Slashdot Mirror
Ask Slashdot: Is the United States Postal Service Obsolete?
Xerron asks:
"Now that e-mail is a big deal, friends and family rarely
need to write snail mail leters anymore. And when you need
a package delivered you use UPS or Federal Express, not
the USPS. Is the USPS in trouble? Since e-mail handles the
bulk of short letters and quick notes and UPS and FedEx
handles packages, that leaves the USPS with nothing but
junk mail and Publishers Clearing House mailers.
Could USPD dwindle in the future?" Considering that
less than 50% of Americans are on the Internet, I highly
doubt that the US Postal Service will be obsoleted in the
near future. But I could be wrong. What do you all think?
Don't forget all the credit card apps,
6cent/minute long distance offers, catalogs, local
independent or small chain mailings etc...
Also those receiving government funds that are NOT
using direct deposit. Plus statements from bank,
bills from local utilities
When money is ALL electronic maybe, but we always need to send Stuff to places far away. In any case, a physical letter or postcard is much more personal then e-mail, no matter how many HTML tags you use... ;)
Perhaps I just have extraordinarily bad luck, but I've used USPS priority mail three times, and all three times the packages never arrived at their destinations. Lost to the ether. I've never had a single package lost using any of the commercial shipping companies. This alone has convinced me to not give them the fourth chance, price be damned.
Actually my grandparents have an email account. Practically everyone with a computer nowadays has net access and as for people traveling there are laptops. (Personally I think a photo taken from a digital camera is a lot more personal and interesting than a postcard. Next vacation I'm taking a digital camera along and maybe one of those spiffy new iBook's)
I don't like the USPS. I don't want to use them. But since they have a govt sanctioned monopoly I'm forced to. Put a stake though this fuckers heart already! Let a freemarket alternative take over! Better and more varied, unsubsidized service. And no more big brother bullshit like this.
You dumbass. Some people don't have computers. Do you think everyone in the damn world is sitting around on their linux box reading slashdot all damn day?
Yep, the USPS will always be around in some form. They already have terminals in some Post Office's that you can send email for a certain amount of cents.
The Gov't is already thinking about taxing email usage. i.e. every 100 emails sent you pay $1.00. or something. The tax will help fund internet access in less devel. countries as well as add some padding to Uncle sam's pocket. I think it is a good idea to tax email but it has to be done right. This will stop some spamming and scam's.
Sh*t if you think how much emails are sent each year the tax could add up to billions of dollars earned.
Which Postal Service are YOU talking about?!?!
Price cuts? That $0.33 breaking you? Priority Mail kicks UPS & FedEx's rates & chances are it'll be in 1 piece when it gets there, too!
Did you save some crack for me?
Yep. I like real, paper, admissible in court, the final word, documents of what I owed and what I paid nor do I yet trust anyone to direct debit my checking account (no protection on this like there is with credit cards, and no, visa/MC debit cards do not give CC-level protections either). How do I prove I paid something if it's done electronically? I'll stick with my cancelled checks, thank you.
And electronic christmas cards just aren't the same and can't be all taped up around the big mirror in the living room!
I would have to agree. The only problem is that the current issue arrived yesterday nearly destroyed. It's missing 4 pages entirely and the cover was almost ripped off. I'm going to have to go down to Borders and buy a replacement for it. I think a sorting machine was a little hungry...
How many of you realize that FedEx and UPS are required *by law* to charge more than the USPS? USPS Prioity Mail commercials make me sick, of course their the cheapest because laws mandate that competing services must charge more than them. This is one perveted form of "competition."
Call your congressman and tell them to repeal laws that give the USPS special treatment.
all the poor people in the US who are on welfare? How are they supposed to get their checks at the end of the month so they can afford booze and cheap drugs?
About a month ago, I went to see a presentation given by one of eBay's VPs. He claimed that 5% of USPS's package traffic was generated by transactions over eBay.
The USPS Priority Mail package delivery is cheap and quick. No package tracking though.
Myself, I use email for everything. But we are the exception, not the rule. The only market that internet email is killing for Postal services, is the pen-pal style chit-chat messages. Most buisness letters / bills / you name it, will still use the Postal system.
:)
When was the last time you got your Electric bill by email.
Besides, Postal services are good for mailing small packages as well. It's usually cheaper than UPS/Purolator/fedx/etc. It only costs $3 for me to mail a CD to someone.
I can see future services offering Electric bills (and others) via email (probably in the near future too), but I think the majority of the 'I'm-so-scared-of-computers' population will probably stick with their current method.
I save my old love emails. They're easy to save. I don't save paper letters, because they would take up too much space, and be too much trouble to carry when I move.
I read somewhere that Airborne Express was outsourcing final destination delivery to the USPS. This could make a potent combination - Airborne Express is the method most businesses (like business businesses, mayyybe some auctionsites) use to send things. Airborne has a good business network, USPS has a good home network, business -> home = Airborne -> USPS. The same unremembered source said that the only venture to ever deliver to every home every day and make anything approaching a profit is the USPS. ... $0.02
I work for the USPS! No way. It's gonna stick around. Get your heads out of your asses. Most of the country doesn't use email, and a lot of the country hasn't even heard of it. Snail mail is gonna be around for a long time.
and every other card-sending event will keep USPS around if nothing else will. C'mon, almost everybody has a non-shopping relative who sticks some money in a card for a gift....and my mom would be offended if I just emailed her a "Happy Mother's Day". Hell, for that matter, she has a hell of a time setting her VCR, let alone figuring out email. I don't think the Post Office is going anywhere.
My company sells apparel via 800-number and mailorder catalog, and ships all goods except overnight deliveries via USPS Priority Mail. We are a testbed company for all the USPS new programs, and they have bent over backwards for us (give us free return envelopes pre-addressed for our customers to return stuff to us, etc). We have never had any problems with their service, and in some cases their Express Mail will get stuff to people out in the boonies faster than FedEx or the Evil Brown Trucks can. And it's *way* cheaper too!
:)
And don't forget, their mail-sorting and other apps run on Linux boxes!
nuthin' like a hand written letter... with perfume.....
try THAT with e-mail...
I can actually intelligently say what's going on with regard to the post office and online stuff.
Most people don't realize that the US post office has been working on a service that lets you literally send real mail without leaving your computer. Of course, i believe there are 5000 users total in the US, a few per zip code. Or maybe that was 5000 in my state. I think it's 5k total, to start, since it seems reasonable, and should cover a range of people.
anyway, the URL is
www.postofficeonline.com
What happens is you upload your document in one of a couple formats (it's not just MS word, don't worry, they don't appear to be stupid about that), choose the printing options, and the mailing options, and how to pay, and away it goes.
It gets printed and mailed, and it costs a few cents more (like 2 or 3) to mail the letter, because of the price of the paper (though if you choose to have it stapled, bound, printed on different types of paper, or whatever, it costs more)
You can send express, priority, etc.
You can also pay for packages (i forget how it gets done, i believe you print out the label on a laserjet printer or something) so you don't have to wait in line at the post office or whatever.
It's useful if you want to mail a letter to 5 people and don't want to hunt 5 envelopes and whatnot down. You can just say "here's the 5 addresses to send it to, send 1 copy to each" (they have address books and all). My use is mainly printing "Take me the hell off your marketing lists and whatnot" letters, and sending it to 70 companies at once, with a little cut and paste.
It's much easier than stamps and envelopes.
And you can track the stuff right online.
Judging from the questions they ask if you want to register ("Are you planning to send a mailing to multiple recipients within the next month?"), this is the use they are aiming for.
HTH,
Dan
The USPS is funded by our tax dollars and is government run. Our bloated government will not remove a good excuse to take our money without a fight.
UPS destroyed my computer when I shipped it, but they were VERY nice about the insurance. They gave me $500 to spend on fixing it, which left me
extra money to get more RAM and a new hard drive.
You only think it's great because you actually care about this person Brooke...if I'm just exchanging words with someone it's a different story, and email is better.
That _is_ extrordinarily bad luck. I've shipped stuff everywhere by Priority Mail and never had a problem, (except for the time my package got returned to me because they said you have to drop it off in person because I might be mailing a bomb to someone. idiots.)
I have a /mnt/store partition dedicated to that kind of stuff, and a lot of love emails and important emails from friends and just.. y'know. stuff worth keeping.
I don't know about corporate types, but in my buying/selling/trading on the net for my various collections, I always send stuff USPS, and people send me stuff USPS around 29 times out of 30... It's cheap, fast, and has never failed me in hundreds of deals.
You have to have a security clearance in order to work for USPS, so it has very close ties to the government.
I am more concerned about the Finnish Postal Service!
Also, some people actually keep old mail for certain reasons (last communication w/ dead relative/loved one). The problem w/ email is that it can be lost due to a HD crash or the tech will become too obsolete to read. Having a physical document is always worth more than something as abstract as email.
my understanding is that first class postage subsidizes bulk rate to some extent
I think you have it backward. For typical residential mail pickup, your average mail person may be able to pick up (just guessing) $100 worth of postage an hour. Now go to one of these high volume advertisers and the same mail person could possibly pick up $1,000 worth of bulk rate mailings in 5 minutes. If I remember correctly, all bulk mail must be pre-sorted which even requires less time in USPS (at least before computerized routing systems).
I use eBay and often use money orders. The USPS offers the cheapest and reliable money orders which are accepted anywhere there is a post office. Also, the International MOs are also accepted in far more countries than all others because it's run by the government. Admittedly, the postal IMOs have been a pain in the arse to use because they kept sending me a refund for them :
Anything that can be emailed can be printed out so electronic greeting cards can still be displayed. Not to mention, as TV and computers become more integrated it will become more feasible to display your e-Christmas cards in a screen saver.
As computer screens get better and smaller, it will only make economic sense for newspapers and magazines to move to digital only format: there's less time delay and less cost in printing and distribution. Right now newspapers and periodicals receive special rates from the Post Office. Eventually, even that won't be enough to compete with the cost of digital distribution.
Certified and Registered mail are just ways of tracking delivery. The first returns a receipt; the second allows you to charge the receipient. FedEx, UPS and email offer better tracking systems already. With e-cash, charging you to read a piece of email will be easy.
The Postal Service will either find a way to meet new customer expectations or find themselves delivering only official government documents.
That's funny. We trust private corporations with our food, our banks, our health care, and our networks. The nation would be in trouble without those. Do you think we should nationalize those too?
No, we don't. The FDA is charged with keeping food safe, and banks are completely dependant on the gov't. Networks don't have as much gov't control, but the wires themselves do--AT&T ring a bell (pun intended)? Or Portland requiring that wires be opened to competition? The effects may be good for business, but the gov't is running the show.
In a free market, there would be several carriers offering a variety of services. That's a hell of a lot more reliable than a single, monolithic government agnency. How do we know the USPS won't go down at some point? If they did, there would be no alternatives in the first class mail space, because it's illegal to deliver first class mail.
Um, *how* could the USPS go under? Either the gov't would have to collapse, or it would have to be purposely dismantled, and in both cases the laws concerning sending mail follow it.
Therefore, the precise opposite is true. We need a free market in the mail business because it is so important. We can't rely on the government to be as reliable or efficient as private companies.
And what incentive would there be for me to use them over the USPS? Could they offer lower rates or faster delivery? What evidence do you have the private mail company culd do any better than the USPS? And even if they were competetive, how long could they last? $.33 (or $.34) a letter doesn't allow for much profit.
-James Lanfear (forget my password)
While a short snippet works great in email. A longer and more important form of correspondance has been around forever. The USPS. It works every where with every one. I can send registered, certified mail for cheap to anyone. period. Priority mail gets my packages around just fine. Its still got the fastest data transfer rate. 8 DDS in 3 days is faster than the net. bla bla bla the USPS is going anywhere.
Saying e-mail is just a bunch of ones and zeroes is like saying the post is a bunch of ink molecules on dead trees.
I am sorry but your just trying to bait me. Your ill informed and shortsighted. (wow my first real flame, honest) Research the facts and come back to the table with an enlightend perspective republican boy.
When I can carry it around with me and stick it on documents as easily as I can scribble my name with a pen or pencil.
Suggestion:
I agree. I don't write many letters, and most of those I do get printed, but I do think that writing something and posting it shows more care than an email.
:-) ) to do the tasks without them.
Email is excellent for organising things quickly (e.g. evenings out with friends), but I don't see it replacing the postal service for a long time. There are people in my family who do not have (and will never get) email access, so if I want to talk to them, I have to either phone or send a letter - and I know that they'd prefer a letter. In any case, I get a certain feeling at finding something in my pigeonhole, that I don't get from finding a full inbox.
While email is (nearly) free, 26p (for a first class letter) is hardly a lot of money - especially not if you care about someone. Bills almost invariably come with a reply-paid envelope.
A point touched on in the previous post _is_ the time factor. You tend not to get flamed in a letter, for the simple reason that you have to sit down and think what to say. You might get criticised, but you are unlikely to be on the receiving end of a lot of incoherent rubbish.
I'd also say that letters are more private than email - unless you encrypt everything. To open a letter (so the opening cannot be noticed) takes skill and time. Unless you encrypt everything (which I can't be bothered to do - typing in that PGP passphrase takes time!), then I don't see that encrypting gains you all that much. If you're that paranoid, then what you don't encrypt will be just as telling as what you do. In any case, the majority of people I write to don't have PGP - and why should they, just to satisfy my paranoia?
The Royal Mail is also more forgiving about addresses - you can miss quite large chunks of an address off (including the post code), and your letter will still be delivered. You can hardly say the same for email addresses.
So I don't think that the postal services will go under in the near future (although they may eventually). I wouldn't like to live without a computer, but I equally wouldn't like to be unable to live without one. Computers are tools - they make tasks much simpler, but you should be able (at least in theory
Just my random thoughts.
