It's still there. I've had some fun times delivering mail on un-plowed roads with enough snow that a regular vehicle would have issues in. But, having to use an LLV with chains on the tires, rear wheel drive, and no anti-lock brakes (plus the front wheels are on a shorter axle than the rear for easier mobility on good days, but then the front doesn't cut into the snow for the rear), is quite challenging to say the least. ..You literally have to time the slide of the vehicle just right so you can stick the mail in the box before the truck slides past it. Of course the dang trucks love to slide right toward the mail boxes too. I'm really surprised I didn't take out a box or two in my day. . .
Well, I would suggest going to post office and have a little talk with the supervisor or postmaster directly if you're at a small office. That kind of behavior just isn't cool and something that makes the post office look worse than it already is. Both myself and my regular carrier (I was a substitute) tried our best to deliver well. As for security, yea, having mail stolen does happen, though if you're caught, it is a federal crime. If you're concerned about stolen mail, definitely talk with your postmaster, they'll jump on that fast.
Just a quick note on finishing routes early. ..for rural routes you get paid for evaluated time of the route. So, if the route is evaluated for 8 hours, you get paid for 8 no matter how long it actually takes you to finish. So, the faster you go, the more money you get per hour since you only worked for 6 but got paid for 8. Of course, the opposite is true too, especially during Christmas season. Now, for city carriers, it's a whole different thing that I have no idea how it works. It's quite funky and they don't teach it to you in rural carrier school (and yea, different training schools for different carriers:-)
As a former rural carrier, I can tell you that your carrier should not be doing that. Plus, he/she would most definitely want to pick that mail up during mail count. The more outgoing mail counted means possibly more money in their pocket as the route will evaluate better. And yes, twice a year or so we have to count the friekin mail. ..not a fun prospect. Luckily management takes a good chunk of the heat counting all the packages.
Ok, as a formal rural carrier, I didn't have to do door to door delivery. We only delivered to boxes at the curb and clusters. We also have 'hardship' boxes for disabled residents, which are basically on house boxes, but they're very few, one or two per route. However, there is one major issue with this plan that only a carrier would understand, and I bet a city carrier would more understand. And that's street parking. If you can't get to the box at the curb in your LLV or personal vehicle, that mail is not delivered. It is held back at the post office to be attempted to deliver the following day. At least that's how it went for rural carriers. Since I drove a LLV doing almost a city route (750+ box route), I seen this quite a bit. I can't imagine how problematic this will be on very busy streets with parking. I would have to guess they would need to rely on cluster boxes heavily in these areas, but even then it won't be pretty. Unless maybe they can get the city gov't to do no parking zones around the clusters, but I doubt it.
This is extremely illegal. I was a former rural carrier and saw a fellow carrier fired for dumping bulk mail. I wouldn't be that surprised if he will be prosecuted too for it. Though dumping mail isn't as bad as stealing it. If you steal, you go out in handcuffs for certain.
That assumes them parcel boxes are actually used. . . When I needed to deliver a package to a cluster box resident on my route, I was instructed NOT to use the parcel boxes for whatever reason, but to deliver to the door. Would have been quite nice if they'd let me use them. Not sure why they didn't though.
Here's a bit of perspective from a former Rural Letter Carrier. All rural boxes are either at the street or in clusters/central boxes (which, btw are actually quite nice to deliver to if you don't have packages, which then you have to go and deliver to the door anyway, but that's another story). However, if someone is disabled or cannot easily get to their box because of a disability, they can apply for a hardship box, which is just a box on the house. My route had one for a while till the lady passed away.
Now, what's being proposed here is going to affect city carriers only, as they are the ones that have to deliver large parts of their routes on foot. And I bet they will have similar setup for hardship boxes like us Rural guys have for disabled residents. In all fairness, I'm surprised the post office didn't do this a long time ago. It always seemed extremely inefficient to keep these walking routes going. I mean, just the amount of health benefits that have to be paid out due to all the injuries must be staggering. I knew a guy who had to get hip replacement and he was only in his early 40s. This is actually I think a much better plan than ending Saturday delivery (plus it might actually have a chance to go through as it's only affecting one of the postal unions instead of at least three).
