US Postal Service To Make Sunday Deliveries For Amazon 258
guttentag writes "The New York Times is reporting The USPS has struck a deal to deliver Amazon's packages on Sundays — a first for both. The Postal Service, which lost nearly $16 billion last year, often loses money on first-class mail delivery, but package delivery is profitable. The Postal Service said it expected to make more such deals with other merchants, seeking a larger role in the $186 billion e-commerce market. For this holiday shopping season, Sunday delivery of Amazon products will be limited to the Los Angeles and New York metropolitan areas. In 2014 it is expected to expand to other cities including Dallas, Houston, New Orleans and Phoenix."
Obligatory note: the USPS is intentionally broken (Score:5, Informative)
http://www.thomhartmann.com/blog/2012/08/us-postal-services-forced-financial-crisis
In 2006 – Republicans in Congress passed a poison pill piece of legislation forcing the Post Office to pre-fund retiree health benefits 75 years out into the future – basically funding benefits for future employees who aren’t even born yet. The Postal Service has to do this by giving the Treasury $5.5 billion every single year. That’s a requirement that no business, or any government agency has ever had to comply with. And it’s the reason why the Post Office is going bankrupt today and looking into closing down post offices, laying off workers, and cutting down delivery service.
Re:Obligatory note: the USPS is intentionally brok (Score:5, Insightful)
Across the Western world, it has been the Right's strategy to privatise popular public services by first deliberately ruining them. Then public perception changes toward, "Oh wow you're right state ownership doesn't work!"
Occasionally, this comes at a cost to human life, such as Thatcher's deliberate underinvestment in the railways, followed by Major's spinning off of Railtrack without any clear identification as to who is responsible for maintenance. But usually it's just a huge fucking waste of money, and the privatised industry ends up enjoying multiple subsidies and regulatory capture.
Re:Obligatory note: the USPS is intentionally brok (Score:5, Insightful)
let's also remember the current post office is protected from many searches by the government, private entities are not. That is also a driving force here.
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Socialize the losses, privatize the gains. That's the Republican way.
Down here in Blood Red Texas, they're floating an idea to have all of us invest in power plants so the power companies don't have to spend their capital on capital improvements. Of course, none of us will get dividends or shares in the power plants, the power companies get to own the power plants the rest of us paid for. We get the worst parts of socialism and capitalism combined.
The way it ought to be...except (Score:5, Insightful)
This, of course, it pretty much the way it ought to be, at least for current employees: Retirement benefits fully funded, instead of vague promises.
Of course, since this money is paid to the government, instead of being put in an independent fund, the government will just steal it and replace it with IOUs
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Re:Obligatory note: the USPS is intentionally brok (Score:4, Insightful)
They are losing $16 billion a year because they pay out $5.5 billion a year for future pensions?
Bad math is bad math. If they didn't fund pensions at all, I guess you should expect future tax payers to just pay that, they are STILL behind $10.5 billion a year. Is that a success for your?
Also note, this bill was passed with STRONG bipartisan support as a way to show private business that pensions should be fully funded and how to do it. Revisionist history is revisionist history.
Re:Obligatory note: the USPS is intentionally brok (Score:5, Insightful)
Originally, the USPS was a government service, subsidized where necessary. It wasn't designed to operate as a private business or to make money. It was OK if it lost money because it was an overall boon to the economy. It worked fine that way for 200 years before it was privatized.
Now it's expected to operate as a private business and turn a profit in the existence of a competive marketplace while bound by rules and financial burdens its competitors do not have to bear. FedEx and UPS do not have to deliver anywhere they don't want to, to deliver on any days they don't want to; they have unregulated rates, don't subsidize anything and don't have to pre-fund retirement benefits.
It's a recipe for destruction. It might be saved by completely removing all regulations OR by giving it real subsidies in exchange for the regulations it bears that its competitors do not. It can't go on the way it is.
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Nope, but the USPS has seen a drastic increase in the number of packages which carry higher postage charges. When teleportation/replication becomes widespread, that's when they will need to worry.
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I see this posted over and over again but nobody can explain why it was passed or why the Democrats never tried to stop it.