Richard Edgar (can't be bothered to create an acct).
rge21@cam.ac.uk
... for dumping girlfriends. I just fire off a quick note saying "Dear (FIRSTNAME), I don't want to see you any more because (PUTDOWN). (INSULT). Sincerely, Bob."
Thank goodness for mail merge!
--> and put the money into gettin the other 50% on the internet
- a nANOCOW from f*ckin belgium (land of dioxins, poison-coke and GREAT BEERS)
Thats one helluva story :P
They may just be 1's and 0's to you, but to the person receiving them they are words. Words typed into an e-mail are no less sincere than a handwritten letter. In fact, people PREFER that I send them e-mail considering how bad my handwriting is. ;-) The only people I send out USPS mail to are bill collectors and the obligatory greeting cards.
From a statistic I once heard, although from a slightly biased source ( my friend's dad is a postal carrier ) the USPS delivers more mail in one day than UPS & FedEx deliver in a year combined.
So, will they die anytime soon? No. And remember, anyone with a residence has a postal address - the same can't be said for an e-mail address.
I prefer sending and receiving love emails rather than paper. My emails are safe until my wife learns to hack my Linux box.
>The USPS may not be a "monopoly" in the classical sense of the word, but there are a lot of federal laws that ensure that it stays entrenched, and that bar competition. For example:
>The USPS is the only entity, by law, that is allowed to deliver first-class mail. That's a biggie - because I guarantee that otherwise, businesses would spring up to deliver local mail for a fraction of the 33c per letter we pay now.
I seriously doubt that. The economies of scale work in favor of the USPS. No organization could seriously and economically setup the infrastructure to collect, sort, and deliver mail for an area larger than a small town. OOOPS, you want to send to the next town? There's a surcharge (~$0.33) for out-of-area delivery.
>The "two-times" rule: wonder why USPS delivers for $3.20 and FedEx for $6-8? It's because private business cannot, by law, charge anything less than twice the USPS rate for comparable package delivery service. This is also huge: it again locks out businesses that could provide cheap local service, and keeps prices artificially high.
Call for citation, please. My father is a retired letter carrier, so I have some familiarity with USPS issues, and I have never heard this.
>This business about the USPS "turning a profit" is bunk. The accounting methods that the federal government uses would be illegal a dozen times over if they were attempted by private businesses. The USPS gets taxpayer money, no doubt about it. Besides, where would this "profit" go? It definitely doesn't go back into the federal budget. Is anybody here receiving dividends from holding stock in the USPS? I didn't think so. "Profit" is conceptually impossible in the context of government (or "pseudo-government", a euphemism some prefer) agencies.
Two points here. First, the "profits" are fed back into the system in the form of technology and equipment upgrades (for improved service!), so technically you are right, the USPS is not a for-profit corporation in the private-sector sense. Second, funds are allocated to the USPS from the federal budget. These funds are _only_ those funds required to pay back the USPS for "foregone profits" mandated by law. There are a number of exemptions and discounts mandated by law that Congress has determined the USPS should be reimbursed for. These are things like the congressional franking privilege, extremely low rates for non-profit organizations, etc. The funding given to the USPS reimburses the difference between what the USPS would have otherwise charged.
>The bottom line is, some people hate the service the USPS offers. Those people are already convinced. To those who like the service, I point out to the countless laws and benefits that favor the USPS, keeping it entrenched no matter how poor its service may get in the future, and locking out private businesses from doing an even better job at a cheaper price.
Once the USPS fails to satisfy the vast majority of people, the laws will change. This does not change the fact that the economies of scale and in-place infrastructure will continue to benefit the USPS.
Remember, as much as we sometimes hate government, there are certain things that are inherent government functions. Unfettered competition will have one result - the cities will get service and the rural areas (probably including some of the small towns just outside large cities) will get screwed. When a private company is willing to sign up to provide service to all addresses on an equal basis (like the USPS), then I say do it.
It's when you can get to the Post Office to pick up the package, which for me is Saturday...if I'm not away that weekend. Which means I don't place orders with places that don't specify how shipping is done.
There is no way a bunch of goverment employees will ever learn anything about customer service.
Gee if the USPS goes down who is going to deliver all those 'You have been pre-approved' junk mails I get OVER AND OVER AND OVER AND OVER? USPS is still making tons of cash. Spam on the Net sucks...but junk mail sucks even worse, theres no delete key, I actually have to get off my ass to go throw it all away! Theres all sorts of tricks to stop spam..how do you stop junkmail?!
You are not looking at the USPS in the bigger picture. It might be obsolete for some people, but there are people out there that still write letters, people who are not in urban areas, people who don't have computers. Plus what about all the people in other countries, my relatives in third world countries that barely have electricity let alone phones and email, how am I to communicate with them. Just because email is a growing form of communication doesn't mean that all other forms of communication have dropped off the face of the earth.
Someone has diliver all those atoms people
are ordering by the internet.
The USPS may or may be a major player.
For packages, USPS is by far the most convenient for me, for smaller stuff anyways. The local USPS is about a 1/2 mile from my work, 5 miles from my house... the "local" UPS is about 10 miles farther, on some obscure back road.
USPS has never damaged a package on me... although a Xmas card showed up in March one year (got caught in the sorter and was kinda crumpled), but once in 20 years?? Not bad.
UPS has damaged several things in shipping... not to mention the one package that never made it, and they could not locate. Scanned at the source and never seen again...
Email has its place... its great for quick little notes to friends & family, etc. But an email'ed "get well soon" card just doesn't have the same effect... And there are certain legal documents (I know, I just sent one out) that need an original signature and to be witnessed by a Notary... now how do you do *that* with email?!?
You have to remember that people in the US will
always need to contact people in other countries
that do not have the same level of technology.
Until everyone on the African and Asian continents
has an email account and a computer to access it
with, the USPS will be the means by which people
in the US contact them.
And don't we love it when these government
assigned addresses save lives (in the case of my father's heart attack when the paramedic team came to the rescue).
Actually those addresses were assigned by E911, not the PS. Until we had E911 service my rural address was merely a P.O. box, after E911 my street got a name, and I got an address.
This depends on your family.
I had a friend over last year for lunch with my grandfather and my mother came along (a girlfriend getting exposed to my mother without warning -- not cool)(this is a woman who got a copy of the standard CIA School of the Americas interrogation manual when her sons started dating because she considered it to be "full of helpful tips" for evaluating prospective girlfriends if she was ever able to corner them for more than 90 seconds)(needless to say, we did everything in our power to make sure that this never happened). My girlfriend made the mistake (again, I hadn't briefed her, I was expecting my grandfather to ask her lots of questions about fine arts and graphic design) at this lunch of saying how much she liked Macs and how ugly CDE was. You could have refrigerated tissue samples for several years in the look that she got from both my mother and grandfather. And then they attacked. She wound up fleeing the table crying and she stayed mortally afraid of both of them from that point on.
I always said that both mom and gramp were born too late to be BOFHs. If they had to use a GUI, they liked CDE. And they would attack anyone who carried the Apple or Next torch for the hell of it.
My mother is a Sun bigot (and a very tiresome one at that) and gramp has a shiny new 43P with 4.3. Both are on ISDN. Both check their email several times a day. Mom is 65 and gramp is 93.
I think that we are well on our way. The older generation is sharper than you think. The baby boomers are the morons.
This depends on your family.
I had a friend over last year for lunch with my grandfather and my mother came along (a girlfriend getting exposed to my mother without warning -- not cool)(this is a woman who got a copy of the standard CIA School of the Americas interrogation manual when her sons started dating because she considered it to be "full of helpful tips" for evaluating prospective girlfriends if she was ever able to corner them for more than 90 seconds)(needless to say, we did everything in our power to make sure that this never happened). My girlfriend made the mistake (again, I hadn't briefed her, I was expecting my grandfather to ask her lots of questions about fine arts and graphic design) at this lunch of saying how much she liked Macs and how ugly CDE was. You could have refrigerated tissue samples for several years in the look that she got from both my mother and grandfather. And then they attacked. She wound up fleeing the table crying and she stayed mortally afraid of both of them from that point on.
I always said that both mom and gramp were born too late to be BOFHs. If they had to use a GUI, they liked CDE. And they would attack anyone who carried the Apple or Next torch for the hell of it.
My mother is a Sun bigot (and a very tiresome one at that) and gramp has a shiny new 43P with 4.3. Both are on ISDN. Both check their email several times a day. Mom is 65 and gramp is 93.
I think that we are well on our way. The older generation is sharper than you think. The baby boomers are the morons who feel that it is their God-given right to inconvenience everyone else.
I think someone has watched Kevin Costnar's The Postman (or whatever that long horrible movie was) a little too much!
2-3 days.. HA. I sent a credit card bill in this way, becuase it was getting close to the due date. Instead of taking 2-3 days to get there it took more like 5-7 days. So i saved a couple of bucks by using the USPS, but now have to pay a $30 late fee.
What a great deal
You are perfectly free to send all your letters with alternate carriers. Even tax authorities now allow you to file on-line, so put your money where your mouth is - hire that kid down the street (they are called courier services), and see how much you are willing to pay for this freedom.
I have noticed that family and friends like to send greetig cards to eath other on special occasions. These cards invariably have colorful envelopes. And they also prefer to thank each other on stationary (with nice engraving sometimes) rather than e-mail. Postcards are nice too. I have also noticed that some people really like the pretty stamps.
The USPS is really the only public/consumer oriented service. The very expensive fedex and ups systems do not alow non-standard packaging, everything has to go in their standard envelopes, sized for legal documents. Everything that the non USPS services offer is business oriented. Even MailBoxes, etc. does most of their business with small businesses.
Noah
The Postal Service is far from disappearing any time soon... They are trying every way they can to hurt UPS and Fed Ex. The government REQUIRES UPS and FedEx to charge AT LEAST 2 times as much as the Gov does. Plus, the USPS can operate at a loss, and they don't care. UPS has had to make 10% of their stock public this week, just so they will have the money to fight the Gov in court. The USPS has no business trying to compete with the private sector in long distance package sending.
This post was made by an obviously uninformed person. The postal service profits in the billions. Every 1 cent increase nets the post office a billion dollars in revenue. They do not run a profit, because they are incredibly inefficient, and wouldn't last one day on the open market. They take all their profit and dump it into overseas markets to beat out competition from private companies such as fed ex, and ups.
I really wonder sometimes why companies don't ship with USPS Priority.. What's this single-minded mentality that drives any mail-order company to use "UPS, FedEx, UPS, FedEx, maybe Airborne Express..."? I know I'd pay a heck of a lot less for all that gear that comes cross-country from California. Maybe even under the UPS standard 5-7 business days (ground).
Of course, there could be a perfectly good reason for it. But I'm oblivious to it, because I don't work in the shipping department. =)
Lime
This may eventually go through the internet and UPS, but there are many other things that the US Postal Service currently gets that will be a bit more difficult.
How about that nasty letter from the electric company or phone company "We will not turn on your electricity until you pay up!" You cannot get these on the internet because you have no electricity or internet connection.
Paying bills by check will need to be replaced by electronic funds. This is easiest on utility payments or regular payments, but what about the occasional check to pay a relitive.
Some things are sent by businesses that are not junk mail - such as bills (though I consider that junk mail too), returned checks with the bank statement, and other various things.
These are a few of the things that will be amoung the most difficult. In fact, even more difficult than the junk mail due to -COUGH- spam -UCK-.
I have to agree. I generally don't feel particularly special when I get a letter. What I find important about mail is the communication, the inherent discourse, not the little curly ends on the captol Ls, or the flowers printed on the paper, so I appreciate many conversations, more than I do a few scented ones on pretty paper. Also, anything I can do to get my damned analog friends to acknowledgize that the internet carries even some vague amount of social importance is worth it. Of course, in a hundred years I can sell real letters for a ridiculous amount of money to someone on eBay....
What mind control? I was submitting to yahoo searches before I'd even heard of the internet!
Therefore, the precise opposite is true. We need a free market in the mail business because it is so important. We can't rely on the government to be as reliable or efficient as private companies.
So, you also support the current crypto policy I would assume. Because, really, there's no way to protect our mail if private companies start being the cole deliverers.
USPS is a godsend for packages. The other two
couldn't find their bunghole (or my house, apparently) with two hands & a GPS.
And they've never broken anything, which is MUCH more than I can say for UPS, which I think stands for U Poor Sod.
And until I can pay ALL my bills electronically - without a convenience fee, I'll be licking, er, sticking stamps. This aspect of the USPS I could do without. But then, there's no fooling the Net...it's hard to get away with 'check's in the mail'
>Second, although UPS or Fed-Ex may (or may not) be more reliable /
>convenient / whatever than the post office, they still do not deliver packages
>to my house unless I am there to receive them.
This is a voluntary plug for UPS: I mailordered some stuff months ago, and UPS was the only option. Few days later, I get home, yellow notice saying "We missed you." Call them up, have it redirected to work address. Order something again a bit later, same thing happens. Then, order a third thing: they drop off a yellow notice, *AND* automagically redirect it to work the next day.
Someone there has a clue about customer service. I liked that. I've never had anything mangled or lost by UPS or FedEx, but the USPS totally lost a box of books I'd sent thru the mail. [Address label managed to get scraped off, and they returned that label to me saying "uh, we don't know what this was attached to"] Even with a *detailed* description of that box, inside and out, it was permanently gone. Ugh.
Don't always complain about junkmail-- it keeps those letter prices down for the rest of us. If the USPS only delivered real letters and magazines, prices would be way up, and I wouldn't be able to heat my home in winter.
