allow 3 day a week delivery on residential routes (and maybe commercial routes), Mon-Wed-Fri for half, Tue-Thu-Sat for the other half. Still offer daily delivery to post office boxes. Anyone who thinks they really need daily delivery can rent a PO Box and pick it up daily.
make imaginary.friends COUNT=100 VISIBLE=false
I really wish Congress, and the Post Master General for that matter, would stop pretending that the USPS is just another business and should be operated as such. It's not! Mail has been a public service almost since this country was founded and the idea goes back even further in time in some other countries.
Given what the USPS does, it cannot operate like a normal business and it shouldn't have to. Considering how much money they are losing each year, it's clear they need to change something, and I wouldn't mind paying a bit more for first class postage, but this idea that the USPS needs to break even needs to stop soon before Congress completely ruins the postal service.
Packages aside, you simply can't send everything through email. I still get plenty of real non-junk mail all the time, from bank notices to insurance EOBs. This is far more secure than email could ever hope to be. Yes, it would be nice if everybody encrypted their email (especially banks), but until that happens, regular mail is a lot more secure. We actually have laws against this sort of thing and most people even take them seriously. There is little, if anything, to prevent electronic eavesdropping.
I certainly don't want to see the end of the traditional post office in my lifetime, but at the rate Congress is going, who knows. And while I would expect the Post Master General to be fighting the good fight *for* the USPS, every time I hear him talk it seems like he's gung ho to implement whatever idea Congress throws his way.
The USPS is a public service, not a business...
Elrond, Duke of URL
"This is the most fun I've had without being drenched in the blood of my enemies!"-Sam&Max
This just sounds like someone wants to kill the USPS and loot it.
Get rid of the pre-loading of pensions for 75 years as required by Congress, and they'd be a LOT closer to solvent - and no need to have slower packages.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
People are still sending around non-electronic messages?
This is a really tired expression. We didn't stop using the axe when the chainsaw came along, and we didn't stop using the broom when the vacuum came along, and we didn't stop using land line phones when cell phones came along. Most long lived legacy technologies and services survive for a good reason. They don't survive in great numbers mind you, and are used in very specialized situations, but they survive nonetheless. It should come as no more of a surprise to you that some people send letters any more than it should surprise you that some guys still cut wood with a metal blade attached to a wooden handle.
Life is hard, and the world is cruel
I would like to ask that the post office only deliver once a week. And that should be the day before garbage/recycling day. 60% of the mail I get goes straight into recycling. The next 30% goes into the shredder and into yard waste bin.
We get so little mail which is direct and important correspondence any more that we only check our mail once or twice a week. Every few months the mailman puts a slip in our box saying we have to go the post office to pick things up because our box is full.
We had 9lbs of mail last time we picked it up. We kept two letters out of everything (2oz).
The problem is not with their service, rather, they have discounted their service so much for things that people don't care about that it has degraded and made the delivery of important items a secondary item. Those who say "they make all their profit on bulk mail". I argue, if they didn't have to stop at EVERY BOX and transport TONS of material every day, they should be able to deliver the first class mail much faster and require half the staff.
And talking about staffing, when they closed a mail processing center in the midwest recently, I saw that nobody lost their jobs. Instead, the unions said the employees took new jobs and were "forced" to deliver mail door to door.
I have no sympathy.
never underestimate the bandwith of a postal delivery truck full of optical discs hurtling down side streets. :)
I listen to both RIAA and non-RIAA stuff if I like the music, tangential business/politics nonwithstanding.
Oh, I disagree with that. I don't want the post office to go away. I just want it to reflect reality. That means fewer post offices doing less stuff (and specifically, a post office that no longer tries to be a FedEx or a UPS. They can't accomplish that with their mandated unprofitable duties).
Let the private shippers do packages, and just deliver my letters a few times a week, thanks.
Life is hard, and the world is cruel
Sad to see the USPS getting worse and worse over the years. It has been a very successful least common communications denominator for over 200 years. It delivers all over the world and does a great job doing so. I would have been using them almost exclusively all along if they would have had a package tracking system like the other guys. USPS keeps rural areas connected to everything else. It is still amazing to me that I can be in such far off places as Hawaii, Guam, or Palau and for less than 50 cents send a letter or postcard to someone living at the bottom of the Grand Canyon or middle of Maine and almost never fail it gets there and quickly (3-5 days). This is definitely not the case in some other countries. Of course I know the Internet has changed things (been using Internet since 91), but still things such as legal contracts, business with governmental departments, shipping of precious metals, etc are still done largely via US Postal service because of its reliability and legal protections.
I think the USPS is a public good and an important part of keeping such a large country with spread out citizens on more equal level. Does this mean they need to find ways to be more efficient? Sure! Does this mean they need to compete with fully private companies? Sure! But I think we need them to stay around and be healthy. This means tax payer money needs to added in because some parts of the business will never be very profitable. Someone needs to deliver the things to people who do not live in high populated areas and the letters to Santa.
Almost everyone accepts electronic bill payment these days. But sometimes one-off payments (medical, dental, etc) need to be in the form of a check. Also governmental agencies such as the USCIS require checks to be mailed in as electronic payment isn't an option yet. Oh, and lets not forget the elderly who still hand-write letters in cursive to other family members.
Life is not for the lazy.
Letters? Remind me, what are those again? On the rare occasions I have to send one, I have to look up online the current rate of postage. Strong indications that the service is redundant, from a couple of standpoints.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
USPS does need to get rid of a lot of it's current functions, they are redundant and wasteful compared to e-mail and privatized delivery (UPS/FedEx/etc) . USPS should serve as a government backed, secure mail service for things like legal documents where a physical piece of paper is necessary and next day delivery wouldn't be necessary. Any pure information is relayed through e-mail, and bulk packages are best handled by current delivery services that have much better customer experience and much more consistent results, probably because they aren't government workers. I also always figured the USPS made money from delivering so much spam mail to everyone, but I guess not.
This is going to be a little bias as I ship a lot of packages but I think to compete with cheap imported goods from other nations we should subsidize package delivery in this country. When I can order something from China for $3 including shipping something is wrong. Shipping costs account for nearly 15% of my costs and in an economy where so many items are ordered online subsidies to shipping companies would benefit us all.
AnimePapers.org: Anime Wallpapers Handled With Care
You could of course check your credit card bill online and pay it on time, like you mentioned yourself. I don't hear people complaining about the lack of jobs in the wooden-wheel-making-market, or the horse-and-carriage driver business lately. Maybe quick mail isn't that what it's used to be and a few niche players will fetch more money for the few letters that still need fast delivery. The rest of the dead tree spam doesn't need to be anywhere in a hurry, so why bother?
I was promised a flying car. Where is my flying car?
USPS is forced to do this because it refuses to excise the wasteful incompetent personnel it employs, even when the incompetence is documented in detail. They even get Congress to pass Federal laws that allow them to further shirk liability and responsibilities. In my postal zone, the only way even a lowly mail carrier can get fired is if he's caught on video killing someone's dog. If he's responsible for the theft, damage, or loss of packages, even when it's documented, he'll be back the next day and every day after that, for so long as he shall live. If you thought the SCOTUS judges had it made with their continued employment prospects, they ain't got nothin' on mail carriers.
I always thought that the post offices would be OK because with the Internet, sure we're sending way less letter mail, but package deliveries must be through the roof compared to what they were before. Most people do shittonnes of ordering on the Internet now.
yeah, they need to cut costs, but this isn't the way to go about it.
closing a bunch of offices in Podunk might be necessary, though.
of course, not gonna touch "administrative expenses" :(
I listen to both RIAA and non-RIAA stuff if I like the music, tangential business/politics nonwithstanding.
The thing is that DM is way more expensive than eDM. Say you get lift over control of oh, I don't know, 1% with eDM and 5% with DM. That means 4% extra sales with DM but you've had to spend roughly 100 times as much on delivery. Plug in some typical numbers for profit margins and well, DM still has a place but more often than not eDM has a much better ROI.
In practice it's more complicated than that - DM tends to cut through to a different group than eDM cuts through to, and in some contexts that matters. Also both have creative costs so for small targeted mailouts the delivery cost is unsubstantial which puts DM in the lead, and then there's printhouse costs.