Re:Obligatory note: the USPS is intentionally brok (Score:5, Informative)
The Democrats strongly supported it. He is pretending that didn't happen. They also never tried to repeal it when they had the chance.
He is attempting to deceive you and hopes you won't go around asking questions.
Re:Obligatory note: the USPS is intentionally brok (Score:5, Informative)
Well, while it was signed by a republican president and sponsored by a republican, it was cosponsored by 2 dems and a republican. It also passed house with a voice vote, and the senate with a unanimous vote.
This was a completely bipartisan bill that our whole government went in on.
Even the postal unions were for this (Why I have no idea).
Re:Obligatory note: the USPS is intentionally brok (Score:5, Informative)
Because it actually forces the pensions to be funded - it's obvious why the union would like it.
Look at the cities going bankrupt in California, as an example. It's unfunded pension liabilities that are dragging them down. The USPS is being forced to actually make good on their promises, otherwise we'll have to bail out their pension fund in the future. The gripe (somewhat legit) is that they're being singled out for this treatment while every other government agency with promises that are going to be broken aren't given this treatment.
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otherwise we'll have to bail out their pension fund in the future.
You mean like we did for every major airline in the country?
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Agree - there needs to be a balance.
Honestly, I think that pensions in the current form mislead employees and put them at a real disadvantage. Traditional pension plans allocate most of their funds to an employee only after they've been employed for many years, so it makes it hard for employees to move around. At the same time, companies have no obligation to actually keep the employee around. So the employee is staying put for the promise of a future gain that the company may never deliver.
And that is a
Re:Obligatory note: the USPS is intentionally brok (Score:4)
Well, while it was signed by a republican president and sponsored by a republican, it was cosponsored by 2 dems and a republican. It also passed house with a voice vote, and the senate with a unanimous vote.
That doesn't mean as much as you think it does. Perhaps to the surprise of nobody, our lawmakers rarely read the full text of the bill they vote on, instead trusting their underlings to summarize it. Sometimes hundred page documents get about as much space as a Twitter post in the mindspace of these guys before they vote on it. And you might have noticed... the names are less and less related to the thing they're about with every new session. At this point, I fully expect to see a Strengthing America's Freedom Act authorizing labor camps and bringing back debtor's prisons in the not too distant future. :/
So there is that. And the argument can be made that whether it was the Republicans or the Democrats... the result rather speaks for itself. Also, questionable what difference there really is between the two parties... since right now over 93% of candidates who win elections are better financed than their opponent. It's clear there really is only one political party: The Richy McRich Club. What colors you wanna wear they leave up to you, but ultimately, both parties are just part of one organization that's only really distinct in the minds of the poor and the uneducated.
But the OP is right: It was fine before it was shot in the head by our government.
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Well, while it was signed by a republican president and sponsored by a republican, it was cosponsored by 2 dems and a republican. It also passed house with a voice vote, and the senate with a unanimous vote.
This was a completely bipartisan bill that our whole government went in on.
No, it was a monopartisian bill. A perfect example of how there is really just one party in Washington.
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Re:Obligatory note: the USPS is intentionally brok (Score:4, Informative)
Congress want to protect the taxpayer from having to take over the duties that the USPS said they would do,back in the 70s, the postmaster general and the postal unions want to make the taxpayers pay for their poor management and keep things as they are.
The postal accountability law,2006, requires the USPS to actually do some proper financial management and dropping it would not make them competitive again; even ignore the money they owe for this they would of lost money for the last couple of years. Without the money set aside they would not be able the meet the obligations they agreed to back in the 1970s and the people who retiring now would not have the monies that they are suppose to get. Privatization would solve nothing of this since the obligations would follow the person who purchased the company.
BTW the 75 years is number of years that is for ACCOUNTING purposes they have to figure future liabilities. It is NOT how long they have to fund benefits. That 75 years of accounting is followed by the DoD, social security, department of Housing, etc.
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$5.5 billion is a lot of money... however the USPS lost about $15.9 billion last year.
http://todaynewsgazette.com/usps-losses-2012/ [todaynewsgazette.com]
Re:Obligatory note: the USPS is intentionally brok (Score:5, Insightful)
That's not so far off. If the USPS must pay $5 billion per year, then it shows continual losses, and the whole program can be cut. The Treasury then has a surplus of cash that's no longer earmarked for future employees, so it's a simple bit of labeling magic to release it into general funds.