Out here in the maximum boonies, the USPS really shines. UPS is a lame dog, and FedEx is good but pricey. No-one but the USPS is going to brave the treacherous roads and middle-of-nowhere's on a daily basis.
My mailman does a lot more than deliver mail-he makes a daily check on the health of ailing neighbors and handles all the stamp sales and package pickups. I get better service from my rural route carrier than anyone gets from the walk-in post office.
The rural USPS folks also work with the Feds to track SSI fraud and the like: these are the people that really check regularly that no-one gets multiple welfare checks and that kind of thing.
I _like_ the USPS, they deliver me really good value.
Sure, first class personal letters are declining, but they weren't making any real money on that, so there's no great loss there. The post office actually loses money delivering a handwritten envelope.
;-)
Bills and junk mail are just as popular as ever, that's probably the bulk of the USPS's business. On top of that, they're pushing their premium services, Priority Mail and Express Mail, which I'm sure are profit centers. They also are expanding their line of products for sale (another profit center). They used to just sell mailing boxes, now you can get books, tee shirts, caps, posters, stamp collecting supplies, phone cards, they even sell a leather carry bag syled after the ones the postal workers carry. I'm just waiting for them to start offering commemerative firearms
----
Open mind, insert foot.
Any organization where people are expected to die in the line of duty, including the Military and Police forces, has procedures for notifying next of kin. They almost always send an officer to your house to express condolences in person.
In general, while letters are one way to add a more personal touch to communications, there are plenty of other ways, depending on the nature of the communications (many love letters are sent by FTD, for example). USPS is not going to thrive by the dwindling number of people using snail mail for personal correspondance. They're going to thrive from everyone's electric bill, and the package you just ordered.
----
Open mind, insert foot.
There is another cost that usually gets ignored: Billing Costs. These are in two parts. The first is a non-monetary one for the customer who must figure out how much to pay for a given piece of mail and then must make the payment. The second is the cost of the postal service to accept payment and make sure that there are not too many "free riders."
The nice thing about the current system of flat-rate billing for practically all 1st class letters, and only a weight-related one beyond that, is its ease of use for the customer who buys bunches of stamps and has to do practically no thinking at all. It also retains the ability to be relatively anonymous and untraceable. It is also very easy for the post-office to make sure that letters have been paid for.
A more complicated billing system would be possible to implement, but the costs involved in running it might overwhelm any advantages of efficiency that it might provide. Of course, an honor-system based payment scheme might work, but it might make people suspect that there are lots of "free riders" out there, even if they really aren't. Besides, it would impose a large (and hidden!) cost on the citizenry which would have to figure out and use the new system.
P.S. I don't think that personal letters are subsidizing junk mail. It is probably the other way around since their volume averages out fixed costs for distribution and thus makes the personal letters cheaper to send and receive.
www.postofficeonline.com
Sorry. :-)
In the past 6 months I've probably sent and received a total of 100 USPS packages with the only loss occuring on a package to canada. (probably got stuck in customs...)
As for e-mail versus snail mail, e-mail your love with a fine sentiment, nice reaction right? now buy some stationary and write them a letter. Even if your handwriting is horrid, I'm sure you'll like the reaction better. There's nothing like an unexpected letter/card/package.
Their business will go down, but the USPS is still good for some things.
I just sent a package to Puerto Rico, and UPS would have charged $18. The USPS charged under $5! (UPS=2 days, USPS=3 days)
And who else is going to carry all the crappy glossy PCMall catalogs we all get???
No way!
#1. Reading the handwriting of some people is really hard. I like computer screens
#2. Snail Mail: 33 cents. E-mail: Free
#3. Snail Mail: 2-4 days. E-mail: Instantaneous
#4. To reply to snail mail, you have to run around the house searching for pens, paper, envelopes, stamps, and your address book. Then you have to use a PEN and WRITE! That takes WAY longer than typing.
- A.P.
--
"One World, One Web, One Program" - Microsoft Promotional Ad
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
The US postal service will not be replaced by e-mail. First, I still cannot e-mail signed documents (or packages). That may change eventually, but right now, electronic signatures can easily be forged (so can real signatures, but they can be detected. But I still cannot e-mail packages).
Second, although UPS or Fed-Ex may (or may not) be more reliable / convenient / whatever than the post office, they still do not deliver packages to my house unless I am there to receive them.
Finally, the post office is more convenient than UPS of Fed-Ex. I live about a mile from the post office, and about 30 miles from my Fed-Ex office. Given that I don't run a business out of my house (and therefore they will not pick up from my house), I just can't see going to Fed-Ex to ship every package I send out. USPS is much more convenient.
I agree about the legal reasons why the U.S. Postal Service is not going away. For example, federal law often requires that you communicate via U.S. Mail in your dealings with the government (such as, e.g., your income tax -- last year was the first year that they allowed you to send your income tax return via FedEx or UPS, though it had to be at the IRS on tax day, a postmark wouldn't work). Similarly, federal credit card laws require you to communicate disputes via paper mail in order to preserve your rights, and 33 cents for a 1st class letter is a lot cheaper than $5 or so for UPS or FedEx.
On the other hand, if you don't get bulk advertising via U.S. Mail, you must be a hermit who never orders anything via mail order! For example, my mailbox was stuffed this afternoon when I checked it -- and after I discarded all the bulk advertising, there was one (1) single letter left in the mailbox -- a bill.
And since I'm paranoid about paying my bills via electronic transfer, that's another reason to keep the U.S. Postal Service around!
-E
Send mail here if you want to reach me.
Posted by Lord Kano-The Gangst:
Postal Investigators who can persue mail fraug allegations. UPS and FED-EX can't compete with that. I can send the most fraudulent scams every through UPS or FED-EX and at most it's only a state level felony. If I'm in another state it's really hard to find me. To do so using the USPS it's a federal crime and you have to worry about Postal Inspectors and the FBI!
Just think about that.
LK
I don't know about you, but Christmas cards cannot be replaced by e-cards and web-o-grams or what not. Besides, you can't tape ecards up all along the edge of the big mirror in the living room by the Christmas tree. (Well, you could, maybe, if your printer can print shiny ink and make raised cards, cut in the shape of Santa Claus, etc.)
Interesting assertion. Can you give references to other literature of the same genre, or discussions of this genre?
There's one thing you are not thinking off.. The REASON why the USPS is so much cheaper then UPS and FedEx is becouse, BY FEDERAL LAW, these companies MUST CHARGE 3 TIMES MORE then the USPS for the equiv. service..
The USPS IS out of date. It is a corperation without the responsibilities of ine..
-- I'm the root of all that's evil, but you can call me cookie..
email is for SHORT TEXT messages. Keep your multimegabyte binary emails the hell off my mail server!
I'm trying to educate people at the company I work for to use http or ftp for binaries. I've gone so far as to put a 1 meg email cap on anything outgoing.
Piss people off? yes. But email was not designed for heavy binary traffic.
etc. etc.
Not only that, but people greatly exaggerate the perceived lack of reliability of the USPS. Remember that on average, the USPS delivers over half a BILLION pieces of mail a day. Even a small fraction of a percentage of that mail lost is a large amount. FedEX looses mail too, you know -- Seel ?s=v/nm/19990719/od/fedex_tests_1.html
http://dailynews.yahoo.com/headlines/od/story.htm
(Sorry, I would anchor this in but slashdot keeps chewing up the url and spitting it back out null.)
Reminder -- Use your ZIP+4 code to help keep mailing costs down!
*cough* um, actually, I have a whole bunch of saved love emails. So does she.
The future is today, my friend.
-Mars
It's the last one that gets me.
The process of writing a letter - a single letter - takes at least an hour. Getting an envelope, finding paper with nothing written on the back of it, finding a pen that works, finding a different pen that doesn't result in hand cramps after ten minutes.
Thinking of what to say. Writing very slowly and thinking everything out as you go, because there's no backspace and you can't fix any mistakes so you'd better not make any in the first place. Thinking of more stuff to say, because this letter is going to Feel Important to whomever receives it and thus it'd damn well better have Something Important In It, or they're going to wonder why you bothered to write and spend hours trying to read between the lines.
Finding the person's current address. Remembering that they moved, and that the address book isn't updated, and that their new address is on a piece of paper in an envelope somewhere. Writing the address. Trying to remember where you last saw the stamps. Putting on the stamps. Waiting for a few days until you left early enough for work that you can take the time to stop at the mail room on the way out of the apartment complex and drop the mail off.
Damn. The only messages *that* important are graduation, wedding, baby, and death announcements. Is it a coincidence that they have pre-printed cards for those?
I doubt the USPS will ever truly go away, much as most of us would like it to, but I can see it eventually living among the horse-buggies, steam trains, and other overpriced services catering to romantics and tourists.
-Mars
I prefer email, myself. Pretty handwriting is just the presentation, and has nothing to do with content.
Meanwhile, snail mail is SLOW. That's a huge disadvantage.
Yeah, politics is one thing, but I'm not sure I want more than three major small package shipping companies. Shoot, in one day, my dad's business can be visited by UPS, USPS and FedEx. Privatizing the phone system makes sense, but I'd really rather not have more delivery companies visit, as it is ecologically unsound in the first place. USPS really don't do a bad job for me, I have never lost an item in the mail that I remember.
The USPS can claim one thing that FedEx, UPS, and e-mail can't: a cancelled stamp can be admitted in court as a certified document, unlike the others. However, even if e-mail can gain this certification (through PGP, perhaps?) the USPS will remain. You must remember, it is a government agency, and they never go away.
MSM
You must remember that a cancelled stamp can be admitted as evidence (as opposed to hearsay). This is a critical service that the others can't provide. Until they can, the USPS will still be around.
Matt
Actually, it is open to competition. Look at UPS, FedxEx, Airborne, DHL, and dozens of other courier services. And while the competitors offer better services in some areas, their costs are orders of magnitude higher and they still don't offer some services which you get with the mail (most notably free daily pick-up and drop-off).
USPS will continue for a very long time, I think. It's still the cheapest way to send packages in the US unless you count throwing them really far (and I might add that it's one of the cheapest postal services in the world; consider the UK's Royal Mail for example).
The main problem with the service is that it is technologically backward, compared to the competing courier services. In particular its computer system is abysmal, though there is an intranet project in the works (last I heard they were even going with WebObjects as the base); this will allow for package tracking and such.
Yes, other courier services are faster. But given the choice, I think most of us would still prefer to use the USPS in most cases for sending non-urgent packages. It's sort of the low end of courier services; popular, cheap, and perhaps not as fast as the higher-end stuff but it still gets the job done.
Not everything that is delivered via the United States Postal Service is junk mail and spam. I personally get 2 different magazine subscriptions, one of which is the Linux Journal(Which speaking of, I should finish reading it any minute now). What about resumes sent to companies, letters sent telling someone they were excepted to a college, or report cards for the school kids. All of these things maninly aren't online yet, and all of them are important to the people they deal with. These are just some reasons why the USPS won't become obsolete, at least not in the next 25+ years.
And speaking of shipping, I believe @ CheapBytes, there is only one way to ship, and that is via USPS, costing you 5 bucks in most cases. Pretty cheap to me.
--
Scott Miga
Like Priority Mail... the de-facto standard for auctioneers using eBay, Yahoo, Auction Universe, etc...
How about Certified and/or Registered mail?
How about the fact that less than 35% of households in the U.S. actually have a computer much less internet access. (thats close to the current stat isn't it?)
Remember years ago when people claimed that computers would virtually eliminate paper in the workplace? In fact, paper use increased 10 fold. Same thing is happening to the Post Office. The actual packages they are transporting may be different, but they are just as busy as ever.
Besides, its kinda hard to stick an electronic greeting card on the fireplace mantle.
The USPS has had a priority and express mail tracking system installed and working for 5-6 months now. They also have auto-insurance up to $50, more available at a much cheaper price than the other major shippers.
You're wrong about the envelopes. If you use a standard envelope, $3.20 will only ship 2 pounds of material by priority mail. But, if you pick up one of the flat rate envelopes from the post office, the postal service will ship anything you put in the envelopes regardless of weight, for $3.20 (provided of course it's not contraband, munitions, hazardous material, or anything else illegal).
So, if you can fit a 20 pound gold brick in one of their priority mail envelopes, they will ship it to a US destination for $3.20, but it's not guaranteed to get there in 2-3 days.
"I sure hope not. Why should it cost to mail a letter across town as it does to mail to Alaska or Hawaii or even just to the other coast? What airline would sell flat-rate tickets to anywhere?"
;-).
It used to be that way. Ben Franklin did a detailed analysis sometime around 1780 (IIRC) and showed that it was more efficient to use a single stamp price. I don't have a reference handy but it should be in your 6th grade history book
sPh
"Arguments about the value of mergers aside, you'll notice my original message stressed the unnecessarily high cost of local delivery, which could otherwise be handled by small businesses.
Question: how much of the mail you send goes farther than 100 miles? People tend to send bills, letters to friends and relatives, and "paid by sender" mail. Bills go to their local phone company, local cable company, etc. Letters and greeting cards to local friends are also common."
To merge with another thread farther up the discussion, this is exactly why the power to create a post office was written into the US Constitution. It was believed that the social benefits of having an accessible, universal communication device that by definition served the entire nation outweighed any savings from local delivery efficiencies.
That was true in 1790, and IMHO there is a strong argument that it is still true today. The breakup of AT&T can't be lightly dismissed in this context; there is very little evidence that it has turned out to be a good thing for the average consumer (keeping in mind that "breakup" != "entry of MCI into the LD market).
sPh
Sorry if my post seemed flame-like - that wasn't my intention. And your point is quite valid. But from my perspective, I think this person
3 9252&cid=259
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=99/07/22/01
covered what I was thinking better than I could at this point.
sPh
Hey! It can't be obsoleted yet, I need my monthly issue of Linux Journal.