The impact of losing USPS would be fair greater than most people here seem to think. Think of all the "junk mail" you get, ever thought about how many people are employed printing and mailing that stuff? Or magazines? Or coupons? Or Newsletters? Or how many jobs are kept around because of direct mail advertising? I'd bet you the cost of keeping USPS alive is less than the tax revenue it enables businesses to bring in.
brickspeed.net for your old Volvo performance addiction
It is a common misconception that the Postal Service uses tax money. They are funded entirely by the money they make from postage.
Wait, private enterprise doing something the government should be doing? It's simply not the democratic way.
What about the Health Care Law? We all know what happens when the government runs things...
I'm rethinking how I feel about government run health care; have been for a while, but this simply re enforces the obvious.
Technically there's nothing preventing me from slitting an envelope and reading it, no?
Not without the recipient knowing and without comitting a crime.
Other than that, your nerdy little ass is right.
Would that stop the FBI or CIA if they were really interested in what you were communicating? I'd almost take it for granted that they'd have the infrastructure in place down at the central post office to intercept letters. They probably have some fancy-fangled-ass-shit to pop open and reseal an envelope without showing signs of tampering, too.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
That's assuming the recipient actually gets the mangled letter afterwards. Mail still gets lost in today's day and age, and without a tampered envelope, a charge of mail tampering is nothing more than a crackpot's rantings.
TV didn't kill the radio, Internet didn't kill the radio; why do you think that email will kill paper letters ?
Because two out of three ain't bad.
They probably have some fancy-fangled-ass-shit to pop open and reseal an envelope without showing signs of tampering, too.
The word you are looking for is "equipment" ;)
+Raider of the lost BBS
Kill it faster!
from what's supposed to be the greatest country in the world
Unless you use a fairly paranoid design(eg. an envelope chemically treated so that it will freak out in some obvious way if the adhesive is tampered with, or a residue-free volatile fluid is used to render the paper temporarily transparent) opening a letter isn't rocket surgery. If the feds are on your back, you probably have a problem. If somebody sends you cash, that particular envelope may just 'get shredded in a mechanical malfunction' and never arrive.
However, tampering with letters would be a pretty ugly process to scale up(machines would be unlikely to be able to do it delicately enough, and 20,000 human tamperers are going to talk...) Tampering with packets requires actual geek skills; but once you have the capability, doing it to 100 million people differs from doing it to 100 only in how large a check you need to cut your vendor...
Coming from Canada a few year ago I was amazed by the USPS.
Overnight delivery? We're used to four to seven days, even in town.
Saturday delivery? We lost that in the seventies.
Mail pickup at your rural mailbox? I'm assuming we don't have that either.
Most amazing to us though was that people used USPS to send important things, and assumed that they'd arrive, and on time. No way do you do that with Canada Post.
Three Squirrels
I run a business that sends a few thousand invoices each month via first class mail. We process about the same amount in checks inbound using first class mail. My customers are regional and the lion's share of them are in the same 3-digit zip code processing center so delivery has been overnight. The USPS has just stated that they are adding what amounts to 4-6 business days to my accounts receivable cycle. This has prompted us to reevaluate implementing some needed changes in electronic billing.
The postal service is so inept, they cannot even manage to put a machine in the post office to sell coils of stamps. I have to stand in line and use the time of a union, pensioned government employee just to buy stamps.
Such is the corrupt government contracting business where contracts go to the Honorable Senator's nephew instead of the company who can do it better for less.
A private company like Redbox seems to have figured it out.
Ok... so Fancy-frangled-ass-shit-equipment then?
:)
Was wondering what the proper name for it was
Encryption.
Good old fashoined paper letters are PRIVATE. e-mail is not private, and good luck getting your contacts to use pgp or s-mime.
43% of identity theft occurs from physical paperwork. 11% from online. Personally, I don't trust any security mechanism that can be defeated by someone walking by, opening your unlocked mailbox, and holding the envelope to the sun. E-mail can be quite private, but you're correct that most people don't require that level of privacy and subsequently don't bother. Let's see you convince your contacts to use PGP on snail mail...
e-mail is best effort, paper mail on the other hand is guaranteed delivery (and for registered mail it leaves a paper trail).
USPS loses about 3-5% of mail, per an unofficial source. They collect but do not publish these statistics themselves. E-mail seems more reliable that that, albeit there are tons of factors that go into it. At least you're much more likely to get a "message undeliverable" reply with e-mail.
e-mail is so impersonal, hand written letters on the other hand are much more personal. Congresspeople don't give a fuck about e-mail petitions, they hear on the other hand the power of hand written letters.
It's a social convention, there's no real difference between the two, beyond the cost of the stamp and slower transit. As for congressmen, I find your assertion that they take either seriously to be quite amusing.
True. I (manually) pay almost all my bills electronically via my bank (which apparently routes through CheckFree) except the water and sewer bills. They come every other month and can only be paid electronically through Bank Of America for a $3 fee and they don't offer any payment guarantee/protection (like my bank does), so fuck 'em, they get a paper check. I still get paper statements because (a) I don't get any discount for getting an electronic bill and (b) I like to have a statement to file and don't see why I should have to print my own and pay for the paper/toner, etc.
Also, for those who route their electronic statements through their Gmail account, remember that Google scans *everything* that goes through your account...
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
I'm an early adopter as well as an impulse shopper. I set things up in my house and it generally isn't longer before my neighbors are knocking on my door asking to see what their kids are talking about. Then before you know it, they're asking me how to get it in their houses and before you know it, they're asking if it would be suitable for their 80 year old mothers.
For the past 9 years, my kids have had media center PCs in their rooms... no TV signal as it isn't important. From collecting seasons of TV shows, they have an assortment of roughly 1500 cartoons on their PCs which they can watch by clicking a few buttons. My daughter has a 22" TV as a screen which was handed down by mamma when she bullied me to give her a bigger TV in the bedroom. My son has a 24" BenQ screen with some Logitech speakers. Their computers are their TVs, video game consoles and web browsers etc... I can safely say that with the exception of maybe on show a night before bed... lasting about 20 minutes, they never really watched TV... well except when visiting houses with technonoobs.
On the top floor, I have a laser/led projector that gives me a 110" screen and a sound system able to do the room it is in justice. It's connected to a media center PC where we often play games we buy from Steam or movies we buy from iTunes and I often find myself web browsing from the couch there.
On the bottom floor we have a 46" Sony LCD with the cable box which my wife watches reality TV on.
All of us have iPhones, we have two iPads and I have a Windows 8 Tablet (Samsung Series 7 Slate) which I use as a PC for Windows, Mac and Linux development as well as watching films, playing games and pretty much everything else. These are our books. I am entirely unable to throw away a paper book on principal. So, I have a full room in my house with the walls covered with books and books stacked in boxes and a chair... I call it the library. I find it doubtful my children will buy paper books later in life. They're inconvenient, wasteful, and they suck up space.
I have received a single piece of mail in the past 13 years which was addressed to me other than a bill. I haven't received a bill in the mail in about 6 years as they come through email. The one piece of mail I received was actually a paper based Nigerian 419 scam presenting itself as a letter from a law firm.
We get out mail on any of the screens in the house. We get our movies entirely electronically. We get our games and music also electronically. If we want to watch broadcast TV, we do it through a streaming web site. If we want to listen to the radio, we do it through a streaming site. Of course, we have a sling box setup just in case someone calls and says "You have to turn on channel 9!" But, it's collecting dust.
I just opened a new bank account inside the U.S. (I'm an American abroad) and I was in utter shock how ridiculously paper based the U.S. still is. I had to open a "Checking account"... I mean really? A checking account. That would imply the use of paper checks... WTF!!! are you still in the dark ages? They insisted I provide a paper form of payment other than cash to open the account and insisted it was sent through the mail. I was mortified. I don't even know how to do that. In the end, they agreed to let my dad send them a bank check or money order for $1 to get it open. They also required a color photocopy of my passport picture page and social security card. It wasn't good enough to e-mail them. They had to have genuine photocopies. So, I scanned them, sent them to my dad and he mailed them to the bank.
