If you've lived somewhere with cluster mailboxes, you know they aren't always under the view of a camera, but are provided with locks in all circumstances.
Who hasn't started with renting an apartment? I did. The mailboxes were outside, away from the street. Anyone could break those locks - they are only strong enough to keep honest people honest. Fortunately, such break-ins haven't happened while I was there, but in general it happens from time to time. Human stupidity is infinite.
At a business center we have clusters; more than once the mail carrier drove away closing the door but failing to lock it, so that all the mail compartments were left exposed.
Thanks for the insider information. I don't know what is evaluated, and how it affects the carrier. But I attempted many things to attract his attention to the outgoing mail. He just doesn't look. Those plastic red flags? Tried, unsuccessfully. Stuck the envelope in the way of incoming mail? It got pushed in! Now the only realiable way is what I described. Or I can wait until I get to the company's office. There mail is collected religiously; but there is some volume of it in a dedicated mailbox.
I must say this situation is not unique to this exact route. My friend lives 30 miles away, in a town. He has a roadside mailbox. He never mails from there. He says, first because the mail is never picked up, and second because it can be stolen. I don't know about the latter, but indeed if a mail piece is accessible to the carrier it is also accessible to everyone else. He mails letters only via USPS collection boxes (in the street) or at comparable safe places.
Perhaps those little brownie points that a carrier gets for collecting mail do not outweigh the ability to finish his route 30 minutes earlier. I don't know if the carrier can go home earlier, though. But he certainly can stop by his lover in the middle of the route:-) or just to have a thoughtful breakfast at some vista point and simply enjoy the view.
What kind of Mad-Maxian post apocalyptic nightmare has the USA turned into?
It is truly revolting. You need to look hard for a road sign that is not yet defaced or shot up. Every other overpass is covered in graffiti. Every fifth delivery truck is covered in graffiti. Every other teenager rides in a rusty car, plays gangsta rap, wears pants on his ankles, and some may try to kill you for a wrong look. I do not stop in unsafe places, of which there are many. But why do I tell you all this, come and see for yourself! You'd kiss the Canadian soil as soon as you cross back. Mere Mississauga, a little industrial suburb within GTA, looks like heaven once you have to visit Niagara Falls (that is on the US side) and come back.
But I work in the USA, and that work is important.
Trust me, I don't dream of a sprawling rural lifestyle where I need to drive 30 minutes to town to buy food when surprise guests stop by for dinner. Some people *do* want that lifestyle, but I don't see why I should subsidize them.
Nobody should subsidize anyone, IMO. Note that I said not a word about prices that USPS may charge for delivery to certain locations. I'm all for them charging more; that would give me a reason to review the deal with USPS.
However many people live outside of cities just because they need the space. For an example, look here. Can you install such an antenna in your backyard (that you don't have anyway?) Other people have other interests, and often their needs exceed what a standard city home, with a one-car garage, can offer. Where do you set up your machine shop? Where is your nanoparticle-emitting 3D printer installed? Where do you do your welding and plasma cutting? You can't seriously suggest that human interests must be constrained to a morning jog in a park and a bar in the evening. I don't even know where any bar can be found in this area, since I have no use of them. But I have a good list of metal warehouses, electronic parts suppliers, and know every Harbor Freight within 100 miles.
It all depends on one specific human - the mail carrier. Some walk an extra mile to be good. Other don't care about you. Some even steal your mail. The carrier here doesn't steal anything, but he won't bother to look for the outgoing mail either. It could be worse. I have low expectations:-(
Those mail clusters would be vandalized pretty soon, if road signs are any indication. Too many idiots in this country. I see damage everywhere as I drive around - graffiti, bullet holes, destruction... Some rural roads are so empty that nothing stops a fool from acting as a fool. It's not as bad in Canada.
That's why, if USPS cares about my opinion, I would rather prefer to get my mail once per week, but at my mailbox (in the street, just outside the gate.) Isn't that what we pay USPS for - to deliver mail?