I'm afraid that by the time a net connection is considered part of the house a T4 to your house would be considered a "slow connection". (Now that would be cool... at leaset a T4 to every house... and could you immagine the bandwidth of the backbones?) Oh, and by then that network appliance might include a "replicator", so that you could recieve packages too... Maybe I'll live to see that. (Maybe not.)
Loren Osborn
Iit's gotta be most expensive to deliver mail (or electricity and telephone services for that matter) to rural areas. If folks out on the farm had to pay ten times as much to mail their payments in to the phone company as I did (living in the city), it just wouldn't be fair. Some things are better priced if you spread out the cost and we all share and share alike. Pretty much any communications infrastructure falls into this category.
>Airlines.... From California, you can usually get to Bangkok cheaper than you can get to New York.
Yeah. And from California, you can get to New York cheaper than you can get to Des Moines or Omaha, or any other place about half way there. What gives? Must be the strange laws of the marketplace in action.
Let's say it does cost ten times as much to send a letter to my a guy out on the farm than it does to send the same letter to a friend across town. If I pay $2.00 for one and $0.20 for the other, I'm subsidizing the rural guy when I send him a letter. He's going to be paying more for postage than I am, so he'll have to raise the price of his corn and soy beans, which will affect anyone who eats.
Hmmm... There's also going to be a lot of people living in places in between those two extremes ($0.20 and $2.00). Isn't there already enough complexity in postage prices? Why add more?
Seeing how I just had to drop off a check in the mailbox today, I don't think USPS is in any trouble. Yes, you can pay bills online, but I MUCH prefer writing a check and mailing it off. Besides, is there any other way with a credit card company? What are you going to do.. give them a credit card number? I don't give my bank account information to ANYTHING. It's a like a social security number. If you don't REALLY need it, then you're not even sniffing it.
--
Never hit your grandmother with a shovel, for it leaves a bad impression on her mind...
The USPS saved US$3M on a project a couple of years ago. Anyone have a link?
Funny the submitter thought that the USPS would only be good for "nothing but junk mail" because I get multitudes more junk email than snail mail.
--
Aaron Gaudio
"The fool finds ignorance all around him.
"Every man is a mob, a chain gang of idiots." - Jonathan Nolan, Memento Mori
Not only that, but just last week I was doing a CD swap with a fellow living in Taipei, Taiwan. I'd absentmindedly procrastinated sending off my end of the trade, and realized on Saturday that I'd let it sit for _weeks_. I ran down to the postal mini mart (conveniently located inside the neighborhood K-Mart) and sent the package via Global Priority mail. Yeah, it cost my 6 bucks, but the package I mailed from Detroit on Saturday was in this guys hands in Taipei on Tuesday. Detroit to Taipei in 3 days for $6. You can't beat that with a stick!
In the US today, it is possible to pick up a telephone, dial a few numbers, and be connected to one of hundreds of competing long-distance companies. In some areas the local phone service can also be bought from multiple carriers.
So, why is it so difficult to privatize mail service? The answer is politics, not technology.
---- "If we have to go on with these damned quantum jumps, then I'm sorry that I ever got involved" - Erwin Schrodinger
While issuing email addresses is technologically problematic (now there's a server I don't want to maintain), ...
Since we're talking about USA here, it isn't even 300 million people.
It should be possible, given the budget and time, to make a system which would allow and even handle 300 million e-mail addresses. Remember that AOL handles (for your favorite value of "handle") only an order of magnitude less already.
And, BTW, it wouldn't be just one server.
The questions should be: Is this the way you want your tax money to be spent? Are there other, better ways of spending that money?
I'll agree with that USPS is the best way to ship packages. For me they've always been more reliable, and faster than UPS, and signifcantly less expensive that FedEx. Recently, the fact that they offered USPS shipping was the sole reason I bought Civ:CTP from Linux Central instead of Linux Mall. I'll almost always choose the USPS shipping vendor over the UPS shipping only one.
I bet long distance phone service will suffer more than mail.
;)
Exactly. In fact, for the last 4-5 months I've been paying AT&T $3 a month. I don't think I can even get rid of LD service. Though I'd like to save that $3 and just use my SprintPCS cell.. Maybe it's time to ditch the landline altogether..
Doom is awesome, no matter what you compare it to.
Actually, I'm in Canada, and I always insist that
packages are sent USPS. Otherwise I get shafted
with UPS's brokerage fees, and other nonsense. I once had to pay ~$30US for brokerage on a motherboard someone gave me... and the worst part is, the motherboard wasn't even worth that...
-lo
-lo
I don't know if this has been mentioned, but another thing to keep in mind is that only the UPS can deliver to P.O. Boxes, and some federal agencies, such as the Federal Student Aid Programs, use the USPS for important mail.
I! Tego Arcana Dei.
Heh, UPS strikes *every time* the Teamsters' contract is up almost. Heck, the other shipping companies actually make plans for when it's contract renewal time at UPS. The others aren't any better, after a stint at RPS when I started college, there's no way in hell I'd *ever* voluntarily ship a package through them, I saw just about every single thing we were told *not* to do in training done in the first few hours, and they're strictly business to business. The companies who ship to personal addresses care even less.
I find it unlikely that the Postal Service will ever be made "obsolete", even with the growing proliferation of email. It'll always be necessary for sending physical packages (co-existing with UPS, FedEX, and others), and it will continue to be the only *official* way to send legal documents from point A to point B.
:-)
Current law states that each citizen of the United States must be reachable by a mailbox. Until laws require ownership of an email account, then it'll continue to be a necessary way to send official documents.
And bulk advertising is kept to a minimum by it's astronomical costs through the medium...
I don't make the laws (actually I don't even always follow them... :-). Recall the last time you submitted your 1040, or any other official form... The IRS, and other branches of the government, need a place to get a hold of you.
By not having a PO box, then you're not paying your taxes, and thus aren't a law abiding citizen. Even homeless citizens without taxable income still need to submit the necessary paperwork to prove their exemptions....
This is true. Mailing something has to be one of my least liked things to do. I will put off sending something until the last minute. I have a package for a friend of mine from last christmas which I still have not mailed... He'll be here eventually, screw it.. he can pick it up himself.
However, when it comes to getting a worth while response from someone or some company, you cannot help but beat a actual physical letter. e-mail means nothing and can easily be blown off. However for someone to take the time and write a letter and mail it, they have to take notice.
"One of these days... milkshake... BOOM!!!!" - emb
singlehandedly keeping the Post Office in business. Everything I buy from eBay is paid for via USPS money order, and a good 80% of the things I buy are shipped to me via it. Online auctions are most definitely helping increase the Post Offices' business, even if their actual letter delivering is going down.
v2sw7CUPhw5ln6pr5Pck4ma7u7LFw0m6g/l7Di5e6t5Ab6TH.
Obsolete? Not while they have the yellow jersey...
;-)
-adam a
Most important about the USPS of course is that they are going to win this years Tour de France, but, to be honest, the only reason for this short note is that I need to add the following statement:
Vorsprung durch Tomate!
The USPS is not going away because it is a government-sanctioned monopoly and they actually defend their turf.
As someone mentioned, the USPS does take legal action against companies who use alternative services -- like UPS and FedEx -- for regular mail. I think it is not too great a stretch to suppose that if/when all those unionized government employees start feeling the pinch of reduced mails thanks to email/digital transmission of data, they *will* act to protect their jobs.
I certainly don't anticipate that happening anytime soon, but let's not be naive: there are millions of jobs dependent upon the USPS. No government bureaucracy has ever been voluntarily closed down. They will protect their turf -- their jobs -- at all costs if the need should ever arise.
But in the end, I just don't think this is a likely scenario. The need for delivery of actual (non-digital) mail is far too great to simply evaporate.
I agree completely with those who have suggested that what we really need is the free market in the area of postal services. It is simply preposterous to even suggest that a monopoly is in any way essential for mail delivery.
DFL
Never send a human to do a machine's job.
Could be. My Mom has bought a computer and is online since that seems to be her only hope of getting her offspring to write in a timely fashion. It usually works too--techno-junkies the lot of us!
I must disagree: my granparents have 'net access, and use it to email all us little grandkids. It's one of the best ways to (almost) instantly keep in touch!
;)
Email is really prevailant now. You can get a Hotmail acct, and check your mail that way (as long as you can find a computer somewhere with 'net access. But again, it's really good for small notes, but the USPS is here, 'cause I don't see Bell Atlantic emailing me my phone bill anytime soon (although my ISP does
Northeast USA Computer Show Schedule
http://www.vermontel.com/~vengnce/shows
The USPS got a bad rap in the past, but I think they've cleaned up a lot, at the same time that the others have been getting lots worse. Just scan deja for horror stories. I've read of FedEx leaving laptops sitting on the porch in the rain when it said "Adult Signature" - UPS leaving packages labeled "controlled contents" containing assault rifles at the front stoop of a gun dealer, etc. Most of these people have had no problems with USPS.
I used to work for a local PC clone shop, and we received on average 40 packages from UPS a day. They usually lost about one package a month; just no idea where it went. Most times it would show up again, but weeks later.
I've started using USPS whenever I can, and have had no problems.
The USPS may not be a "monopoly" in the classical sense of the word, but there are a lot of federal laws that ensure that it stays entrenched, and that bar competition. For example:
The bottom line is, some people hate the service the USPS offers. Those people are already convinced. To those who like the service, I point out to the countless laws and benefits that favor the USPS, keeping it entrenched no matter how poor its service may get in the future, and locking out private businesses from doing an even better job at a cheaper price.
>(I rarely use a spell checker and rarely need
>one), but as for writing... I can't handwrite
>somethings at 70 words per minutes, but I can
>type that fast, and usually do, at least when
>I'm dashing of a quick note to someone
Should be dash OFF a quick note...
Hee hee heee..
If tits were wings it'd be flying around.
For those of you in the US who slept during civics class:
The power to create the postoffice is explicitly mentioned in the US constitution (unlike much of what the government does these days). The founders felt that universal mail delivery was one of the foundations of a democracy. Thus any postal system--even if it consisted of a bunch of private companies--would wind up heavily regulated, and thus expensive to run. The current quasi-indendent corporation is probably the best solution, given this mandate.
Currently, only the USPS can carry normal letters. The argument is that if competition were allowed, competitors would "cream skim" the profitable routes and services such that the USPS could no longer be self-sustaining (since it must, by law, deliver to each US resident), or alternatively the USPS would have to raise rates for outlying areas. Since congress has to approve rates, the latter simply isn't going to happen; there are too many sparsely populated states with two senators each.
we pay enough damn taxes, we dont need anymore
Personaly, i still use the USPS from time to time, Fedex is ok, but UPS has been on my bad side lately, they have distroyed like 20 of my dad's packages in the last year alone, and we never had problems with them before that strike that they had.
I seem to be the only one here who watches Modern Marvels.
If I remember correctly (probably not), the USPS handles as many mail items (letters, packages, etc) as in 3 weeks as UPS does in a year... and UPS does 3 times more business than FedEX.
Methinks they have nothing to worry about.
-= PsychLo =- x86?? xor sp,sp inc sp push sp
I fell for a girl in a big way over the net, and I still have the letters she sent me (and the copies of the ones I sent her).
Although my relationship with the girl never advanced beyond email, the fact that relationships are created between people in faraway places eventually gives tons of money to the phone company and postal service, because there's nothing more personal than a delivered gift and even a phone call works far better than typed words.
Of course any letter I sent anyone will be typed on the computer. No human being on this planet could ever, ever read my handwriting. Sorry.
D
----
Yeah, unless you actually need it to get there.
If the usps screws up your priority mail delivery, you're pretty much SOL.
In my personal experience, it takes the USPS one to two days to recover a priority mail package that bears the wrong zip code. This has happened to me twice.
When they lose a package, it's just plain gone. Don't expect anybody to have any clue where it was last seen. They have no tracking system for Priority packages.
Express mail is quite a bit more expensive, and USPS claims a tracking system is "in the works".
The extra cost of UPS or FedEx buys you a lot of assurances that the USPS is unable or unwilling to give you.
Right now, I'm wondering where the heck the book i mailed a girl for her birthday went. The USPS is not on my list of friends today.
It's more like "Two to three days, or maybe not at all"
This is just like television, only you can see much further.
I can't believe i didn't see that when I reread what I'd written.
That's one to two WEEKS to recover from a bad zip code.
This is just like television, only you can see much further.
Well said. But regardless, it only takes UPS a few hours to figure out it.
This is just like television, only you can see much further.
While I email a whole lot more than I snail mail, its very unlikely that snail mail will ever become truely obsolete. There will always be someone you need to converse with who won't have an access.
My girlfriend works at a summer camp, about 50 miles from civilization, there probably will never be a computer at the camp. Thus leaving me with only pen and paper to contact her.
All editorial writers ever do is come down from the hill after the battle is over and shoot the wounded.
So if the Constitution said the government had the power to shoot people at random would that be ok too? My question is not whether it is Constitutional. My question is whether it is right. I hope you see a difference between the two.
The same can be said of Microsoft. The vast majority of users are perfectly happy with Windoze and can't imagine any alternative. So the simple fact that you like them doesn't mean that they couldn't be better.
The difference is that at least Microsoft does have some competition to keep them at least somewhat honest. Imagine if Microsoft were granted a legal monopoly on the OS business how much Windows would suck.
I think we get used to whatever we use on a regular basis. If the Post Office monopoly were broken up, I think you'd see dramatice price cuts and vastly increased relieablity. There's a reason why UPS and FedEx are preferred by most businesses: they have to earn their customers. The Post Office has the first class mail market guarunteed, so they can afford to do a half-ass job in the parcel market. If they lose market share, what do they care? It's next to impossible to fire a government employee anyway, so why should they care?