I didn't have a social security card anymore and although I provided them with my number, they needed proof it was mine... so I asked the american embassy for a letter saying so... it was printed out and signed. After all... somehow a piece of linen stationary from 1975 which was printed in blue ink by a cheap press and then put into an IBM electric type writer is obviously more proof that the number is mine than me saying so.. DUH!!!!
overnight, same 'sector' delivery has been touch and go for 5+ years here in new england. Used to be that we could send a birthday card the day before a normal delivery day and it would arrive on time. Not so much the past few years, and it's never really annoyed me either.
Would rather they drop Satyrnday delivery in favor of keeping up with regional deliveries, even if they are 1-2 days.
She blinded me with science, she tricked me with technology. ~ Thomas Dolby
Would it be any easier to replace the envelope? Still will be tricky to automate because if you have some paranoid envelope, need to replace that one with another paranoid looking envelope and a printed recipient address, and maybe a stickon return address. Still there could be those envelopes that self-destructs the message in 5 seconds...
They have to fully fund the benefits of every postal employee; that's actual employees, not any potential employee they might hire in the next 75 years. Meaning that for any new (young) employee they get, they must fully fund his retirement/benefits that wouldn't normally have to be paid until his retirement 40 or 50 years from now. The cost you cited is correct, and the requirement is justifiably called absurd and not a thing any private company is burdened with, but getting hyperbolic with the requirements of the law itself simply give your opponents a way to wave off your entire argument by pointing out this one innacuracy. I know it isn't you that started that little misinformational bit of hyperbole, but I've heard it a bunch and I've seen plenty of conservatives shrug off the entire argument by pointing this out and claiming the whole thing is "union lies" or some such. Whoever started the 75 years thing did their cause a terrible disservice.
That said, another restriction Congress has put on USPS is the requirement not to raise rates faster than inflation (based on CPI or something like that). Fuel costs go up 30% this year? Well, suck it up, because you're not raising rates more than 1.67%!
Conservatives like to point at the apparent failure of the USPS as an indicator that the government is simply wasteful in everything it does (instead we should privatize things so our corporate friends can take the profitable areas and leave everyone else to rot!), but that is a ludicrous assertion given that USPS is under restrictions such as the above which no private business would have to work under. Add to that the requirement that they serve every American, no matter where, with the same rates (a good and proper one, IMO) and it's amazing they're even close to profitable.
95% of what the USPS delivers to my mailbox goes directly into the recycling bin. This is no great loss.
Can we vote for Slashdot Hall of Fame entries? If there is a "tl;dr" category or an "Overt Asperger Perseveration/Rumination", I would like to nominate the parent.
Thank you.
USPS isn't on the verge of collapse due to any shortfall in business, it's recent changes in politics that have thrown a set of concrete slippers on a historically great swimmer.
H.R. 1351 would allow the Postal Service to apply billions of dollars in pension overpayments to the congressional mandate that requires the USPS to pre-fund the healthcare benefits of future retirees. No other government agency or private company bears this burden, which forces the Postal Service to fund a 75-year liability in 10 years — at a cost of more than $5 billion annually. Without the mandate, the USPS would have shown a surplus of $611 million over the past four fiscal years.
from http://postalemployeenetwork.com/news/2011/09/h-r-1351-gains-momentum-on-capitol-hill/
There's a lot more to the Post Office than just delivering junk-mail. The Post Office has been the glue that allowed the US to exist almost right from the start. The difference between a 1st class nation and a 3rd world country is the Post Office. Can you imagine if your bills didn't arrive in a timely fashion or you weren't able to put a check in the mail. Sure there's a lot of movement towards electronic payments for everything, but there are still plenty of areas without broadband and getting on the modern web with a modem is painful. Odds are if you're older, the Post Office also delivers your medications safely and quickly regardless of where you live. Rain or shine, you can always count on the Post Office to deliver, Fed-up and OoPS, half the time when the package is in town, on the truck and out for delivery, it still won't show up for another day or two as they skip stops.
If I was a politician, I'd really think twice about screwing with retirees prescriptions or the people handling the ballots.
- tensions in our lives that are attacking our minds, unite themselves together to make our consciousness blind - op'ivy
For me, where the post office is only a half dozen miles away, it is quicker to drive there and find out the price of postage then to load a page online. I'd guess there are a lot of people in this situation nowadays when most web sites seem to think you have a fiber connection.
Paying bills online is the same, quicker to drive to the post office and mail a check then to load a page and discover it's not working anyways right now.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
You can get deb and rpm files in the mail now?!?
Yes, they have. It's called a bowl with hot water. Hold the envelope in the steam and wait until the glue comes off.
The word he was looking for was "pot with boiling water"
bickerdyke
Never underestimate the bandwidth of a mail truck full of CDs (or DVDs, or flash/hard drives, etc)... although it's just been cut in half now.
Ass-fangler.
Michael Reed, freelance tech writer.
So if you wondered why Netflix was shooting itself in the feet repeatedly a few months back, now you know why. Folks are not going to be as satisfied with their by-mail service if DVDs take three days to show up, and three days to get back.
Speaking of cursive... Have you older people noticed that modern teens no longer write in cursive at all? I heard that some schools were no longer teaching cursive writing. There's something sad about this in a Sherlock Holmes kind of way.
Sorry, but gray text on gray background is making my eyes bleed.
Good old fashioned paper letters are NOT private. I have had my credit card number stolen exactly 3 times in my life and NONE of them were electronic.
1 Domino's Pizza employee
2.Pickpocket (out of my front pocket no less)
3.Postal Service.
Of the three the only one that actually succeeded in making charges was the one taken from the postal service. Safe? Not even close.
Unless you use a fairly paranoid design(eg. an envelope chemically treated so that it will freak out in some obvious way if the adhesive is tampered with, or a residue-free volatile fluid is used to render the paper temporarily transparent) opening a letter isn't rocket surgery. If the feds are on your back, you probably have a problem. If somebody sends you cash, that particular envelope may just 'get shredded in a mechanical malfunction' and never arrive.
That's why, after sealing the envelope, I drip hot wax over the seam and make an imprint using my signet ring.
#DeleteChrome
However, tampering with letters would be a pretty ugly process to scale up(machines would be unlikely to be able to do it delicately enough, and 20,000 human tamperers are going to talk...)
History proves you wrong: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:MfS_Abt_M_Brief1.jpg - Automatic letter re-sealer, in use by East-German Staatssicherheit (Stasi) until the fall of the wall.
You might want to look to countries other than the US for examples of how government-run health care can be 'good' (or at least far better than in the US). It has its disadvantages, yes, but I think that its advantages outweigh those (assuming that your government isn't terrible).
Read it.
If you bothered to do -any- research, you would know that the price increase by netflix has everything to do with SKYROCKETING content costs, not delivery costs.
So, while firex726 is hauled away for daring to think in a free country (try typing that with a straight face) I, as a communist living in a communist country (IE everywhere NOT America) can confirm this.
There are plenty of essential services that our society depends on but that don't always make economic sense. A starbucks is a easy. it should only continue to exist where it makes economic sense. It is not going to have enough business to sustain itself in a one horse town. (Horses don't drink coffee for the agriculturally challenged) But since nobody actually NEEDS a coffee shop (no, you really don't no matter how much you need caffeine to function) this is alright. You can live your entire life quiet happily without a starbucks or a McD near you.
But try the same thing without say, water and sewage services. Electricity or gas. Or even more basic, a road system. Roads to most people just seem to be there but they are costly to put down and maintain and often of no direct economic value. It is a rare farm that can afford to pay for a road a system to deliver its produce to all its customers. Without the road it cannot deliver but it would be a very costly bit of lettuce if the farm itself had to pay for it. Me? The customer pay for it? I don't NEED that farm road or even the countless kilometers (remember, communist) of highway. I live in a small area and pay for goods to be delivered to me. They can pay the transport costs from that.
This is why private roads are rare AND deliver ON private roads is NOT a sure thing. If you own a farm and don't keep your private road in a satisfactory state of repair you might be highly surprised to learn that deliveries are to the edge of your land, not the door. I am not going to risk MY truck on YOUR pot filled hole. To some people, getting the mail is a bit a more then firing up Gmail.
