The USPS provided a vital service for a good chunk of our history, but it just isn't necessary anymore. That isn't to say mail delivery isn't necessary -- but we live in a time where we have numerous other cheap or free ways to communicate and deliver things. Often much faster and more reliably. Email, telephones, cell phones, private package delivery companies and so on. Most people can process their bills online, communicate by email, phone, text message, get their online orders delivered by UPS, FedEX, Airborne, and DHL, and would rather not have the junk mail (which is the bulk of mail).
The USPS only really provides two remaining vital services: A last resort of alternate communication and advertising.
Junk mail is not a service. It is a revenue generation service for the USPS. It does nothing for you and me. You need to deliver mail to my door every day, because you have to deliver junk mail that you were paid to deliver to keep the USPS funded so that you can afford to deliver more junk mail to my door every day? I have a better idea - delivery it once per week and you can probably afford to cut out the junkmail and sucking off that spam-teat.
Alternate communication / last resort communication is great. That letter from your great aunt can wait a couple more days and chances are any vital documents from a business you work with or your employer are going to be sent by courier, anyway. This is a great reason to continue to have a national mail delivery service. So let's do away with the spam, deliver mail once per week (cutting out 80% of the work and the labor expenses and so on), and maybe charge a more reasonable fee for delivering mail? In 2013, I'm pretty sure people would be okay spending a dollar to send that one letter every month they send to someone.
Just because you get your bills online doesn't mean they have to be automatically deducted from your accounts. Use online billing and when you get the bills online, go manually pay them.
I mean . . . this is like . . . pretty common stuff. My mom is in her late 50s and knows nothing about technology and has been doing this for years.
This is one city where that wouldn't fly. They are not going to drill holes in the concrete sidewalk every thirty feet and jam an ugly looking mailbox into it. It looks ugly as hell, for one thing. Especially as neighbors start to let their boxes deteriorate. Rush, graffiti, dents, the posts start getting bent or rotted. This sort of thing has to be planned into the development. I don't even think, in this city particularly, that there is room on the sidewalks for a mailbox. That is part of why they put them on the door.
Plus, it really doesn't take all that long for them to deliver things on foot. The postal carrier usually cuts through yards, so it's no different than walking on the street (that is, no walking back to the sidwalk, down the street, back up to the house, back down the walkway, out to the street, etc). I haven't timed it or anything, but my postal carrier seems to sort his mail as he walks between houses, too. So when he gets to your house, the mail is already in his hand. Bam - in your box and on his way. When I grew up with those jeep-driving carriers who brought them mailbox to mailbox, they would speed along to the next house . . . then sit there for a minute or so, while they sorted through the mail to find stuff that belongs to you. Then put it in the box. Then speed along to the next house, where they'd sit for a minute or so picking through their mail.
I'm sure there are some places where it could truly speed things up, but in a tightly-packed and organized neighborhood, I doubt the difference in delivery speed is really that significant.
And if it is ... I'm happy to sign something saying "ONLY DELIVER TO ME ONCE A WEEK AND DO NOT DELIVERY ANY JUNK MAIL". That will cut the time you spend delivering to my door by about 98% per year.
I get packages delivered very often. Sometimes several packages per week. With that "community delivery" bullshit (in apartments, for example), there's simply no place to leave a package. The result? Every fucking delivery is a god damn chore, unless you are home. Or, frankly, even if you are home and the delivery person just decided it was easier to write "recipient not home" than it is to actually check and see if you are home. Then you end up having to go out to the sub-office (UPS/FedEX/whatever) and pick it up.
Now that I own a home? Shit is delivered to my doorstep and they ring the bell and leave. I get every package, every time, on time, right at my doorstep.
Not having to deal with the bullshit of those community delivery box center things several times per week for multiple/big packages is a motherfucking godsend. That, alone, is nearly worth the mortgage.