That means that whatever party does eventually kill the USPS gets to claim responsibility for a few tens of billions of dollars additional revenue for the Treasury. With the right spin, the public at large will be aghast at how the irresponsible other party could have let the Postal Service survive so long when it was so obviously financially beneficial to shut it down.
Already Started maybe (Score:2)
I got a Sunday package delivery via USPS from Newegg.
https://tools.usps.com/go/TrackConfirmAction_input?origTrackNum=4200705492748901015478100001164480 [usps.com]
the 10th(yesterday) was a Sunday, kind of weirded me out when I got a knock on my door and a package was dropped off.
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Sunday and holiday delivery is available, for an extra cost. I've never seen Newegg pay the extra, did the screw up your order and this was their way of apologizing? Or maybe they had guaranteed delivery in x-many days and it was getting close?
Sunday delivery is not news... (Score:2)
I remember the USPS advertising Sunday delivery for Express Mail quite a long time ago -- ten years or more, I think.
Still advertised today: http://pe.usps.com/businessmail101/classes/express.htm [usps.com]. A bit more digging indicates that there's a $12.50 surcharge for Sunday/holiday delivery.
So, since USPS was already offering Sunday delivery, the news here must be some favorable pricing terms for Amazon. Which, of course, they're not going to specify in detail.
Stop subsidizing junk mail (Score:4, Insightful)
My mailbox is filled with junk mail every day. In fact, I bet I get 3-4X as much junk mail as I do legitimate mail. I probably get 1-2 newspaper-like ads every week from grocers that I've probably never opened.I bet the USPS would start making money if they started charging these guys closer to regular rates. Well, assuming they can't get the pension pre-funding fixed in Congress.
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No need to privatize. Just remove legislation protecting the USPS, together will any subsidies.
And for those of you who remember fondly the good old days - The Post Office used to be open and deliver on Christmas day.
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The USPS has not received any direct taxpayer money since the 1980's, with minor exceptions for delivery overseas (APO's, etc.) and for disabled services.
USPS is still important (Score:5, Insightful)
Just remove legislation protecting the USPS, together will any subsidies.
You mean remove the Constitution [wikipedia.org]?
Despite your glib implication that subsidies are not needed, mail remains a vital service and it is important that it be available to everyone, even if this requires subsidies. There is no one else who realistically can replace the USPS including UPS and FedEx. This remains true despite falling mail volumes. Just because the postal service often seems to be mostly a paper spam delivery service doesn't mean it isn't also a vital service for communications. Remove subsidies right now and the USPS will collapse and yes that IS a Bad Thing (tm). While the USPS will need to adapt to modern times, the role it serves is a critical one and that isn't going to change.
And for those of you who remember fondly the good old days - The Post Office used to be open and deliver on Christmas day.
They also used to deliver multiple times a day. So what? We don't need that now. Times change.
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I'm not sure why you brought up the constittution. It says the feds have the ability not that only the feds can do it. Hell, if that wasn't the case, fed ex and ups couldn't exist.
That being said, the feds can just as easily allow the usps to be private and considering recent events with the ACA, they would be more constitutionally sound in requiring everyone to only use the USPS or face a fine without due process of law.
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I'm not sure why you brought up the constitution. It says the feds have the ability not that only the feds can do it. Hell, if that wasn't the case, fed ex and ups couldn't exist.
FedEx and UPS can't deliver mail, just packages. What you are saying is not true.
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Times change.
You make my point for me.
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Just remove legislation protecting the USPS, together will any subsidies.
You mean remove the Constitution [wikipedia.org]?
The Postal Clause AUTHORIZES Congress to create a post office, it doesn't REQUIRE it. And it certainly doesn't force Congress to fund it or give it monopoly access to delivering first class mail and access home post boxes.
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Re:what? (Score:5, Interesting)
How about removing the ridiculous pension requirements that congress placed on them, then they would be profitable.
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How about giving everyone else good pension requirements? How about a race to the top instead of a race to the bottom? We should be doing this globally, rather than cheering cheaper goods all the time at the expense of faraway people and then wondering where our jobs went.
