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US Postal Service To Make Sunday Deliveries For Amazon
guttentag writes "The New York Times is reporting The USPS has struck a deal to deliver Amazon's packages on Sundays — a first for both. The Postal Service, which lost nearly $16 billion last year, often loses money on first-class mail delivery, but package delivery is profitable. The Postal Service said it expected to make more such deals with other merchants, seeking a larger role in the $186 billion e-commerce market. For this holiday shopping season, Sunday delivery of Amazon products will be limited to the Los Angeles and New York metropolitan areas. In 2014 it is expected to expand to other cities including Dallas, Houston, New Orleans and Phoenix."
They technically are. How about we just stop stealing from their budgets?
No need to privatize. Just remove legislation protecting the USPS, together will any subsidies.
And for those of you who remember fondly the good old days - The Post Office used to be open and deliver on Christmas day.
Prove anything by multiplying Huge Number times Tiny Number
http://www.thomhartmann.com/blog/2012/08/us-postal-services-forced-financial-crisis
In 2006 – Republicans in Congress passed a poison pill piece of legislation forcing the Post Office to pre-fund retiree health benefits 75 years out into the future – basically funding benefits for future employees who aren’t even born yet. The Postal Service has to do this by giving the Treasury $5.5 billion every single year. That’s a requirement that no business, or any government agency has ever had to comply with. And it’s the reason why the Post Office is going bankrupt today and looking into closing down post offices, laying off workers, and cutting down delivery service.
To continue your thought...
It actually makes sense for an entity like the postal service to be losing money. While not a guarantee, it does at least help to make sure that the money coming in is going to the right places and is not spent on extraneous expenditures. Remember, the management folks are really good at finding uses for any excess money in the budget.
What do you mean? They're already extensively privatized.
I always found that USPS was the way to go when buying things on Ebay and having the shipped from the US to Europe. I never had a problem with them, but the other players always ended up botching things up. I just cannot fathom how they can have such a bad reputation in the USA.
Across the Western world, it has been the Right's strategy to privatise popular public services by first deliberately ruining them. Then public perception changes toward, "Oh wow you're right state ownership doesn't work!"
Occasionally, this comes at a cost to human life, such as Thatcher's deliberate underinvestment in the railways, followed by Major's spinning off of Railtrack without any clear identification as to who is responsible for maintenance. But usually it's just a huge fucking waste of money, and the privatised industry ends up enjoying multiple subsidies and regulatory capture.
The too big to fail mentality was invented by the government and corporations. Let them fail. I can name at least a dozen car manufacturers
that no longer exists and we are probably better for it. If you're worried about a company being too big to fail, split it apart or set a maximum
size of a company. The splitting up of the telephone company was probably one of the better moves that the government did but unfortunately
they have basically merged back together. Setting a maximum size would prevent that from happening. Something like if gross revenue
exceeds $1B then all profits are taxed at 95%. Companies would immediately split themselves up. I think one of the problems is these big
corporate or government entities lose sight of reality and the average joe can't compete with someone who has the strength of 10 million men
but more government is not the solution. The solution is to reduce the power of the government AND the power of the corporation so that a
reasonable size group of people (say 10k activists) actually have a fighting chance.
This, of course, it pretty much the way it ought to be, at least for current employees: Retirement benefits fully funded, instead of vague promises.
Of course, since this money is paid to the government, instead of being put in an independent fund, the government will just steal it and replace it with IOUs
Enjoy life! This is not a dress rehearsal.
The USPS has not received any direct taxpayer money since the 1980's, with minor exceptions for delivery overseas (APO's, etc.) and for disabled services.
They are losing $16 billion a year because they pay out $5.5 billion a year for future pensions?
Bad math is bad math. If they didn't fund pensions at all, I guess you should expect future tax payers to just pay that, they are STILL behind $10.5 billion a year. Is that a success for your?
Also note, this bill was passed with STRONG bipartisan support as a way to show private business that pensions should be fully funded and how to do it. Revisionist history is revisionist history.
Just remove legislation protecting the USPS, together will any subsidies.
You mean remove the Constitution?
Despite your glib implication that subsidies are not needed, mail remains a vital service and it is important that it be available to everyone, even if this requires subsidies. There is no one else who realistically can replace the USPS including UPS and FedEx. This remains true despite falling mail volumes. Just because the postal service often seems to be mostly a paper spam delivery service doesn't mean it isn't also a vital service for communications. Remove subsidies right now and the USPS will collapse and yes that IS a Bad Thing (tm). While the USPS will need to adapt to modern times, the role it serves is a critical one and that isn't going to change.
And for those of you who remember fondly the good old days - The Post Office used to be open and deliver on Christmas day.
They also used to deliver multiple times a day. So what? We don't need that now. Times change.
Originally, the USPS was a government service, subsidized where necessary. It wasn't designed to operate as a private business or to make money. It was OK if it lost money because it was an overall boon to the economy. It worked fine that way for 200 years before it was privatized.
Now it's expected to operate as a private business and turn a profit in the existence of a competive marketplace while bound by rules and financial burdens its competitors do not have to bear. FedEx and UPS do not have to deliver anywhere they don't want to, to deliver on any days they don't want to; they have unregulated rates, don't subsidize anything and don't have to pre-fund retirement benefits.
It's a recipe for destruction. It might be saved by completely removing all regulations OR by giving it real subsidies in exchange for the regulations it bears that its competitors do not. It can't go on the way it is.
That's not so far off. If the USPS must pay $5 billion per year, then it shows continual losses, and the whole program can be cut. The Treasury then has a surplus of cash that's no longer earmarked for future employees, so it's a simple bit of labeling magic to release it into general funds.
That means that whatever party does eventually kill the USPS gets to claim responsibility for a few tens of billions of dollars additional revenue for the Treasury. With the right spin, the public at large will be aghast at how the irresponsible other party could have let the Postal Service survive so long when it was so obviously financially beneficial to shut it down.
You do not have a moral or legal right to do absolutely anything you want.
With cities in China.
In Shanghai, same day delivery or delivery in 2 hours is often the norm.
Yes, really.
I see this posted over and over again but nobody can explain why it was passed or why the Democrats never tried to stop it.
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
Forcing people to compete by breaking them up is even more sadistic than simply making it hard for them to cooperate. When will this religion end?
How about removing the ridiculous pension requirements that congress placed on them, then they would be profitable.
Well, while it was signed by a republican president and sponsored by a republican, it was cosponsored by 2 dems and a republican. It also passed house with a voice vote, and the senate with a unanimous vote.
This was a completely bipartisan bill that our whole government went in on.
Even the postal unions were for this (Why I have no idea).
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The senate refused them the ability to suspend saturday delivery.
And there is probably going to be a sunday delivery premium, either charged to the customer or absorbed by amazon.
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let's also remember the current post office is protected from many searches by the government, private entities are not. That is also a driving force here.
The Democrats strongly supported it. He is pretending that didn't happen. They also never tried to repeal it when they had the chance.
He is attempting to deceive you and hopes you won't go around asking questions.
The last word from the USPS was that ending Saturday delivery was the key to staying solvent. Now opening on Sunday is the key to survival?
No one was paying them extra to deliver on Saturdays. Now, Amazon is footing (a part?) of the bill, and USPS can make money off it. Cognitive dissonance or comprehension-fail?
Also, the proposal to end Saturday delivery failed (first line of the article). And they already (apparently) deliver a some packages on Sundays and holidays for a fee. This just helps them make get a bigger piece of the e-commerce pie.
It is required for legal notices and the court system. Unless you are suggesting a national email system...
Delivering packages every day = good. Only stop at the the places you need to.
Delivering letters and junk mail to every single mailbox on Saturday = bad. No extra revenue, and those letters can wait until Monday.
Whatever their cost, they should charge appropriately. First class mail should not be losing money. Bulk mail should cost more but instead they neglect the delivery cost, claiming the mail person will be making the stop anyway. If USPS is losing money it's because it's used to subsidize marketing for business. If the low cost mail wasn't there I think I'd only get actual first class about 2-3 days a week, so those other 3-4 stops are really for mail that they charge next to nothing for.
Forcing people to compete by breaking them up is even more sadistic than simply making it hard for them to cooperate. When will this religion end?
So what do you suggest? You're the one who was complaining about private industry. Private industry is
more efficient than government. Most complaints I hear about the evils of capitalism are complaints about
very large fortune 500 companies. I was trying to give one possible solution that could be the best of both
worlds. Privatizing the USPS just makes sense not so someone can make a profit but so everyone benefits
from an efficient operation.
Please stop repeating this lie, granted it is repeated enough on alot of hate sites. For you it was probably a mistake since you did not know the truth.
Congress want to protect the taxpayer from having to take over the duties that the USPS said they would do,back in the 70s, the postmaster general and the postal unions want to make the taxpayers pay for their poor management and keep things as they are.
The postal accountability law,2006, requires the USPS to actually do some proper financial management and dropping it would not make them competitive again; even ignore the money they owe for this they would of lost money for the last couple of years. Without the money set aside they would not be able the meet the obligations they agreed to back in the 1970s and the people who retiring now would not have the monies that they are suppose to get. Privatization would solve nothing of this since the obligations would follow the person who purchased the company.
BTW the 75 years is number of years that is for ACCOUNTING purposes they have to figure future liabilities. It is NOT how long they have to fund benefits. That 75 years of accounting is followed by the DoD, social security, department of Housing, etc.