I do not want the cluster because I'm sure it would be poorly secured (like no security at all,) and it would be a good target for any delinquents who want to get someone else's refund checks or whatever else that is valuable. My mailbox is locked, and it's in the field of view of a security camera.
The USPS has to go to each address each day, to see if there's any mail to be picked up.
Mail carriers only do that at clusters, where there are large collection mailboxes dedicated to outgoing mail.
But if you are talking about an individual curbside mailbox, carriers do not collect mail from them. They should, but they don't bother, regardless of how obvious the flag is. As they approach the address they look through their pile, and if there is nothing for you today they just drive on. They do not stop and check, even though my mailbox is at the street, in front of the gate. (I do not receive anything at the door, except UPS and FedEx for who I open the gate because they can't deliver anywhere else, and they sometimes need a signature.)
If I have mail to be sent, I watch the USPS carrier driving up the street. He will be back in about 10 minutes - just enough for me to gather outgoing mail, walk up to the gate and into the street, and wait a few minutes for the truck coming back. Then I say hello to the carrier and give him the mail. He double-checks that I haven't forgotten the stamp, and the mail is as safe and secure as it ever going to be within USPS system.
So, why do you think you need to actually empty your mailbox if it's three miles away?
The response above perfectly answers that question:
Try it and see what cruel things the government does to you. The IRS people... The motor vehicle department... the lawyers... jury duty. Automated speeding tickets. Rare random demand letters from the government about X, Y or Z (i.e. registered mail).
You do not want to lose the letter from DMV with request for payment of your car plates fees, or with a sticker once you do pay. Inattention to jury summons may be even less pleasant.
The math is correct. Farmers and ranchers, who usually live along county roads, do not go to the town every day. There is no reason to; they work at their own property. (As matter of fact, I do the same; I work from home, and I go to the valley maybe twice per week.) Distances to nearest towns can be considerable, like 10 or 20 miles. It's not the end of the world, but you don't go there just to check your mailbox. I was driving some of those roads between CA and NV, from north toward Reno, and you have to watch your fuel gauge because not every town has a gas station. Those are some serious distances.
City dwellers already have mailbox clusters, and I see no reason why they can't continue using them. Most business centers have mailbox clusters too. The only catch is security - those clusters must be sufficiently protected from vandals.
This is the kind of company I'll feel just peachy about letting have unfettered access to my bank account? Right.
I pay all my bills electronically. Wells Fargo has a "Bill Pay" service where you can instruct the bank, online, to either transfer the payment electronically (if the service company registered for that) or to mail a check (if they haven't done so.) Both payments are one-way and one-time (unless you want them to be recurring.) The receiving company does not have an "unfettered access to my bank account." Some companies offer automatic withdrawals, but I decline such offers for the same reason as you do.
Another good aspect of this service is that all payments are registered at the bank. If some service company mixes up the paperwork, I have the proof that is pretty heavyweight - records of a major bank that document everything that happened to every sum of money that moved around. This service is free (to me, at least - don't know if they tie it to some other conditions.) I would be better off even if it costs 45 cents per transaction - because that's what a stamp costs, and an envelope, and my time to fill it all out and then worry if the check gets lost. Many services signed up for e-bills; this means that no paper is involved, and no humans either.
If you don't want to drive miles to a mailbox cluster, the USPS doesn't want to drive those miles to deliver a bulk mail envelope that only earned them 25 cents.
This is so obviously untrue. Math to the rescue. USPS requires one customer per mile. Let's say there are two, and the road (dead end) is 10 miles long. There are 20 customers. A carrier has to travel 20 miles to make all deliveries if he starts at the mile 0 (and let's posit that the USPS office is there too.)
Now, if the carrier doesn't deliver then every resident has to drive to the USPS office. Let's even disregard the waiting time and focus only on miles driven. The fist customer drives one mile (0.5 mile * 2.) The second customer drives 2 miles (1 mile * 2). The third customer drives 3 miles. An obvious arithmetic progression here (every next resident has to drive extra to his neighbor and back.)
