Hi! I'm a tech guy, skeptic, feminist, gamer and atheist, and love OSS and science of all stripes. I enjoy a good bit of whargarbl now and again, and will occasionally even seek it out. I am also apparently responsible for the death of common sense on the internet. My bad.
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The commenting rules are simple: don't piss me off. This rule has worked for me for a decade; I have never found a need for any other rule, because any other rules leads to rules-lawyering. Just remember --
this is my property, not yours.
I’ve been saying welcome to the New Gilded Age since Ronald Reagan. It has only gotten worse since then.
Amazing how in Canada our Conservative government forced mail workers back to work to protect the mail; in the US the Republicans will kill the mail out of some sort of foolish Conservative ideology.
Because only the government is efficient and benevolent enough to have a monopoly on mail delivery.
Jason just loves the State.
Daniel, there is no monopoly on mail delivery in the U.S. If you don’t like the Post Office, try FedEx or UPS or one of a rather large number of delivery services. You’re free to pay more to a private company that can’t provide the same service at the same price.
Not loading the vid because I don’t want to elevate my blood pressure further, but I hafta ask: Was this directly linked to the NYT’s hideous hatchet-piece on the post office’s financial woes, or is this a mere coincidence that everyone just happens to be talking about the USPS at the same time?
Directly related, but the video discusses the real reason they’re suddenly facing financial woes — a bill introduced to force them to pay in five years retirement funds for the next seventy. For people who aren’t even born yet, much less hired and ready to retire.
@Daniel M.
Mail delivery is a national communication directive that has existed since day one as a federal department. The ability to move mail is a very important one that was decided to be a national directive by the Founding Fathers. Who are we to argue with their wisdom?
Stephanie: The U.S. Postal Service does have a monopoly on the delivery of first class mail (via the U.S. Constitution, Article I, Section 8, and the Private Express Statutes, 18 USC 1693-1696 and 39 USC 601-606–see Wikipedia: https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Private_Express_Statutes). Its competition for first class mail delivery is not private companies, but email. (Though historically there were private companies which offered the service at a lower price, such as anarchist Lysander Spooner’s American Letter Mail Company, 1844-1851).
@VeritasKnight ,
I don’t blindly agree with everything the founding fathers believed.
The simple fact is that we don’t need a U.S. postal service although I really don’t mind having them.
This is a great article:
http://www.lewrockwell.com/alston/alston21.html
@Daniel M: Typical libertarian bullshit.
Jim:
The US Post Office has a monopoly on delivery to their mailboxes. That’s it. A private company is free to deliver an equivalent product. I think it is called “ground delivery” and it costs a lot more.
-MV
Because only the government is efficient and benevolent enough to have a monopoly on mail delivery.
Jason just loves the State.
Fuck you.
You have no idea how hard the USPS employees work to deliver mail to your sorry ass. And if you want to know where the inefficiency is, it’s in management, and on you, cupcake.
Management wastes money by doing stupid shit like hiring limos for themselves to get around in sometimes, but they waste even more money not following the contract (they get a cute little pocket contract to carry with them!). It’s easy as pie to follow the contract. I did it for over a year, and I had ZERO grievances filed against me, which meant I had employees working properly, and in accordance with the contract–I was efficient and I cost the USPS ZERO in awards, wasted time, wasted effort, paperwork, and the like. Unfortunately, that’s not the case with 90% of the management in the USPS. I don’t know how to fix it. I got tired of being treated like crap because I did my job the right way, and went back to being a worker bee!
The biggest waste is also on management: The USPS effectively PAID companies to process and deliver their mail.
Yep, you read that right. The pre-sort rate (set by MANAGEMENT) for certain mass mailers was lower than the cost of processing and delivering the mail. The conservative estimate we’ve seen for the number of letters sent out? A billion. And that’s the conservative number.
The next biggest waste and source of inefficiency in processing and delivering mail is from CUSTOMERS being fucking idiots. Morons like you waste postal time AND money because you can’t be bothered to put mail in the proper envelope or box, you don’t put the proper postage on anything, you don’t address mail properly, you don’t notify people of your correct forwarding address–if you do it at all, or you pull stupid-ass stunts that you think are cute, but that injure employees, delay mail, and can result in a stay at a federal prison for you if you’re caught at it. And it costs money to try morons like you for that, along with getting injured employees treated.
When you are so fucking stupid that you don’t know how to address a mail piece, someone has to figure out what the hell you’re trying to say–manually. And that costs money. Because it’s a “good” job in the USPS, it’s usually done by people who are at the top of the pay scale for clerks.