There are still people without internet access. I use snail mail to mail physical checks to pay my bills, and get those bills via snail mail.
You don't have to pay to receive snail mail, but you do to get email. When the government provides everyone with a free internet connection and email address, then you can start talking about getting rid of snail mail.
But first you'll have to pass a constitutional amendment. The Constitution demands the USPS, have you read that document?
Free Martian Whores!
It was dropping of delivery of personal mail only, package delivery would still continue.
And of course, there's the insane requirement enacted in 2006 that the USPS pre-pay healthcare benefits 50 years in advance
So for the last 7 years, they've had a $5B handicap -- limiting what they can do wrt expanding into other markets, upgrading services, and so on. I'd say they're doing pretty amazing.
TCP: Why the Internet is full of SYN.
Congress want to protect the taxpayer from having to take over the duties that the USPS said they would do,back in the 70s, the postmaster general and the postal unions want to make the taxpayers pay for their poor management and keep things as they are.
The postal accountability law,2006, requires the USPS to actually do some proper financial management and dropping it would not make them competitive again; even ignore the money they owe for this they would of lost money for the last couple of years. Without the money set aside they would not be able the meet the obligations they agreed to back in the 1970s and the people who retiring now would not have the monies that they are suppose to get. Privatization would solve nothing of this since the obligations would follow the person who purchased the company.
BTW the 75 years is number of years that is for ACCOUNTING purposes they have to figure future liabilities. It is NOT how long they have to fund benefits. That 75 years of accounting is followed by the DoD, social security, department of Housing, etc.
The too big to fail mentality was invented by the government and corporations.
No, "Too Big to Fail" is a natural consequence of the fact that not all aspects of business are self-regulating, as illustrated by the old adage that "Nothing Succeeds Like Success". In engineering terms, that's a positive feedback loop whose ultimate termination is extinction for the losers and monopoly for the winners.
In real life, actual mileage may vary. Capital-intensive businesses tend to be more likely to go that route because cost per unit tends to decrease the more units you buy. And because the entire reason for having a capital-based business is because other forms of business organization lack the resources needed to establish themselves and grow. Nor is it a "pure" model across the board. Even with the dominance of large pizza chains, mom-and-pop shops remain popular, but you're not going to find many steel refineries or chip foundries in that state.
Of course, once you reach a certain size, you can afford to start buying political favors, but the options available when you have lots of money to throw around expand in many different directions. That's just one of them.
"Too Big to Fail" isn't just a slogan. It's an acknowledgement that if you do fail, you'll cause major damage to the rest of the world in the process of collapsing. You will, in fact, have leveraged the cost of your own failure to the point where the collateral damage greatly exceeds the damage you yourself will receive and that therefore you have a gun to the figurative head of the economy.
The best way to ensure that Too Big To Fail doesn't occur is to put a choke on the positive feedback loop. Once a business begins to get so large that its likely to reach that point, limits should kick in. That is, in fact, what anti-trust laws were designed for.
In recent decades, though, we've been bombarded pretty much continuously with the mantras that Government Control is Always Bad and Unfettered Markets are Always Good. We de-fanged the laws that had been created as a result of the Great Depression, we did little or nothing to regulate monopolies (see, for example, Microsoft), and have even seen broken monopolies such as AT&T slowly rebuild themselves from their erstwhile breakup components like an old horror movie villain coming back for a sequel.
Then, to add icing to the cake, we've encouraged the get-rich-quick culture that says it's better to buy and sell and plunder and loot other businesses than to invest in one's own business.
I wonder how soon people will realise that there is really no need for almost all normal non-packet mail.
Not even remotely true. Delivery of physical documents remains a vital service for a variety of reasons, not the least of which is that many people do not have computers. Furthermore there is no other organization, public or private (including FedEx and UPS), that has the infrastructure to deliver envelopes to virtually any mailing address in the US like the USPS can and certainly not for the price point the USPS charges.
Most could be sent by email. There are very few documents that have to be sent physically but don't require signed or tracked delivery.
Which helps people who cannot afford computers how exactly? Paper mail has a least common denominator quality to it. Pretty much everyone with an address can and does utilize it. Not everyone has a computer or can afford an internet connection nor should they be expected to do so. Perhaps many years down the line electronic delivery of documents will become ubiquitous and computers will become sufficiently cheap but that time will probably require another generation or two to die off before it happens.
If the USPS was about efficient operation then it would not provide the benefits that it does today.. For example the "last mile" to some places would be cut in the example you mention so that someone could make a profit.
When you cant win, ad hominem.
It makes sense because it's part of basic infrastructure, that enables other services and businesses to function more efficiently.
You don't need to pull profits from basic infrastructure, if you can instead collect taxes from companies attracted by superior infrastructure that enables them to do business much more efficiently, and often do business where it would be otherwise impossible to do. It's called "synergy" - infrastructure enables more business, and pays for itself with taxes collected from them.
Because it actually forces the pensions to be funded - it's obvious why the union would like it.
Look at the cities going bankrupt in California, as an example. It's unfunded pension liabilities that are dragging them down. The USPS is being forced to actually make good on their promises, otherwise we'll have to bail out their pension fund in the future. The gripe (somewhat legit) is that they're being singled out for this treatment while every other government agency with promises that are going to be broken aren't given this treatment.
Do you have ESP?
It is required for legal notices and the court system. Unless you are suggesting a national email system...
Don't these require tracked or signed-for delivery though?
Private industry is more efficient than government.
Yeah. It keeps healthcare costs down in the US and it worked brilliantly for UK rail services. And everyone benefits? Investors are not going to punt money in to something because they want to support the building of an efficient operation that'll benefit everyone. Most investors are looking for returns,
I'll agree that government is good at spending but haven't you seen wastage in the private sector? I don't know what kind of level you're at so maybe you haven't seen the sheer waste that gets lost in the accounting. I've seen tens of thousands pissed away in days because of dumb ass mistakes that'll be absorbed somewhere and not spotted. This shit happens everywhere and it's in no-ones interests to have themselves or an underling exposed for losing a fuckton of cash. Better to put a spin on it and absorb the cost in to something else. I've worked for some pretty large multinationals and this is what happens. If you want more efficient delivery of services then vote in candidates who'd work towards a system of accountability and realistic provision of services. i.e. not some fucknuts who thinks they can fix everything by either outsourcing, privatising or slashing budgets.
Do you think a corporation on the scale of the Department of the Treasury would be automatically more efficient? The private sector is not a silver bullet for tackling perceived governmental inefficiencies. There's no reason why a state run enterprise could not be held to higher standards than the private sector, and without the need to piss money in to the pockets of the board and its friends.
While minimum service standards can be incorporated in to the regulation that would precede privatisation, the primary goal will be to enrich the board and major shareholders. These goals are not incompatible with delivering a good service, but will take priority over trying to build a system in which everyone benefits. And would the USPS be split up in multiple concerns? Could they really compete against one another?
The one advantage of email over postal mail is that it is not location dependent. We're an increasingly mobile world, and some people have jobs that take them all over the place weekly. It's much too inefficient for snail mail to keep up with them, but email requires zero changes to do so. Sure, it's a relatively small number of people that do this now but the world population is becoming increasingly mobile and it will need to be addressed at some point so it doesn't hurt to start thinking about it.
They were going to end Saturday deliver or letters, but not packages. Letters and such are a net loss while delivering packages is profitable.
The last mile is cut in many instances with the USPS. I have lived in many rural places where if i wanted to recieve mail, i had to purchase a p.o. box. They wouldn't even deliver packages to the door and you had to show up to sign for them durring bankers hours. And yes, fed ex would come right to the door too.
This isn't unusual in the least. There are areas more rural then the suburbs. Cost cutting at the post office has taken the last mile from many places. Perhaps this would be different if big businesses didn't get steep discounts for first class mail. But the facts are, we as citizens pay more than double what large companies pay and i doubt a private postal service would be able to do that if they were losing money on it.
Read the summary? loses money on first-class mail delivery, but package delivery is profitable. Saturday MAIL delivery loses them money. While Sunday PACKAGE delivery is profitable.
All you need to incentivize spending money wisely is privatization; if you waste money you suffer consequences (get fired),
I'm not saying the other guy is right, but you've never held a real corporate job have you? Waste is rampant in all major companies and the executives responsible for it don't get fired (they may leave for "family reasons", but they take their bonuses and parachutes with them).
The problem with Michael's argument is that just because a company is in the red doesn't automatically stop waste. In fact in some cases it makes it worse as all the little fiefdoms within continue to fight for their piece regardless of how it impacts the rest of the company or if they really need it.
When the government provides everyone with a free internet connection and email address, then you can start talking about getting rid of snail mail
Plus, US mail offers greater protection than email. If you attempt to commit fraud via sending something by the US mail or intercept someone's mail, you're looking at a felony. With all the spam, I don't trust any of the email I receive from a bank, credit card, etc. So before email can completely replace regular postal mail, we'd have to see the same level of protections. Maybe the US postal service could have a service where they offer an optional digital signature that the sender can use and is legally protected from forgery.
Insert simplistic political, ideological, or personal proselytization here.
Well, while it was signed by a republican president and sponsored by a republican, it was cosponsored by 2 dems and a republican. It also passed house with a voice vote, and the senate with a unanimous vote.