Rumor says that the sum of an arithmetic progression is often found as n*(a1+an)/2. Since the a1 is 1 and an is 20, we suddenly learn that all residents have to drive 20*(1+20)/2 = 210 miles per day!!! Compare to 20 miles that the carrier has to drive. If we force residents to drive to their mailbox cluster (under those conditions, that are typical in rural areas) then it would generate a lot more pollution and wear of vehicles.
Of course there is one simple solution to that - let's outlaw rural homes and make everyone live in 100-storey skyscrapers; Gil the Arm visited one of such buildings, as I recall. Arcologies are very efficient this way. And who needs all that nature anyway? Humans are born and bred to live in caves of steel and eat yeast products. They don't need all that dusty and dirty nature.
The nearest Post Office here is in about 15 minutes of driving. However parking there is pretty bad, the office is tiny, and the lines are huge. If you come at rush hour you cannot easily leave because of traffic issues. You need to allocate at least 30 minutes if you only want to buy one stamp at the counter. I cannot imagine myself ever going there; the few times I had to do that to retrieve a package were a sad waste of time.
What USPS needs to do is this. They scan the front of all incoming first class mail and make the scans available to you over the Internet. (You can register for that.) Pieces of mail that you mark for retrieval could be delivered on a weekly basis by a carrier, to your existing mailbox (or door.) Pieces of mail that you explicitly decline (and all flyers, if you so desire) are trashed right at the post office. Pieces of mail that you haven't marked for a couple of weeks are returned to sender. You would be also able to configure vacation mode, where this limbo time is extended (for free or for extra pay, depending on how long the vacation lasts.)
This way you'd be receiving important mail once per week, and the carrier would be running light. The number of carriers can be reduced, since they don't need to deliver from 9am to 11am; now they can deliver 24/7 if they want to, as long as they visit every mailbox not more often than once per week.
It's not a problem in apartments, where it is safe and easy to get down to the mailboxes. However where I live the distance between residences is about 0.5 mile, and if they create a mailbox cluster it would be about 3 miles away. Do you want to drive for 12 minutes to just get useless ads? If they go ahead with this method, I would be tempted to cancel mail service. Those who I deal with have email, and I can pay them electronically.
You're deciding what is and isn't fair arbitrarily.
That's the key question here. Who and how decides what is fair?
The answer to that is, of course, that these norms are set by the society. The mechanistic allocation of fairness (based on expended labor vs. received rewards) is the top layer, and the most visible one. But then there are things that people do for free or receive for free, and they are considered to be fair for everyone involved.
If you want to object to the principle of "who does not work shall not eat" (which is remarkably shared by the Bible and by Marxists) then you are, of course, welcome. As they say, "a government that robs Peter to pay Paul can always depend on the support of Paul." Governments all over the world used, and still use, this principle to convert non-political (administrative) power that they have into political power. There are many Pauls out there who are demanding their daily bread, even though they don't work. To that end they vote for every populist that promises them the wealth from the public treasury. That's how democracies die. The next step would be complete stagnation of industry, smothered by taxes of every kind. And then you will be welcoming a strongman who will clean the stables, preparing for another cycle. That's how things go for all the known human history, no matter what is the name of the economic system.
I have no objection to Mexican workers - they are, actually, honest workers. Few people would be willing to crawl across the field that is miles long, under the blazing sun. Farmers insist that without Mexicans they couldn't survive. Machines do only so much.
But Mexicans are so good at agricultural jobs that they displaced everyone else. You can become a redneck too, if you are willing to work for pennies. Few people do - even social security pays better, and you don't even need to work. If the $deity suddenly looks through the clouds and magically forces farmers to pay good wages for that labor, agricultural products will cost 10x more, and they become too expensive for poorer people. They get hit no matter what.
Mexicans have to work, too. Why do they come here for jobs? Aren't there jobs in Mexico for all those little brown people?
Why do Mexicans come across the border? Because it pays better in the USA. They certainly can work in MX, it's just the fruits of their labor will be purchased for pennies per ton by agricultural cartels, and there is nobody else to sell to. Whose fault is that? But it's always easier for any one individual to vote with his feet. The fight against corrupted politicians may take more than a lifetime; a person has to think about his family first.