Seriously! All we need is some "new" mail company with 1 year of experience to start delivering mail to some 300 million Americans. Yeah, that'll work.
OK, look. If you want to send your mail with the USPS, fine. Don't force me to. If I want to pay Fedex or UPS or the kid down the street to deliver a letter, what business do you or the government have telling me I can't? It's really that simple. No matter how good the Post office is, there's no reason I should be forced to use it.
Actually, it is open to competition. Look at UPS, FedxEx, Airborne, DHL, and dozens of other courier services. And while the competitors offer better services in some areas, their costs are orders of magnitude higher and they still don't offer some services which you get with the mail (most notably free daily pick-up and drop-off)
Um, private corporations are legally prohibited from doing first-class mail. That would explain why there's no competition in that area. And that would also explain why they're the only ones who do daily delivery and pickup: most of the mail is first-class, and its illegal for other companies to handle it.
Yes, other courier services are faster. But given the choice, I think most of us would still prefer to use the USPS in most cases for sending non-urgent packages. It's sort of the low end of courier services; popular, cheap, and perhaps not as fast as the higher-end stuff but it still gets the job done.
If it's so great, why should the government have to give it a legal monopoly? If I want to have someone else deliver my mail, by what right does the government tell me I can't? All the good things the USPS does could be done just as well as the private sector. In addition we'd see the benefits that result from an open, competitive market. I'd be willing to be money that you'd see prices drop and reliablility improve. The USPS is really not reliable at all. Mail regularly comes mangled or doesn't come at all, and there's nothing you can do about it.
If folks out on the farm had to pay ten times as much to mail their payments in to the phone company as I did (living in the city), it just wouldn't be fair.
So if I choose to live in a lot in the middle of nowhere, and it takes the mailman half an hour to pick up my mail, you're saying that it's "not fair" to charge me more for that service? How is that? If I choose to live in the boonies, how is it "fair" for the rest of you to subsidize me? It might be convenient, and it is nice for me, but it most definitely not "fair" by any definition I can think of.
The reason we give the post office the upper hand is because we can't trust a business outside the government with our nations mail. If they went under the country would be screwed... so we keep USPS.. and as a matter of fact I think they do a great job.
That's funny. We trust private corporations with our food, our banks, our health care, and our networks. The nation would be in trouble without those. Do you think we should nationalize those too?
In a free market, there would be several carriers offering a variety of services. That's a hell of a lot more reliable than a single, monolithic government agnency. How do we know the USPS won't go down at some point? If they did, there would be no alternatives in the first class mail space, because it's illegal to deliver first class mail.
Therefore, the precise opposite is true. We need a free market in the mail business because it is so important. We can't rely on the government to be as reliable or efficient as private companies.
The FDA is charged with keeping food safe, and banks are completely dependant on the gov't.
But there's not a government provider of all banks. And it certainly is not illegal to open a competing bank.
Networks don't have as much gov't control, but the wires themselves do--AT&T ring a bell (pun intended)? Or Portland requiring that wires be opened to competition? The effects may be good for business, but the gov't is running the show.
But your point was that if we let the private sector provide the service, that they could go under and we would be without service. This is true in all of these markets. Yet we don't employ government farmers, bankers, or long-distance companies. Regulation is a long way from nationalization.
Um, *how* could the USPS go under? Either the gov't would have to collapse, or it would have to be purposely dismantled, and in both cases the laws concerning sending mail follow it.
The chances of several mail-delivery firms all going under simultaeneously and so fast that no one could take their place is equally small. A company the size of UPS doesn't just "go under." They lose money gradually, and other businesses take over their marketshare as they decline. Of course, strikes can cripple a carrier, but that's partly because labor laws prevent companies from hiring replacements.
And what incentive would there be for me to use them over the USPS?
Who says you have to. We can privatize the USPS and leave it intact. If you're happy with it, then go right ahead and keep using it.
The point is that some of us are not happy with the USPS and want an alternative. We are prevented by law from doing so. That's not right.
As for why another company would be more efficient: they've been a government monopoly for 220 years. How can they possibly be efficient. They've never had any particular incentive to keep prices down or provide good service.
$.33 provides a lot of potential profit. The average household gets at least 4 letters a day. That's $1 per household, per day, 365 days a year. By my calculations, that's a more than $25 billion industry. That's a lot of potential profit if someone can find more efficient ways of doing it.
Look any socialist country. All state-run industries are bloated, inefficient, and under productive. What's so special about the USPS that it should be different?
Oh, and another thing---there's nothing stopping any new mail delivery services from starting up, but I don't see any. Perhaps it's not as cost-effective as you think?
It's illegal. There actually was a startup in the seventies that tried to do first class mail deliveries (letters, not packages) in New York (This may not be quite right. Don't remember where I read this). The government shut them down. The fact is that it's illegal to compete with the post office in first class mail delivery. That's stupid.
urban delivery subsidises the rural post.
People keep saying this like it's a good thing. I don't understand it. If it costs more to deliver mail to a given location, then that person should be charged more. The same thing is true with bananas. I pay more for my bananas here in Minnesota than someone would in Central America. Is that a bad thing?
The fact is that different geographical areas have different costs and benefits. Cities are more crowded, dirtier, and have less open space. The country has higher mail service, less access to technology, and other problems. We balance the options and make a choice. Why should we single out one piece of that equation and subsidize it? Does the government pay me for the lousy air I have to breathe or the lack of peace and quiet? The fact is that I chose to live where I do and I chose to bear the costs of living there. Why should someone who chooses to live in the country be any different?
Therefore, the precise opposite is true. We need a free market in the mail business because it is so important. We can't rely on the government to be as reliable or efficient as private companies.
That's been my position all along.
So, you also support the current crypto policy I would assume. Because, really, there's no way to protect our mail if private companies start being the cole deliverers.
I think that crypto should be unregulated. Anyone should be allowed to use any strngth encryption they please with no strings attached.
As for the privacy issue, certainly there is a possiblity that a private mail carrier will go reading you mail. But the same possibility exists with the USPS. I don't see any reason why the private alternative is worse.
I work for a company that supplies the sorters and sort control computers to companies like USPS, UPS, FedEx, RPS, DHL, and the like and I'd have to agree with you.
Even if the very improbably happens and letters become obselete, there is still a huge amount of larger parcels being pushed through USPS...
------------------------------------------
Reveal your Source, Unleash the Power. (tm)
It isn't the Government...unless you count the UN as such.
That's right, it's a UN plan that the US Government has largely laughed at.
Tom Byrum
Up here Canada Post has been pumping commercials promoting the use of letters and touting slogans like "There's nothing that says it like a letter". I think they are feeling a bit of the drain and are just trying to catch it early. I can't remember the last time I sent a letter via the surface. It's all e-mail now. Sign 'o the Times.
--
Shabbs
Mark
The USPS leaves a delivery notice and I pick up the package at the local post office at my convenience the next day. This is much easier.
UPS may be cheaper or more convenient for shippers but they seem to have no interest in making life easier for the people who receive the packages.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
I can't see the USPS going away until we have widly used, strong, legaly binding digital sigs. The only reason I ever send snail mail is because something requires a signiture or it needs to be send via certified mail. By the time congress gets around to overhauling the crypto laws most people will have internet access. Sure, a few will still use snail mail, but most will find the speed and ease of email much to convenient. Yeah, the model T was a quality car with lots of character (and its still around), but it just isn't practical any more - the same will be said about hand written letters in the future.
just my $0.02
\forall code \in C, \frac{\Delta readability(code)}{\Delta t} < 0
I submit (based on my own, meandering experience) that the USPS is handling more mail than ever. This is based on 3 things:
:)
1) I got the eBay bug BIG about 6 months ago, and now I not only buy stuff, but I sell stuff that I would ordinarily sell via "garage sale." And every single transaction, save 1, I have sent/had delivered via USPS. One was UPS, but only because it was a very expensive item and the seller stipulated it had to be done that way. This has created situations like me getting four pieces of my MP3-mobile in my US Mail in one day! First-class postage is just not matched in price/performance by UPS/FedEx/Airborne Express/DHL/etc.
2) I only write one check every month, for my rent because my landlord company is tech-stupid. Other than that, every single bill I pay (about 15 a month) is done electronically. How is this relevent? Well, when I pay electronically, my bank still does paperwork tranactions via mail with the companies I pay, and all those companies continue to send me statements (and useless bundled ads for miscellaneous crap.)
3) I still get roughtly 20 pieces of "junk mail" in my box a week... and I'm fairly sure that some of these people have gotten my address from Net-based vendors!
Yes, the USPS is alive and well. As long as the customers keep their expectations reasonable... unlike the woman who expected Priority Mail to maek it overnight halfway across the country with her son's medication in it. DUH! Quit holding up the rest of us in line with your inability to read the sign that says, "Most packages in 2-3 days." FWIW, my only complaint is that this CAN and DOES mean 8 days to towns like Laramie, Wyoming.
SlashSigTheorem: Humorous, Political, Critical, Constructive- If you have a
I believe last year was actually the first year that the USPS turned a profit. They're actually expanding.
Think about all the things that are being sent in the mail. I try to do as much online as possible, but companies like Utilities are unlikely to organize any form of web payment. So even if we just concentrate on bills, think of all the more bills we have today than we used to. Instead of a light bill and maybe a water bill many of us have two and three phone bills, pager bills, internet service bills, etc. As life gets more complicated we tend to use the USPS much more often.
I honestly don't expect them to be obsolete anytime soon (or not so soon).
geisel
The park service is just as well run as the USPS, and manages to stretch the money they get from Fee Areas to cover all of their costs and then some. Other than the IRS and SSA they take in more money for the government than any other agency. Sure, the accounting just puts their excess funds into general accounting, where they don't get official credit for it, but lets give credit where credit is due.
Legally prohibited from delivering first class mail???
Haven't you ever absolutely needed to get an important document somewhere at the last minute? FedEx may be expensive, but they'll take anything anywhere in very little time.
Although if it isn't extremely important, I'm for the USPS all the way.
I love a written letter. One of my friends is gone until Thanksgiving to a lake in Manitoba. Though she has e-mail, we keep in contact via letter writing. It's so much more personal; I mean, admit it, do you get the same feeling from receiving an e-mail that you do from a letter? I certainly don't. With a letter, I can sit down wherever I want and enjoy trying to decipher someone's handwriting.
There's simply no comparison.
I don't see why this would be more welcome as a written letter than as an email message. That sort of thing would be typed anyways, the only difference between it and an email message would be the letterhead and the fact that you could hold it.
The message has plenty of impact right there on the page in a supposedly impersonal electronic medium. Why would a a grief-stricken parent care whether they were informed via typewritten letter
or email.
Heck, a while back, the message would've probably been sent via another form of email -- in a telegram.
-Z
The subject says it all. USPS Priority mail is one of the greatest things ever. It's far cheaper than USPS or Fedex and gets there within 2 to 3 days. For more than the weight limit (2 pounds?) It's not all that expensive either. Sure, if you need it there overnight, it's not the way to go, but if you just need it there, USPS is really great. The fact is, computers are great but sometimes you need your penguin mints and you can't FTP them!
Jim
If I'm not back again this time tomorrow...
I can't seem to figure out why people who aquire a technology such as the internet consider everything that is of a lower technology level to be inferior and therefore obsoltete. Less than 50% of the US uses the internet on a regular basis, there are actually people who dont have cable television (gasp! the horror!!). The internet is still the toy of the rich and middle class. It isnt the worldwide phenomenon that most people think it is, most of the planet has no idea what email is or even how to type on a keyboard. I still prefer getting papers letters than electronic files, I also like my hand wound pocket watch. With my watch and letters I dont need to worry about any millennium bugs.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
Not too long ago, I heard it said (dang, don't remember where I heard that) that 5% of all packages (not letters) now shipped by the USPS are eBay transactions. My wife discovered eBay and now I'd say that number is a bit low :-) Seriously, the free, self-adhesive, priority mail boxes you can get at the post office has got to be one of the best marketing coups the USPS has had in a long time. They make life soooo easy. Also, be aware that there are a couple box sizes (6-9" squarish type boxes) that are not available at your post office - you have to order them by phone and they'll send them to you free.
a. For those of you who are concerned with the Post Office being a monopoly: Do some research into how the post office got started. Sorry, but the federal government is the only agency that is going to be able to ship ALL first class mail (FedEx will never ship mail to U.S. Navy ships in the middle of the ocean, that's what the Fleet Post Offices do.
b. The USPS ships more tonnage in a single day then FedEx, UPS, Airbourne Express, etc. do in a year.
c. When you get junk mail in your US mail, is it spam?
Brought to you by Frobozz Magic Penguin Fodder.
Thanks to sites like eBay, people are sending more mail than ever. Think of all those checks that people are mailing. Sure, eventually, this can all be done electronically, but not for a few years, at least. Also, while big businesses may get better deals for packages from UPS and the likes, most consumers are better off with US Mail. Again, eBay and Amazon Auctions result in many more small packages from the USPS.
Besides transmission of non-virtual things, bandwidth is the other reason the post office or equivalent physical-mail services will be around for a long time.
Say in the near future I've put my 500 records/CDs on a half-dozen MP3 DVDs, and I want to share them with my friends. Even assuming I only have cool friends with high-bandwidth connections, I bet they'll be happier to receive a small package in the mail then to have to wait a week until they've downloaded everything (my server will be happier too).
Same goes for movies, pictures, maps. It's best not to understimate the storage capacity of the physical world.