When you try to mail a wrench in a regular business envelope, you damage machines that are trying to process mail, they need repair from skilled (highly paid) technicians, they need parts and time to be fixed, and that machine not working delays mail for other people–tens of thousands of them. Quit being a fucking cheapskate and put the thing in a bubble mailer, or a box, for fuck’s sake!
When you try to mail some kind of white powder that isn’t packed properly and leaks out all over the place, or you mail a fucking grenade (NO, I’m NOT kidding) that somehow falls out because you used a cheap box to mail it in and didn’t pack it properly, you cause entire buildings to be evacuated, hundreds of employees who are trying to process your mail. And then they have to work overtime to get the mail out that your stupidity delayed.
When you try to mail bricks with Business Reply envelopes taped through them to some company you hate, that’s mail fraud. Worse, postal workers get hurt trying to lift them, because they can’t see what’s in the bottom of a “bucket” underneath all that mail. And then their shoulders and backs and knees get hurt from trying to lift something like that. It happened to me. Those bricks cost the USPS probably tens of thousands from my injury, between the emergency room visit, the MRI, the follow up visits with an orthopedic surgeon, the meds, the physical therapy, the time off I needed, the light duty assignment they had to find for me when I could come back to work, and having to pay someone to cover for me all the time I couldn’t do my job. It was usually someone working overtime, because there aren’t enough people to do the job when you’ve cut your staff to the bone.
And those are just a FEW examples of how customers waste postal money.
But the way that you fuckers cost the Postal Service in the worst way: Constantly sniveling about having to pay an extra 2 cents for the USPS to PICK UP your lousy mail, send it all the way across the fucking country, and deliver it right to your fucking residence. You griped and moaned like someone was fucking killing you to the point that raises were done only when there was no other choice, and certainly weren’t high enough to counteract the growing costs of delivering mail to 140 million households and businesses.
All of those things add up.
And people like you want to blame the union workers, when they are some of the most efficient and productive workers in the nation, especially for the crap wages they’re paid AND how they have to deal with ALL Americans, which means they deal with more idiots and nutbags and thugs than the prisons and mental institution, day in-day out?
Fuck you.
@Daniel M
They’re a public service, not a private entity. They don’t exist to make a profit, and they don’t answer to stockholders every quarter. They exist to provide a service to everyone, full stop. Not everything has to exist to make a profit.
@frankniddy
EVERYONE exists to make a profit. It might not be in the direct form of selling some service or product and calculating revenue less expenses, but EVERYBODY lives to make some type of profit.
You think USPS employees work for the service of the public? Hell no. They work for themselves, to get money. You think the people at the top of the totem poll in any government organization doesn’t want more funding? You’re dilusional. The difference is that when the government runs it, their decisions are skewed because there is no risk.
@Aquaria
You seem pretty damn mad at me and accusing me for a lot of stuff. Here is some good news – I don’t care about postal employees and their hard work because it makes no real difference to me.
All of the things I get in the mail are advertisements. All my bills are paid online. NOW THAT IS EFFICIENCY.
The reason why things are so INEFFICIENT is precisely because there is no loss to be had. A private company would require somebody to pay for mailing something, thereby providing information on the sender, and would have the employee’s best interest in mind when it comes to safety to avoid lawsuits.
Imagine if managers in a private company renting limos to get around on the company’s dime! They sure as hell would be fired. But the postal employees? No, of course not.
You sound like the baby complaining about all of the mischievous things people do or the mistakes they make. Imagine what would happen if they had to PAY for such pranks!?
Don’t lecture me on how hard postal employees work. I simply don’t care. So do the people in my office. They probably work harder because if they don’t work hard and show results, they get canned for being a non-contributing employee.
Cry to somebody else.
@breadgod
Yes sir – I am a libertarian.
Please engage in a conversation that shows exactly what part of libertarianism is bullshit and maybe we can have a discussion.
So far, you’ve said nothing.
I’ve heard that they’ve done studies about whether private corporations could take over the US Post Office’s role, and the answer is basically “Yes, but it would be a lot more expensive and service to more rural areas would have to be cut.” The post office is unprofitable because it charges much less for its services than what they really cost.
@Daniel M
The reason she’s mad, probably, is that almost ALL of the people screaming “public employees are all lazy parasitic good-for-nothings” are ideologically rigid libertarians and free market fundamentalists.
@Paul S
Thank you, I couldn’t have said it better.
Incorrect. There are more risks, because when government tries to do something, they aren’t able to externalize their business risks onto the public, like unregluated businesses do.
hugely profitable…
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