That doesn't mean as much as you think it does. Perhaps to the surprise of nobody, our lawmakers rarely read the full text of the bill they vote on, instead trusting their underlings to summarize it. Sometimes hundred page documents get about as much space as a Twitter post in the mindspace of these guys before they vote on it. And you might have noticed... the names are less and less related to the thing they're about with every new session. At this point, I fully expect to see a Strengthing America's Freedom Act authorizing labor camps and bringing back debtor's prisons in the not too distant future. :/
So there is that. And the argument can be made that whether it was the Republicans or the Democrats... the result rather speaks for itself. Also, questionable what difference there really is between the two parties... since right now over 93% of candidates who win elections are better financed than their opponent. It's clear there really is only one political party: The Richy McRich Club. What colors you wanna wear they leave up to you, but ultimately, both parties are just part of one organization that's only really distinct in the minds of the poor and the uneducated.
But the OP is right: It was fine before it was shot in the head by our government.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
I think you should call him a few more names, I don't think you got your point across.
I got a Sunday package delivery via USPS from Newegg.
https://tools.usps.com/go/TrackConfirmAction_input?origTrackNum=4200705492748901015478100001164480
the 10th(yesterday) was a Sunday, kind of weirded me out when I got a knock on my door and a package was dropped off.
The other gripe is that they are funding pensions too far into the future.
The requirement should be, that money is put away for a person's pension the day they are hired, as the pension grows, the appropriate funds should be put into the fund. This way when the person retires the fund has the money and the employer isn't suddenly on the hook for anything (all the funds already having been put into the account).
What it should not be, is funding pensions for employees that have yet to be conceived much less born.
It could also make it worse in other ways as well. To keep a company afloat, decisions are often made to take on tremendous debt to be "paid back when times are better" but often the debt load itself prevents the time from getting better regardless of actual revenue. Take a look at AMD if you don't believe that to be possible. Governments waste money and companies do as well, just how they do it is different.
They do have an incentive to not waste, just not the same one as companies. The people working AT the company often have the exact same mindset as government employees, only shareholders have the "spend my money wisely" mindset.
Quoting the Anonymous Coward:
But you are advocating pissing away MY MONEY. I just wish you would have the balls to tell that to me to my face. But we all know you are nothing but a pathetic lying statist thief and a coward.
LOL -- and you even got a bite.
How about giving everyone else good pension requirements? How about a race to the top instead of a race to the bottom? We should be doing this globally, rather than cheering cheaper goods all the time at the expense of faraway people and then wondering where our jobs went.
$5.5 billion is a lot of money... however the USPS lost about $15.9 billion last year.
http://todaynewsgazette.com/usps-losses-2012/
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
I remember the USPS advertising Sunday delivery for Express Mail quite a long time ago -- ten years or more, I think.
Still advertised today: http://pe.usps.com/businessmail101/classes/express.htm. A bit more digging indicates that there's a $12.50 surcharge for Sunday/holiday delivery.
So, since USPS was already offering Sunday delivery, the news here must be some favorable pricing terms for Amazon. Which, of course, they're not going to specify in detail.
I don't remember the post office actually being open on christmas day, but I do remember them making deliveries on Christmas day. In fact they still do for express deliveries.
These comments are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views or opinions of my employer or colleagues...
Fuck you. Reliable mail service to 99% of addresses is the mark of an advanced Republic. I dont care how much money it loses, its a vital piece of infrastructure.
Good-bye
Mr. Anonymous? I think you need to stop swearing, calm down, and look at a very important question that you (accidentally) raised.
What IS basic infrastructure?
Roads. Sewers. Electricity. Water delivery. Education. Hopefully decent health care. Working law systems. And yes, even something as basic as package delivery. Internet?
See, I run a business. I NEED those things for my business to function, but I'm too small to buy them for everyone, let alone to buy them for myself. I need roads so my workers can get to work. I need roads so I can ship things. I need electricity or my machines can't run. I need water delivery and good sewers so all my customers aren't dying of dysentary. I need basic education so there is a half assedly educated workforce available for me to hire. I really do need decent health care so _I_ don't have to provide it for my workers (god what a headache). I need basic law systems so I can have legal protections or sue someone who tries to take unlawful actions against my business (or me). Package delivery? Yeah, I depend on that. I build widgets. I NEED parts delivered. My business wouldn't exist without the postal service.
Man do I wish internet was a basic infrastructure....
Anyway, if these were provided by private companies, they would be a fucking mess. Just imagine private roads. Multiple roads in parallel, starting, stopping, the legal hassles of right of way, the tolls, fees, the collusion, the even larger tolls and fees... No. It's a nightmare!
So, businesses and individuals NEED the government to create this basic infrastructure. What the poster is saying is even that businesses are attracted to countries that HAVE this infrastructure. I sure wouldn't want to run my business in Somalia, that's for damn sure. Maybe the market is there, but the act of running my business would be far harder due to the lack of infrastructure. Ew. No Thanks.
In short, you benefit so much, and you take it all for granted. That you DO take it for granted is a sign of how WELL that government provided basic infrastructure works. You benefit FAR beyond what taxes you put in because it's a collective effort.
Also, you ignorant twit.... You want to whine about government waste? Sure. Go ahead. But be civil about it. The OP raised a good point, an intelligent point, and you were so busy being angry that you missed it. Calm down and LISTEN next time.
Also, we all pay taxes. Seriously, quit whining.
Damn, who let the Freepers in?
I just wish you would have the balls to tell that to me to my face.
Says the brave little Anonymous Coward. Log in with a real account, debate rationally, and the next time you're in Seattle we can meet and argue over a cup of coffee. Until then you're pissing away MY ELECTRONS.
"Think about how stupid the average person is. Now, realise that half of them are dumber than that." - George Carlin
Do not discount the impact of the Internet on the declining use of traditional mail services, or the fact that almost half of what is delivered is junk mail, almost all of which just gets thrown away. You can't only blame privatization while completely ignoring the most significant advance in communications technology in human history. Let's face it -- traditional mail services just aren't important as they were before the Internet.
My mailbox is filled with junk mail every day. In fact, I bet I get 3-4X as much junk mail as I do legitimate mail. I probably get 1-2 newspaper-like ads every week from grocers that I've probably never opened.I bet the USPS would start making money if they started charging these guys closer to regular rates. Well, assuming they can't get the pension pre-funding fixed in Congress.
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
"It actually makes sense for an entity like the postal service to be losing money."
Socialism is truly a mental disorder. Do you realize what you just said? Do you have to be reminded to breathe?
All you need to incentivize spending money wisely is privatization; if you waste money you suffer consequences (get fired),
The state is the only organization where you would find people saying 'it is better to waste money', because the money they waste is not theirs, and the supply is unlimited - they can always tax more or print more.
But you are advocating pissing away MY MONEY. I just wish you would have the balls to tell that to me to my face. But we all know you are nothing but a pathetic lying statist thief and a coward.
God I fucking hate socialists.
The post office is self-funded. It has not received taxpayer funding for a long time.
So, they're not pissing away "your" money.
Besides, the only reason they are officially losing money is because they were forced via an act of congress to pre-fund a retirement that is extremely onerous and far beyond what any private company would have to do. This was done so that the republicans can say "hey, look, the USPS isn't working! Let's privatise it!".
Sorry to burden you with facts, it looked like you had a good head of steam up there for your frothing libertarian rant.
These socialist douchebags piss our and our childrens money away to the tune of 17BILLION fucking dollars and you want me to fucking be nice about it.
FUCK YOU YOU FUCKING FUCKITY FUCK FUCK FUCKS
What money? The USPS is not taxpayer funded.
Whose money are they "pissing away" exactly?
they are losing $16 billion a year now partially because they couldn't spend that $5.5 billion a year to invest in new revenue streams since 2006.
had they been able to reinvest at last a portion of that into themselves then they may not be losing money today.
Private industry is more efficient than government.
I take it you've never experienced the joys of private water/sewer service. Locally, in Snohomish County the people have the choice between the Snohomish County Public Utility District or Puget Sound Energy for electricity. Because of the necessity of feeding as much profit as possible into shareholder dividends and executive salaries PSE's electrical service is more expensive, less reliable, and the equipment and lines are poorly maintained. For some odd reason, when given a choice almost everyone prefers to get their electricity from SnoPUD instead of PSE.
"Think about how stupid the average person is. Now, realise that half of them are dumber than that." - George Carlin
Well, while it was signed by a republican president and sponsored by a republican, it was cosponsored by 2 dems and a republican. It also passed house with a voice vote, and the senate with a unanimous vote.
This was a completely bipartisan bill that our whole government went in on.
No, it was a monopartisian bill. A perfect example of how there is really just one party in Washington.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
Um, no. There is no other corporate or government entity in this country that is required to meet the standards applied to the USPS under that law, and the 75 years is indeed a hard funding benefit - they've got a $5b/year over 10 years requirement.
I believe if you look at the accounting, absent the pre-payment plan the USPS actually made money last year.
Let us live so that when we come to die, even the undertaker will be sorry -- Mark Twain
otherwise we'll have to bail out their pension fund in the future.
You mean like we did for every major airline in the country?
"Think about how stupid the average person is. Now, realise that half of them are dumber than that." - George Carlin
It's easily possible to run a good and sustainable pension plan without meeting the beyond-reasonable requirement to pre-fund 75 years of retiree health benefits. Normally the amount of funding would be calculated by actuaries and spread out over the course of 20-30 years of employment, adjusted annually, not 75 years in advance.