This post was a classic example of a political art form flourishing in modern times. Seems the Americans don't like you conspiring to blow up their buildings but they do permit freedom of speech. So terrorists just use encryption to communicate on the internet. This time it just happened to end up on Slashdot.
You'll note that the first letter of each paragraphs spells out "ART DO TBO", an obvious message to "Art" to kill someone with initials "TBO".
Anyway - it's an interesting idea, but it's hardly supportable on any level. The Revelation of St. John the Divine might make good religion, but it makes lousy history and an even lousier spy story.
Repeal any laws that give USPS special powers so that other companies are free to compete.
If you want to get rid of the USPS's special privileges, then you will have also have to get rid of their special responsibilities. Does the UPS man walk down your street every day? Is FedEx required to charge you the same price regardless of where you live? If you permit these other carriers to deliver letters, are you going to require them to pick them up from ANYWHERE and deliver them to ANYWHERE for 33c apiece?
Are other carriers recognized by the Constitution? Do other nations recognize them as governmental bodies? If Uganda halts delivery of UPS packages, does that have the same effect on national policy as if they halted delivery of mail bearing U.S. stamps?
If someone else thinks they can make a profit delivering letters, I think we should permit it, but I think they should also be REQUIRED to service the same population as the USPS. Otherwise other companies take away the profitable routes, the USPS can't get rid of the unprofitable routes, and the profits from profitable routes go to private stockholders rather than subsidizing the unprofitable routes, so our taxes go up in order to maintain mail delivery to areas that no private companies will serve.
If it's so great, why should the government have to give it a legal monopoly?
:). I think if someone came along and said "Hey, we can do the 1st class mail thing for 20c per envelope without subsidies and with better service and delivery times" the USPS would lose its monopoly in a hurry. but that's not going to happen because of the economics of the situation.
Because the government subsidizes it. The USPS is required by law to deliver letters from anybody in the country to anybody in the country. In every rural and metropolitan area I've lived in, a representative of the USPS walked or drove past by my mailbox on a daily basis (except Sundays and holydays - a strange thing for a nation that prides itself on separation of church and state). They permit you to address envelopes in such a way that automated sorting is impossible - writing with black ink on a red valentine envelope, for example.
One thing to consider is that some routes are profitable (urban ones, perhaps) and some are unprofitable (rural Alaska, for example). The thing about privatization and competition is that no one would compete for the unprofitable routes, and either our taxes would subsidize those routes, or mail delivery to parts of the country would cease. I seriously doubt that a private company could compete with the USPS in the area of point-to-point letter deliverif they had to serve the ENTIRE clientele of the USPS with the same level of service or higher. By same level of service, I mean that their delivery time distribution curve would have to be better at all points (a very vague definition, I know, but I'm still trying to visualize how to quantiy that
I'd rather have 5 or 6 written letter from someone I care about than 100 worthless e-mails. Letters have an intrinsic value that will never be matched by e-mail. I can't but a value on the letter, maybe its the smell, or the thought that they did take the time to hand write the letter, and that they spent that much time thinking about me, and what they were going to say. If I want to send something meaningful to someone I care about I sure as hell don't use e-mail. It may take a little longer, and it may cost a few cents more, but in the end I think the feeling delivered by a physical, hand written letter are more effective than a little bit of e-mail.
And of course, Credit card offers, columbia house garbage, local circulars, publishers clearinghouse, etc.
E-mail is too insecure, informal, unreliable, non-authoritative, or just not suited for delivering any of the items in the first list. As for the second, since none of us give a rats ass about them, they are stedily enroaching upon our digital domain . . . ;)
I have seen an uptick in packages and catalogs from companies that do business on the web. The internet has helped our package business. Every office is connected to the net, and we have the largest intranet in the world. WebObjects, run throught NT boxes. Loral Letter sorters running QNX, also connected to an intranet. I see a lot of Amazon packages. I do get a lot of letters too. My route is in a low income neighborhood, so connectivity is low.
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Until everyone is banking online -and- the online banking firms get the concept of e-bills worked out there will be a need for the USPS.
How can the cable company, phone company, water utility, electric utility, gas utility, trash company, and credit card companies collect money for services rendered if they can't submit a paper bill with a return envelope?
Maybe, but I don't really have any complaints with the USPS.
Firstly, the USPS pays for itself. That is, it is fully funded by the stamps we buy, not by taxes.
Secondly, I don't think it's all that expensive for what you're getting. I don't feel it's unreasonable to ask $0.33 to carry something to the other side of the country.
Compared to the horrible service, sleasy marketing, and ludicrous prices of my phone company, the USPS looks pretty good. It could be a lot worse.
> Why should it cost to mail a letter across town as it does to mail to Alaska or Hawaii or even just to the other coast?
:)
Not that I don't really know what I'm talking about here; I'm just making wild-ass guesses.
Anyhow, my guess is that most of the cost is with the local delivery to the individual mailboxes and the overhead of all those POs. Shipping the letters from central office to central office (the extra cost incurred for long-distance mail) is probably much smaller than this, so a long-distance mail shouldn't cost a lot more. So if the costs are similar, why not just make them the same, and save on complexity and processing?
> What airline would sell flat-rate tickets to anywhere?
Ugh. Airlines. A whole other can of worms. What's with airline rates, anyway? Their prices *really* don't reflect how far you're going. From California, you can usually get to Bangkok cheaper than you can get to New York.
Well, the usps just ended their fiscal year in the black in a big way so I think the pronouncement of its death is a little premature. I prefer other shipping methods because the they can be tracked and because the postal service in DC is just soooo bad. This is the place they found multiple trailers stuffed with undelivered mail parked behind some of the branches.
But, on a brighter note, US Postal team member lance armstrong is on the verge of winning the tour de france. While not the first american to win, the previous US winner (you know, that greg guy) was on a french (I think) team.
I would be perfectly happy to abolish the postal service-- then maybe all those pesky bills would stop showing up. I mean, those people want money each and every month! It's a travesty!
Help stamp out and abolish redundancy!
It costs more than 33 cents in labor to collect, sort, and distribute a handwritten person to person first class letter. The postal service actually looses money on the kind of mail that Email is likely to replace.
The post office makes money on the following:
Presorted First Class - (bank statements, bills, etc)
Second Class - magazine subscriptions
Bulk Rate - just as the name implies
None of these types of mail are going to go away any time soon. In fact, it seems that I receive more than I ever have before.
UPS and FedEx do a great job for large packages that require insurance. However, both companies are way overpriced for small, lightweight parcels. Priority Mail is the best option for packages up to 2 lbs. Parcel Post is usually the cheapest option for larger packages that don't require insurance.
mrlefty
Well, fact is that the USPS is now a private
company, and has been for a while. It's
no longer directly controlled by the Gov't.
You really think that if there were
"competition" I could still get a letter
from D.C. to California in 3 days for
only 33 cents? Riiiiight.
--- witty signature
The USPO /is/ obsolete. I don't know about the rest of you but, I'm awaiting silent Tristero's empire....
when Push Comes to Shove
Look any socialist country. All state-run industries are bloated, inefficient, and under productive. What's so special about the USPS that it should be different?
Ah yes... but they're cheap. Corporations are interested in one thing: profits. Serving the customer well is a means to an end, not the end itself.
Some things, it's true, shouldn't be government-run. Some industries are non-essential, and hyper-competition can be a good thing for the consumer.
Health care, for example, should be government-run. "Right," someone's going to say, "but then you'll end up waiting 3 hours for a Band-Aid." The obvious answer to this involves spending time in a hospital. The last time I was in one was when my father dislocated his shoulder. It took 5 hours to establish that it was no longer dislocated and $600 in bills (painkiller, brace, ice pack, etc) to "fix" the problem.
Fast, efficient service? No.
Less paperwork? No.
Lower prices? No.
More industry experts? No. (The doctor that we saw for all of 15 minutes looked younger than me.)
Also, since I moved out, I'm uninsured. If I get a broken leg or something, I'm fucked. If I get cancer or some other expensive disease, I'm going to have to die.
So when I look at any socialist country (hell, let's say Sweden) I see free schools and free medicine. Yes, yes, the taxes are massive, but what's 80% of jack shit?
-- I can't think of anything witty to put here. Sorry.
I found this nifty 1998 Annual Report at the USPS web site. They delivered 198 billion pieces of mail in 1998, 3.7% more than 1997. Most of the mail was First Class.
I must have missed something...I thought that Publisher's Clearing House mailings WERE junk mail!!!
# They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety. --Fran
It depends on the time perspective one chooses to take when it comes to speculation. Of course the USPS will be completely outdated within 100 years. Most certainly by then we'll have evolved well beyond the need to pass bits of paper around the globe. In the short term, there are quite a few worldwide who will either not be able to afford internet access or will be too dumb to allow themselves to use the medium, making a continued need for paper passing almost certain.
"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." -- Aurther C. Clarke
I wouldn't exactly call it a monopoly, since it does have UPS and FedEx (and assorted minor carriers) to compete with. It used to be---at one point, a number of roads were designated "Post Roads" and legally could not be used to deliver things, except by the government postal service.
Of course, now the USPS has been privatised, although it is still sort of quasi-governmental. But there is something that people here either don't know or just aren't considering: urban delivery subsidises the rural post. I mean, it's just not that hard to pick up and deliver all the mail when an entire zip code fits within a couple blocks. But when one post office has to serve many square miles of sparsely populated land, the overhead goes up quite a bit. That's why it's "so expensive" and "ridiculously slow" sometimes---yes, a private company could maybe cut costs for most of us, but I can almost guarantee that prices would go up (substantially, I suspect) in the more rural areas. If not, then that means that someone is still subsidising them, and the prices wouldn't go down (much).
Oh, and another thing---there's nothing stopping any new mail delivery services from starting up, but I don't see any. Perhaps it's not as cost-effective as you think?
``This, too, shall pass.'' ---Eastern proverb
For me, email has made postal mail much more effective. If I want to get in touch with one of my friends, I have two options: fire up Communicator and send a few millicents worth of email in thirty seconds, or dig out a postcard, write in ink and manually my message, put a twenty-cent stamp on it (How many emails is that?), and drag the lot out to the mailbox for my friend to recieve in a few days.
Slow? Of course. Expensive? Certainly. Primitive? In the extreme. But such impact! Even among people who aren't always the best about replying to email, a personal letter or card among the morass of bills, credit card applications, and catalogs stands out.
It also makes for a good protest medium. As a friend of mine said, "It's a lot harder to delete a thousand letters than it is to delete a thousand emails."
I use email extensively, of course, but postal mail can be worth it when you're willing to trade the advantages of digitality (speed, cost, reliability, ease of processing) for those of solidity (impact, permanence).
In fact, what a boon! And exactly for the reasons you mentioned. Think of it -- most folks use e-mail in lieu of personal first-class letters which have got to be a HUGE loss leader for the USPS. For practically every personal letter that's sent you've got to have a clerk sell somebody a stamp, pay somebody to (usually) sort the message by hand, and send almost every piece off to a different city.
Bulk mail, magazines, etc., which the internet isn't even close to replacing, come to the USPS pre-sorted and bundled by zip code, and they move massive amounts of it to a smaller number of locations. That's what they really make money on. So heck, if they could deliver only bulk mail, and everybody used e-mail instead of first-class letters, they'd save a ton of dough.
The other great thing the internet does for the USPS is to create a lot of catalog-style commerce that requires shipping, shipping, shipping. And most folks, when they buy a book from Amazon, will opt to wait a few extra days so they can save a buck or two by shipping with USPS. "Priority mail" (which is, like, the biggest scam in the world) has gotten a totally new lease on life, thanks to online commerce.
And the post office takes advantage of this -- they give ebay sellers free shipping materials, and they even print special boxes for Amazon. Now if we could just get record labels to realize what a non-threat MP3 is...
yes, but with email, you can say a lot more, I mean in a few months, you get what, 5 or 6 letters acoss? you could send thousands of emails.
while real letters are nice, email is almost always better..
_
"Subtle mind control? Why do all these HTML buttons say 'Submit' ?"
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
well, I'm willing to bet the IRS turned a profit last year......
aside from that, what other government agencys are *supposed* to turn a profit?
_
"Subtle mind control? Why do all these HTML buttons say 'Submit' ?"
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
did you hear about the guy who started DHL? he died in a plan crash, just like JFK junior, and they were going to give all his money to charity.
he had retired in haweii(sp?) and it turned out that he had fatherd illigetemate childrend all over asia.
oh well...
_
"Subtle mind control? Why do all these HTML buttons say 'Submit' ?"
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
a) The difficulty of writing with a pen
b) Spelling and grammar.
What's the deal with schools these days? When I left school to go to university four years ago, I had been taught how to write and how to use a dictionary to look up words I didn't know.
Now unless someone has a genuine learning disability, I think it's pretty shocking that these are the excuses given.
It's also worrying because it implies that computer literacy breeds functional illiteracy.
Do we really want to live in a world where the only people who can speak their own language properly are those employed to write spell-checkers? It sounds to me like teachers need to sort out their act and not allow assignments to be typed.
It might also be worth insisting on proper spelling in all subjects at school; I know my brother doesn't care about how he spells a word if it's maths or science - he only gets down-marked for spelling mistakes in English classes. (So, no, this isn't just a dig at America as I'm based in the UK). What do people think?
I think that the idea was that you would be able to email someone who had no computer access (or who lived so far away that it'd take ages by airmail) - so you'd send a msg to the Post Office and they'd print it and deliver it to the addressee.
Probably the idea was to have an automated system so that no one would see your msgs.
Any chance of the USPS doing this?