Essential services are a part of the infrastructure that an entire society is build upon. This is nothing new. It doesn't even have to be costly. Once the USPS was a big source of income for the US government. But decades of mis management in order to reduce government by republicans have made a profitable service that everyone needs a byword for money loosing inefficiency. And the result? We have been steadily going back on the quality of a service once known for its reliability.
But who still sends mail? Bill collectors? In a country in debt, that is the only remaining growth industry. The idea that you can send a letter and have it delivered anywhere in the country the next day is so ingrained that we don't think of it anymore. Electricity and water are the same and when they are turned off for a short time we suddenly notice how depended we are on it (quick for how many flushes of your shit do you have water stored). But they are only cut for short times or during unplanned outages where everyone is working as fast as possible to get it back up. NOBODY could seriously suggest that electricity will only be delivered part time (except in the glorious free market of California, high tech area of the world, think about that if you can).
Once the mail service has been gutted (and it is already way to late) turning it back on is impossible. The infrastructure is gone and no matter how much it is needed, the finances just won't be there to restart it. Oh, the people will adjust but it will be one more slide into 2nd world status for the US. Roads broken up, bridges falling apart, electricity unreliable as in 2nd world nations. Pretty soon, this will be used as an excuse for entire companies to relocate to areas with better infrastructure. Oh wait, the companies already did move since lack of social services and high living costs put the pressure of paying for it on individual wages and made the US worker far to expensive. Here is a hint, if the only way for a worker to come to your factory is by car, then his salary must be able to pay for said car. A cyclist can afford to demand a lower wage. Simple economics no republican will ever understand. Same with health
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
You are aware that volunteer fire services are a perfect example of socialism? They may not pay a wage but the equipment is payed for by the people FOR the people. And it is fairly typical that everyone in the area gives the volunteers leeway to do their service. Or do you think non-volunteers can suddenly drop their job and rush out to put out a fire? No? Can't think of any employment contract that has this in it. Yet volunteer fire fighters do it all the time and are NOT fired (get it , fired, fire-fighter, that pun is smoking hot!, Get it, smoking hot? Fire? I am on FIRE today! What do you mean, good?)
So what is your argument? Things that the whole society needs even if an individual might never need it, need to supported by the whole off society?
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
A Republican so someone who cuts of his own legs because they are to large and unwieldy for their minimal usefullness. All that meat and bone (lets face it, muscles on a rep are in the neck) for what? Cut it off. And that brain? 25% of energy of the body? Who does it think it is?
For a postal service to work, it has to be inefficient. The same with public transport. Unless it reaches everywhere, it isn't usable. That is why early electricity producers PAID big bucks to get everyone hooked up. But they would only do that where it made sense. Getting a line out to the farms often didn't. And so they didn't.
Society NEEDS infrastructure even in areas YOU as a person never use. That road to nowhere DOES go somewhere and those people at the end need it.
Don't believe it? Go live in areas of the world where only individual interests are catered for. Somalia is nice for that. No functional government, no services. No taxes. Just protection money to the guy with the bigger gun. And the payment might be your kids. Gosh, wished you payed a tiny percent for a national police service now eh?
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
USPS loses about 3-5% of mail, per an unofficial source. They collect but do not publish these statistics themselves.
That's about standard for the industry I'd bet. While working for a major package delivery company, a letter went out congratulating the employees of that state for only losing 40,000 packages that year, which was about 4% IIRC.
Because my boss is still living in the 20th Century, my paycheck still comes by mail. We've been hounding him for years to get direct deposit, but he's old-fashioned and hard-headed.
I told him one time that I banked online and shopped online, and he asked if that was safe. I told him it was as safe as my paycheck sitting in an unlocked metal box in front of my house for up to a day. I don't think he got it even then.
The word you're looking for is "kettle".
In forensic circles it's known as a "Ferric Semi-sealed Dihydrogenmonoxide Phase Change Apparatus".
How many more years will slashdot have an off-by-one error on your Score in your profile?
Two relatives, mother and daughter on my dad's side, both ran large Post Offices in the Midwest. Both can tell you the same things about what is wrong with the Post Office. First is a the unionized work force who doesn't care. As in, you tell them something, they tell you take a hike. My cousin used to refer to her work as "Debby's Day Care" except all those in her charge were adults. Had an emergency, too bad their going home, you do it or get that new guy to do it, the one with the shitty route. People paid more simply because they were there longer who didn't feel they had to work because she was powerless to do anything. You could write someone up for being drunk and it went no where because it couldn't go anywhere. Fortunately no one was ever hurt but she always wryly remarked, it probably would not have mattered.
The second problem was the incredible waste. Like the convention in Chicago where they stayed at 4 and 5 star hotels (depending on size and importance) where mother and daughter offered to share a room and were told that "they don't do that". Where they were flown in for the convention business class. My Aunt used to scream about the waste of that convention when she needed a new delivery truck and instead had to watch the money poured down the drain so upper PO officials could celebrate themselves.
Then comes the trucks, or should I say the infamous left hand drive Windstars. Which no one on a route wanted because, well they were too large to reach across and such made mail delivery a non-starter. So they became shuttles to smaller post offices or those road side lock box places.
Still the largest controllable costs except it ain't because of union negotiating is the costs of the employees. The actual rules state that negotiations cannot take into account costs when it comes to setting rates for employment.
Go search CATO.ORG to see all the stories on the USPS. I tend to ignore the calls to privatize it, it is a requirement of the US Government to do this. However nothing requires them to do it wrong or inefficiently, that happens because of the unions and Congress. One which protects the pay of the workers and more importantly the union bosses and the second because they want to stay in office.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
I worked at a Fedex sorting facility for 2 days through a temp service. I can assure you the same type of manhandling occurred there as well. Guys were heaving boxes out of the trucks sometimes up to 5ft through the air before they hit the belt and tumbled over several times.
Ironically enough, 35% of what we unloaded that day were PCs and monitors from the vendor I had worked for that past summer. We wondered why we kept getting customer complaints of unseated video cards, HDDs, etc. I went back the next summer and told them about what happened at Fedex, and was told there was nothing they could expect to change except extra securing for the innards of the PCs...
I think, it should be:
"Never underestimate the bandwidth of mail truck full of micro-SD cards of maximum available size (currently 32G, I believe)."
No, I did not calculate the actual bandwidth as it's late, and I don't have exact measurements of cards or space available for packages in a truck, or thought what would be optimal packaging that can be loaded into the truck, unloaded and connected to something that can read and write them (time for those operations should be counted along with the truck trip itself). But others are welcome to try. Take into account that gigabytes used for storage devices are decimal while bandwidth units are binary.
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
It's called a "kettle".
What kind of messed up networking do you have where units are expressed in binary?
Just a point of clarification. The USPS is NOT required to stop at your door if you have mailbox that is not at the roadside. Outgoing mail can sit in my mailbox for days and days if they don't have any spam ...err... incoming mail to deliver. This is according to my local post office.
Forsooth, man, cans't not your trusty vassal deliver a simple epistle without knavish tampering?
(All joking aside, sealing wax is one of those things that I suspect, unless yours is impregnated with a dispersion of certified-unique-per-instance coded microdots or something[incidentally, given the demand for supply-chain verification in pharmaceutics and the like, you could probably actually add those to sealing wax pretty cheaply...] a professional could get past surprisingly quickly and quietly; but is sufficiently rare and idiosyncratic that it would drive up the human labor requirements of widespread mail-tapping. That's the tricky thing with physical mail: almost anybody who cares to can invent a (probably weak; but has to be broken manually) ad-hoc sealing scheme comparatively easily. If there were thousands of homebrew crypto systems(mostly bad; but sufficiently weird that you'd need to call an analyst over for 10 minutes to think about them a bit) floating around in common use, cracking packets open would be similarly annoying...)
I live in Chicago and honestly I wouldn't even bother trying to mail a letter. It's basically a jobs program.
if your life is such a big joke then why should I care?
What's to stop me from making an identical copy of your signet ring (the seal on the envelope provides a convenient mould) melting the wax off, opening, copying and resealing the letter and then resealing it with my signet ring copy?