If some work and other do not, but they all are fed and clothed, it is unfair because the working individuals expend their labor. One could say that workers are paid much better than the non-working people, but today the difference is not that great. With more and more people not working, the government has to pay unemployed people, or else mass deaths (and riots) will occur. Working people see it as injustice and stop working. See USSR in 1990's - that's what happened. In the end, the society has no goods because nobody is willing to produce them.
Communism postulates that work is optional, and is done only as long as the worker wants to work. That in itself is not unusual; the whole F/OSS is made possible by such workers. However there is no pathway from here to there. Automated factories exist today, but their products are not given away for free. In an ultimate case we will have one owner of all factories; many such factories, 100% automated; and 6 billion people who have no income to buy output of those factories. What reason would the factory owner have to maintain those factories if they produce no income? Perhaps in a severely communist society the owner would be killed (as communists love to do) and the factories will be taken over by the hungry masses.
That's just it... the idea is not protected. Only their creative expression.
What is that "creative expression" that you are talking about? Is it a specific cardboard cutout? No, it's a specific idea that contains a well defined image of a certain rodent. An opposite of such specific idea would be a generic idea of a rodent without any such identifying characteristics.
So Mickey Mouse is an idea, and the owner controls every physical or virtual implementation of that idea. There are other ideas about animals, and sometimes other people have rights on those - but Disney has their Mickey Mouse idea.
This is one of major obstacles to the transition from the current system to the future system of robotic factories and lazy consumers who don't need to work. (That is the utopian world of communism.)
The transition depends on factory owners - who invested money - to give up their property, including the IP. But what motive would they have to do that? Wouldn't they want to be owners of the world? Who will make them surrender their wealth? They are the government, for all practical reasons.
If you have a gun? Nothing. Remember what Mao said about the origin of power?
A con man could easily print a legitimately looking laminated ID, carry a holster with a plastic (training) gun, print some official-looking papers... and that would do it. Who is going to question orders of a secret court? If you want to be doubly sure, get a phone number in an area code of interest, put a secretary there, and she will confirm your identity. How would anyone confirm identity of a secretary? No way.
That would be the legal requirement. However there are many businesses (like all) that don't want to send all their printed documents to a man on the cloud.
Ideas without implementation are not patentable. But they are certainly copyrightable - like books, for example, or music. Or Mickey Mouse; what is it other than an idea of a certain kind of an anthropomorphic rodent? They don't exist, and they never existed (as far as I know.)
Some poor negro kid in my city (it's full of poverty-stricken blacks, and Good Will donations go exactly to the store you put them in) now gets a $70 pair of pants for $5. Now he has nice pants, a few repairs, but they're nice. He doesn't have to buy pants, and that wealth stays in society.
On the flip side of the coin, you just removed the last reason for that black kid to go out and earn some money. Why should he work if eventually some white dude will throw goodies at him? (This can be extended to the government, whose social services act as a lifetime free money supply.) Why then should we wonder that black kids don't work and don't learn?
Using the poor as a recycler for your old clothes is arrogant. We do not need poor as such. It would be nice if everyone is reasonably well off. However for that to be fair everyone has to work. This is not going to happen simply because there are no jobs for less educated (or less talented where it matters) people. As result, every working stiff has to pay for ten non-working stiffs. That's how poverty spreads.
To prevent that you need jobs. But there won't be any more jobs for manual laborers. Those jobs are domain of Mexicans (agricultural work still requires a lot of manual labor.) What to do? I don't think anyone has a working solution. The efficiency of labor is already too high. Luddites, I guess, had their panties in a bunch a century or two too early.
In other words they were just doing the job they were hired for..
I'm unsure that they were "hired" (they were the police, not mercenaries) to terminate, without warning, everyone who crosses an imaginary boundary of their protected area. But that's what they did.
Slashdot Mirror
If you've lived somewhere with cluster mailboxes, you know they aren't always under the view of a camera, but are provided with locks in all circumstances.