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Paying for pensions for people who haven't even been born yet is a good pension requirement?
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I don't remember the post office actually being open on christmas day, but I do remember them making deliveries on Christmas day. In fact they still do for express deliveries.
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What do you mean? They're already extensively privatized.
Re:what? (Score:4, Insightful)
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This is, in fact, so obvious that US Constitution has included an explicit grant of power to the Federal government to establish a postal service from day 1. Which is very telling in and of itself, as few other things were deigned with being enumerated in such a precise fashion.
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The too big to fail mentality was invented by the government and corporations. Let them fail. I can name at least a dozen car manufacturers
that no longer exists and we are probably better for it. If you're worried about a company being too big to fail, split it apart or set a maximum
size of a company. The splitting up of the telephone company was probably one of the better moves that the government did but unfortunately
they have basically merged back together. Setting a maximum size would prevent that
Re:what? (Score:4, Interesting)
Forcing people to compete by breaking them up is even more sadistic than simply making it hard for them to cooperate. When will this religion end?
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Forcing people to compete by breaking them up is even more sadistic than simply making it hard for them to cooperate. When will this religion end?
So what do you suggest? You're the one who was complaining about private industry. Private industry is
more efficient than government. Most complaints I hear about the evils of capitalism are complaints about
very large fortune 500 companies. I was trying to give one possible solution that could be the best of both
worlds. Privatizing the USPS just makes sense not so someone can make a profit but so everyone benefits
from an efficient operation.
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Re:what? (Score:4, Informative)
The last mile is cut in many instances with the USPS. I have lived in many rural places where if i wanted to recieve mail, i had to purchase a p.o. box. They wouldn't even deliver packages to the door and you had to show up to sign for them durring bankers hours. And yes, fed ex would come right to the door too.
This isn't unusual in the least. There are areas more rural then the suburbs. Cost cutting at the post office has taken the last mile from many places. Perhaps this would be different if big businesses didn't get steep discounts for first class mail. But the facts are, we as citizens pay more than double what large companies pay and i doubt a private postal service would be able to do that if they were losing money on it.
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Big businesses get discounts because they sort their mail, prepare them for automated processing and sometimes transport them to postal facilities. In other words, they pay less because they cost less to service. You could pay the same price if you printed your mail with IMpb barcodes, pre-sorted it and sent it in batches of five hundred or more.
Commecial first class and bulk mail services provide the volume necessary to keep postal rates relatively low and routes open. Increase their rates, volume will
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Private industry is more efficient than government.
I take it you've never experienced the joys of private water/sewer service. Locally, in Snohomish County the people have the choice between the Snohomish County Public Utility District or Puget Sound Energy for electricity. Because of the necessity of feeding as much profit as possible into shareholder dividends and executive salaries PSE's electrical service is more expensive, less reliable, and the equipment and lines are poorly maintained. For some
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I use a private service to haul away my trash. They cost 30% less than the (public) county service, and every Monday, they haul away my trash around 6am. I have not had a service interruption.
Clearly this means private business is better than public!
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Private industry is more efficient than government.
I take it you've never experienced the joys of private water/sewer service. Locally, in Snohomish County the people have the choice between the Snohomish County Public Utility District or Puget Sound Energy for electricity. Because of the necessity of feeding as much profit as possible into shareholder dividends and executive salaries PSE's electrical service is more expensive, less reliable, and the equipment and lines are poorly maintained. For some odd reason, when given a choice almost everyone prefers to get their electricity from SnoPUD instead of PSE.
Although I think it makes perfect sense to privatize USPS and alot of other government agencies, I do not think water/sewer should be
privatized and doing so is bad for everyone and makes no sense. USPS, UPS, FedEx can all compete because they all are able to use
the same common infrastructure. The only way to do this with "water/sewer" would be to still have the government maintain the main
water lines or to lay multiple mainlines down every street so that each house has the option to tap each line. As you
Re:what? (Score:4, Insightful)
The too big to fail mentality was invented by the government and corporations.
No, "Too Big to Fail" is a natural consequence of the fact that not all aspects of business are self-regulating, as illustrated by the old adage that "Nothing Succeeds Like Success". In engineering terms, that's a positive feedback loop whose ultimate termination is extinction for the losers and monopoly for the winners.
