Slashdot Mirror
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.
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 USPS would be doing ok financially if they didn't have to fund medical coverage for employees who aren't even born yet. They have to fund 75 years of retiree health care benefits, $59 billion, in 10 years after the passage of the Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act of 2006. Who else has to do anything even close to that?
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.
At the rate they're going, in 75 years there will only be a handful of people left at the USPS. When they split that $59 billion between themselves, they're going to be rich!
(Hey, this is Slashdot. I was told there would be no math.)
Have gnu, will travel.
Just jack the price of delivery up to its real value... I did a quick lookup at FedEx for sending a package across town... The lowest cost was $7. Add to that that UPS and FedEx essentially "cherry pick" only the profitable areas... Even locally they don't always deliver to suburbs and make you pick up the package.
The Post is undervalued. That used to be offset with "junk mail". Each of those items subsidized the wages of the mailman that only brought 0-3 pieces of actual mail per day. To turn the figures around, for a person to deliver to your house, you probably need 5-10 pieces of mail each day... Or $2.50-$5.00. That comes close to FedEx quote for $7 I mentioned earlier. Also, there is no way that $.44 now equals $.25 from 20 years ago.
Mail needs to cost more, I'd say the need to jump to $1 minimum. They also need to trim residential service days to Mon-Wed-Fri. I know I don't get ANY mail at least one day per week, and at least one other is only junk. I could easily get all my bills in one day per week, except that makes receiving things timely a problem. I think Businesses get enough mail to justify 4 day service, maybe take Wed off.
I don't think for most individuals upping the price to $1 will hurt anybody.. You're paying $4 for an average greeting card now! Packages are a separate business that allows a higher price point already.
It is a common misconception that the Postal Service uses tax money. They are funded entirely by the money they make from postage.
The USPS would be doing fine financially if the gov't didn't mandate that the USPS is profitable. It's a red herring. Our military isn't (officially) profitable. Our schools aren't profitable. Our infrastructure isn't profitable. Our police and fire aren't profitable. The USPS exists to provide a basic level of delivery service to ALL Americans. If the USPS goes away, it'll be really, really difficult to live anywhere other than in cities and suburbs.
I don't respond to AC's.
Not without the recipient knowing and without comitting a crime.
Other than that, your nerdy little ass is right.
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
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
Ok... so Fancy-frangled-ass-shit-equipment then?
:)
Was wondering what the proper name for it was
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!!!!
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
You can get deb and rpm files in the mail now?!?
The real problem is that not all deliveries cost the same. If you're a company in downtown Houston, Texas, and you want to mail something to the suburbs in Houston, Texas, the cost will be pretty small. If you want to deliver something to Anchorage, Alaska, the actual costs will be much larger.
The point of universal postal service is that it allows businesses to treat all customers as equal. Imagine a situation where the cost to buy something from Amazon was dependent on your distance from an Amazon distribution centre; Amazon's business would quickly fall apart as they would be undercut by a hundred local competitors. Same for banks, mailing out bank statements. Or the cost of mailing your Congressman. Maybe that's a good thing, but the government's usual position is that it is not.
USPS subsidise their tricky long distance deliveries by charging more for their simple local deliveries. If you were to allow private companies to compete on an even keel (but without legally mandating them to provide a universal service), they would simply undercut USPS on the profitable local deliveries, while leaving the taxpayer to carry the can for the expensive deliveries. It's one of those situations where you can't just change it a little bit without massive unintended consequences- if you're going to change it, you're going to need to do a complete overhaul and rethink.
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
http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=population%20density%20of%20UK%2C%20Japan%2C%20US
Switch back to Slashdot's D1 system.
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.
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.
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?
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...
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...)
What is your point ?
Maybe you should use statistics that matter, or use more than one and explain how you combine them.
Percentage of urban population by country
This statistic is more relevant than yours because distribution network works as a a mesh network of hubs, followed by a star network for delivery, and not some kind of globally meshed network.
Due to economies of scale, the mesh network costs less to operate, so the most relevant aspect of operating costs is the efficiency of the star network, which improves with local population density, independantly from the global, average population density.
I have discovered a truly marvelous proof of killer sig, which this margin is too narrow to contain.
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?
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!"
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 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.
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.
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