Doesn't work that way. People act like taxing a big profitable company is the end of the line, it is not. Those big profitable companies sell you nearly everything you consume. They do not take a hit to the bottom line from taxes, shrug their shoulders and move on with life. Instead they program the taxes into product and service prices--so YOU are paying the taxes, NOT the company. If you know anything about corp accounting/finance you will know that a certain percentage of return is required on products, raising taxes on them is just going to transfer the expense back to you and everyone else. If you really want to tax the rich progressively then you should tax purchases with a federal sales tax. Corporations makes jobs for people, real jobs where you can buy a house and cars, and toys---so yeah smack them with a 35%, hell 90% tax, and witness economic malaise. I don't think corporations should be taxed at all, no one who employs should be taxed.
I object to power without constructive purpose. --Spock
In my neighborhood if I don't get anything but junk on a particular day the mail carrier just skips my mailbox. Sometimes I don't get anything for three or four days, then an enormous pile of junk mail with a couple of bills on top of it. That's probably not policy, but no one is complaining.
"Think about how stupid the average person is. Now, realise that half of them are dumber than that." - George Carlin
Roads. Sewers. Electricity. Water delivery. Education. Hopefully decent health care. Working law systems. And yes, even something as basic as package delivery. Internet?
Slice out education and healthcare....those are far to complicated to compete as a government manged with a properly functioning market-based solution...and add in banking which should be boring and quite uncomplicated and devoid of profit. Straight-forward deliverables the government can handle...if it takes innovation and involves complex economic interactions you can pretty much guarantee the government will fuck it up--it simply can't help it. You can't micromanage things like that.
I object to power without constructive purpose. --Spock
They pissed away our money a generation ago. Right now they are pissing away the money of our GRANDCHILDREN and at the current rate within two years they will be saddling our great-grandchildren with debt.
The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50
I noticed at a very early age that big companies resembled governments.
I object to power without constructive purpose. --Spock
the world population is becoming increasingly mobile
[citation needed]
Free Martian Whores!
Because anecdotes are SO valuable:
I use a private service to haul away my trash. They cost 30% less than the (public) county service, and every Monday, they haul away my trash around 6am. I have not had a service interruption.
Clearly this means private business is better than public!
Somalia
I wasn't necessarily agreeing with you, but at least I was listening to you, until this.
Somalia is not a libertarian society, and equating it with the libertarian ideal is an intellectually dishonest rhetorical tactic meant to conceal rather than reveal. Now, you can say we libertarians are wrong that markets can provide infrastructure, and fair enough if you do, but our ideal is no better represented by the overlapping collection of theocrats, warlords, and the occasional functioning republic that makes up today's Somalia any more than the progressive ideal is represented by Cuba or North Korea.
By the way, the belief that healthcare can only be provided by government or by employers is a false dichotomy. Better than either if people simply pay out of pocket for routine expenses and maintain insurance only for catastrophic, unplanned expenses, just as they do for gas and oil changes vs. collisions.
Space game using normal deck of cards: http://BattleCards.org
Private industry is more efficient than government.
I take it you've never experienced the joys of private water/sewer service. Locally, in Snohomish County the people have the choice between the Snohomish County Public Utility District or Puget Sound Energy for electricity. Because of the necessity of feeding as much profit as possible into shareholder dividends and executive salaries PSE's electrical service is more expensive, less reliable, and the equipment and lines are poorly maintained. For some odd reason, when given a choice almost everyone prefers to get their electricity from SnoPUD instead of PSE.
Although I think it makes perfect sense to privatize USPS and alot of other government agencies, I do not think water/sewer should be
privatized and doing so is bad for everyone and makes no sense. USPS, UPS, FedEx can all compete because they all are able to use
the same common infrastructure. The only way to do this with "water/sewer" would be to still have the government maintain the main
water lines or to lay multiple mainlines down every street so that each house has the option to tap each line. As you stated above with
people prefering SnoPUD, that's how it is suppose to work. People should move to the provider they prefer and the shoddy one should
eventually die off. That unfortunately doesn't happen if there is a defacto monopoly because one person owns the infrastructure so you
can't fairly compare the private water/sewer to private postal service.
Nope, I frequently receive jury summons for people who no longer live at this address.
They could solve a lot of that problem by consolidating delivery locations in rural areas. They've already been doing this in cities (instead of mailboxes at each house, it is now common for entire neighborhoods to have a central mailbox, which saves a ton of time and therefore money for the carrier to deliver.) They'd save a lot of money if they centralized it further in rural areas, for example locating mailboxes at the nearest grocery stores.
Sure its an inconvenience, but now that electronic communication is common the volume just isn't there anymore to make it cost effective to continue the old ways.
A privatized company would have no problem doing this, but because the USPS (while technically private) has to answer to the government anyways, making changes like this requires an act of congress.
And slightly off topic: Only on slashdot can you find somebody who praises unions for giving us saturdays off (incorrectly I might add as it was Henry Ford who initiated that) while at the same time believing it is a travesty that the USPS is considering no longer working on saturday.
Careful with names containing L slashdot.org/~AiphaWolf_HK slashdot.org/~AlphaWoif_HK slashdot.org/~AiphaWoif_HK
Paying for pensions for people who haven't even been born yet is a good pension requirement?
Well said
But you are advocating pissing away MY MONEY
How's that? USPS is self funded and gets no money from taxpayers. Being a government organization, it isn't allowed to make a profit, so all profits ether get fed into lower rates the next year or surplus considered income to the federal government to spend as it pleases.
those are far to complicated to compete as a government manged with a properly functioning market-based solution
Insurance has about a 50% overhead associated with it because of the huge amount of paperwork caused by having so many insurance companies and all of their loop holes. Several places around here will cut your bill in half if you don't us insurance, because it requires hiring on more full-time people to manage the paperwork.
Medicare on the other hand has about a 10% overhead cost for companies because it is more strait-forward and is a single point of contact. The current insurance market is too complicated and has too many options for be efficient. We need a more singular market.
There are some other basic issues with having insurance privatized, at least with insurance companies being able to reject or charge more for some people.
It's impossible to have a free market, so long as greed is involved. Good luck with that.
Don't let trying for perfect stop you from accepting good. Plenty of ways to have a "good" market, even if not idealistically perfect.
Arbitrary values aren't going to work. The perfect ratio of net profit to gross profit varies a lot depending on the context. Look at Intel, they can spend $10bil+ on a single fab plant, then another $5bil on R&D to make use of it. They make a new plant every few years. An arbitrary of $1bil(or whatever value you want to use) will not work for every case.
Nope, but the USPS has seen a drastic increase in the number of packages which carry higher postage charges. When teleportation/replication becomes widespread, that's when they will need to worry.
Agree - there needs to be a balance.
Honestly, I think that pensions in the current form mislead employees and put them at a real disadvantage. Traditional pension plans allocate most of their funds to an employee only after they've been employed for many years, so it makes it hard for employees to move around. At the same time, companies have no obligation to actually keep the employee around. So the employee is staying put for the promise of a future gain that the company may never deliver.
And that is all if the company actually makes good on the pension in the first place. Pension funds are considered the property of the company and employees become just like any other creditor if the company goes into bankruptcy.
I'm fine with creating incentives for people to save for retirement. However, ALL compensation really needs to be paid in full at the time the work is done. Every two weeks the employee and the company should be "even" - neither party owing the other anything aside from minor transactions like expenses/etc. Any kind of retirement savings should be in an account owned by the employee, like a 401k. Companies would not be permitted to advertise the future value of these plans - they could only declare what they contribute to them up-front. I wouldn't allow any kind of compensation based on years of service either (including vacation time and retirement contributions). Just pay people for the work they do.
The USPS is a special case because of the law they wanted in the 1970, they agreed to take over payments for retirement for a bunch of extra benefits and employee pay. Now they don't want to pay the money they owe to former employees. So the 2006 law required them to pre fund the account
Unfortunately alot of idiot sites that keep repeating the lies that have been put out about the 75 years. You can read the OPM regulation and the 2006 law about the 75 years being for accounting purposes, they only have to fund peoples retire for the government level of life expectancy which is around 78.9 year however for accounting purposes they have to figure what is going to be happening for 75 years. So if everyone in at USPS retires at age 62 they would only have to figure retirement pay of 16.9 years per person; the 75 years is for accounting.
At the end of 2010 the USPS was paying around $50 billion for peoples retirement if they follow through and make the prefunding payments it should be under $33 billion a year by 2020.
USPS lost $15.9 billion in 2012, so even without the $5 billion pre funding requirement they lost money.
Socialize the losses, privatize the gains. That's the Republican way.
Down here in Blood Red Texas, they're floating an idea to have all of us invest in power plants so the power companies don't have to spend their capital on capital improvements. Of course, none of us will get dividends or shares in the power plants, the power companies get to own the power plants the rest of us paid for. We get the worst parts of socialism and capitalism combined.
If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I bought a pair of binoculars.
I think mail delivery on weekends is strange.
Get free satoshi (Bitcoin) and Dogecoins
Oh dear. Try taking economics 101 again, and listen this time.
The price of an item is what the market will bear. That means if I can make you pay no more than $100 for it that is how much is costs regardless of MY costs.
Now, what the market will bear can be altered by competition, of course, but the whole "pass the tax on to the consumer" thought is complete gibberish. The price of Windows (for example) wouldn't change if you doubled the tax Microsoft pays, or totally removed it - the price point is determined by what amount of money they can get you to pay before it would be worth your while switching to Linux/Apple or pirating it. That's why a brand new copy of Windows 8 Pro is less than fifty bucks in China, seventy for US students and two hundred for normal US users. OEMs and upgrades get a discount. Why? Because that's /what they will pay/.