Who hasn't started with renting an apartment? I did. The mailboxes were outside, away from the street. Anyone could break those locks - they are only strong enough to keep honest people honest. Fortunately, such break-ins haven't happened while I was there, but in general it happens from time to time. Human stupidity is infinite.
At a business center we have clusters; more than once the mail carrier drove away closing the door but failing to lock it, so that all the mail compartments were left exposed.
Thanks for the insider information. I don't know what is evaluated, and how it affects the carrier. But I attempted many things to attract his attention to the outgoing mail. He just doesn't look. Those plastic red flags? Tried, unsuccessfully. Stuck the envelope in the way of incoming mail? It got pushed in! Now the only realiable way is what I described. Or I can wait until I get to the company's office. There mail is collected religiously; but there is some volume of it in a dedicated mailbox.
I must say this situation is not unique to this exact route. My friend lives 30 miles away, in a town. He has a roadside mailbox. He never mails from there. He says, first because the mail is never picked up, and second because it can be stolen. I don't know about the latter, but indeed if a mail piece is accessible to the carrier it is also accessible to everyone else. He mails letters only via USPS collection boxes (in the street) or at comparable safe places.
Perhaps those little brownie points that a carrier gets for collecting mail do not outweigh the ability to finish his route 30 minutes earlier. I don't know if the carrier can go home earlier, though. But he certainly can stop by his lover in the middle of the route :-) or just to have a thoughtful breakfast at some vista point and simply enjoy the view.
What kind of Mad-Maxian post apocalyptic nightmare has the USA turned into?
It is truly revolting. You need to look hard for a road sign that is not yet defaced or shot up. Every other overpass is covered in graffiti. Every fifth delivery truck is covered in graffiti. Every other teenager rides in a rusty car, plays gangsta rap, wears pants on his ankles, and some may try to kill you for a wrong look. I do not stop in unsafe places, of which there are many. But why do I tell you all this, come and see for yourself! You'd kiss the Canadian soil as soon as you cross back. Mere Mississauga, a little industrial suburb within GTA, looks like heaven once you have to visit Niagara Falls (that is on the US side) and come back.
But I work in the USA, and that work is important.
Trust me, I don't dream of a sprawling rural lifestyle where I need to drive 30 minutes to town to buy food when surprise guests stop by for dinner. Some people *do* want that lifestyle, but I don't see why I should subsidize them.
Nobody should subsidize anyone, IMO. Note that I said not a word about prices that USPS may charge for delivery to certain locations. I'm all for them charging more; that would give me a reason to review the deal with USPS.
However many people live outside of cities just because they need the space. For an example, look here. Can you install such an antenna in your backyard (that you don't have anyway?) Other people have other interests, and often their needs exceed what a standard city home, with a one-car garage, can offer. Where do you set up your machine shop? Where is your nanoparticle-emitting 3D printer installed? Where do you do your welding and plasma cutting? You can't seriously suggest that human interests must be constrained to a morning jog in a park and a bar in the evening. I don't even know where any bar can be found in this area, since I have no use of them. But I have a good list of metal warehouses, electronic parts suppliers, and know every Harbor Freight within 100 miles.
It all depends on one specific human - the mail carrier. Some walk an extra mile to be good. Other don't care about you. Some even steal your mail. The carrier here doesn't steal anything, but he won't bother to look for the outgoing mail either. It could be worse. I have low expectations :-(
Yes, I can tell that it's Canada. (I lived there for a few years.) There is no damage.
Here is a road sign that is more typical for the USA:
http://www.istockphoto.com/stock-photo-9983225-vandalized-road-sign-many-bullet-holes.php
Those mail clusters would be vandalized pretty soon, if road signs are any indication. Too many idiots in this country. I see damage everywhere as I drive around - graffiti, bullet holes, destruction... Some rural roads are so empty that nothing stops a fool from acting as a fool. It's not as bad in Canada.
That's why, if USPS cares about my opinion, I would rather prefer to get my mail once per week, but at my mailbox (in the street, just outside the gate.) Isn't that what we pay USPS for - to deliver mail?