In real life, actual mileage may vary. Capital-intensive businesses tend to be more likely to go that route because cost per unit tends to decrease the more units you buy. And because the entire reason for having a capital-based business is because other forms of business organization lack the resources needed to establish themselves and grow. Nor is it a "pure" model across the board. Even with the dominance of large pizza chains, mom-and-pop shops remain popular, but you're not going to find many steel refineries or chip foundries in that state.
Of course, once you reach a certain size, you can afford to start buying political favors, but the options available when you have lots of money to throw around expand in many different directions. That's just one of them.
"Too Big to Fail" isn't just a slogan. It's an acknowledgement that if you do fail, you'll cause major damage to the rest of the world in the process of collapsing. You will, in fact, have leveraged the cost of your own failure to the point where the collateral damage greatly exceeds the damage you yourself will receive and that therefore you have a gun to the figurative head of the economy.
The best way to ensure that Too Big To Fail doesn't occur is to put a choke on the positive feedback loop. Once a business begins to get so large that its likely to reach that point, limits should kick in. That is, in fact, what anti-trust laws were designed for.
In recent decades, though, we've been bombarded pretty much continuously with the mantras that Government Control is Always Bad and Unfettered Markets are Always Good. We de-fanged the laws that had been created as a result of the Great Depression, we did little or nothing to regulate monopolies (see, for example, Microsoft), and have even seen broken monopolies such as AT&T slowly rebuild themselves from their erstwhile breakup components like an old horror movie villain coming back for a sequel.
Then, to add icing to the cake, we've encouraged the get-rich-quick culture that says it's better to buy and sell and plunder and loot other businesses than to invest in one's own business.
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And of course, there's the insane requirement enacted in 2006 that the USPS pre-pay healthcare benefits 50 years in advance [newsmax.com]
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The postal accountability law,2006, requires the USPS to actually do some proper financial management and dropping it would not make them competitive again; even ignore the money they owe for this they would of lost money for the last couple of years. With
Re:what? (Score:5, Informative)
Um, no. There is no other corporate or government entity in this country that is required to meet the standards applied to the USPS under that law, and the 75 years is indeed a hard funding benefit - they've got a $5b/year over 10 years requirement.
I believe if you look at the accounting, absent the pre-payment plan the USPS actually made money last year.
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Unfortunately alot of idiot sites that keep repeating the lies that have been put out about the 75 years. You can read the OPM regulation and the 2006 law about the 75 years being for accounting purposes, they only ha
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They could solve a lot of that problem by consolidating delivery locations in rural areas. They've already been doing this in cities (instead of mailboxes at each house, it is now common for entire neighborhoods to have a central mailbox, which saves a ton of time and therefore money for the carrier to deliver.) They'd save a lot of money if they centralized it further in rural areas, for example locating mailboxes at the nearest grocery stores.
Sure its an inconvenience, but now that electronic communicatio
Re:what? (Score:5, Insightful)
It makes sense because it's part of basic infrastructure, that enables other services and businesses to function more efficiently.
You don't need to pull profits from basic infrastructure, if you can instead collect taxes from companies attracted by superior infrastructure that enables them to do business much more efficiently, and often do business where it would be otherwise impossible to do. It's called "synergy" - infrastructure enables more business, and pays for itself with taxes collected from them.
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Re:what? (Score:5, Insightful)
Mr. Anonymous? I think you need to stop swearing, calm down, and look at a very important question that you (accidentally) raised.
What IS basic infrastructure?
Roads. Sewers. Electricity. Water delivery. Education. Hopefully decent health care. Working law systems. And yes, even something as basic as package delivery. Internet?
See, I run a business. I NEED those things for my business to function, but I'm too small to buy them for everyone, let alone to buy them for myself. I need roads so my workers can get to work. I need roads so I can ship things. I need electricity or my machines can't run. I need water delivery and good sewers so all my customers aren't dying of dysentary. I need basic education so there is a half assedly educated workforce available for me to hire. I really do need decent health care so _I_ don't have to provide it for my workers (god what a headache). I need basic law systems so I can have legal protections or sue someone who tries to take unlawful actions against my business (or me). Package delivery? Yeah, I depend on that. I build widgets. I NEED parts delivered. My business wouldn't exist without the postal service.