TL:DR - your argument is naive and ignores the very basics of economics.
If you want to get into "what we really should be doing", then the answer is "get rid of pensions and give everybody a 401K/403B/tax-sheltered-retirement-savings-plan".
Do you have ESP?
otherwise we'll have to bail out their pension fund in the future.
You mean like we did for every major airline in the country?
Yes. What's your point?
Do you have ESP?
We're an increasingly mobile world,
I've had the same snail mail address for fifteen years. Mobile?
and it will need to be addressed at some point
You mean like all the companies that will send you your bills by email and take online payments, some of which have done so for years? The problem, for those who want that particular answer, has been solved.
But some people seem to think that their particular choice should be applied to everyone else and paper bills should be done away with completely, replaced by email. That's a problem that only telling those people to sit down and be quiet will solve.
The biggest problem with email bills is them not being delivered. The middle of last week I found out about an online meeting on Sunday from someone who asked me if I was attending. What online meeting? Turns out that GMail had started labeling one of my important mailing lists as spam about two months ago. Thanks. GMail. Wouldn't it be nice to find out you are two months behind a credit card payment because the emailed bills, which you had been getting, were now being kept from you because your ISP decided they were spam?
But you'll know when you don't get the bill, won't you? Sure. One of my credit card companies doesn't send anything when the balance is 0. "No email", for me, for some credit cards, would mean "no bill". The rare month when it means "GMail screwed you" will not be unusual enough for me to worry about not getting a bill.
By the way, the belief that healthcare can only be provided by government or by employers is a false dichotomy. Better than either if people simply pay out of pocket for routine expenses and maintain insurance only for catastrophic, unplanned expenses, just as they do for gas and oil changes vs. collisions.
Thank you, thank you, thank you. I have been saying this for years. There is a reason why you can get a basic oil change for $30 at a quick lube place - you aren't dealing with a large, inefficient bloated system, some of which is mandated by government. I see my doctor for medication adjustments every 6 months. My appointments last 15 minutes at the most, and I spend more time waiting and getting my vitals taken. My insurance is billed $300. I have a tough time wondering why it costs so bloody much. I would much rather pay my doc $30 cash for her time and she would rather not have all the billing overhead.
They are only protected from indiscriminately opening every package. Since they are a gov't agency, they helpfully scan the outside of every letter/parcel for use by our overlords as the FBI/CIA without even a warrant.
Hopefully, the other package services require law enforcement to have a warrant to do the same or to seize/open packages [but we can't be sure].
Sleep your way to a whiter smile...date a dentist!
Well, another way to think about it is that the bulk mail is there to smooth out the cost and revenue for the delivery process. You might get real mail 2-3 times per week, but I'd be willing to wager that there are individuals and even whole neighborhoods who don't get first class mail more than once a week. Without something to deliver daily, it might make sense to reduce schedules in certain areas even more, which would reduce the overall value of the service because then even sending out mail would take longer. Incremental cost of delivery would go up, overall value would go down. Without heavy subsidies, getting rid of bulk/DMA delivery would likely further the divide between haves and have-nots.
Don't get me wrong; I despise bulk mail, and it inevitably goes right in the recycling bin for me. However, to suggest that it's a pure subsidy for the businesses that use it, without also showing the benefit that the USPS and the people who send and receive mail through it is not entirely fair.
My personal view is not a popular one: I think it is OK for a service like the USPS to be heavily subsidized in locations and during times when it is losing money. Not all things of value necessarily produce enough revenue to reflect that value. Destroying the mail infrastructure would, in my humble opinion, injure our democracy and lead to problems that we have yet to imagine.
That being said, there are other ways to skin this cat. If the folks on the Hill were to amend the Constitution to indicate that Internet access is a human right, and provide funding such that even the poorest of the poor had basic access via, say, smart phones at a rate which is affordable to all, I'd be OK with gutting the USPS. But I don't see that happening any time soon.
Of course, now that I think about it, T-Mobile is sort of doing that. If you just want to pay your bills, send a few emails a week, their free 200 MB for life for tablet owners is actually pretty good...
The CB App. What's your 20?
Really, even business owner I've ever know well enough to chat with is happy to pay taxes to get basic infrastructure. As it happens, basic infrastructure isn't really all that expensive, and no one sane would complain about the spending required for it (it's maybe 20% of the federal budget, unless you include defense, perhaps a larger slice of state and local budgets).
This stupid meme that business owners don't want to pay any taxes (or don't understand the value of infrastructure) is pure political spin, and people need to get better BS filters in place around it.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
I think the question of whether or not something should be government-run (or at least involved) vs free market is: Are we, as a society, okay if some people don't get this service?
If the answer to that is 'yes', then free market is probably the way to go.
But if the answer to that is 'no', then free market won't work -- free market requires the voluntary participation of buyers AND sellers.
Don't care if some people don't have health care or education because they can't afford it? Free market is the way to go.
Think health care & education are important for a civilized, well-functioning society? Probably need to have government involvement then -- which is not to say our current systems are perfect (far from it!) but "free market" is not the solitary answer.
The USPS doesn't pay property tax, sales tax, or federal income tax. They also get special loans directly from the Treasury. That's all taxpayer funding.
Then there are the special laws the protect the USPS, like the monopoly on letter carrying and the their immunity from parking tickets. If you don't count those laws as "funding" they at least qualify as government support.
As I understand it, for regulated services USPS is not allowed to offer any negotiated prices to any company. Sunday delivery is presumably an unregulated add-on, but for normal weekday package delivery Amazon has to pay the same prices as any other shipper. One way Amazon gets around that is by using their own trucks to move packages as close to the consumer as possible, then mailing the package only a short distance. The post office can also unofficially rebate money by doing joint advertising.
Yeah, I thought about that when I posted. There are alot of capital intensive or otherwise unusual industry that wouldn't fit
a typical mold not to mention as yet unthought of industries but it was ment as one possible way of how to get rid of the idiotic
"too big to fail" mentality. Southwestern Bell deployed a slightly different strategy for the same purpose. I had a friend that
used to work there and every year they would give a "vital to the company" bonus to the most irreplacable employees. These
bonuses were large (I think his was almost 1 year salary) but were given on the condition that you train a second person to
do your job in case something happened to you. I wouldn't be opposed to the government implementing something like this
especially in areas where there is a single supplier of critical components that are needed to maintain our technological house
of cards.
Isn't that far far better than the current situation, where companies *don't* have the money to fund the promised retirement benefits?
(BTW, I think there are TONS of examples seen in the news where people get FAR FAR FAR too much in retirement -- but it is also VERY wrong to change what people get after the fact/after they started employment. So the "cushy deals" should still exist for those who already got them, but new employees should have regular 401ks or similar.)
Unfortunately alot of idiot sites that keep repeating the lies that you are repeating. You can read the OPM regulation and the 2006 law, they only have to fund peoples retire for the government level of life expectancy which is around 78.9 year however for accounting purposes they have to figure what is going to be happening for 75 years. So if everyone in at USPS retires at age 62 they would only have to figure retirement pay of 16.9 years per person; the 75 years is for accounting. At the end of 2010 the USPS was paying around $50 billion for peoples retirement if they follow through and make the prefunding payments it should be under $33 billion a year by 2020. USPS lost $15.9 billion in 2012, so even without the $5 billion pre funding requirement they lost money.
Now great employees and a nationwide infrastructure can again do something very useful!
This is, in fact, so obvious that US Constitution has included an explicit grant of power to the Federal government to establish a postal service from day 1. Which is very telling in and of itself, as few other things were deigned with being enumerated in such a precise fashion.
I think the postal service is something valuable to retain across the country, but I certainly don't think it needs to be delivered to every address six times per week. There are countless other methods for contact and delivery in the modern world that are superior to and preferable to the USPS. I think delivering mail to every address ONCE per week is entirely reasonable. You can have a cheaper, slimmer, smaller organization and still get people what they need (if, for some reason, they require USPS service) every week.
Also, the only thing the USPS does for me is deliver physical spam to my door that I have to clean out by taking out of the box and dumping it in the trash every week.
I don't even look at my mail, anymore. I reach my h and in, pull it out, dump it into the trash basket right inside the door. I don't even go through to see if there is anything important. It's big packs of coupons, big papers full of advertisements, catalogs, flyers, campaign bullshit, charity spam, lots of stuff for people who lived here the twenty or thirty years before me, and so on. . . . after a certain point, I just got tired of the bullshit. It goes straight into the trash. If it was something vital or time-sensitive, you probably would have sent it to me in another form or by courier.
Yes, that's why we should get rid of pensions, and make all retirement plans 401(k)s, or similar.
Why don't you simply *stop* the junk mail in the first place?
The free iOS app PaperKarma lets you take snapshots of your junk mail to unsubscribe that way.
There's more info about stopping junk mail at:
http://www.consumer.ftc.gov/articles/0262-stopping-unsolicited-mail-phone-calls-and-email
and
https://www.catalogchoice.org/
There is a war being waged against the USPS by corrupt and ideological fanatics (who ignore the constitutional mandate for the USPS.)
They NEVER had money problems, they will run at a loss if they have to - it's a constitutional required service of government (aka non-profit.) The idiotic things going on are part of the political war against them, the pensions for the unborn being a fake budgetary disaster invented by the enemy so they can exploit the "crisis."