I do not want the cluster because I'm sure it would be poorly secured (like no security at all,) and it would be a good target for any delinquents who want to get someone else's refund checks or whatever else that is valuable. My mailbox is locked, and it's in the field of view of a security camera.
The USPS has to go to each address each day, to see if there's any mail to be picked up.
Mail carriers only do that at clusters, where there are large collection mailboxes dedicated to outgoing mail.
But if you are talking about an individual curbside mailbox, carriers do not collect mail from them. They should, but they don't bother, regardless of how obvious the flag is. As they approach the address they look through their pile, and if there is nothing for you today they just drive on. They do not stop and check, even though my mailbox is at the street, in front of the gate. (I do not receive anything at the door, except UPS and FedEx for who I open the gate because they can't deliver anywhere else, and they sometimes need a signature.)
If I have mail to be sent, I watch the USPS carrier driving up the street. He will be back in about 10 minutes - just enough for me to gather outgoing mail, walk up to the gate and into the street, and wait a few minutes for the truck coming back. Then I say hello to the carrier and give him the mail. He double-checks that I haven't forgotten the stamp, and the mail is as safe and secure as it ever going to be within USPS system.
So, why do you think you need to actually empty your mailbox if it's three miles away?
The response above perfectly answers that question:
Try it and see what cruel things the government does to you. The IRS people... The motor vehicle department... the lawyers ... jury duty. Automated speeding tickets. Rare random demand letters from the government about X, Y or Z (i.e. registered mail).
You do not want to lose the letter from DMV with request for payment of your car plates fees, or with a sticker once you do pay. Inattention to jury summons may be even less pleasant.
The math is correct. Farmers and ranchers, who usually live along county roads, do not go to the town every day. There is no reason to; they work at their own property. (As matter of fact, I do the same; I work from home, and I go to the valley maybe twice per week.) Distances to nearest towns can be considerable, like 10 or 20 miles. It's not the end of the world, but you don't go there just to check your mailbox. I was driving some of those roads between CA and NV, from north toward Reno, and you have to watch your fuel gauge because not every town has a gas station. Those are some serious distances.
City dwellers already have mailbox clusters, and I see no reason why they can't continue using them. Most business centers have mailbox clusters too. The only catch is security - those clusters must be sufficiently protected from vandals.
This is the kind of company I'll feel just peachy about letting have unfettered access to my bank account? Right.
I pay all my bills electronically. Wells Fargo has a "Bill Pay" service where you can instruct the bank, online, to either transfer the payment electronically (if the service company registered for that) or to mail a check (if they haven't done so.) Both payments are one-way and one-time (unless you want them to be recurring.) The receiving company does not have an "unfettered access to my bank account." Some companies offer automatic withdrawals, but I decline such offers for the same reason as you do.
Another good aspect of this service is that all payments are registered at the bank. If some service company mixes up the paperwork, I have the proof that is pretty heavyweight - records of a major bank that document everything that happened to every sum of money that moved around. This service is free (to me, at least - don't know if they tie it to some other conditions.) I would be better off even if it costs 45 cents per transaction - because that's what a stamp costs, and an envelope, and my time to fill it all out and then worry if the check gets lost. Many services signed up for e-bills; this means that no paper is involved, and no humans either.
If you don't want to drive miles to a mailbox cluster, the USPS doesn't want to drive those miles to deliver a bulk mail envelope that only earned them 25 cents.
This is so obviously untrue. Math to the rescue. USPS requires one customer per mile. Let's say there are two, and the road (dead end) is 10 miles long. There are 20 customers. A carrier has to travel 20 miles to make all deliveries if he starts at the mile 0 (and let's posit that the USPS office is there too.)
Now, if the carrier doesn't deliver then every resident has to drive to the USPS office. Let's even disregard the waiting time and focus only on miles driven. The fist customer drives one mile (0.5 mile * 2.) The second customer drives 2 miles (1 mile * 2). The third customer drives 3 miles. An obvious arithmetic progression here (every next resident has to drive extra to his neighbor and back.)