It depends on the style of your residence, often. In my city, everyone has delivery to a little box on their doorstep. No mailboxes at the end of your walkway, on the street (which is the normal way of doing it, I believe). It seems obvious, from looking around the city, that this is done to save space on the street/sidewalk and to keep clutter away from the road. It makes the neighborhoods look a little cleaner and more organized not having endless rows of mailboxes. Not to mention, it is probably very nice for the elderly and infirm, as well as more secure (someone would have to come to your door to thieve things instead of walk past it on the street).
Delivery carriers seem to enjoy it, too. Especially in the summer. Throw on some shorts and an ipod and go for a walk delivering mail versus being in a stinky little overheating metal box of a postal jeep.
What's fun is when those "community mailbox centers" get vandalized or smashed open. Also, they're usually VERY TINY boxes that fill up fast. When I lived in an apartment complex, it would fill up every one to two mail deliveries and then the post office would start leaving shitty little messages about how they're going to stop delivering to me (GOOD!). That's all well and fine, except the reason it was full was because of all the shit they were shoving into my mailbox. Almost every day, there was at least one multi-page newsprint advertisement thick enough you could roll it up and fend off a rabid dog with. Not to mention all they mail they delivered for people who had lived there the prior fifteen years ... even though none of them lived there anymore (in fact, that accounted for about 70% of the mail).
Sorry, but I am not going to be going out of my way to pick up a bunch of shitty advertising that people are paying you to make me come pick up.
Is your question rhetorical? Lighting is the best way to avoid burglary. Burglars will avoid a house that is well lit. You can live in your freaky pitch-black crime-hole. I'll light up my walkways and entries and back yard - thanks.
Uh. This isn't about "not leaving your package". This is about them leaving it at your door versus leaving it at some weird "community bundle" down the street. Personally, I'd rather they just leave it on my doorstep and ring the bell, like they already do.
Well, the one time every year or two I get anything of any importance via the USPS. 98% of everything actually goes through UPS and FedEx, which go out of their way to deliver things to you and give you great service.
Give me the option to totally opt-out of the USPS. I'll gladly do that.
Seriously, it's enough of a hassle to have someone shove a bunch of fucking junkmail every day into the box outside my door. Now you want me to walk to the curb or down the street for the pleasure of collecting all of your shitty paid-for advertising so I can throw it in my trash that I also have to pay for?
I don't think you quite understand the situation. The USPS is not in a money crunch. It is a fabrication forced upon them through ridiculous per-funding requirements that aren't forced upon other institutions. The whole "they're bleeding cash and gotta cut spending!" thing is a farce.
I get my bills online. The only thing I get in the mail are county tax assessments once or twice per year. EVERYTHING else is bulk advertising that goes straight into the trash.
If I wanted to deal with a giant apartment-style "all mailboxes in a cluster far away from your house" thing, I wouldn't have bought a god damn house. I'd be living in an apartment.
But, really, mail is pretty irrelevant. Save a ton of money for the USPS by delivering mail to each address once per week. That is frequent enough.
I have a better idea. How about they deliver TO THE DOOR but only deliver mail once per week? Believe me, if I have anything that is more time sensitive than "about a week", I am NOT sending/receiving it by USPS. As it is, I don't check the mail more than once every week or two *and it is delivered right to my door*... and that is, frankly, just to grab it out of the little box and throw it directly into the trash. Hell, moving it to the curb or somewhere else would be fantastic -- because it can be someone else's problem and I won't even have to ever empty my mail...
More like all Star Wars is like a bad long-term relationship. Everyone else knows you should get out and experience more things in life. Better things. Far more amazing and creative and imaginative things. Unfortunately, you've invested so much time in it that it is all you know and you stick around taking the whacks and insults rather than venturing out.
My thought was more along the lines of "great, when they're swallowed up, can we finally stop giving a shit about Star Wars?"
Unfortunately, I think it'll still be milked and unimaginative dolts will still be jacking off to the franchise in a thousand years, when these are unearthed.