1st moves were to cut costs, since management is required to abide by the laws passed to destroy themselves. These were known to fail because they had enough allies in government to prevent the plans from happening, it was a political move to gain public attention and to legally meet the ridiculous demands being placed upon them. Sadly, the idiotic media didn't inform the public that the crisis was BS so people think email is killing the USPS and that it has to make a profit like a business (the media get advertizing from the USPS and UPS and FedEx so one wonders why it can't be fair.)
2nd moves were to EXPAND instead of shrink. Cutting saturday service was a transition or hybrid solution in that they were keeping package delivery. This new plan is a full-on expansion -- doubly enjoyable because it is EXACTLY the opposite of what the enemy wanted! Any major change is going to have to be phased in. Plus anything that WORKS is going to be under heavy attack to prevent it from happening, just as the attacks were heavily defended against. By focusing on Amazon in major cities they'll have a quick trail run that CANT BE STOPPED with amazing results to defend further expansion of the plan. You know they are serious when they are so strategic about implementation; the Saturday plan seemed a bit heavy handed which made me think it was a compromise gesture to illustrate a point.
The USPS is ours; it belongs to the citizens.
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
And slightly off topic: Only on slashdot can you find somebody who praises unions for giving us saturdays off (incorrectly I might add as it was Henry Ford who initiated that) while at the same time believing it is a travesty that the USPS is considering no longer working on saturday.
Perhaps that "somebody" realizes that the generic "Saturday off" and having some people work on Saturday but get incentive pay to do so and other days of the week off aren't mutually exclusive concepts, especially when one refers to generic employment and one refers to a common infrastructure.
Sure its an inconvenience, but now that electronic communication is common the volume just isn't there anymore to make it cost effective to continue the old ways.
The same rural people whose mailboxes you want to be ten or twenty miles away from their homes are the same rural people who don't get the "electronic communications" you city dwellers find to be the solution to every problem.
A Republican bill???
There were 163 cosponsors of the bill: 104 DEMOCRATS, 58 Republicans, and 1 independent.
Republican bill????
There were 163 cosponsors of the bill: 104 DEMOCRATS, 58 Republicans, and 1 independent.
If you're talking about health insurance, there's no way there's a 50% overhead due to paperwork. That sounds closer to the negotiated price discount for insurance companies, which is not overhead. And that's the reason they can cut your bill in half if you don't have insurance -- even cutting it in half they're going to make more money off you than if you got the preferred price that insurance companies pay. When I look at my insurance statement, stuff like lab work is discounted 90%. Cutting your bill in half would mean they still charge you 5 times what the insurance company would pay for the exact same work.
Why? Since you're paying with checks, you have a bank account. Your bank account almost assuredly has *FREE* bill pay. Heck, it's *better* than free, because it's *saving* you money, since even if the bill can't be paid electronically, *THEY SEND A CHECK AND THEY PAY POSTAGE*. (At least this part is true with my bill pay, and I suspect it is true of all bank bill pay that lets you pay any addressee.)
(Yes, I realize "they" is really all of us customers, but it is literally saving me from paying for a stamp AND filling out a check.)
Over the weekend I started wondering if I could pay my property tax via online bill pay too. I may end up calling the state tax board if I can't find any relevant info online/way to contact them online. (The bills DO say basically that the payment will be delayed if you don't include the payment coupons.. obviously those wouldn't be included if I paid online..) Heck, it's not even obvious if I have to write a separate check for EACH payment coupon (I want to prepay to offset some dividend income) or one big check. One big check makes the most sense, but this is government. (They DO at least tell you to include both payment coupons if you are paying both at once.)
Oh, I forgot to mention, there *is* an electronic way of paying my property tax, but it has a ridiculous fee, and no, that is not a credit card fee. It's a fee even with "electronic check", even though my yearly tax bill/refund can be pulled/pushed directly to my bank account.
Oh, I didn't mean the USPS shouldn't be subsidized. I view it as a government provided service that we pay to use. The government part means it's available everywhere to everyone, while paying to use it makes it more fair. I don't expect it to make money - at best it should brake even, so government subsidy at times is fine. What I have a problem with is first class mail subsidizing junk mail. Without junk mail you'd still need a carrier to visit every day for pickup, but the stop will still be faster without a pile of crap to put in there. Or they could make the service run every other day, but that increases worst case delivery by 2 days. There are lots of ways to make adjustments, but having bulk pay well under 10 cents is really a bad joke since it still uses all the infrastructure that first class has put in place.
If they want to run it like a business and not a government provided service then they at least have to charge enough to pay their bills, and that includes ALL mail.
Big businesses get discounts because they sort their mail, prepare them for automated processing and sometimes transport them to postal facilities. In other words, they pay less because they cost less to service. You could pay the same price if you printed your mail with IMpb barcodes, pre-sorted it and sent it in batches of five hundred or more.
Commecial first class and bulk mail services provide the volume necessary to keep postal rates relatively low and routes open. Increase their rates, volume will drop, and everybody's rates go up.
Occasionally, this comes at a cost to human life, such as Thatcher's deliberate underinvestment in the railways, followed by Major's spinning off of Railtrack without any clear identification as to who is responsible for maintenance. But usually it's just a huge fucking waste of money, and the privatised industry ends up enjoying multiple subsidies and regulatory capture.
Ooh... you're so cynical, but be fair- it's resulted in a far more efficient and low-cost railway system that's affordable by everyone in the country.
Oh wait, no it hasn't. It's given us railways that cost far more than comparable systems in other countries, resulting in obscenely priced tickets that are only affordable to well-paid professionals. You know it's bad when the first result from Googling "British railways expensive compared" is a f*****g Daily Mail article making this point.
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
No other government agency is subject to the law that was specifically designed to cripple them. That alone should tell you all about what it's there for. (Hint: it's not about retirement safety for the employees).
All of the cost cutting measures that the USPS has tried are subject to congressional approval - for example, Congress sets the rates for postage (so the USPS can't raise rates to stop losing money, even though it only costs 46 cents to send a letter anywhere in the US), and they have tried other things like cutting Saturday delivery to save about 2 billion (Congress said "nope, not allowed!).
The republicans want to cripple it so they can soft sell the idea of privatising the postal service. It's much easier to parrot the "look how inefficient and crappy government services are!" when you actively work against them.
Without these ludicrous controls (that no other company or government agency is subject to) and the inability to control their own logistics (control of the cost of their services, veto of their operational decisions etc) then the USPS would be perfectly solvent.
My appointments last 15 minutes at the most, and I spend more time waiting and getting my vitals taken. My insurance is billed $300. I have a tough time wondering why it costs so bloody much. I would much rather pay my doc $30 cash for her time and she would rather not have all the billing overhead./quote>
Your Doctor's time and the overhead costs of his/her office are worth more the $30/15-minutes. That doesn't even cover their salary, much less that of the receptionist, the power bill, and the huge insurance costs.
That’s a requirement that no business, or any government agency has ever had to comply with.
Yet apparently about 1/4 of the companies with this type of long-term retirement benefit, do set aside that money. It can be done either way (set aside, or plan/calculate future expenditures), but in the case of the USPS they were basically spending that money with no plan to be able to pay retiree benefits. As that money is intended to be for the retiree's future expenses, then if the USPS isn't setting it aside, then really they are borrowing it from the retiree. It's no different than GM borrowing out of the pension funds with no plan to pay it back.
USPS would have defaulted on the Treasury Loan regardless of this bill.
That's not so far off. If the USPS must pay $5 billion per year, then it shows continual losses, and the whole program can be cut. The Treasury then has a surplus of cash that's no longer earmarked for future employees, so it's a simple bit of labeling magic to release it into general funds.
That $5b/year is due to the USPS being force to paying towards it's existing debts held by the Treasury. USPS currently has about $46b worth of unfunded liabilities because they haven't been setting aside or planning for future retiree benefits. You are aware that USPS can not be funded via general funds by law, right?
Actually, this is incorrect. Go back and look at the voting record for the 2006 bill. It was passed with overwhelming bipartisan support, and it was cosponsored by two Democrats and 1 Republican.
And, the Postal carriers' union thinks it was a great bill
Don't care if some people don't have health care or education because they can't afford it? Free market is the way to go.
Think health care & education are important for a civilized, well-functioning society?
This is exactly what it all boils down to. And the answer is that a large portion of America's population, including people who can't afford decent healthcare or education, do not want these things to be given to all the citizens in our society. We're not going to be a civilized, well-functioning society as long as so much of our population has this mentality, and votes this way. The only way this will change will be to break the country apart, so that people with this mentality can be in their own country, and can enjoy turning into a 3rd-world society, while the rest of us can be free to implement decent governance for a change.
(ignoring the first troll comment)
The same rural people whose mailboxes you want to be ten or twenty miles away from their homes are the same rural people who don't get the "electronic communications" you city dwellers find to be the solution to every problem.
Actually yes they usually do. Even in the more remote areas where cell phones and broadband aren't available, you still generally have a phone. If you're in an area where there isn't even electricity, then chances are you already have to travel a fair ways to get to a mailbox anyways.
This isn't exactly asking anybody to go anywhere they don't already go, it's simply saying that they check their mail about the same time that they go to town to get the provisions they already need anyways. It's already a given that mail is slow, about the only people who I think would complain are the advertisers whose ads might be slightly out of date by the time the recipient checks their mail, but even then they don't send a whole lot of material to rural areas other than mail order catalogs.