All I want is a secure system where it's easy to do anything I want. Is that too much to ask ~~ Randall Munroe
True, they use the Internet, but even dial-up is enough to manage one's Netflix DVD queue.
Hmm... that's an interesting thought. So we should first encrypt our data with a known good encryption scheme, then use a home brew version on top of that? What would be the benifit beyound just using the generally thought uncrackable version?
It's a social convention, there's no real difference between the two, beyond the cost of the stamp and slower transit.
It's not the cost of the stamp. It's the cost of the time. I can send an email in 20 seconds. Writing, printing, addressing and stamping an envelope takes 20 minutes, plus the time taken to walk to the mailbox and back. I'm not going to bother doing that unless it's about something that really matters to me - and hence is likely to affect my vote.
Or Radar off of MASH.
When I had to send papers of a restraining order to another state, I could care less if the FBI or CIA wanted to read them as long as my mail makes it. I fail to see how your argument applies to nearly every real world situation.
The only real reason they can't do the mandated be profitable was stated publicly- they have to fund their pension funds for all their employees to 75 years into the future, as mandated by Congress (So they can raid THAT like they did Social Security...).
Do you have any idea how hard it is to duplicate individual handwriting?
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
A private service comes in and competes only for the simple jobs- they refuse service to anywhere tricky. As all their deliveries are simple, they can massively undercut the national service on these jobs, depriving the service of it's main revenue stream.
You just described the Wal-Mart business model. They don't really compete with flower shops, pharmacies, craft stores, toy stores, etc. They don't offer the same depth of choice or quality or service. But they siphon off enough of their customers--the ones buying the common, cheap, bulk basics, and requiring little service--to turn them unprofitable.
One thing I never hear mentioned is the level of service to private residences. When I grew up (ca 1950-60) we had a mail box on our front porch and many had slots in their door. The mailman walked up to each door to deliver. At present we have a mail box across the street that a mail delivery person (no longer a man...) can drive up to and deposit mail. In even newer neighborhoods there are centralized stations where mail can be delivered to a bunch of addresses in one stop. One thing I've never heard is that the USPS is going to reduce the service level to the older neighborhoods to match the level provided in newer areas. Surely it must be more labor intensive to walk door to door than to drive down a street and deliver to boxes that are all on one side of the street.
I'm sure that would cost jobs, but that's the primary way to save money, isn't it?
Oh, I'm aware of those. All I was doing (albeit, rather more curtly than I typically would) was pointing out the factual inaccuracies in the OP's statement with regards to the USPS being tax-funded.
"The changes would provide short-term relief, but ultimately could prove counterproductive, pushing more of America's business onto the Internet."
In the future, please link to news, not editorials.
No. But your subsequent sabbatical to Federal Pound-me-in-the-ass Prison may make you regret it.
I am over 50 and I can safely say I HAVE NEVER SEEN, IN MY ENTIRE LIFE, EVER, seen a letter delivered overnight anywhere for anything under any and all circumstances by the USPS. They even tell you that overnight delivery is 'maybe 2-3 days'. And the last several years, here in zipcode 27615 Not only do we NEVER get mail before 6pm, we're lucky if they show up all scheduled days. 5 out 6 is considered pretty good. And that's just for pick up. We stopped dropping our letters in our own mailbox for pickup YEARS ago because if we were lucky they wouldn't disappear to never be delivered half the time. Today it takes about TWO WEEKS to send a letter from one zipcode in Raleigh NC to another zipcode in Raleigh NC. And when ordering anything online with shipment via USPS, on average 3-5 business days is approximately one MONTH. Netflix? I dropped the disk in the mail Wed. It's Monday and the next disk will come today if we're super fortunate but probably tomorrow. In my local PO when you trudge there to do something like send your tax return registered mail receipt requested, while you're waiting on the next employee to keel over from obesity and diabetes, you get to watch on not 3, not 4, not 5, but SIX 50" flat screens overhead extolling the wonders of stamps depicting silent film stars, state flowers, and Christmas.
I say napalm the lot of them.
I'd like to add, as an aside, that FedEx Home loses roughly .025%-.05% of any given truck, Sam's Club loses about 1%, and Wal-mart does the same to roughly ~5-10% of any given truckload (they overstuff their trucks). These statistics are informal, mind you, and may vary.
Like the parent poster said, individual handling. Anything that can't simply be dealt with once, but requires a human to enter the loop, drives up the cost of implementing your algorithms, AND creates a potential for the snoopers to betray themselves. Why do we put locks on houses? A professional can get through the typical lock quickly. There are a few lock systems thought to be generally uncrackable (within certain limits, like no fair bringing along a wrecking ball and crane), but not everyone buys such an 'uncrackable' lock. Why bother with any of the others at all?
Here, it's a case of inflicting costs on the snooper. It's very cheap to harvest lots of unencrypted e-mail. It's equally cheap to throw out all the items that have standard, reliable encryptions and let those people keep their privacy. For some nefarious purposes, reading just the rest is enough. But it gets very expensive in human resource terms to determine what's hard encryption and what's a simple but unique code that could be worth breaking if the effort was put forth, but only if a human spends some time on the task.
Try this example (Warning, non car example follows): The US government has machines that can recognize an individual voice in a phone call by voice-print analysis. They can record all calls featuring one of those voices and it's very cheap. They could probably catch absolutely every call by a particular suspect once they were in the system. But what happens when they want to figure out what region of what country someone on a voice call was raised in? Could they possibly afford to filter for all calls made featuring a voice with some particular geographic or ethnic traits?
Who is John Cabal?
Not without the recipient knowing and without comitting a crime.
Other than that, your nerdy little ass is right.
That's just plain moronic. Its just as illegal to access someone's e-mail, and at least it has a password. My mailbox doesn't.
Sure mail traffic has gone down in an internet age.
But the manufactured crisis that put them in their current state was caused by Republicans requiring that they prefund their pension plan to a degree that no other group has ever been required to.
It follows the current repugnicon playbook: Create a crisis and use it to justify changes which profit their cronies.
We need to stop handing the keys back the dishonest Republicans who have no interest in governing for the benefit of the many, only in profit for the few.
We need quick deliveries. If the problem is money, raise the rates. In 1850, the price of a stamp was around 5 cents. Lets move the cost of a letter to a buck. I can pay that.
Latency is your issue here- you've gone from a 86,400,000 ms ping to 172,800,000 ms ping.
"Seven Deadly Sins? I thought it was a to-do list!"
The networking equipment at the CO is less reliable than the phone equipment, probably due to the fact that the phone network hardware is far more mature.
You do have a valid point though, using POTS lines for both puts the parent at non-zero risk for having simultaneous failures. We use both cable internet and T1s at our office. That didn't help us one day when one of the 4 telephone poles carrying both wires caught on fire, leaving us without internet for about 36 hours.
"If it has to be there tomorrow, call the other guys. If it had to be there two weeks ago, call us."
http://www.hulu.com/watch/285313/saturday-night-live-jiffy-express
How much first class mail do they lose though? A hell of a lot less than 3% of my outgoing mail has been lost. More like, one letter so far in the 25 years I've been using postal mail.
[Sir Garlon] is the marvellest knight that is now living, for he destroyeth many good knights, for he goeth invisible.
I think, it should be:
"Never underestimate the bandwidth of mail truck full of micro-SD cards of maximum available size (currently 32G, I believe)."
What would that be in Libraries of Congress?
"why do you think that email will kill paper letters ?"
It killed half of the USPS right now, no small feat.
The rest will follow.
Good that Cliff Clavin didn't have to see that.
"A hell of a lot less than 3% of my outgoing mail has been lost. "
Try to send some expensive shit. Nobody is going to 'lose' congratulations to aunt Mable.
This plan makes perfect sense. "Woe be" to those instant gratification people who demand at least what they've gotten used to or BETTER. (shrug)
"the seal on the envelope provides a convenient mould"
Actually, it doesn't. Try it sometime. The wax is too easy to melt and deform. You COULD use some sort of laser-scanning device to build a 3d model. But at that point you're out several million dollars.
I have to agree, although I've long since switched to FedEx for most of my package shipping needs.