Well, I have seen some stuff on this that technically the person receiving the misdelivered mail shouldn't open or use the contents of the mail to their advantage. However, I only seen these warnings on mail usually sent from the government, like social security checks. I was never officially briefed on the responsibilities of the person receiving misdelivered mail. Usually, they just put the mail back in the box for us to redeliver correctly. I did have a piece that was accidentally opened before being put back in the box, but I let my manager decide what to do with it, which, IIRC, he just told me to redeliver.
Now for continuous messups with a new set of carriers, there could be something a bit more interesting going on. All letter sized mail the carrier receives comes already presorted from distribution. The presorted mail may not be setup correctly and the new carriers don't know it. I had to deliver to a set of trailer parks on my route where the presorted mail was always messed up. You literally had to memorize the names and trailer numbers to get any form of accuracy of delivery as you couldn't rely on the addresses alone. And it was quite _fun_ to do because the turnover rate for the trailers was really high.
Actually, the entire mail piece is considered confidential, and only the necessary bits are to be read. As a former rural carrier, I can attest that you're not allowed to read someone's postcard or thumb through a magazine before delivering it. You're also not allowed to tell others about the kind of mail someone receives, like baby or bridal magazines and the logical conclusions of that type of mail. So, there is some expectation of privacy for mailing for everything except the from and to addresses.
In this state, they can and do shut off your water if you don't pay, especially if you only rent and not own your house. You miss a month of payment, you might not even get a warning, just notice one morning that you don't have water. Same goes for electricity. The utility companies here are extremely jumpy about people who don't pay.
I seriously wonder where on the GSP or NJT you can actually go 80mph without traffic or toll booths slowing you down. Having lived in NJ for a major part of my life, I rarely recall ever having the opportunity to go that fast.
I think it even more depends on who you have working under you, and what kind of talent you have access to. As a small business owner, it's not so easy getting good people that you know can get the job done without constant overview. Ideally, you want to hire good people you can trust to get their jobs done, but sometimes, especially since I'm in a rural area, they are really hard to find. With really large businesses, you have much better access to better talent.
As a business owner myself, I do agree with this, to a point. There are times, especially if you are a manufacturer, that you desperately need capital to just keep up with the ever growing orders. And if you ever get decent publicity, you could be screwed very quickly as you won't have nearly enough inventory to supply the massive increase of demand. And when that happens, a couple of things can occur. One would be that because you can't supply demand, a hole has opened up ready for a competitor to take over. Or, maybe worse, people lose interest in the whole concept of the product because they just can't purchase it. The other problem comes when you throw all the money you have at making more only to find out that still isn't enough. But, you're so strapped up in debt that you literally now must produce more to pay the debt, but you can't because you ran out of money to make more. You end up forcing yourself to go bankrupt even though you have lots of sales.
However, this all hinges on one very major assumption: that the product being sold has the potential of being widely popular where you could easily see exponential growth with just a little marketing, whether expected or not. A true niche product probably has very little possibility of going mainstream and so it can grow at a much slower rate and at possibly higher margins. Just take a look at niche software products like Adobe's stuff or any point of sale system. The prices are high, and especially for the point of sale stuff, not that complicated in features. Like what my one computer science professor always said, the money is in the niche software, and this goes for all markets as long as its a true niche serving a real need. Stuff that isn't widely known but serves a general need is not a niche, it is just starting out.
At a really small scale like that, I can understand. However, with a bit of money invested in improving the soil via added organic matter and some permanent stuff like fences, you can easily get a decent crop that doesn't cost much after the first year with the added improvements. But, if you're like me, there's never an end to the improvements and you always end up with way more money spent in the gardens than what its worth . . .;-)
Hybrids are not the same thing as GMO crops. The hybrids are crosses from varying stable (ish) lines to produce a set of offspring that are generally more vigorous than the parent lines but generally that vigor doesn't survive further breeding. It's called heterosis. It's a mostly natural thing and doesn't involve direct recoding of the genes. The GMOs on the other hand, are directly changed and only provide very certain benefits. This is usually only borer resistant (BT GMOs) or herbicide resistant (Roundup Ready). The GMO's do not provide any other advantage.