Rumor says that the sum of an arithmetic progression is often found as n*(a1+an)/2. Since the a1 is 1 and an is 20, we suddenly learn that all residents have to drive 20*(1+20)/2 = 210 miles per day!!! Compare to 20 miles that the carrier has to drive. If we force residents to drive to their mailbox cluster (under those conditions, that are typical in rural areas) then it would generate a lot more pollution and wear of vehicles.
Of course there is one simple solution to that - let's outlaw rural homes and make everyone live in 100-storey skyscrapers; Gil the Arm visited one of such buildings, as I recall. Arcologies are very efficient this way. And who needs all that nature anyway? Humans are born and bred to live in caves of steel and eat yeast products. They don't need all that dusty and dirty nature.
The nearest Post Office here is in about 15 minutes of driving. However parking there is pretty bad, the office is tiny, and the lines are huge. If you come at rush hour you cannot easily leave because of traffic issues. You need to allocate at least 30 minutes if you only want to buy one stamp at the counter. I cannot imagine myself ever going there; the few times I had to do that to retrieve a package were a sad waste of time.
What USPS needs to do is this. They scan the front of all incoming first class mail and make the scans available to you over the Internet. (You can register for that.) Pieces of mail that you mark for retrieval could be delivered on a weekly basis by a carrier, to your existing mailbox (or door.) Pieces of mail that you explicitly decline (and all flyers, if you so desire) are trashed right at the post office. Pieces of mail that you haven't marked for a couple of weeks are returned to sender. You would be also able to configure vacation mode, where this limbo time is extended (for free or for extra pay, depending on how long the vacation lasts.)
This way you'd be receiving important mail once per week, and the carrier would be running light. The number of carriers can be reduced, since they don't need to deliver from 9am to 11am; now they can deliver 24/7 if they want to, as long as they visit every mailbox not more often than once per week.
It's not a problem in apartments, where it is safe and easy to get down to the mailboxes. However where I live the distance between residences is about 0.5 mile, and if they create a mailbox cluster it would be about 3 miles away. Do you want to drive for 12 minutes to just get useless ads? If they go ahead with this method, I would be tempted to cancel mail service. Those who I deal with have email, and I can pay them electronically.
You're deciding what is and isn't fair arbitrarily.
That's the key question here. Who and how decides what is fair?
The answer to that is, of course, that these norms are set by the society. The mechanistic allocation of fairness (based on expended labor vs. received rewards) is the top layer, and the most visible one. But then there are things that people do for free or receive for free, and they are considered to be fair for everyone involved.
If you want to object to the principle of "who does not work shall not eat" (which is remarkably shared by the Bible and by Marxists) then you are, of course, welcome. As they say, "a government that robs Peter to pay Paul can always depend on the support of Paul." Governments all over the world used, and still use, this principle to convert non-political (administrative) power that they have into political power. There are many Pauls out there who are demanding their daily bread, even though they don't work. To that end they vote for every populist that promises them the wealth from the public treasury. That's how democracies die. The next step would be complete stagnation of industry, smothered by taxes of every kind. And then you will be welcoming a strongman who will clean the stables, preparing for another cycle. That's how things go for all the known human history, no matter what is the name of the economic system.
I have no objection to Mexican workers - they are, actually, honest workers. Few people would be willing to crawl across the field that is miles long, under the blazing sun. Farmers insist that without Mexicans they couldn't survive. Machines do only so much.
But Mexicans are so good at agricultural jobs that they displaced everyone else. You can become a redneck too, if you are willing to work for pennies. Few people do - even social security pays better, and you don't even need to work. If the $deity suddenly looks through the clouds and magically forces farmers to pay good wages for that labor, agricultural products will cost 10x more, and they become too expensive for poorer people. They get hit no matter what.
Mexicans have to work, too. Why do they come here for jobs? Aren't there jobs in Mexico for all those little brown people?
Why do Mexicans come across the border? Because it pays better in the USA. They certainly can work in MX, it's just the fruits of their labor will be purchased for pennies per ton by agricultural cartels, and there is nobody else to sell to. Whose fault is that? But it's always easier for any one individual to vote with his feet. The fight against corrupted politicians may take more than a lifetime; a person has to think about his family first.