UPS uses union labor and FedEx doesn't (at least, last I checked -- because I realize there have been some fights to unionize there in the last few years).
I'm not necessarily a believer in the idea that union labor is always worse in some way, but I think that tends to be the case when you're talking about relatively unskilled labor. Basically, you've got a scenario where the people doing basic, manual labor (loading and unloading of boxes at sorting facilities, etc.) are protected against punishment for wrongdoing in the workplace by layers of bureaucracy. (EG. Shop foreman can't just fire some guy on the spot if he witnesses him flying into a rage and stomping his boot through a customer's "FRAGILE: HANDLE WITH CARE!" box on the shop floor. He has to go through some union-mandated disciplinary procedure that probably means, at the very least, the employee just receives some kind of verbal warning for the first offense.)
Plus, I'm not impressed with UPS based on personal stories told to me by former UPS employees themselves. For example, one of my buddies used to work at a UPS facility where he said boxes were regularly stacked up into 6 foot high walls, regardless of any warnings printed on them. When a truck would come in, someone would yell "Tear 'em down!" and they'd knock over the walls, letting boxes fall all over the concrete floor, for people to sort through and load up.
FedEx isn't perfect.... I once had them absolutely destroy a music synthesizer I was shipping to Canada, and then fight me for weeks about paying the insurance claim on it. But overall, I think they have a better track record of getting boxes to destinations on time and in one piece. Additionally, they have a better arrangement for receivers of packages if they're not available to sign for the delivery. Unlike UPS, it's easy to go to a FedEx facility in person, in the evening, and sign for and pick up your delivery.
Given the time-sensitive nature of small claims court filings (many of which get served via USPS) this is going to pose a large burden on the right to due process.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
Yes, there's a funded-through-2038 trust fund. However, the US Government as a whole collected that money, borrowed it, and spent it on other things. Remember those "surpluses" in the 1990s? They were counting baby boomer social security taxes as current revenue in that "surplus" computation - we were still going into long-term debt.
The US Government as a whole is in deep fiscal trouble. The social security surplus helped cover up the problem, and it is going to have to be part of the solution.
To a Lisp hacker, XML is S-expressions in drag.
Lost wax / investment casting.
Writers imply. Readers infer.
That's what Registered Mail is for... it not only generates a paper trail, it also gets special-security handling (as in, they lock it in a safe for the interval between you handing it in at the desk and it needing to be sorted, etc.) Plus, Registered Mail is an international standard so the benefits are supposed to apply when sending to any UPU member state (although I'm not going to venture a guess as to what might have happened to the wad of cash you may have sent to that nice man in Nigeria). If it was good enough to carry the Hope Diamond, it's probably going to get your negotiable bearer bonds there in one piece.
Save Maine's economy: write stuff down. All comments are exclusively my own, not my employer.
Damn... why did it strip my link? Hope Diamond ref: http://postalmuseum.si.edu/museum/1d_Hope_Diamond.html .
Save Maine's economy: write stuff down. All comments are exclusively my own, not my employer.
This is interesting, because your experience with FedEx Ground sounds completely different than mine! I'm starting to think this stuff varies a lot by region, and there's no way to make a blanket statement about any of these carriers.
I know here (St. Louis, Missouri area), FedEx has their sorting facility open until at least 8PM for people to drop by and pick up packages from missed deliveries. I've done that many times, if I see while at work via email or the web site that my delivery was attempted. I just run by there on the way home and get my box. UPS refuses to let me do such a thing, at least on the first delivery attempt. I'm *forced* to wait a second day for them to attempt the delivery again and pick up a signed tag I leave out for them on my door, stating I'd like to pick it up in person.
Also, I don't think I've ever had an issue with FedEx Ground skipping my delivery, just because a signature was required. I've *often* had issues like that with UPS though, including times they ring my doorbell and I hurry to the door, only to open it and see the guy sprinting back into his truck and a note already stuck to my door saying I wasn't home to sign for the package. Other times, I've had UPS simply leave my box in random, strange places, with no delivery notice on my door whatsoever. Once, I waited days for a box I was expecting, only to discover the driver had gone around to the back of my house and placed it inside my BBQ grill. Why in the world would I check my grill for a package delivery if there was no note telling me to look there??
There's still no alternative if you want to rent rare or unusual movies. Where else can you rent The Red Green Show, Mary Tyler Moore, and new releases that aren't mass market crap (Redbox movies).
The problem is, the service may be cheap for what's involved to perform it, but people don't find enough value in the service to pay more without complaint!
Most of the 1st. class letters I've mailed in the last year or two were for things like receiving a $2 - $5 "mail-in rebate" on something I bought, or forms the government itself required I mail back to them. If I'm already losing 50 cents of that $2 I was trying to get back by filling out a bunch of other pain in the ass paperwork to send in, yep -- I'm not going to be real happy about it.
A few years ago, I got an entire OS distribution in the mail that consisted of deb files.
The latest stat from Wikipedia is 71% of firefighters are volunteers. Having just done some community activities with our local volunteer FD I heard a similar number from the chief. Our FDs in my part of Michigan are all tax funded through township or city taxes. If new equipment need is given then they can get very attractive loans but they are still loans. The only grants I know our local ones have received were post 9/11 for chemical and nuclear equipment (Due to being near 2 plants within 50 miles).
I live in a rural area. Local taxes also pay for the local police via a police millage (around 100K for 40 hour police protection a week, plus supplemental emergency coverage from the county dispatch), ambulance (109K for township coverage) and a road millage and a school millage. The local school district built a new middle school a few years ago and a millage had to be passed to pay for it. Schools are also ran off of property taxes. I personally am in favor of removing the Dep of Education since it doesn't make sense to send local taxes to the state, then feds, only for the feds to send the money back to the local school. Cut the bureaucracy! My area is partly on sewer - if you live near one of the lakes - but that was all paid for by hookup fees and monthly fees. Water is supplied all by personal wells. Clean water that tastes good out of the tap is a wonderful thing.
Not surprisingly my rural area is consistently republican. Don't even think of running for the township as a Dem (Not that I think national parties matter on the local level). Realistically most everyone is more libertarian than anything - my land, my right to do anything I damn well please on it if it doesn't hurt you.
Not sure I believe that. Back in the early nineties when dialup was all there (reasonably) was, I was paying bills online. Not many, because back then most businesses didn't have the option. It was slow compared to fiber, but us old fogies still managed to get stuff done.
I've seen this a lot lately "we don't have broadband so we can't get anything done on the internet" and I think that works with people who have had broadband all their lives and can't imagine what dialup must have been like. But for those of us who were there, it rings false.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
Defense 1 - Use glitter. Sprinkle it inside any envelope you want to protect. Anyone opening the envelope is going to positively HATE you for the next week - that stuff gets everywhere!
Defense 2 - Encode a message as tiny colored dots on the paper - anyone seeing the dots will assume it's just more glitter that didn't get cleaned off;
Defense 3 - Make it easy to detect the envelope has been switched or opened by ... you guessed it ... MORE glitter, on the envelope sealing strip (use envelopes with a self-adhesive strip). Sprinkle at random, shake off what you can, photograph the resulting pattern. Send the photograph via email. (Note: This method is used to detect tampering with nuclear warheads under international agreements - if it's good enough to be verifiable by both Uncle Sam and Uncle Joe, it's good enough for you);
Defense 4 - SWAK at the bottom of the letter, or the reverse side - and photograph that as well. It's very hard to match - they have to get the lip pattern, position, and the lipstick color just right. If they try to just "print it", that's easily detected, since it won't smudge when rubbed;
Defense 5 - "This doesn't smell like it's from her" - use a (very VERY) small amount of your usual perfume (guys, substitute your after-shave or cologne - remember - very VERY small amount);
Defense 6 - Coffee ring. A light, broken ring of coffee or tea, off in a corner - with a different mug each time. Don't slop the mug - just dab a bit of coffee in several areas on the bottom rim, and "stamp" your letter. Again. hard to duplicate, send photo of same. Bonus points if you use lemon juice instead (only shows up when heated).
Defense 7 - Put the REAL message buried in the photos, not the letter.
The bandwidth is nearly unchanged, it's the latency that's gotten worse.