Careful with names containing L slashdot.org/~AiphaWolf_HK slashdot.org/~AlphaWoif_HK slashdot.org/~AiphaWoif_HK
Actually, it is a bit more complicated then that but taxes are built into the mix to.
You see, it isn't just what the market will bear, it is what the market will bear while being the most profitable. Microsoft could simply increase the costd of windows to compensate for lost users or they could drop prices in order to grab more sales. Imagine the worlds bedt candy bar. Now imagine that if you sold it at 20 buck a piece for a 19 dollar profit and sold 100 of them. But if you sold them for 2 bucks a piece with 1 dollar profit and sold 10 million. So lets say you sold them at 2 bucks and every one else was too. Now all the sudden the gove raises taxes and every candy bar maker has to pay an aditional 30%. So all but the novelty mom and pop shops making their own crap will eith raise their price which everyone who wants a candy bar will pay or they take a 30 cent per piece loss in profits. So they raise their price because there aren't many mom and pop shops around and by the time they have the same market penetration, they will pay the tax too.
All costs are passed to the consumer. When you tax a company, you tax their competitors as well. Few competitors will drop profit when their competitors are not.
If consumer rates need to be so high, they aren't paying enough. Seriously, a penny or two raise in commercial rates could cause a 20 cent drop in postage for consumers and perhaps then, people might actually use the post office.
They also have advantages their competitors do not get:
Favorable taxes on their property and fleet.
Enough to offset prefunding retirement for people they won't hire for another 40 years? Enough to make them come by my house every day whether or not they have mail to deliver? Enough to allow them to deliver a letter for 46 cents when FedEx charges $9.50 to deliver a letter across the country?
Implicit backing of the US gvt.
That and two-fifty will get you a cup of coffee.
Private industry is more efficient than government.
Yeah. It keeps healthcare costs down in the US and it worked brilliantly for UK rail services. And everyone benefits? Investors are not going to punt money in to something because they want to support the building of an efficient operation that'll benefit everyone. Most investors are looking for returns,
We have runaway healthcare costs because of government involvement not because of private industry. If the majority of people actually paid
their own medical bills you would see medical bill prices dropping the same way lasik, dentistry, and plastic surgery prices continue to fall.
Doctors couldn't stay in business if people had to pay cash at their current prices but instead of lowering their prices to something reasonable
prices continue to skyrocket because of upside down incentives put in place by the government.
I never said that investors wanted to build an efficient operation but industries with healthy competition force them to to be able to compete
that's why lasik continues to become safer and cheaper while in the medical world ruled by government incentives and subsidized healthcare
you can't even get a medical doctor to quote you a price.
(ignoring the first troll comment)
I'd say, if anything, your attempt at claiming that the same people who thank unions for Saturdays off are the same people who want Saturday mail delivery was the troll comment. I simply pointed out that the two situations are not as related as you pretend. It is not hypocritical in the least to enjoy one's free weekends while thinking that infrastructure services would be provided by those who choose to work on those same weekends, because it is a choice for them and they do get other days off. It is the concept of "time off" that is the critical feature of the "weekends" vs. having to work seven days a week, not those two specific days of the week necessarily.
Actually yes they usually do. Even in the more remote areas where cell phones and broadband aren't available, you still generally have a phone.
"A phone" is not the communications system that electronic bill systems are designed for. Email for bills and paying via the web are Internet, not landline phone, operations. The rural users who you think can be made so independent of USPS that their mailboxes can be moved ten to twenty miles away because "electronic communications" has solved the paper billing/payment system are the ones who have the least access to the electronic billing/payment systems.
Now, I suppose you could expect them to call everyone who would send them a bill and then pay it over the phone, but that's hardly the same convenience you expect from your electronic billing/payment systems, so maybe you should cut them a little slack, huh?
This isn't exactly asking anybody to go anywhere they don't already go, it's simply saying that they check their mail about the same time that they go to town to get the provisions they already need anyways.
You've never lived in a really rural area, have you? They don't go to the store every day. Maybe once a week. Maybe even less. Now, I know, you care so little for what you get via the USPS that you don't care if you see the mail but once a week, but I suspect that's based in large part on your access to electronic communications systems, to wit, the Internet, which they are least likely to have.
And for those who live between towns and shop in one but wind up with their mailbox in the other thanks to your consolidation efforts would be making special trips, unless you think it's ok to force them to shop where you want them to instead of where they want to.
You want your mailbox down the block so that the carrier doesn't know exactly where you live or doesn't have to go so far when delivering, that's fine. But stop pushing for consolidation in places you've never been and never experienced, ok?
but even then they don't send a whole lot of material to rural areas other than mail order catalogs.
Oh, well then, it is certainly ok to move every rural dweller's mailbox ten miles or more away from them into the "big city" cause the only thing those hicks get in their mail is free toilet paper for the outhouse. Sure, ya, ok then. Alpha_Wolf says it should be that way because he doesn't care about his mail, so what person in their right mind would care about theirs?
So, if you are big enough to strike some major deal then you can get a special treatment from the "basic infrastructure"? And an up-and-coming small competitor for Amazon will be at a disadvantage, since they aren't big enough for such a deal. This is different than paying for faster delivery or registered shipping, since those things can be done on a per-packet basis, with the cost being directly visible to the customer. Is it now the job of the US postal service to cement the market dominating position of a certain company by allowing such deals? If we are for net neutrality on the Internet, shouldn't we be for "neutrality" in other infrastructures as well?
And no other government agency has the freedom to control themselves the USPS does, read the 1970s law. All government agencies and most non-government companies that have pension are under the same restrictions for pre-funding that the USPS was forced to start doing.
Also learn to curb your hatred and ignorance that comes from it. Any simple search would of shown you that a Republican introduced the bill to allow USPS to stop saturday delivery of non-packages. The main person pushing against this was Mark Pryor a democrat.
As a former postal union member, for over 8 years, yes it is about retirment safety there was no way the USPS could of handled the retirement duties they were suppose to cover from the 1970s law. Forcing them to lower the amount they spent every year by pre-funding was one of the correct financial methods of doing it.
The gas and phone companies charge fees for e-pay, the electric company is handy, I drive past it often. I do pay the credit card company with e-pay sometimes.
Free Martian Whores!
How is that a troll? Have you not seen what the national debt is up to? It's actually over $60 TRILLION now when all federal liabilities are included.
The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50
They are losing $16 billion a year because they pay out $5.5 billion a year for future pensions?
Bad math is bad math. If they didn't fund pensions at all, I guess you should expect future tax payers to just pay that, they are STILL behind $10.5 billion a year.
Nope. Read TFA, and following the links. There is a GAO report linked therethat contains details of the USPS budget shortfall.
According to the GAO report, $32 billion of the $41 billion shortfall in the past 6 years is due to the pension requirements. If 78% of the shortfall is due to an unreasonable requirement, I think we can say that it's a significant contribution.
As for the rest, the new requirement for pensions came into effect right about the time that first-class mail use began to decline (2008). If the USPS had its normal budget, it might have been able to make investments in its own infrastructure, try to figure out ways to deal with that decline, etc.
Instead, every year it has Congress forcing it into more debt. Imagine if you suddenly had to make payments each year that broke your budget, and just at that moment your sources of income started going down.
People faced with desperate situations make difficult decisions, which sometimes force them into further debt. As an individual, you might be forced to drop some of your insurance coverage, get into credit card debt, etc., rather than investing money in things that would help you recover.
Congress's requirements put the squeeze on the USPS in the same way, at the worst possible moment. I'm not saying everything was managed great, but the USPS was basically balancing the books until this pension requirement came along... and the vast majority of losses since have come from it.
Weird, for me, my electric & gas (which are different companies, electricity is municipally owned) just charge credit card automatically every month, no fee.
"A phone" is not the communications system that electronic bill systems are designed for. Email for bills and paying via the web are Internet, not landline phone, operations.
No, but a modem is, and last I checked there are nationwide dialup ISP's that still offer service in every area code.
What the hell else did you think I'd bring up a phone line for?
The rural users who you think can be made so independent of USPS that their mailboxes can be moved ten to twenty miles away
I don't know about you, but ten miles is nothing to me. I ride my bike 12 miles every day (some days I do 25 miles, occasionally I do a 52 mile route.) Riding a car that far takes all of 10 minutes in a rural setting.
You don't think in very practical ways do you? The fact of the matter is that what USPS currently does is not sustainable, with or without the political mess.
You want your mailbox down the block so that the carrier doesn't know exactly where you live or doesn't have to go so far when delivering, that's fine. But stop pushing for consolidation in places you've never been and never experienced, ok?
Both experienced and lived in, actually. In fact, I'm a bit in doubt that you have done either. I mean you make 20 miles sound like a trip to BFE, which makes it sound like you have to make a special affair out of going anywhere past your favorite chair. You do know what BFE means, I hope. Probably not, you'll probably have to look it up on google.
Careful with names containing L slashdot.org/~AiphaWolf_HK slashdot.org/~AlphaWoif_HK slashdot.org/~AiphaWoif_HK
No, but a modem is, and last I checked there are nationwide dialup ISP's that still offer service in every area code.
You'll be quite happy for them to spend ten minutes accessing a website over a slow dialup line because you've got yours and you don't care. Ok. Hey, they've got nothing else to do with their evenings once the cows have been milked and the pigs slopped, right? They can pay the bills by candlelight.
I ride my bike 12 miles every day (some days I do 25 miles, occasionally I do a 52 mile route.)