Man do I wish internet was a basic infrastructure....
Anyway, if these were provided by private companies, they would be a fucking mess. Just imagine private roads. Multiple roads in parallel, starting, stopping, the legal hassles of right of way, the tolls, fees, the collusion, the even larger tolls and fees... No. It's a nightmare!
So, businesses and individuals NEED the government to create this basic infrastructure. What the poster is saying is even that businesses are attracted to countries that HAVE this infrastructure. I sure wouldn't want to run my business in Somalia, that's for damn sure. Maybe the market is there, but the act of running my business would be far harder due to the lack of infrastructure. Ew. No Thanks.
In short, you benefit so much, and you take it all for granted. That you DO take it for granted is a sign of how WELL that government provided basic infrastructure works. You benefit FAR beyond what taxes you put in because it's a collective effort.
Also, you ignorant twit.... You want to whine about government waste? Sure. Go ahead. But be civil about it. The OP raised a good point, an intelligent point, and you were so busy being angry that you missed it. Calm down and LISTEN next time.
Also, we all pay taxes. Seriously, quit whining.
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those are far to complicated to compete as a government manged with a properly functioning market-based solution
Insurance has about a 50% overhead associated with it because of the huge amount of paperwork caused by having so many insurance companies and all of their loop holes. Several places around here will cut your bill in half if you don't us insurance, because it requires hiring on more full-time people to manage the paperwork.
Medicare on the other hand has about a 10% overhead cost for companies because it is more strait-forward and is a single point of contact. The current insurance market is too complicat
Re:what? (Score:4, Insightful)
I think the question of whether or not something should be government-run (or at least involved) vs free market is: Are we, as a society, okay if some people don't get this service?
If the answer to that is 'yes', then free market is probably the way to go.
But if the answer to that is 'no', then free market won't work -- free market requires the voluntary participation of buyers AND sellers.
Don't care if some people don't have health care or education because they can't afford it? Free market is the way to go.
Think health care & education are important for a civilized, well-functioning society? Probably need to have government involvement then -- which is not to say our current systems are perfect (far from it!) but "free market" is not the solitary answer.
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Somalia
I wasn't necessarily agreeing with you, but at least I was listening to you, until this.
Somalia is not a libertarian society, and equating it with the libertarian ideal is an intellectually dishonest rhetorical tactic meant to conceal rather than reveal. Now, you can say we libertarians are wrong that markets can provide infrastructure, and fair enough if you do, but our ideal is no better represented by the overlapping collection of theocrats, warlords, and the occasional functioning republic that makes u
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These socialist douchebags piss our and our childrens money away to the tune of 17BILLION fucking dollars and you want me to fucking be nice about it.
FUCK YOU YOU FUCKING FUCKITY FUCK FUCK FUCKS
What money? The USPS is not taxpayer funded.
Whose money are they "pissing away" exactly?
Re:what? (Score:4, Informative)
The USPS doesn't pay property tax, sales tax, or federal income tax. They also get special loans directly from the Treasury. That's all taxpayer funding.
Then there are the special laws the protect the USPS, like the monopoly on letter carrying and the their immunity from parking tickets. If you don't count those laws as "funding" they at least qualify as government support.
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They pissed away our money a generation ago. Right now they are pissing away the money of our GRANDCHILDREN and at the current rate within two years they will be saddling our great-grandchildren with debt.
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Actually, this is incorrect. Go back and look at the voting record for the 2006 bill [govtrack.us]. It was passed with overwhelming bipartisan support, and it was cosponsored by two Democrats and 1 Republican.
And, the Postal carriers' union thinks it was a great bill [nalc.org]
Re:what? (Score:5, Insightful)
All you need to incentivize spending money wisely is privatization; if you waste money you suffer consequences (get fired),
I'm not saying the other guy is right, but you've never held a real corporate job have you? Waste is rampant in all major companies and the executives responsible for it don't get fired (they may leave for "family reasons", but they take their bonuses and parachutes with them).