Maybe he's used several colors of wax in layers, and when you "melt the wax off", the resulting lump won't be the same color. It's how I would do it.
Next thing you know, "nigger" will be a polite word that refers to white people. I think that's more likely.
Whatever the color, count yourself in.
Studies showed that a bit of practice is all it takes to write non-cursive just as fast, and FAR more legibly. Look at doctors' prescriptions for an example of how the use of cursive can harm or even kill.
Walk to the mailbox? Just put it in your mailbox and the carrier will take it. It always goes out that day too.
Letters are what I have to use to pay my association fees and garage rental because they won't do any type of electronic transfer and my bank wants to charge about ten times what a stamp costs for their service. Not to mention holiday and birthday cards - and please, don't talk about e-cards. I once asked a friend of mine whether he actually knew when his friends' birthdays were or just set it up with a service. He said he used a service because he really didn't want to be bothered with keeping track of birthdays. It's not "it's the thought that counts" when there's no thought behind the act...
He referred to Netflix "shooting itself in the foot" and did not mention only the price increase. There was also the spin-off of mail delivery to Qwikster, leaving Netflix as a streaming-only operation. The net effect, combined with their public statements about the future, showed that Netflix management considers DVD-by-mail to be a dead model and was willing to abandon it immediately.
Also, it has been reported that Netflix mail costs are 20-times more expensive than their streaming costs. The reported change in their studio contracts is about 10x.
I've actually mailed things sealed this way; the wax doesn't really survive the mechanized sorting process very well.
That's the number of career USPS employees.
Let's say that 25% of those work in sorting centers.
That's 143,500.
42% of sorting centers closing puts 60,270 people out of work.
All that human misery, because the Legislative Branch would rather buy 2,443 aircraft for an estimated US$323 billion [Joint Strike Force Fighter], than fund the US Post Office [running at a $5.1B loss this year].
There's something terribly wrong with this picture.
Some days it's just not worth
chewing through my restraints.
The summary reads as if this is a definitive occurance. It's not. They haven't decided yet...
While I am pretty sure you were joking, he said the unit of measure is binary, not that the count is represented as binary. In case anyone got confused by it, he is referring to the fact that 1GB on an SD card is 1000000000 bytes where as over a network, 1GB is 1024MB or 1073741824 bytes.
AJ Henderson
Is it black?
AJ Henderson
Or you could take an e-mail, pgp it, print the file, put it in an envelope, mail it, the recipient could then open it, scan and OCR it and then decrypt it... or I could just send a plain text e-mail with a link to go to an SSL protected website with the actual message and require authentication to get at it. (Granted the authentication mechanism would still have to be preconfigured, likely by mail.
AJ Henderson
Certified mail.
Not everyone has one right by their door. I live in an apartment complex, where my mailbox and the outgoing one are somewhat far from my door.
why not put your wax-sealed letter inside another "normal" letter? if your "outside" letter is one of those bubble-wrap ones it should work pretty well...
-- the cake is a lie
Netflix has decided that it ISN'T splitting off Qwikster.
And while their streaming costs for a title may be lower, the content they offer that way is about 10% of their total catalog. Per title streaming costs a lot more.
Wow, what's it like in your world?
Good old fashoined [SIC] letters are trivial to intercept, and unless you're Francis Bacon, trivial to read.
e-mail is as private as you want it to be. If it doesn't matter, it doesn't matter. If it does, it borders on trivial to make it darned near impossible to read.
Who hand writes letters anymore? I'm in my fifties and never learned to write cursive (typewriters having become common in my grandfather's time). How old are you?
Email is best effort, but average delivery is in seconds, whereas fastest delivery by physical mail is 24 hours.
You've never heard of delivery flags on email, I'm guessing.
Congresspeople are scared as hell of the internet, for several reason.
And I'm guessing, the people who get paid out of postal service funds are scared to death of the alternatives that are making them redundant.
But you know, it doesn't matter. If there are enough people still hand writing correspondence on parchment and sealing them with wax, there will exist a service to hand-carry it on horseback to its destination. But at some point it starts to not make sense to pay for a service out of tax dollars that does not clearly benefit the public at large. (Man, if I had a nickel for every time I heard that...)
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
So if I'm reading someone else's physical mail for illicit purposes, what's going to stop me, is that opening the letter is committing a crime? You seriously believe this?
Keeping the recipient from knowing could be as easy as steaming open the envelope and resealing, you know, like we did as kids for those letters sent home from school.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
Public schools... Sigh.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
Paging Dan Brown...
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
I think it's telling that a group of geeks like us could come up with a dozen fairly technical ways to tamper with mail, and another dozen countermeasures, in a matter of minutes. Non-geeks don't stand a chance. :-)
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
I take my mail to the Post Office. I've had times where the mailman didn't bother to pick up my outgoing mail. Plus crooks are more likely to steal outgoing mail because it is more likely to have checks in it. They don't want your bills.
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
USPS loses about 3-5% of mail, per an unofficial source.
In my experience, it is an order of magnitude less than that. Our business sends out and receives about 30 items per month. I know that is not a huge volume, but in about 3000 items, we have never lost one. I don't think the statistical variance could be that extreme. yes, these are all normal first class items.
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
This is why there are big blue mailboxes all over town. Drop it off on the way to work/school whatever.
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
Oh, you gave me flashbacks. Fedex somehow destroyed an expensive synthesizer had been professionally double-packed and sent across the country. After weeks of struggling with their insurance department I gave up. Never given them business since.
I've looked into direct deposit, and one reason he may be avoiding it is due to the expense. Judging from some other things you have said, maybe he just hasn't looked into it at all, but it is definitely a lot more expensive than just handing out checks.
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
There are still far, far too many people charging "convenience fees" for electronic transactions. This is why most of my stuff is still paid by check. Unfortunately, the banks are still charging far too much for electronic transactions and the extra costs get passed on to the consumer. bank's seem to be fine with eating the cost of dealing with a physical check, but they want to pass on the significantly smaller cost of electronic transactions to the customer.
Of course, if we went all electronic, about 3/4 of a bank's staff would be on the breadlines, so maybe we should ease into it.
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
I would cast a geas spell on the envelope.
That's great and all but you'd have to step it up on the envelope itself. It's child's play to 'see through' even security envelopes for someone with the time and interest (and some money) - far easier than steaming open envelopes once you get beyond small quantities.
If we now have devices that can (literally) see through walls in proof-of-concept about I'm pretty sure a lowly envelope doesn't stand a chance. If for no other reason than you by definition lose control of your letter once the carrier takes it.
You can get rich if you own a politician, but you have to be rich to buy one in the first place.
USPS has been SELF funding by law for a long while. It is not losing money.
The USPS has been doing record 'business' but their losses are due to the GOP forcing them by law to pay for their pensions IN ADVANCE many decades (I think it was 45 years) in advance! This added an instant MASSIVE cost which makes their operating expenses be negative for years.
The mail is a public service; if it can't effectively be run non-profit then it has to be run AT A LOSS; just as it was when the FOUNDERS created it-- it was heavily subsidized back then (and for over a century.) The mailman used to be thought of as another public servant, like the fireman or policeman-- but unlike those, there was a fee for use (can you imagine the taxpayer cost and amount of junk if postage was free?? or how crazy it would be to pay a police of fire bill?? don't pay up, let the house burn...) We put money into police and fire after 9/11. With rising gas costs instead of investing in electric mail trucks we stick like 50 years of future pensions on their tab causing them to lower service, lay off people and raise rates during a depression.
2010 was the biggest year they ever had; they are not losing demand (ebay, netflix, mortgage issues etc.) Postage prices have RISEN to cover costs in gas etc.
FedEx costs like $5 to do anything; and the volume is far far lower (not physical volume.) maybe 1 time a week I see that truck on my street. I get 6+ items EVERY DAY on average and I'm as paperless as possible.
The Republicans being ignorant and ideological have been purposely attacking this well run institution with baseless attacks. Just watch the ignorance displayed in the sadly entertaining reality show "GOP Presidential debates." A few do know better and are just trying to ruin it so a for-profit contributor to create another wonderful monopoly power like AT&T or Comcast because we love them... Instead of arguing we should make internet more like the post office (equal fair packet delivery) we are trying to prevent it from becoming a hostage to private mega corps (whose 'product' is in extremely high demand with no real competition making it a poor market for pop economics.)