That's not flamebait. It's a very valid philosohical point. What was written in a law is not by definition correct. Take apartheid as an example. (I'm not saying that the sacred constitution is as evil as apartheid, what I'm saying is that slavishly following a set of doctrines is stupid). Why do you think the constitution contains amendments - people wanted to change bits of it, so they did. The constitution of the USA was written by humans, not God - therefore, it may not be perfect. Moderators - mark the previous comment up, please.
wha?
how can you say that it's a monopoly given the existence of FedEx and UPS?
The US Postal Service is the only profitable (i.e. self-supporting without any taxes) arm of the government.
And EXPENSIVE?!?! Just exactly HOW is $0.33 EXPENSIVE? Keep in mind that this will send a letter ANYWHERE in the states in just a few days.
I don't think the point is if this is welcome, I think the point is the formality attached to written correspondence [sp?]. Sure, this is cultural and could change over time, but in this time, an e-mail on this subject could be seen as somewhat of a slight, almost like a form letter or fax might seem to be.
:-) ). We send e-mail back and forth to our customers all the time, but some stuff is in paper, just because everyone expects a certain level of formality for some things. (invoices, project authorizations, dispute settlement, etc.)
Another example is professional correspondence (guess I'd better look up the spelling if I'm gonna keep using that word
If I got an e-mail from my lawyer with his statement of his charges for work on my fater's estate, I would probably have an odd reaction. I would expect a letter with a hand-written signature. This is just customary. I'm sure in 20 years that custom will change and people will be comfortable with e-mail for just about everything.
I think email has replaces short phone calls or calls to people who are hard to get in touch with.
Mostly I only used the post office for sending (and receiving) bills. Also magazines. That may change over time, but it might not.
I bet long distance phone service will suffer more than mail.
According to the June edition of Smart Money they're betting on CNF Transportation which delivers the packages for USPS.
"...These virtual companies are finding they need computers, trucks, and logistics... Meanwhile, e-shoppers are making Priority Mail one of the most popular delivery vehicles for Internet goods. Why pay $11 to a have a $10 book or CD delivered by FedEx? Priority Mail delivery charges average just $3.20."
Pork is not a verb
No, your question was not whether it was "right", but whether or not it was "a right". I hope you
see a difference.
"A right" is a power granted by the consent of society - the right to free speech, the right to bear arms, the right to party, etc. In this case, the government does have "a right" to regulate the post in whatever way they see fit, as the power was granted to them by the Constitution, a document forged by, and ratified by, the people.
Whether it is "right", well, that is a moral dilemna and anyone's views on that are pretty much their own, especially since we are not looking at atrocities or crimes against humanity here, but delivering mail.
If it's so great, why should the government have to give it a legal monopoly? If I want to have someone else deliver my mail, by what right does the government tell me I can't?
Actually, the governments right to do that is in
the Constitution - Article I, Section 7 says that
"The Congress shall have Power...
To establish Post Offices and post Roads;" among
other things
Try reading it sometime
When someone takes the time to handwrite a letter, its a unique artifact with sentimental value. Email cannot match that. In the future, I don't see people saving their old love emails. While email is a great way to keep in touch with people--it's fast, cheap, and easy--nothing beats a nice, handwritten letter once in a while.
The DMCA--for corporations, the best copyright law money can buy.
I use the USPS all the time. Priority mail costs 3.25 and is somethng like 2-3 days. You can't beat that. UPS ground is way too expensive. You can't track your package but I never send things that are that important.
--------------------------------------
in a world without bounderies or fences, who needs Gates anyway?
My company informs me that the Postal Service is in the process of implementing an e-mail address system for every location in the country. I can e-mail your physical address and the Post Office will print the letter and deliver it to your door. Sort of like a telegram. The printing facilities are supposedly very good. Email yourself a massive pdf and it will be delivered the next day. Byebye kinkos.
PS. I work in the IT section of a large printing company that actually considers this step as direct competition. Print on demand sort of thing.
-- All my friends are high or naked.
I have had more problems with UPS and Fed-Ex. Sure, maybe they will insure the package (if USPS doesn't), but it's a lot less convienient.
UPS stinks. They're slow. They're expensive.
FedEx is also expensive.
The USPS is available to everyone. They have more offices than UPS or FedEx. The USPS is also highly effecient at what they do (heck, they run Linux). My letters usually get to their destination within two days for $0.33. That's anywhere in the country. I'm impressed if a company can send a letter from Hawaii to Maine for $0.33 and still be profitable.
When purchasing on-line, I usually choose the USPS. They are faster and cheaper than UPS. For expensive items I'll use Fed-Ex or UPS, but for most stuff the USPS is great.
This post is encrypted twice with ROT-13. Documenting or attempting to crack this encryption is illegal.
.. receiving/paying bills, magazine subscriptions, and occasionally sending things via [Global] Priority mail - cheaper than FedEx if 2/3/4 days is OK.
Right now the USPO has a regular mail delivery monopoly protected by law!!! Some companies use FedEx to bulk mail stuff between officesm but strictly speaking that's illegal. I guess it is important to guaranteee mail delivery in remote areas where it's a money loser, but I can't see any reason why they can't open it up for competition with a required coverage clause.
It's not the e-mail etc software you use, it's the secure sockets connection that's being used to send the data. As long as you only conduct electrocic business over secure connections, there's really nothing to worry about.
I'd prefer to trust RSA 128 bit encryption with my credit card number than some underpaid restaurant, hotel or gas station employee...
If it's that important to you, you could always back it up, or even print it out...
What matters to people is more the amount of effort put into it, and perhaps the increasing *novelty* of getting snail mail.
As far as your examples goes, do you think a parent would be more happy to receive your example note by snail mail, or to receive it plus e-mails from members of their son's platoon telling personal memories and how much they miss him?
Also, which would you prefer to receive from your girlfriend (esp. in a long distance relationship):
a) a letter, or
b) a video e-mail where you can see her
Technology doen't bring impersonality - it's how you use it.
Of all the "overnight" services I have ever used (and list includes just about all of them), the *only* organization which has a 100% record delivering my packages on-time, without damage or loss, is the United States Postal Service.
Need I also mention that the USPS will deliver Express Mail on Saturdays and holidays at *no extra charge*? They even deliver on Sundays for Express Mail!
When it absolutely, positively, without-a-doubt, life-or-death, MUST BE THERE, my first choice will always be the US Postal Service.
so what are grandma and grandpa going to do? What about all the people who don't have net access? What about people on holiday?
somehow I don't think you can get rid of them that easily.
Remember folks, the USPS makes most of it's money on that so called "Junk Mail" (Real name 3rd class mail). The call it Money Mail. People like Publishers Clearing House have mail bills running literaly in the 10s of millions/month!
Speaking of bills, the USPS actually worries more about Electronic bills (Direct payment) than the lost of personal letters (Think about it)
-- 73 de KG2V For the Children - RKBA! "You are what you do when it counts" - the Masso
I've always considered libraries and postal services as the perfect institutions to increase internet accessibility for the general public.
Does anyone know of a country whose postal service has taken such a leadership role?
Yes, you can get to New York cheaper because there is a bigger overall demand for passage to New York, because there is a higher volume of traffic, because many more airlines have routes to New York than to Omaha, because there are at least two major airports serving NYC, etc
There is just a much higher level of competition. Nothing too strange.
timothy
jrnl: http://tinyurl.com/c2l8yr / foes: http://tinyurl.com/ckjno5
I have to disagree with this. I realize that anecdotal evidence is different from statistical evidence, but here are a few things that have happened to me via the USPS:
1) In spring 1993, a check mailed to me which I needed to pay my tuition didn't arrive for a week after sending. No big deal, I regularly expect the vaunted 3-5 days to be doubled, even between metro areas. But then it didn't arrive after another week, and payment was coming due. I asked for the check to be remailed, and it was -- this second check *again* didn't arrive after a week, then 10 days
2) A package my mom sent about a month ago, which had (among other things) replacement car keys has not yet showed. Priority mail my ass.
That's not hearsay and rumor -- that's what has happened to *me*. Yes, I have sent far more postcards and letters than packages, but so far I have not had any trouble with UPS or FedEx.
Not to mention that the USPS now requires me to supply both drivers' license and passport (!!!) number in order to use a private mailbox, and the talk about USPS exacting an email tax. Bah, humbug.
timothy
jrnl: http://tinyurl.com/c2l8yr / foes: http://tinyurl.com/ckjno5
Current law states that each citizen of the United States must be reachable by a mailbox.
And don't we love it when these government assigned addresses save lives (in the case of my father's heart attack when the paramedic team came to the rescue).
plus, I do enjoy my share of real mail, and everything I've ordered from the net thus far has been sent by USPS.
But I seriously doubt that snail mail and the USPS are going to become obselete any time soon. It's just not going to happen. (then again, if it did, I'd feel pretty dumb.)
Insert mind here.
What do we send in the mail? Money. The bills come in and the checks go out. Sure, you can just get many places to automatically bill your credit card, but you still have to pay your credit card bill. You may even be able to have the money taken straight from your bank account but you still get your bank statement.
Sure, you could do most of those things online, but a lot of people (myself included) don't trust the internet for financial stuff. Most software used for email and such is too insecure and unstable. I'll just keep doing finances through snail mail if you don't mind.
My local Post Office in Brooklyn now offers:
1) a pick-up window featuring a hand-written sign "no yellow slips here." That is, no package pick-ups at the package pick-up window.
2) a loud, commercial radio station blaring over the lobby loudspeaker
3) a loud television (playing the Maury Povitch show, when I was there), competing with the radio for attention.
4) one or two clerks avaiable for a long line of tired, disgruntled people.
5) the ability to misplace a package addressed to me because it was filed under my second initial instead of under my last name.
6)delivery people who cram articles into the mail-box, crushing personal cards and letters.
7)a delivery person who was sypmathetic about my "lost" package but shrugged, gee, we have a lot of packages. Er, yeah.
As for me personally, I've never had anything lost in Priority Mail and I've bought and sold hundreds of things online. They do have a primitive tracking system which works. When time isn't the main concern, but you need a reliable, cheap way to get it there, the USPS is the only way to go.
NekoMouser
For most forms of printed information (letters, information, brochures, etc), email (or electronic messaging in general) is more than sufficient. Once digital signatures become standard (and more common), this method will suffice for transmissions that require confidence. I would opine that most Americans are not comfortable enough with email to trust it to the exclusion of the USPS; the USPS has been around for a long time, while email has only been around for about 30 years (but ask a kid nowadays--they all think email started in the 80's). There are confidence issues, reliability issues (real and imagined), and technological issues.
A more interesting--although not completely related--question is this: When are digital signatures going to become standard?
There were rumors that the US government wanted to "issue" email addresses to babies at birth, along with social security numbers. While issuing email addresses is technologically problematic (now there's a server I don't want to maintain), issuing a digital certificate at birth is not, since prime pieces of information (e.g., name and SSN) are present shortly after birth. Perhaps this is the "number of the beast" of which Revelations warns us...
(darren)
on the contrary, i have a wide variety of pens, pencils, charcoals, paints, papers, etc. at my disposal in my room, where i do most of my writing.
time is not an issue when i'm writing to someone i care about. obviously, i enjoy receiving hand-written letters more than email, but i'm not at all knocking it. i send and recieve dozens of emails a day. email is actually great for conversations with some people. a friend at work, at school, etc.
but when my friend Brooke writes me from art school, it's nice to see her hand-made, beautifully-painted letters before i even get to read her words. and as far as being ABLE to read the words, more often than not, reading the words is not a problem at all. anyone who takes the time to write me, takes the time to make it ledgible.
humorously enough, my best friend Ashley, due to a disorder in his brain, is almost completely illedgible via the computer, but his hardwriting in just fine.
who doesn't perfer a handwritten letter on an interesting piece of stationary and a decorative envelope to a bunch of 1's and 0's from anyone who takes two minutes to write? snail mail from friends and loved ones is so much more heartfelt that email. email is boring.
the USPS is hear to stay.
Hey all,
I personally *adore* writing letters... whilst email is quick and easy (and interesting getting mails from people you'll never meet...), written letters are so much more personal. When writing, I generally spend a lot more time on it than with email, and generally the letters are longer too...even though it's a thrice-weekly experience.
I still feel the same even though my handwriting is worse than a doctors, and I'm young... 17 in fact.
That's the biggie for me. That, and I type really fast (hoping to break 100 WPM in the next year), but I have very nasty handwriting unless I'm actually trying to be neat, in which case I write v-e-r-y s-l-o-w-l-y. Kind of gives new meaning to "snail mail."
That said, I was in a LDR that despite both of us having e-mail (admittedly, I had JUST gotten it), we continued to write snailmail letters to each other every day. *smiles*
Also, writing to Grandma still means *writing* to her, though admittedly I tend to compose on-computer and print it out so her poor old eyes don't have to deal with my scribble.
Mostly, though, e-mail is the Great Lowerer of Phone Bills for me. It is weird because it's not-quite-snail-mail yet not-quite-telephone, but for me and my friends (who have this annoying tendency to scatter around the world) it's helpful.
I'd certainly rather try to get e-mail to Poland than either a letter OR a phone call.
"Somebody exploded a letter-bomb today
Well, the problem with teleportation is that it won't be allowed/admitted to until there was a sure-fire way to block it.
I mean, you don't want someone just going ahead and teleporting out the contents of a bank, or some store.
Teleportation will be locked down even further than encryption laws, but I'd say there'd be good reason for it, even if it would make it rather inconvenient.
Now, on the other hand, if they could just go and put those cool vaccuum things like at the drive through at the bank everywhere, with some sort of a routing system, I could see some definate uses for that.
Build it, and they will come^Hplain.
- Formal Invitations. (graduation, wedding, etc.)