The problem with Michael's argument is that just because a company is in the red doesn't automatically stop waste. In fact in some cases it makes it worse as all the little fiefdoms within continue to fight for their piece regardless of how it impacts the rest of the company or if they really need it.
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It could also make it worse in other ways as well. To keep a company afloat, decisions are often made to take on tremendous debt to be "paid back when times are better" but often the debt load itself prevents the time from getting better regardless of actual revenue. Take a look at AMD if you don't believe that to be possible. Governments waste money and companies do as well, just how they do it is different.
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They do have an incentive to not waste, just not the same one as companies. The people working AT the company often have the exact same mindset as government employees, only shareholders have the "spend my money wisely" mindset.
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Don't let trying for perfect stop you from accepting good. Plenty of ways to have a "good" market, even if not idealistically perfect.
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Quoting the Anonymous Coward:
But you are advocating pissing away MY MONEY. I just wish you would have the balls to tell that to me to my face. But we all know you are nothing but a pathetic lying statist thief and a coward.
LOL -- and you even got a bite.
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Damn, who let the Freepers in?
I just wish you would have the balls to tell that to me to my face.
Says the brave little Anonymous Coward. Log in with a real account, debate rationally, and the next time you're in Seattle we can meet and argue over a cup of coffee. Until then you're pissing away MY ELECTRONS.
Re:what? (Score:5, Insightful)
"It actually makes sense for an entity like the postal service to be losing money."
Socialism is truly a mental disorder. Do you realize what you just said? Do you have to be reminded to breathe?
All you need to incentivize spending money wisely is privatization; if you waste money you suffer consequences (get fired),
The state is the only organization where you would find people saying 'it is better to waste money', because the money they waste is not theirs, and the supply is unlimited - they can always tax more or print more.
But you are advocating pissing away MY MONEY. I just wish you would have the balls to tell that to me to my face. But we all know you are nothing but a pathetic lying statist thief and a coward.
God I fucking hate socialists.
The post office is self-funded. It has not received taxpayer funding for a long time.
So, they're not pissing away "your" money.
Besides, the only reason they are officially losing money is because they were forced via an act of congress to pre-fund a retirement that is extremely onerous and far beyond what any private company would have to do. This was done so that the republicans can say "hey, look, the USPS isn't working! Let's privatise it!".
Sorry to burden you with facts, it looked like you had a good head of steam up there for your frothing libertarian rant.
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No other government agency is subject to the law that was specifically designed to cripple them. That alone should tell you all about what it's there for. (Hint: it's not about retirement safety for the employees).
All of the cost cutting measures that the USPS has tried are subject to congressional approval - for example, Congress sets the rates for postage (so the USPS can't raise rates to stop losing money, even though it only costs 46 cents to send a letter anywhere in the US), and they have tried other
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But you are advocating pissing away MY MONEY
How's that? USPS is self funded and gets no money from taxpayers. Being a government organization, it isn't allowed to make a profit, so all profits ether get fed into lower rates the next year or surplus considered income to the federal government to spend as it pleases.
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USPS are quite brilliant. When I ran some e-commerce thing in the US, most of our stuff was shipped by USPS. Yeah, they had the "government operative" mindset, which means they're quite officious, but you know what? that's bloody nice, as it means providing you do what you're supposed to do, you'll get exactly what you've been promised in return. Value system based on duty rather than profit.
(That was nearly a decade ago. Maybe things have changed radically since?)
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IDK. Royal Mail have got worse and worse as competition has increased in the UK.
Although that's partly because much of the postal service in the UK has already been privatised, and RM have been required to perform the unprofitable parts of mail delvery for other providers.
The coup de grace was suddenly allowing prices to shoot up earlier this year, then selling off the remainder in the last few weeks.
The UK will no have no postal service. Which is weird.
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Which of course is great until their political masters get a bee in their bonnet and want to score brownie points on some issue....then bang you can't carry tobacco, or alcohol, even in small quantities, and you have home brewers advising eachother to label their beer as biological samples for test (lol!) and debating the legality of things that could be anywhere from a felony to huge cost all for wanting to share a little beer: http://www.brewboard.com/index.php?showtopic=62601 [brewboard.com]
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Yeah stupid regulations can be (and are) imposed on private carriers too, you know.