If some work and other do not, but they all are fed and clothed, it is unfair because the working individuals expend their labor. One could say that workers are paid much better than the non-working people, but today the difference is not that great. With more and more people not working, the government has to pay unemployed people, or else mass deaths (and riots) will occur. Working people see it as injustice and stop working. See USSR in 1990's - that's what happened. In the end, the society has no goods because nobody is willing to produce them.
Communism postulates that work is optional, and is done only as long as the worker wants to work. That in itself is not unusual; the whole F/OSS is made possible by such workers. However there is no pathway from here to there. Automated factories exist today, but their products are not given away for free. In an ultimate case we will have one owner of all factories; many such factories, 100% automated; and 6 billion people who have no income to buy output of those factories. What reason would the factory owner have to maintain those factories if they produce no income? Perhaps in a severely communist society the owner would be killed (as communists love to do) and the factories will be taken over by the hungry masses.
That's just it... the idea is not protected. Only their creative expression.
What is that "creative expression" that you are talking about? Is it a specific cardboard cutout? No, it's a specific idea that contains a well defined image of a certain rodent. An opposite of such specific idea would be a generic idea of a rodent without any such identifying characteristics.
So Mickey Mouse is an idea, and the owner controls every physical or virtual implementation of that idea. There are other ideas about animals, and sometimes other people have rights on those - but Disney has their Mickey Mouse idea.
This is one of major obstacles to the transition from the current system to the future system of robotic factories and lazy consumers who don't need to work. (That is the utopian world of communism.)
The transition depends on factory owners - who invested money - to give up their property, including the IP. But what motive would they have to do that? Wouldn't they want to be owners of the world? Who will make them surrender their wealth? They are the government, for all practical reasons.
If you have a gun? Nothing. Remember what Mao said about the origin of power?
A con man could easily print a legitimately looking laminated ID, carry a holster with a plastic (training) gun, print some official-looking papers... and that would do it. Who is going to question orders of a secret court? If you want to be doubly sure, get a phone number in an area code of interest, put a secretary there, and she will confirm your identity. How would anyone confirm identity of a secretary? No way.
That would be the legal requirement. However there are many businesses (like all) that don't want to send all their printed documents to a man on the cloud.
Ideas without implementation are not patentable. But they are certainly copyrightable - like books, for example, or music. Or Mickey Mouse; what is it other than an idea of a certain kind of an anthropomorphic rodent? They don't exist, and they never existed (as far as I know.)
I guess Google wants to have access now to the traditional hardcopy documents that you provide to your tax accountant and your banker.
The world is quickly separating into two stable groups: Google fans and Google haters. The latter started as the former, but got better.
Some poor negro kid in my city (it's full of poverty-stricken blacks, and Good Will donations go exactly to the store you put them in) now gets a $70 pair of pants for $5. Now he has nice pants, a few repairs, but they're nice. He doesn't have to buy pants, and that wealth stays in society.
On the flip side of the coin, you just removed the last reason for that black kid to go out and earn some money. Why should he work if eventually some white dude will throw goodies at him? (This can be extended to the government, whose social services act as a lifetime free money supply.) Why then should we wonder that black kids don't work and don't learn?
Using the poor as a recycler for your old clothes is arrogant. We do not need poor as such. It would be nice if everyone is reasonably well off. However for that to be fair everyone has to work. This is not going to happen simply because there are no jobs for less educated (or less talented where it matters) people. As result, every working stiff has to pay for ten non-working stiffs. That's how poverty spreads.
To prevent that you need jobs. But there won't be any more jobs for manual laborers. Those jobs are domain of Mexicans (agricultural work still requires a lot of manual labor.) What to do? I don't think anyone has a working solution. The efficiency of labor is already too high. Luddites, I guess, had their panties in a bunch a century or two too early.
In other words they were just doing the job they were hired for..
I'm unsure that they were "hired" (they were the police, not mercenaries) to terminate, without warning, everyone who crosses an imaginary boundary of their protected area. But that's what they did.