Most home owners don't grow the species that are currently GMO'd outside of corn, and usually home owners just grow sweet corn. I've yet to see much home owner interest growing soy beans, sugar beets, canola, cotton, etc.
Here's the thing with their seed. It does one of two things generally: one produces an insecticide internally so if any insect eats the plant, it dies. This is specifically the BT variant GMO. The other is resistant to Monsanto's other product, Roundup. That allows farmers to spray everything with this herbicide and everything is suppose to die except the resistant stuff. That's the marketed advantages. There's nothing about making the product better for _consumers_ outside of seemingly reduced prices via more production (and that is debated depending on who you talk to). There's also nothing on making the plants stronger and more resistant towards adverse conditions outside of borer insects which are targeted by the BT variant GMO.
Albeit not a practical solution for people with no land or time, but growing food yourself is definitely a way to make sure it ain't GMO and considerably cheaper than even non-organic produce. Even with people who have really limited land can produce quite a bit if they have enough determination. Check out these guys: http://urbanhomestead.org/ Of course living in California with their great growing climate really helps, but it's still possible in more harsh climates.
The summary is incorrect with saying Apple blocked Java 7 on 10.6. Actually, Snow Leopard can't run the new Java from Oracle, it can only run the Apple version of it which is still the 6 series. With this last round of blocking, Apple also blocked their own version on Snow Leopard and Apple has not yet released an update for it last time I checked.
Now, in my opinion, this whole blocking thing without notice was extremely unprofessional and made me disappointed in Apple, and that's coming from a Mac fan. I got hit with it the other day and spent hours trying to figure out why in the world Java wasn't working on my machines. Ended up finding a work around editing a.plist file using a console text editor. Definitely not a solution for anyone not familiar with the command line.
Another thing to point out is, how many of those handgun murders were gang or drug related? Would gun control do anything to stop the already illegal activities going on associated with the gun crime? I once served as the foreman of a grand jury a few years ago, and can attest that a staggering amount of the felonies we indicted were drug related, and this is in a small rural county. And the only gun related case we saw (one out of hundreds of felonies) was a guy who also had a mobile meth lab.
You're right with the profitability of both the packages and bulk mail (officially can't call it 'junk' mail as a carrier). However, both the parcels volume has increased and the bulk mail has stayed roughly the same in volume, despite the move to the internet. And as for first class mail, it isn't so much that it costs more to deliver, its more that they're just not getting enough volume like they used to. Of course they could raise prices on first class to make up for volume, but that would probably cause even less volume.
Now the thing here with the monopoly on the mailbox is fairly simple. Reliability of you actually getting your mail delivered would drop if the box is filled with junk from every local business who wants to stick stuff in your box. If the box is full or blocked, we have no requirement to deliver, and so you'd have to go to the post office to pick it up. That would then tarnish the post office's reputation, making it less useful for people.
Now I definitely agree there should be more emphasis on getting high speed internet access to the rural areas in this country, but without a 'last mile' postal service, many areas in this country wouldn't get any delivery service at all. Just like with the mandates on getting electricity to everyone, there must be some option to get mail and packages to everyone, hence the postal service.
The thing is, the USPS is no longer supported by tax dollars. That changed quite a while ago. The postal service has been mandated to at least break even during the subsequent years by congress. And if it wasn't for declining first class mail volume (ie, bill statements and checks going back and forth) and the insane prepayment of retirement mandated by congress, the USPS would be in pretty good shape.
On a side note, USPS is not technically a US Federal government agency. It is controlled by congress at the highest level, but otherwise is not supported by the gov't. Even the employees are not true federal employees (I should know, since I happen to be a mail carrier). We do get access to some of the benefits of federal employees, however.
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Same here (KY) with Mitch McConnell. I really wish he was voted out the last time he was up for election. . .