Why yes, people who live in rural areas have nothing better to do with their time than take long bike rides so they can get their mail. Phones and bikes are the solution to all rural communications problems.
Riding a car that far takes all of 10 minutes in a rural setting.
Let's see. Ten miles in ten mintues. A mile a minute average. 60MPH. And since it would take a round trip (you do allow them to go home after they pick up their mail, don't you?) that ten minutes for ten miles turns into 120MPH, without considering the time it takes to actually pick up the mail. Even the 60MPH value is ridiculous, so it's clear you don't know what rural areas of the US are like at all.
The fact of the matter is that what USPS currently does is not sustainable, with or without the political mess.
And now we've hit the poorly defined buzzword "sustainable." You win, you've got all the right buzzwords.
As for BFE, it is no surprise you'd use that to refer to the rural areas you think don't deserve to get local mail service.
There are countless other methods for contact and delivery in the modern world that I think are superior to and preferable to the USPS.
FTFY. And thus nobody can have a different opinion of the need for USPS.
I think delivering mail to every address ONCE per week is entirely reasonable.
You don't care about more than once a week, therefore once a week is sufficient for everyone else.
Hmmm. Let's see. Bill is printed on a Tuesday. Pickup is Monday, so we're one week into the billing cycle before the bill leaves the office. The bill makes it to the closest USPS facility on Friday, but local delivery is Thursday. The bill sits in USPS hands for another week. So, ummm, we're 17 days into a billing cycle before the bill gets to the person who has to pay it. Another week before the mail is picked up, 24 days, Thursday. Gets to the USPS office closest to the payee next Tuesday. Oops, missed this weeks delivery by one day. Delivered the following Monday. Thirty five days.
I've got idjit companies that have 14 day payment windows and get pissy on day 15. Many are 21. None is 35.
But, you say, the company sending the bill will adopt the billing cycle to the local email delivery dates, right? Sure. They'll give up the chance for late payment fees by being helpful in setting the billing cycle. They all seem really happy to take weekends and holidays into consideration now, don't they? Feh.
Also, the only thing the USPS does for me is deliver physical spam to my door that I have to clean out by taking out of the box and dumping it in the trash every week.
And for this crime everyone else deserves to have their mail service cut back to once a week. I'm sorry you don't get any real mail. It probably means nobody loves you.
You'll be quite happy for them to spend ten minutes accessing a website over a slow dialup line because you've got yours and you don't care. Ok. Hey, they've got nothing else to do with their evenings once the cows have been milked and the pigs slopped, right? They can pay the bills by candlelight.
I don't think you realize just how much dialup ISP's have modernized. Most of them offer services (which you can turn on or off) where they strip out a lot of unneeded content and/or downsample images prior to delivery. It doesn't take 10 minutes to load webpages on dialup. A lot of people in the US still use dialup, even when they have access to broadband.
Why yes, people who live in rural areas have nothing better to do with their time than take long bike rides so they can get their mail. Phones and bikes are the solution to all rural communications problems.
I never suggested they did.
Let's see. Ten miles in ten mintues. A mile a minute average. 60MPH.
Yeah, because many rural roads are highways with little traffic. And even then, it's pretty common to go 70 unless the local law enforcement are very anal. I did it all the time.
And now we've hit the poorly defined buzzword "sustainable." You win, you've got all the right buzzwords.
It's not a buzzword, it's a fact. I'm not an eco geek if that's what you are thinking, I'm speaking purely in terms of monetary cost. For example, if your monthly expenses were $1,500 a month and you only brought in $1,000, then your lifestyle isn't sustainable. This is the reality of the post office. What, are you the buzzword police? What else do you want me to say? Does "can't be continued long term" meet your ordinance? But I like shorter words better than phrases, so kindly take your ordinance and cram it. Unsustainable it shall remain.
As for BFE, it is no surprise you'd use that to refer to the rural areas you think don't deserve to get local mail service.
Rather it's just a term I've had thrown at where I live. I don't mind it, I think it's funny, sometimes when people ask where I live I say I live in BFE. Even on web boards that demand your location, I indicate to them that I'm in some Egyptian desert, (which is half true, because I do live in a desert) and if they ask for the city I put BFE, Egypt. It's also funny because I've cracked jokes with racial overtones only to have people on these boards crack Egyptian jokes in response :D
Careful with names containing L slashdot.org/~AiphaWolf_HK slashdot.org/~AlphaWoif_HK slashdot.org/~AiphaWoif_HK
The thing is, I **DO** have the balls to say it to his face. By staying anonymous he's ensured that can't possibly happen, making him the coward. BTW, haven't you ever drank a cup of coffee in a park, at the bus stop, or any other neutral location? Starbucks isn't the only place to drink coffee.
"Think about how stupid the average person is. Now, realise that half of them are dumber than that." - George Carlin
Yeah, that's great, but look at the real world. Where the government runs healthcare (UK, Canada etc) it's cheaper and more efficient.
But hey, don't let observable facts get in the way of your reasons.
Apparently you've never talked to the people in those countries who hate their systems
and their taxes or noticed how the people there who can afford it still come to the US for
many treatments.
I don't think you realize just how much dialup ISP's have modernized.
The ISP modernization doesn't change the 22.3k modem speed that is often the best you can do on a rural phone line.
Most of them offer services (which you can turn on or off) where they strip out a lot of unneeded content and/or downsample images prior to delivery.
You're using an HTTPS connection to your bank and the ISP can just modify the content in any way it wants without breaking that? Wow. What good is SSL if MIM can just change what they pass on?
Yeah, because many rural roads are highways with little traffic.
Many rural roads are dirt and just wide enough for two cars to pass in opposite directions if they are really careful. Many of those tend to follow property lines instead of regular grids, so you'll find yourself trying to make sharp right and left turns on a dirt road at 70MPH is you drive the way you want. The roads are designed for 25 at best, not like the Interstates that are designed for 70. You really have no clue, and it is obvious there is no way to clarify things for you. You've got what you want, others can get by with what you think they need.
Like it or not, you're part of the community of 21st Century North Americans. The overwhelming majority of people in that group do not want to see starving widows and orphans in the street, a sight which was common before the introduction of Social Security. They want clean water and breathable air and uncontaminated food. They want their shit to disappear down the drain when they flush rather than have to crap behind the bushes, they want their garbage to be taken away rather than pile up in the street, they want bridges over the rivers, they want their streets to be lighted at night, and they want to know that the medicine they're prescribed is pure and has some likelihood of helping them. By and large, they want civilization. Civilization costs money. Money needs to be raised through taxes.
There are still plenty of places where people can go live the heroic go-it-alone mountain man existence. For the rest of us the values of community and the desire to provide a better life for ourselves, our progeny, and others in our community override the greed and self-centered myopia of the few. That's civilization, love it or leave it.
"Think about how stupid the average person is. Now, realise that half of them are dumber than that." - George Carlin
I really like this. It's a good way to frame the discussion, and it's a discussion we really need to have as a country. I'd change it to "a good chunk of people", but yeah.
Are we, as a society, okay if a good chunk of people don't get BLANK. What are the repercussions of some people NOT having BLANK.
It's a good place to start, and I wish we'd start there instead of just throwing ideology.
I'm glad I've known enough Yupers over the years to know that you're not a typical example, because otherwise I might be embarrassed to admit that my grandmother was from Marquette. Your family hasn't been in the UP since the 1600s, the Sioux lived there then. The Hurons didn't push them out until the tail end of that century.
You're apparently younger than I am. I remember quite well when the copper smelters had left a plume of dead land several miles downwind, when many of the rivers ran weird colors when the rain ran off the mountains of mine tailings, the enormous dead zones in Lake Superior surrounding every pulp mill, and their appalling stench. Welcome to 2013, when the water is clean and the air is breathable because of the government regulations enforced with tax dollars taken from people like me to assist people like you. You're welcome.
When is the UP finally going to get around to declaring their independence from the US so that you don't have to pay taxes any more? They've been talking about it since I was a little kid in the 1960s, but every time someone points out that they'll lose their welfare checks and it quiets down. Those people in Alabama and Mississippi and Tennessee that "don't want to be robbed at gunpoint so their money can be used to support people they don't even like" really needn't fret either. They suck down far more tax dollars from those of us in the Blue states than they'd ever dream of paying, the same as the UP. Maybe some day they'll start to pull their own weight, but not in the foreseeable future.
You needn't worry about me, if the crash comes I'll be punching wells, building windmills, growing mushrooms in depths of the parking garages and tomatoes on their roof, smoking salmon, and making wine. I'll feel sorry for the rednecks condemned to drinking from the river their neighbor crapped in upriver, eating venison 200 days a year and suckers and carp the rest.
"Think about how stupid the average person is. Now, realise that half of them are dumber than that." - George Carlin
You're from Alabama and you moved to the UP? No wonder you have an attitude. It's a wonder you survived the first winter.
"Think about how stupid the average person is. Now, realise that half of them are dumber than that." - George Carlin
Have to admit, this has been one of the more entertaining threads. I've been threatened with injury, dismemberment, and death online many times, but this is the first time that my offense was simply pointing out some of the virtues of civilization.
BTW, it doesn't matter how long you live in the UP, those people are never going to consider you a local. If you, and probably your parents, weren't born there you'll never be a real Yuper.
"Think about how stupid the average person is. Now, realise that half of them are dumber than that." - George Carlin
Thanks! I didn't know about the FTC option. Hopefully it works better than the "do not call" list.
The CB App. What's your 20?