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As reciever of packages, I have to agree.
Both Fed-Ex and UPS failed to call on cellphone or write email or basically have any attempt at contacting sendee at all.
Case 1:
FedEx, street address. There are no nameplates on house to show who lives in flats, because there is supposed to be some amount of privacy. Fed Ex Employee sees he can not get into house nor can he ring bell and enters "undeliverable address" a continues on.
Sendee had to call them up.
Package is returned to business even if support on phone c
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The senate refused them the ability to suspend saturday delivery.
And there is probably going to be a sunday delivery premium, either charged to the customer or absorbed by amazon.
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The last word from the USPS was that ending Saturday delivery was the key to staying solvent. Now opening on Sunday is the key to survival?
No one was paying them extra to deliver on Saturdays. Now, Amazon is footing (a part?) of the bill, and USPS can make money off it. Cognitive dissonance or comprehension-fail?
Also, the proposal to end Saturday delivery failed (first line of the article). And they already (apparently) deliver a some packages on Sundays and holidays for a fee. This just helps them make get a bigger piece of the e-commerce pie.
It is logical. (Score:3)
There is a war being waged against the USPS by corrupt and ideological fanatics (who ignore the constitutional mandate for the USPS.)
They NEVER had money problems, they will run at a loss if they have to - it's a constitutional required service of government (aka non-profit.) The idiotic things going on are part of the political war against them, the pensions for the unborn being a fake budgetary disaster invented by the enemy so they can exploit the "crisis."
1st moves were to cut costs, since management i
Re:So Saturday Bad, Sunday Good? (Score:5, Insightful)
Delivering packages every day = good. Only stop at the the places you need to.
Delivering letters and junk mail to every single mailbox on Saturday = bad. No extra revenue, and those letters can wait until Monday.
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In my neighborhood if I don't get anything but junk on a particular day the mail carrier just skips my mailbox. Sometimes I don't get anything for three or four days, then an enormous pile of junk mail with a couple of bills on top of it. That's probably not policy, but no one is complaining.
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They were going to end Saturday deliver or letters, but not packages. Letters and such are a net loss while delivering packages is profitable.
Re:So Saturday Bad, Sunday Good? (Score:5, Informative)
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There are still people without internet access. I use snail mail to mail physical checks to pay my bills, and get those bills via snail mail.
You don't have to pay to receive snail mail, but you do to get email. When the government provides everyone with a free internet connection and email address, then you can start talking about getting rid of snail mail.
But first you'll have to pass a constitutional amendment. The Constitution demands the USPS, have you read that document?
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The one advantage of email over postal mail is that it is not location dependent. We're an increasingly mobile world, and some people have jobs that take them all over the place weekly. It's much too inefficient for snail mail to keep up with them, but email requires zero changes to do so. Sure, it's a relatively small number of people that do this now but the world population is becoming increasingly mobile and it will need to be addressed at some point so it doesn't hurt to start thinking about it.
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the world population is becoming increasingly mobile
[citation needed]
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When the government provides everyone with a free internet connection and email address, then you can start talking about getting rid of snail mail
Plus, US mail offers greater protection than email. If you attempt to commit fraud via sending something by the US mail or intercept someone's mail, you're looking at a felony. With all the spam, I don't trust any of the email I receive from a bank, credit card, etc. So before email can completely replace regular postal mail, we'd have to see the same level of protections. Maybe the US postal service could have a service where they offer an optional digital signature that the sender can use and is legally
Not everyone uses email (Score:2)
I wonder how soon people will realise that there is really no need for almost all normal non-packet mail.
Not even remotely true. Delivery of physical documents remains a vital service for a variety of reasons, not the least of which is that many people do not have computers. Furthermore there is no other organization, public or private (including FedEx and UPS), that has the infrastructure to deliver envelopes to virtually any mailing address in the US like the USPS can and certainly not for the price point the USPS charges.
Most could be sent by email. There are very few documents that have to be sent physically but don't require signed or tracked delivery.
Which helps people who cannot afford computers how exactly? Paper mail has a least c
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It is required for legal notices and the court system. Unless you are suggesting a national email system...
Don't these require tracked or signed-for delivery though?