It's still there. I've had some fun times delivering mail on un-plowed roads with enough snow that a regular vehicle would have issues in. But, having to use an LLV with chains on the tires, rear wheel drive, and no anti-lock brakes (plus the front wheels are on a shorter axle than the rear for easier mobility on good days, but then the front doesn't cut into the snow for the rear), is quite challenging to say the least. . .You literally have to time the slide of the vehicle just right so you can stick the mail in the box before the truck slides past it. Of course the dang trucks love to slide right toward the mail boxes too. I'm really surprised I didn't take out a box or two in my day. . .
Well, I would suggest going to post office and have a little talk with the supervisor or postmaster directly if you're at a small office. That kind of behavior just isn't cool and something that makes the post office look worse than it already is. Both myself and my regular carrier (I was a substitute) tried our best to deliver well. As for security, yea, having mail stolen does happen, though if you're caught, it is a federal crime. If you're concerned about stolen mail, definitely talk with your postmaster, they'll jump on that fast.
.for rural routes you get paid for evaluated time of the route. So, if the route is evaluated for 8 hours, you get paid for 8 no matter how long it actually takes you to finish. So, the faster you go, the more money you get per hour since you only worked for 6 but got paid for 8. Of course, the opposite is true too, especially during Christmas season. Now, for city carriers, it's a whole different thing that I have no idea how it works. It's quite funky and they don't teach it to you in rural carrier school (and yea, different training schools for different carriers :-)
Just a quick note on finishing routes early. .
As a former rural carrier, I can tell you that your carrier should not be doing that. Plus, he/she would most definitely want to pick that mail up during mail count. The more outgoing mail counted means possibly more money in their pocket as the route will evaluate better. And yes, twice a year or so we have to count the friekin mail. . .not a fun prospect. Luckily management takes a good chunk of the heat counting all the packages.
Ok, as a formal rural carrier, I didn't have to do door to door delivery. We only delivered to boxes at the curb and clusters. We also have 'hardship' boxes for disabled residents, which are basically on house boxes, but they're very few, one or two per route. However, there is one major issue with this plan that only a carrier would understand, and I bet a city carrier would more understand. And that's street parking. If you can't get to the box at the curb in your LLV or personal vehicle, that mail is not delivered. It is held back at the post office to be attempted to deliver the following day. At least that's how it went for rural carriers. Since I drove a LLV doing almost a city route (750+ box route), I seen this quite a bit. I can't imagine how problematic this will be on very busy streets with parking. I would have to guess they would need to rely on cluster boxes heavily in these areas, but even then it won't be pretty. Unless maybe they can get the city gov't to do no parking zones around the clusters, but I doubt it.
This is extremely illegal. I was a former rural carrier and saw a fellow carrier fired for dumping bulk mail. I wouldn't be that surprised if he will be prosecuted too for it. Though dumping mail isn't as bad as stealing it. If you steal, you go out in handcuffs for certain.
That assumes them parcel boxes are actually used. . . When I needed to deliver a package to a cluster box resident on my route, I was instructed NOT to use the parcel boxes for whatever reason, but to deliver to the door. Would have been quite nice if they'd let me use them. Not sure why they didn't though.
Here's a bit of perspective from a former Rural Letter Carrier. All rural boxes are either at the street or in clusters/central boxes (which, btw are actually quite nice to deliver to if you don't have packages, which then you have to go and deliver to the door anyway, but that's another story). However, if someone is disabled or cannot easily get to their box because of a disability, they can apply for a hardship box, which is just a box on the house. My route had one for a while till the lady passed away.
Now, what's being proposed here is going to affect city carriers only, as they are the ones that have to deliver large parts of their routes on foot. And I bet they will have similar setup for hardship boxes like us Rural guys have for disabled residents. In all fairness, I'm surprised the post office didn't do this a long time ago. It always seemed extremely inefficient to keep these walking routes going. I mean, just the amount of health benefits that have to be paid out due to all the injuries must be staggering. I knew a guy who had to get hip replacement and he was only in his early 40s. This is actually I think a much better plan than ending Saturday delivery (plus it might actually have a chance to go through as it's only affecting one of the postal unions instead of at least three).