I dunno... the world could do with a good nuclear war. Life is kind of fucking dull worrying about mortgage payments and remembering to DVR the latest episode of shitty television shows. Might do us some good to go be propelled into a time where procuring shelter, food, and fortifications within small communities of self-reliant groups is your daily toil; rather than punching a 9-5.
I really wish more of this stuff (like Task Rabbit and Uber) would come to Denver. Since I've moved out here, I've missed the closeness of everything that you have in the Bay Area and the fantastic public transit of Portland. My hours are inverse of the normal human being, which means there are a ton of things that I couldn't do even if I wanted to. For example, my neighbors wouldn't be too happy if I mowed my lawn at 2:00am on a Saturday morning and it is hard to get groceries at 3:30AM on a Sunday morning. Not to mention just regular errands. Picking things up, grabbing lunch, delivering paperwork across town.
Unfortunately, nothing in Denver, yet.
Of course, there are still a lot of concerns you have to deal with. Insurance, bonding, claims, etc are not quite so clear cut or simple. More, plenty of municipalities don't appreciate having the middle-men taken out of this process and have been impeding people connecting online to perform work that the city wants to control/license/lease/regulate.
On the whole, I think Slashdot has been pretty fair in treatment of Slashdot. Coming up, they were beacons of genius and outliers and open source and pushing the envelope and they were the go-to choice for geeks. Slashdot's community even supported Google pretty far into their shift to "doing evil". The sentiment didn't really seem to change around here until they had crossed the line and made it clear they weren't ever going back.
Slashdot Mirror
The USPS provided a vital service for a good chunk of our history, but it just isn't necessary anymore. That isn't to say mail delivery isn't necessary -- but we live in a time where we have numerous other cheap or free ways to communicate and deliver things. Often much faster and more reliably. Email, telephones, cell phones, private package delivery companies and so on. Most people can process their bills online, communicate by email, phone, text message, get their online orders delivered by UPS, FedEX, Airborne, and DHL, and would rather not have the junk mail (which is the bulk of mail).
The USPS only really provides two remaining vital services: A last resort of alternate communication and advertising.
Junk mail is not a service. It is a revenue generation service for the USPS. It does nothing for you and me. You need to deliver mail to my door every day, because you have to deliver junk mail that you were paid to deliver to keep the USPS funded so that you can afford to deliver more junk mail to my door every day? I have a better idea - delivery it once per week and you can probably afford to cut out the junkmail and sucking off that spam-teat.
Alternate communication / last resort communication is great. That letter from your great aunt can wait a couple more days and chances are any vital documents from a business you work with or your employer are going to be sent by courier, anyway. This is a great reason to continue to have a national mail delivery service. So let's do away with the spam, deliver mail once per week (cutting out 80% of the work and the labor expenses and so on), and maybe charge a more reasonable fee for delivering mail? In 2013, I'm pretty sure people would be okay spending a dollar to send that one letter every month they send to someone.
Just because you get your bills online doesn't mean they have to be automatically deducted from your accounts. Use online billing and when you get the bills online, go manually pay them.
I mean . . . this is like . . . pretty common stuff. My mom is in her late 50s and knows nothing about technology and has been doing this for years.
This is one city where that wouldn't fly. They are not going to drill holes in the concrete sidewalk every thirty feet and jam an ugly looking mailbox into it. It looks ugly as hell, for one thing. Especially as neighbors start to let their boxes deteriorate. Rush, graffiti, dents, the posts start getting bent or rotted. This sort of thing has to be planned into the development. I don't even think, in this city particularly, that there is room on the sidewalks for a mailbox. That is part of why they put them on the door.