- Christmas Cards. (and not those annoying e-cards that your parents think are cool, because they show they're 'with it', but in reality, fill up
/var/mail ) - Birthday Cards. (the cool ones, from the grandparents who put the $20 in there when you were little)
- Get-Well Cards. (and they cheer you up a hell of a lot more that someone took the time, over some quick, crappy e-mail)
- Thank-you Notes. (same reason as above)
okay, so most of 'em are cards and the like, but you get the idea. Also, there's the nice advantage that fraud through the mail is illegal, whereas there aren't those laws on the internet. (Watch the nice coverage on the 'sweepstakes' stuff going on these days with congress.)Build it, and they will come^Hplain.
It might eventually be outdated, but probably not anytime in the near future. I prefer email since it is fast and my handwriting sucks, but I still have to use it to send check to pay the bills. There are also a great many people who will never own a computer in their lifetimes. Hey, there are still people around that have 8-track tape players and claim they don't need a CD player since the 8-track has all the music they want.
When I write an letter to a congressman, TV News program, or some other political entity I _always_ use snail mail, especially if it's part of a letter writing campaign. People can just turn off their computers or pretend that some automatic spam mail thing is sending out all the Email. It is harder to ignore real, "legitimate" mail.
Besides, most of the politicians I write to are not tech-savvy enough to read Email by themselves anyway... so I'd just be writing to one of their interns.
All the creatures will die, And all the things will be broken. That's the law of samurai. (Jubai, 1605)
i have to agree with almost everyone in that the USPS might be a bit slow in the delivery, but the reliability is the key. they're like the el camino of postage. they might not be pretty or fast, but they could drive through a bloody wall and still get it there.
:)
the reason why i only use the USPS (aside from the fact that relatives work there) is that some of the competition utilizes unethical business practices and treat their workers VERY poorly. anyone who watches the Awful Truth can attest to that...
"How it infuriates a bigot, when he is forced to drag out his dark convictions"-- Logan Pearsall Smith
I figure as soon as Teleportation of small objects becomes feasible, USPS will figure some way to get a piece of the action.
satire, n: 1) witty language used to convey insults or scorn; 2) a form of humor lost on most slashdot moderators.
I have been a child of a USPS mail clerk for many, many years now --So, I'm a tad biassed. ;^) There are many things that aren't being mentioned about the USPS, and I just kinda wanted to point these out.
;^)
1. The more the Junk Mail that is shipped out, the lower your first class stamp will be. Why? Because the people who have to send mass mailings actually have to PAY to get the USPS to ship it. Current USPS regulations also require that bulk mailings be presorted by zip code when they come into the local branch office. The result, less sorting, and more money for the USPS. And remember kiddies, since the USPS is a government owned corporation (of sorts), it's required to pass savings on to customers.
Compare this model to the Internet model of e-mail, where spam doesn't lower the cost of your internet costs.
2. The USPS is the only body governed by law to handle letter delivery. (Parcels, Overnight, and 2nd day air are special services that other companies can compete with the USPS for.) In other words, it's going to take at least an act of congress to open up competition on the letter delivery side.
3. They cut costs whereever possible to keep the price of a first stamp down. e.g. They use Linux to run their character recognition software. More savings.
4. There's just nothing like getting a personal letter in the mail. Wow. Someone actually took the time to write a letter to you. When was the last time you felt this way about an e-mail.
5. Most e-mail that is sent right now, is sent in the clear. Most paper mail, however, is sent in an envelope.
6. The USPS investigates illegal use of its services, including mail-order scams. It also monitors any employee that handles mail, from mailbox to mailbox to ensure unauthorized opening of the contents. (of course, the government can still open up your mail with a court order, but at least they can't run it through a communist-sympathizer filter during transmit.)
I use the USPS almost daily. Useful for stuff like ebay and amazon auctions, shipping my O'Reilly books to me, and all the tape trading. Over the last several years, I've joined the nuts who record and trade [ at no profit! ]concerts. Think of the audio geeks at Phish or Dead shows. That's me, except I don't much like Phish, and never got to see the Dead. Think Agents of Good Roots or Everything (e:). Having used the USPS for shipping and receiving for over 5 years, I've never had a package lost or didn't get one I should've. Plus, you can ship a DAT tape for 55 cents.
While if the gov't enhanced competition for the postal service, costs *might* go down [this might be a good candidate for a natural monopoly.], I doubt that UPS, FedEx, Airborne Express, or anyone else could match that price for a LONG time. For now, until DAT-quality audio can traverse the internet in less time than it takes the show to record [MP3 doesn't cut it.], I'll stick to the postal service.
"To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield."-Tennyson
The reason we give the post office the upper hand is because we can't trust a business outside the government with our nations mail. If they went under the country would be screwed... so we keep USPS.. and as a matter of fact I think they do a great job. You don't? Well how about you contrast them with some other countries services. The difference between our USPS and Ecuador's mail system is like the difference between Q3Test v1.07 and Doom... :)
JOhn
Campaign for Liberty
When in the Navy I got a no cost move from Puerto Rico and packed everything that could be shipped in boxes and sent it stateside UPS..sold the big stuff like refrigerator. (UPS guys gripe at the slightest little weight problem..lol) Other than that one time I have sent everything USPS with one trick..insure it heavy. Anyway..it's hard to get UPS and Fedex when you are in some places like combat zones..ships at sea..Mississipi..Alabama..et...
--- Join my team at www.dcypher.net $10,000 to the winning computer #147 "Homebuilt Computer Users"
A bit off topic, but...
.mil domain just HAD to name one of its machines "beast". B-)
Revalataions appears to be a classic example of a political art form flurishing under the Romans at the time. Seems the Romans didn't allow you to write anything criticizing their government and functionaries, but they did allow religious freedom. So the revolutionaries came up with codes for writing their messages and propagands pieces disguised as scripture and prophecy. Revalations is just the one that happened to get included in the bible, though there are a number of other examples available for study.
The "Beast" in question was apparently a Roman general, and the number was a hash of his name by well-known (at the time) rules, which would let the reader figure out which official they were talking about.
Decent cyphers were necessary, because the Romans had figured out that, as long as they had these military couriers running everywhere to carry government messages, they could provide a service by carrying messages for merchants - for a fee. And this government-subsidized service was cheaper than hiring your own messenger, so everybody used it. "Neither rain nor snow nore sleet..." was originally the Roman Courriers' motto.
Of course the couriers were also the Roman secret police, who read the messages before delivering them and sent interesting tidbits to the rest of the authorities. (And after a lot of naive revolutionaries and crooked or spying-on-the-side businessmen got crucified, private encryption was born.)
This practice of the couriers was also mirrored by the USPS during at least the '60s and '70s. They could open and examine "damaged" mail, so heaven help anybody who lived in an area where drug trafficing was common. I still recall the time my grandmother sent me some cookies at college - carefully packed in a coffee can and wrapped with a dozen layers of brown paper. They smashed it in until the cookies were crumbs and the paper ripped - must have taken ten minutes or more. Then they stamped it "recieved in damaged condition at the post office and delivered it.
Back to the number of the beast: Current theological interpretation by a number of apocalyptic religions has it being variously your Social Security number, a hypothetical goverment banking account number yet to come, or a personal I.D. number to be laser-tatooed or implanted on one of those remotely-readable chips, like they use to identify lost pets. (You need it to buy and sell, so it's obviously an account number or something else used by financial institutions as a universal identifier, right?) One version has the "Beast" as a banking computer in Switzerland.
Of course the
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
It's just another government monopoly. If the government opened it up to competition we'd see better service and lower costs. But until then the postal industry will just continue to loose customers.
"You can kill a man but you can't kill an idea."
I'm pretty sure that if you look at overall postal traffic over the years I am quite certain that the overall volume is still growing, and will continue to grow for some time to come. To put it another way, I don't think I'd worry about my job if I worked for the postal service...
So how does USPS's 198 billion snail mails compare to the volume of Internet email? This would be a good pointer to obsolence or relevance. Barring exact statistics (pointers anyone?), let's do a back-of-the-envelope estimate...
AOL has actually made public some figures for its corner of the Internet; I haven't seen much from other providers, so lets start with that.
AOL is currently claiming to deliver 200 million pieces of email a day. Grossly simplifying, that multiplies out to 73 billion emails a year.
The number of AOL users is 17 million. The number of Internet users, (in the U.S. only, since we're comparing against the US Postal service.) is around 100 million according to figures from Neilsen or MIDS. So AOL has 17% of the US Internet users.
Extrapolating, that implies that the total amount of email being sent is 429 billion pieces. So the Internet has doubled USPS traffic and is still growing, and at a fair pace faster than 3.7%.
USPS for messages is obsolete; for goods, it'll remain relevant.
--LP
It may be true that only 50% of Americans have the resources and equipment required to take part in the exchange of eMail, but the fact that all this has happened, for all intents and purposes, in the current decade should say enough. With the exponential growth of usage of the internet by home users, it appears to be just a matter of time until almost only the (although notably sizeable) impoverished population of this country is still without the means of digital communication.
Reason 2.) I read someplace the the USPS plans on getting into the emial business in order to provide email services to the 50% of americans who are not online. However since I can find anything about this on the web site, maybe they have changed those plans.
They have a pretty spiffy web site. While that does not mean they will last, at least it is a nerd point in thier favor.
-- Dustin
The USPS Priority Mail commericials on TV really piss me off, because they are very deceptive. They compare FedEx 2-day vs. UPS 2-day vs Priority Mail 2-3 days. FedEx and UPS guarantee 2-day delivery. USPS doesn't even guarantee 3-day delivery. I'm not sure delivery is guaranteed at all.
I will use Priority Mail occasionally, but not if I want it to get there in two days. If it's under two pounds and I'm not picky about when it gets there, I'll use Priority Mail. Otherwise I'll stick with FedEx for something small and fast and UPS for something big. Last thing I ordered that got shipped Priority Mail took four weekdays. I've had other things take a full week. The local disgruntled postal employee left a delivery notice today for a package that should be delivered somewhere down the road (right suite, wrong building, duh). I've had the wrong mail delivered to my mail box fairly often, and I don't want to think how much of my mail has been delivered to the wrong house.
Legally, FedEx and UPS and other carriers are excluded from being in the letter delivery business. There have been occasions where the USPS has fined companies for using those carriers for delivering non-urgent mail, to the tune of what they think they would have paid using USPS.
I say, privatize USPS: Sell stock to the public over a period 10 years or so. At the very least, they have a lot of assets: Post offices, delivery vehicles, sorters, mail readers, etc. Repeal any laws that give USPS special powers so that other companies are free to compete.
This message has been scanned for memes and dangerous content by MindScanner, and is believed to be unclean.
Priority mail is NOT guaranteed to arrive in 2-3 days, and for good reason. And sure, you can load the envelope with as much as it can hold, just so long as it doesn't hold more than 2 lbs. Also keep in mind that you can't actually mail a package weighing more than (I think) a pound yourself: You have to physically hand it over to a postal employee, just in case you are the next Unabomber.
This message has been scanned for memes and dangerous content by MindScanner, and is believed to be unclean.
I think that even if the USPS takes a hit from the mail they will increase in funding from things like eBay since a lot of people are sending goods through the mail rather than letter now.
To: Jane Doe
- ------------------------------
From: Col. William Smith
Subject: John Doe
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It is with a heavy heart and deepest regrets that I must inform you of the death of your son, Pvt. John Doe. John died valiently and honorably during the final push of our three day assault on Baghdad sacrificing his own life so that the rest of his platoon would not perish. He was a couragous soldier and served his country well.
My prayers are with you and your family during this most grevious time.
Sincerely,
Col. Bill Smith
United States Army
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Yah, this is a little extreme, and one certainly doesn't see these too often, but my point is that some things are best expressed through a written letter. Email is convenient and quick, but it lacks the personality of a hand written letter, and I think most people in the U.S. would agree. As long as there are special things to write to someone, there will be the USPS.
how bout the best of both worlds? http://www.eletter.com
Of course the snail mail services will be reduced to the strict minimum over the years, once everyone (even your girlfriend ;) will be used to the email.
:)
Maybe children won't even learn handwriting at school but rather typing, and if these nifty neuronal interfaces come out one day, typing will become obsolete as well.
If you push further the concept of a digital world, you can find out that after all most things you do or care about (your work, your professional or personal mail, books, videos, pictures, etc...) can be stored on a computer and easily duplicated.
If you can see beyond your porsche or any other "futile" belongings (that could be simulated anyway), what you've got left in the plain old reality is only bare humans with some HD and computers.
It's one aspect of The Matrix or any cyberpunk book and it might sound cheap SF, but it sounds quite probable to me that eventually people won't have any "valuable" belongings besides their digital world.
Even now, if I think seriously about it, the worst "material" thing I could lose (of course I don't take account of beloved human beings) would be my HD and backups. Cars, computers, etc... are easily expendable, but datas are not !
Fortunately it will be really easy to backup our personal datas in several places on the earth in the next years so that an earthquake or any other major disaster wouldn't destroy them.
I remember Torvalds said one day that whenever he needed something backuped, he just uploaded it on a server and it was mirrored worldwide on the same day
Of course we'll always need USPS... look at Greyhound's presence in an era of aviation, 2 car families, etc. Someone has to haul the trash.
Heck, a half year ago, I had a $25K AT&T PBX that another business had abandoned and defaulted on the lease - leaving it in our warehouse. AT&T wanted it back (badly) but refused to give a FedEx or UPS account - and even threatened our company if we didn't return their property (that they wouldn't pay to pick up).
To get rid of the annoyance, we lugged the box down the street to the USPS and mailed it the lowest class possible - uninsured. I sure hope it got jostled a bunch on the way!
Thank goodness for last class USPS!!!
*scoove*