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US Wants To Build 'Internet of Postal Things'
dcblogs writes: The U.S. Postal Service plans to spend up to $100,000 to investigate how it can utilize low cost sensors and related wireless technologies to improve the efficiency of its operations. The postal service already scans letters and parcels up to 11 times during processing, representing 1.7 trillion scans a year. It uses supercomputers to process that data. In theory, the postal service believes that everything it uses — mailboxes, vehicles, machines, or a letter carrier — could be equipped with a sensor to create what it terms the Internet of Postal Things. The Internet has not been kind to the postal service. Electronic delivery has upended the postal services business model. In 2003, it processed 49 billion pieces of single-piece first-class mail, but by 2013, that figured dropped to 22.6 billion pieces.
In other high-tech postal service news, Digital Post Australia has shut down. It was an attempt to digitize snail mail, but they didn't manage to convince enough senders that it was worth trying.
2) Want to send something physical, such as a key. This also includes any letter you think your great grandchildren might want to read some day.
3) Want to send something that you don't want copied/replied/forwarded/subpoenaed in a law suit (A lot more important than you might think).
4) You don't know the recipient's email address.
5) The law says you must (important for financial papers, etc.)
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
I've never understood this term. It makes no sense as an informative expression, because everyone attempting to use the internet needs a thing to do so. There can be no internet without things. In fact, the internet exists in the connections between things. The "internet of things" is like "the story of words" or "the forest of trees". It means nothing.
For some reason, too many people instantly lose the abillity to care about what they're sending out (like the dreaded top-post), or even spell. In contrast, most of us have learned in school how to write a passable letter and there's something about having the thing in your hands, looking it over before stuffing it into an envelope, that makes people think again and perhaps even correct errors and such.
Because of that it'd be a shame to no longer be able to send letters. Then again, plenty of postal volume was in fact junk mail and much of that moved to email too. So they were shipping a lot of noise already, and taking that out would've been a blow anyway. So a smaller postal service is probably inevitable every which way. But losing it entirely would be... unwise.
So it's not surprising they want to improve and why not use modern technology for that? "Everybody" is doing it, and anyway, they're already taking and keeping pictures of everything sent, "for your safety from terrorism" and such malarky. I'm not at all happy with that.
In the end it's probably yet another "because we can" thing that may help a bit but the drawbacks will be systematically ignored, and that's bad.
They would collectively go "DOESN'T ANYBODY SPEAK A DECENT LANGUAGE AROUND HERE?!?"
Oh, got caught in the fascist caps filter.
Daily postal service to all citizens is the mark of an advanced society. I dont care how much money it loses, its necessary and dont fuck with it.
Good-bye
Yeah, a lot of savings can be done by not doing anything at all. /sarcasm
A lot of the value of the postal service is that you can send stuff from the sticks to the cities and back again. You propose cutting out half of that. Go look up "network effect."
You must be an accountant.
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BMO
Where do you live that your neighborhood gets mail delivered every day of the year?
I think Xicor's suggestion was just to increase the number of days where rural areas wouldn't get mail delivered, that's all. Another way to equalize the cost of mail delivery across all addresses is to reserve door to door mail for urban areas. Why should poor inner city residents subsidize mail delivery for middle class suburbanites? Shouldn't welfare flow in the opposite direction?
Any sufficiently unpopular but cohesive argument is indistinguishable from trolling.
Mentioning the decline in first-class mail without mentioning the increase in package volume is highly misleading... but then again, ever since the pre-funding mandate nonsense in Congress there has been a rather obvious attempt to dismantle and/or privatize the USPS.
The USPS *does* need to be reformed, however. The workplace environment created by management is extremely toxic. Safety rules and labor laws are routinely violated and quality of serivce is constantly compromised in order to increase management bonuses. The various postal unions are fighting a losing battle against the abuses and the Hollywood accounting, and the increasing number of "temp" employees is going to weaken the unions' position even more.
Efficiency in operations should not just be a euphemism for barbarism in the workplace. If you want to see the war against the middle class up close and personal, just sign up to be a CCA at the Post Office.
Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law
I receive more parcels now than ever before. Most of my shopping is done online. How is that not good for the postal service?
Nah, 'bulk' mail is never sent first class. They got a rate class of their own, usually marked as 'standard'. Having a bit of inside knowledge of the post office as a former carrier, I can definitely say they make a pretty penny on all that bulk mail. This is why they won't do anything that would disrupt that revenue stream especially with the massive drop in first class (which was mostly comprised of business correspondence, ie bills and checks going back and forth).
Actually, the rural runs aren't that particularly expensive to the USPS. I was once a rural carrier, and most rural routes actually require the driver to use his/her own vehicle (with a paid stipend on vehicle use). This is actually a cheaper arrangement for the USPS than sending LLVs around. Plus, with the rural routes, you don't get that much of a drop in box count. They just add more miles to your route. The PO I worked for had a rural route that had over 100 miles on it.
Would NFC really be the answer here? I would think it would still be better to pick a more robust bar code format (QR codes would offer a nice phone-app tie in for customers) and supply better quality scanners? After all you can just print a barcode/QR code...