Well, I have seen some stuff on this that technically the person receiving the misdelivered mail shouldn't open or use the contents of the mail to their advantage. However, I only seen these warnings on mail usually sent from the government, like social security checks. I was never officially briefed on the responsibilities of the person receiving misdelivered mail. Usually, they just put the mail back in the box for us to redeliver correctly. I did have a piece that was accidentally opened before being put back in the box, but I let my manager decide what to do with it, which, IIRC, he just told me to redeliver. Now for continuous messups with a new set of carriers, there could be something a bit more interesting going on. All letter sized mail the carrier receives comes already presorted from distribution. The presorted mail may not be setup correctly and the new carriers don't know it. I had to deliver to a set of trailer parks on my route where the presorted mail was always messed up. You literally had to memorize the names and trailer numbers to get any form of accuracy of delivery as you couldn't rely on the addresses alone. And it was quite _fun_ to do because the turnover rate for the trailers was really high.
Actually, the entire mail piece is considered confidential, and only the necessary bits are to be read. As a former rural carrier, I can attest that you're not allowed to read someone's postcard or thumb through a magazine before delivering it. You're also not allowed to tell others about the kind of mail someone receives, like baby or bridal magazines and the logical conclusions of that type of mail. So, there is some expectation of privacy for mailing for everything except the from and to addresses.
If you only said coconuts instead of a broom stick, more would have understood the analogy. . . .
In this state, they can and do shut off your water if you don't pay, especially if you only rent and not own your house. You miss a month of payment, you might not even get a warning, just notice one morning that you don't have water. Same goes for electricity. The utility companies here are extremely jumpy about people who don't pay.
I seriously wonder where on the GSP or NJT you can actually go 80mph without traffic or toll booths slowing you down. Having lived in NJ for a major part of my life, I rarely recall ever having the opportunity to go that fast.
I think it even more depends on who you have working under you, and what kind of talent you have access to. As a small business owner, it's not so easy getting good people that you know can get the job done without constant overview. Ideally, you want to hire good people you can trust to get their jobs done, but sometimes, especially since I'm in a rural area, they are really hard to find. With really large businesses, you have much better access to better talent.
As a business owner myself, I do agree with this, to a point. There are times, especially if you are a manufacturer, that you desperately need capital to just keep up with the ever growing orders. And if you ever get decent publicity, you could be screwed very quickly as you won't have nearly enough inventory to supply the massive increase of demand. And when that happens, a couple of things can occur. One would be that because you can't supply demand, a hole has opened up ready for a competitor to take over. Or, maybe worse, people lose interest in the whole concept of the product because they just can't purchase it. The other problem comes when you throw all the money you have at making more only to find out that still isn't enough. But, you're so strapped up in debt that you literally now must produce more to pay the debt, but you can't because you ran out of money to make more. You end up forcing yourself to go bankrupt even though you have lots of sales.
However, this all hinges on one very major assumption: that the product being sold has the potential of being widely popular where you could easily see exponential growth with just a little marketing, whether expected or not. A true niche product probably has very little possibility of going mainstream and so it can grow at a much slower rate and at possibly higher margins. Just take a look at niche software products like Adobe's stuff or any point of sale system. The prices are high, and especially for the point of sale stuff, not that complicated in features. Like what my one computer science professor always said, the money is in the niche software, and this goes for all markets as long as its a true niche serving a real need. Stuff that isn't widely known but serves a general need is not a niche, it is just starting out.
At a really small scale like that, I can understand. However, with a bit of money invested in improving the soil via added organic matter and some permanent stuff like fences, you can easily get a decent crop that doesn't cost much after the first year with the added improvements. But, if you're like me, there's never an end to the improvements and you always end up with way more money spent in the gardens than what its worth . . . ;-)
No, it also has been GMO'd but only fairly recently from what I can find. The majority of GMO corn is not sweet corn.