Plus, it really doesn't take all that long for them to deliver things on foot. The postal carrier usually cuts through yards, so it's no different than walking on the street (that is, no walking back to the sidwalk, down the street, back up to the house, back down the walkway, out to the street, etc). I haven't timed it or anything, but my postal carrier seems to sort his mail as he walks between houses, too. So when he gets to your house, the mail is already in his hand. Bam - in your box and on his way. When I grew up with those jeep-driving carriers who brought them mailbox to mailbox, they would speed along to the next house . . . then sit there for a minute or so, while they sorted through the mail to find stuff that belongs to you. Then put it in the box. Then speed along to the next house, where they'd sit for a minute or so picking through their mail.
I'm sure there are some places where it could truly speed things up, but in a tightly-packed and organized neighborhood, I doubt the difference in delivery speed is really that significant.
And if it is . .. I'm happy to sign something saying "ONLY DELIVER TO ME ONCE A WEEK AND DO NOT DELIVERY ANY JUNK MAIL". That will cut the time you spend delivering to my door by about 98% per year.
Really?
I get packages delivered very often. Sometimes several packages per week. With that "community delivery" bullshit (in apartments, for example), there's simply no place to leave a package. The result? Every fucking delivery is a god damn chore, unless you are home. Or, frankly, even if you are home and the delivery person just decided it was easier to write "recipient not home" than it is to actually check and see if you are home. Then you end up having to go out to the sub-office (UPS/FedEX/whatever) and pick it up.
Now that I own a home? Shit is delivered to my doorstep and they ring the bell and leave. I get every package, every time, on time, right at my doorstep.
Not having to deal with the bullshit of those community delivery box center things several times per week for multiple/big packages is a motherfucking godsend. That, alone, is nearly worth the mortgage.
It depends on the style of your residence, often. In my city, everyone has delivery to a little box on their doorstep. No mailboxes at the end of your walkway, on the street (which is the normal way of doing it, I believe). It seems obvious, from looking around the city, that this is done to save space on the street/sidewalk and to keep clutter away from the road. It makes the neighborhoods look a little cleaner and more organized not having endless rows of mailboxes. Not to mention, it is probably very nice for the elderly and infirm, as well as more secure (someone would have to come to your door to thieve things instead of walk past it on the street).
Delivery carriers seem to enjoy it, too. Especially in the summer. Throw on some shorts and an ipod and go for a walk delivering mail versus being in a stinky little overheating metal box of a postal jeep.
What's fun is when those "community mailbox centers" get vandalized or smashed open. Also, they're usually VERY TINY boxes that fill up fast. When I lived in an apartment complex, it would fill up every one to two mail deliveries and then the post office would start leaving shitty little messages about how they're going to stop delivering to me (GOOD!). That's all well and fine, except the reason it was full was because of all the shit they were shoving into my mailbox. Almost every day, there was at least one multi-page newsprint advertisement thick enough you could roll it up and fend off a rabid dog with. Not to mention all they mail they delivered for people who had lived there the prior fifteen years . .. even though none of them lived there anymore (in fact, that accounted for about 70% of the mail).
Sorry, but I am not going to be going out of my way to pick up a bunch of shitty advertising that people are paying you to make me come pick up.
Is your question rhetorical? Lighting is the best way to avoid burglary. Burglars will avoid a house that is well lit. You can live in your freaky pitch-black crime-hole. I'll light up my walkways and entries and back yard - thanks.
Uh. This isn't about "not leaving your package". This is about them leaving it at your door versus leaving it at some weird "community bundle" down the street. Personally, I'd rather they just leave it on my doorstep and ring the bell, like they already do.
Well, the one time every year or two I get anything of any importance via the USPS. 98% of everything actually goes through UPS and FedEx, which go out of their way to deliver things to you and give you great service.
Give me the option to totally opt-out of the USPS. I'll gladly do that.
Holy shit, I never thought of this. You mean, if I refuse to shovel my walk in the winter, they will refuse to deliver stacks of junkmail to my door?
It seems so fucking obvious, but I never thought of doing that. Looking forward to next winter!!!
I would rather give up all deliveries.