I'm in no way connected to the USPS.
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
Stop Rural Free Delivery and see how loud remote people squeal. There are many places UPS/FEDEX won't go. The post office ends up delivering the last leg to the mailbox.
And this is different from having your personal assistant send out cards in your name, in what way? That's been going on since at least the fifties.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
Encrypt it, print the file to paper tape, mail the paper tape.
Karnak the Magnificent FTW.
...the future crusty old bastards are already drinking the Kool-Aid.
USPS loses about 3-5% of mail, per an unofficial source.
I find this unlikely. I send a lot of mail. It all gets there.
paintball
I haven't written a letter in fifteen years. I probably wouldn't have even then, but that was when the military got email for deployed troops. Why would you anyone write a personal letter when you can call someone and talk to them now? Or text message them and have them get it almost this minute?
Mail is private? Do you have any idea of the volume of mail lost or stolen from the USPS? Well in actual fact no one does, because the problem is so bad that the USPS won't release the figure. You might get security through obscurity for your mail, but you're just as likely to get a card (which might contain money) stolen as delivered. In any case if the government wants to intercept your mail it's no harder to get a court order to do than it is to get one to see your email. In the post 911 world it probably doesn't even require a court order.
That would work; I haven't done it since I was a kid though.
It varies by mail carrier I'm sure. Personally, I receive more mail meant for other people than for myself. Of course, the problem is beyond the carrier because I occasionally get mail for people in other zip codes.
For registered mail it's even more annoying. My mail carrier would knock, then be gone by the time it took me to walk to the backdoor of my one bedroom apartment. After several days of this (I thought it was some neighborhood kids playing pranks), he left a note to go pick it up at X post office... which referred me to Y, which referred me to Z. I felt like I was playing Super Mario Brothers!
The USPS plan to fund their crazy generous pension plan is to increase the volume of junk mail.
Being that we are entering into winter and the cost of natural gas and firewood is increasing, their ideas are intriguing to me and I wish to subscribe to their newsletter.
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
Anybody with a smartphone believes that. Webpages are chock full of cruft these days. Mostly advertisements, with all kinds of flash and images. And of course they are loaded first. Sometimes the advertisements take so long to load that they are refreshing before you have even got to the content of the page. I wonder if browsers will still allow you to turn off images like they used to do back in the dialup days.
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
For example, one of my buddies used to work at a UPS facility where he said boxes were regularly stacked up into 6 foot high walls, regardless of any warnings printed on them. When a truck would come in, someone would yell "Tear 'em down!" and they'd knock over the walls, letting boxes fall all over the concrete floor, for people to sort through and load up.
I've heard exactly the same thing from a friend of mine and given how much damage I've seen on my own shipments, it seems likely this attitude is everywhere at UPS.
I work at payment processing center, Last year we processed over 5 million payments made by check and several hundred made by cash, all delivered by the USPS.
Checks aren't going away anytime soon people.
0.003125
Right, but you should be sure to use the proper units.
1GB equals exactly 1,000,000,000 bytes by definition.
1GiB (notice the 'i') is the one that equals 1,073,741,824 bytes.
That's nothing. I just got a delivery through UPS of my DEC Alpha Personal Workstation 533a.
'tis'n't even 1999 anymore and it's just getting to me because the UPS manager said they "FOUND" this parcel with my name on it in a back room being used as a shelf stool because THE FUCKING LABEL GOT PUT ON UPSIDE DOWN and they finally just now 10 years later looked underneath to see my name and address and phone number and delivery codes but at-least my name is still the same so they looked me up in a phone book hoping I was the same John Doe in that ZIP code.
CAN"T FUCKING BELIEVE THIS SHIT!! Digital Equipment Corporation was bought-up by Compaq, then Compaq absorbed into HP, then HP stripped naked and pimped and under-payed by Carly Fiorina, and then my DEC Alpha finally arrived with an expired support contract for VMS. Thanks UPS. Thanks 'murika.
>>I got three new 1U servers sent to me via UPS last year. One of the cartons had a TIRE TRACK across the top of it.
Back in the '90's web sites were optimized for dialup, shit in the early '90's there was no java-script, no ads and images were generally small though I can remember that some JPEGs took as long to decode as to download on my 386/33 with no math coprocessor..
The phone lines here are pretty crappy which translates to a 26.4 connection so it takes as long to get to the post office as to download 3 to 3.5 MBs and the web sites I've tried for paying bills are bigger. I'm just thankful I've got privoxy, no-script and no Flash.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
Probably 90% by weight of the mail I receive through USPS is straight-to-the-recycle spam. It's a really phenomenal waste of trees, oil, and labor. I suspect the USPS would have a lot more public support if they didn't enable such wanton and annoying waste of resources.
Oh, then we should make sending mail free, as a public service. Wait, that's not what you meant? Of course it's a public service, but that doesn't mean we can't use a more rational means to support it.
You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make it dissolve.
In Chicago its that on a great week. Any further forget it its at least a week.
Most of the mail boxes are once a day pickup and you never know for sure when that is (even though its posted don't believe it). While the PO is going down hill UPS is doing better. I have given up mailing boxes (or larger than envelope) via the PO and only use UPS.
1. Waiting time is essentially zero at UPS
2. More dependable that PO
3. Clerks are actually pleasant (as opposed to the PO where they are surly and work at a snails pace).
4. Prices are higher at UPS but (see above).
Drivers are a hit and miss group. UPS uses those big brown vans and block the street when they deliver a MAJOR minus.
But even in the nineties there were bill pay services that were set-and-forget. My credit union had it, and they didn't impress me as being cutting edge. You tell them what bill to pay, how much, what account to take it out of, and then you got email when it happened. You only had to hit the website to set it up.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
Sorry to say this, but you are probably in the low 20 percent of the 80/20 rule. It probably doesn't make a lot of fiscal sense to keep a rather expensive national service going for the few people in the Ozarks who are still using acoustic modems.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
That was probably true with my credit union as well. Back then it loaded pretty fast and supported most browsers unlike so many sites that became IE only.
At the time I was starting my own business and to be honest finances were tight and I was usually slightly behind on my bills, never enough that it was a problem but enough that a set and forget payment would have been risky. I had the odd check bounce due to receiving bouncy checks as my accounts were never very full back then.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
I'm not American, my countries postal service serves the biggest area of any postal service in the world (Russia doesn't have post service to most of Siberia) and our countries population is 1/10 of the States and it still makes money. Stamps are only a couple of cents more then the US post and certain letters like the millions sent to Santa (address North Pole, postal code H0H 0H0) don't even need stamps (they get replied to as well as well as letters addressed to the Easter bunny and even God)
If Canada Post can make money then the US post should be able to as well. It just needs to be let free to offer more services, have more choice in post offices (many of ours are contracted out and just a section of eg a drug store) and diversify.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
Interesting, I found wikipedia to be a better link. It appears that the IEEE changed over to using Gigabyte to refer to the metric definition in 2000 though JEDEC still considers a Gigabyte in terms of memory to be the binary version. I was unfamiliar with the Gigibyte terminology since I work mostly in software and deal with memory addressing much more than anything else. It is also worth noting that while IEC came up with and NIST, CIPM and IEEE have endorced the GiB symbol, it is mentioned as having seen limited acceptance in the broad market. I never even heard of the term while going to one of the top 20 ranked comp sci schools in the US from 2002 to 2006.
That all said, I was still apparently wrong as the telecom and networking industry has apparently traditionally used the SI interpretation for bandwidth, so it would still be 1,000,000,000 bytes on a network as well, just not in memory or disk space when you take in to consideration the working definition rather than the standard definition.
AJ Henderson
Oh, a teapot!
Borrowed via Treasury Bonds. Funny how that part always gets left out of the IOU storyline. And the government has never, ever defaulted on a single Treasury Bond, nor will it - our creditors in China and Saudi Arabia would never allow such an event to occur.
But not cuts to defense spending or tax increases on the rich? Some priorities you have there.