Hybrids are not the same thing as GMO crops. The hybrids are crosses from varying stable (ish) lines to produce a set of offspring that are generally more vigorous than the parent lines but generally that vigor doesn't survive further breeding. It's called heterosis. It's a mostly natural thing and doesn't involve direct recoding of the genes. The GMOs on the other hand, are directly changed and only provide very certain benefits. This is usually only borer resistant (BT GMOs) or herbicide resistant (Roundup Ready). The GMO's do not provide any other advantage.
Most home owners don't grow the species that are currently GMO'd outside of corn, and usually home owners just grow sweet corn. I've yet to see much home owner interest growing soy beans, sugar beets, canola, cotton, etc.
Here's the thing with their seed. It does one of two things generally: one produces an insecticide internally so if any insect eats the plant, it dies. This is specifically the BT variant GMO. The other is resistant to Monsanto's other product, Roundup. That allows farmers to spray everything with this herbicide and everything is suppose to die except the resistant stuff. That's the marketed advantages. There's nothing about making the product better for _consumers_ outside of seemingly reduced prices via more production (and that is debated depending on who you talk to). There's also nothing on making the plants stronger and more resistant towards adverse conditions outside of borer insects which are targeted by the BT variant GMO.
Albeit not a practical solution for people with no land or time, but growing food yourself is definitely a way to make sure it ain't GMO and considerably cheaper than even non-organic produce. Even with people who have really limited land can produce quite a bit if they have enough determination. Check out these guys: http://urbanhomestead.org/ Of course living in California with their great growing climate really helps, but it's still possible in more harsh climates.
The summary is incorrect with saying Apple blocked Java 7 on 10.6. Actually, Snow Leopard can't run the new Java from Oracle, it can only run the Apple version of it which is still the 6 series. With this last round of blocking, Apple also blocked their own version on Snow Leopard and Apple has not yet released an update for it last time I checked. Now, in my opinion, this whole blocking thing without notice was extremely unprofessional and made me disappointed in Apple, and that's coming from a Mac fan. I got hit with it the other day and spent hours trying to figure out why in the world Java wasn't working on my machines. Ended up finding a work around editing a .plist file using a console text editor. Definitely not a solution for anyone not familiar with the command line.
Another thing to point out is, how many of those handgun murders were gang or drug related? Would gun control do anything to stop the already illegal activities going on associated with the gun crime? I once served as the foreman of a grand jury a few years ago, and can attest that a staggering amount of the felonies we indicted were drug related, and this is in a small rural county. And the only gun related case we saw (one out of hundreds of felonies) was a guy who also had a mobile meth lab.
You're right with the profitability of both the packages and bulk mail (officially can't call it 'junk' mail as a carrier). However, both the parcels volume has increased and the bulk mail has stayed roughly the same in volume, despite the move to the internet. And as for first class mail, it isn't so much that it costs more to deliver, its more that they're just not getting enough volume like they used to. Of course they could raise prices on first class to make up for volume, but that would probably cause even less volume. Now the thing here with the monopoly on the mailbox is fairly simple. Reliability of you actually getting your mail delivered would drop if the box is filled with junk from every local business who wants to stick stuff in your box. If the box is full or blocked, we have no requirement to deliver, and so you'd have to go to the post office to pick it up. That would then tarnish the post office's reputation, making it less useful for people. Now I definitely agree there should be more emphasis on getting high speed internet access to the rural areas in this country, but without a 'last mile' postal service, many areas in this country wouldn't get any delivery service at all. Just like with the mandates on getting electricity to everyone, there must be some option to get mail and packages to everyone, hence the postal service.
The thing is, the USPS is no longer supported by tax dollars. That changed quite a while ago. The postal service has been mandated to at least break even during the subsequent years by congress. And if it wasn't for declining first class mail volume (ie, bill statements and checks going back and forth) and the insane prepayment of retirement mandated by congress, the USPS would be in pretty good shape. On a side note, USPS is not technically a US Federal government agency. It is controlled by congress at the highest level, but otherwise is not supported by the gov't. Even the employees are not true federal employees (I should know, since I happen to be a mail carrier). We do get access to some of the benefits of federal employees, however.