Seriously, it's enough of a hassle to have someone shove a bunch of fucking junkmail every day into the box outside my door. Now you want me to walk to the curb or down the street for the pleasure of collecting all of your shitty paid-for advertising so I can throw it in my trash that I also have to pay for?
I don't think you quite understand the situation. The USPS is not in a money crunch. It is a fabrication forced upon them through ridiculous per-funding requirements that aren't forced upon other institutions. The whole "they're bleeding cash and gotta cut spending!" thing is a farce.
I get my bills online. The only thing I get in the mail are county tax assessments once or twice per year. EVERYTHING else is bulk advertising that goes straight into the trash.
If I wanted to deal with a giant apartment-style "all mailboxes in a cluster far away from your house" thing, I wouldn't have bought a god damn house. I'd be living in an apartment.
But, really, mail is pretty irrelevant. Save a ton of money for the USPS by delivering mail to each address once per week. That is frequent enough.
I have a better idea. How about they deliver TO THE DOOR but only deliver mail once per week? Believe me, if I have anything that is more time sensitive than "about a week", I am NOT sending/receiving it by USPS. As it is, I don't check the mail more than once every week or two *and it is delivered right to my door*... and that is, frankly, just to grab it out of the little box and throw it directly into the trash. Hell, moving it to the curb or somewhere else would be fantastic -- because it can be someone else's problem and I won't even have to ever empty my mail...
Don't worry. None of these industry people are ever in a government position responsible for anything related to their business or anything, at least!
Oh wait...
Hey, I know my BILL has increased 30% (from $100/mo to $125).
Thanks, Comcast!
:(
Glad I'm not the only one who misread it that way. :)
More like all Star Wars is like a bad long-term relationship. Everyone else knows you should get out and experience more things in life. Better things. Far more amazing and creative and imaginative things. Unfortunately, you've invested so much time in it that it is all you know and you stick around taking the whacks and insults rather than venturing out.
Depends what sex the dog is. Everyone knows bitches don't read slashdot.
(I shall now retire to my underground bunker where I can hide from the incoming for the above statement).
My thought was more along the lines of "great, when they're swallowed up, can we finally stop giving a shit about Star Wars?"
Unfortunately, I think it'll still be milked and unimaginative dolts will still be jacking off to the franchise in a thousand years, when these are unearthed.
I dunno... the world could do with a good nuclear war. Life is kind of fucking dull worrying about mortgage payments and remembering to DVR the latest episode of shitty television shows. Might do us some good to go be propelled into a time where procuring shelter, food, and fortifications within small communities of self-reliant groups is your daily toil; rather than punching a 9-5.
Agreed. It's only acceptable for the first two male children of Adam and Eve. None of this hereosexual incest stuff!
Indeed. My first thought was "giggady".
I really wish more of this stuff (like Task Rabbit and Uber) would come to Denver. Since I've moved out here, I've missed the closeness of everything that you have in the Bay Area and the fantastic public transit of Portland. My hours are inverse of the normal human being, which means there are a ton of things that I couldn't do even if I wanted to. For example, my neighbors wouldn't be too happy if I mowed my lawn at 2:00am on a Saturday morning and it is hard to get groceries at 3:30AM on a Sunday morning. Not to mention just regular errands. Picking things up, grabbing lunch, delivering paperwork across town.
Unfortunately, nothing in Denver, yet.
Of course, there are still a lot of concerns you have to deal with. Insurance, bonding, claims, etc are not quite so clear cut or simple. More, plenty of municipalities don't appreciate having the middle-men taken out of this process and have been impeding people connecting online to perform work that the city wants to control/license/lease/regulate.
On the whole, I think Slashdot has been pretty fair in treatment of Slashdot. Coming up, they were beacons of genius and outliers and open source and pushing the envelope and they were the go-to choice for geeks. Slashdot's community even supported Google pretty far into their shift to "doing evil". The sentiment didn't really seem to change around here until they had crossed the line and made it clear they weren't ever going back.