On the end of USPS 1st Class Saturday delivery:

Are you one of the people who makes more than $35 an hour, and is resentful of somebody else making as much as you?

Or are you one of the people who makes less than $35 an hour, and is jealous of somebody else making more than you?

As far as I can tell Congress is every bit as retarded as any wall street owned corporate management I've ever had the pleasure to work with. We have all the right pieces: idiotic shareholders (we call them voting taxpayers) who expect infinite return for little or no investment, dominated by a board of directors (i.e. wealthy elite) with only their selfish best interests at heart, a figurehead CEO (we call him the pres) who pushes an agenda tailored to ensure the shareholders who can get him fired are hoodwinked, some mindless middle management (congress) and a whole lot of employees who, to varying degrees, don't give a flying fuck (civil servants).

Normally I'd say the best solution to this problem with government is the same as with large multinationals: split them the hell up and let the fragments manage themselves. But I don't think our state and local governments have anything like the infrastructure to manage themselves, so many of the states founding articles are antiquated and inconsistent. Note that I ignore hte "efficiency" argument, it's as much bullshit on the government level as it is on the corporate level.

The time to get parcels between the US and Australia varies so much, it's weird.

Just in the last couple of months I've had:

- Something posted in mid-November arrive around New Year's.

- Something posted on a Monday arrive on Thursday the same week

Both were standard rate USPS parcels. The slow one was a bit physically larger than the fast one, and was posted from the Midwest rather than California (which is a little closer obviously), but still, it's incredibly inconsistent.

You're looking at it the wrong way. It should be "why is the minimum wage so ridiculously low".

That is less than half of the minimum wage in the country I live in. And almost noone actually gets paid the minimum wage here (government or private sector). No company paying only the minimum wage would be able to attract and retain employees. Even my first ever job when I was a teenager, stacking shelves at a supermarket part time was paying $19/hr (and significantly higher on Sundays/public holidays).

In Finland, most people make $25 or more. Their economy is doing pretty well. Their high school students have better scores in the international exams than ours.

Our service industry should be decimated. I don't need to stay at luxury hotels where maids making the minimum wage clean out my room. Pay them enough to live on or shut down your hotel.

I don't need to buy hamburgers at MacDonald's for $2 served to me by counter girls who don't make enough to buy health insurance. The people working for the same MacDonalds corporation in Europe get health insurance and better benefits than American workers. Pay Americans as well as you pay your workers in Europeans.

You want Americans to live in poverty. You want America to be a country of inequality and poverty. That's the conservative vision of America.

You think you're doing pretty well now. Well, a lifetime is a long time. Sometimes during your lifetime your technology may become obsolete, which happened to a lot of workers. Or the bosses may figure out a way for somebody in India to do your job for a fifth as much as you charge, which happened to a lot of workers. Then you'll be one of those service workers who gets $7 an hour or whatever your minimum wage is. And you'll be competing with a lot of younger and more energetic people for that $7 an hour.

I used to get magazine subscriptions from the US and it wasn't unusual for different months' issues to arrive in reverse order. I would see part 2 of an article and think "WTF, I don't remember reading part 1?". Part 1 would arrive 3 days later.

I'm guessing they were creating a LIFO stack with shipping containers. The earliest post gets shoved down the back of the shipping container and gets unloaded last.

Sorry to hijack the thread here but everyone should read an article in this month's Esquire entitled "Do We Really Want to Live Without the Post Office? [esquire.com]"

The fact of the matter is that the postal service does not LOSE money, but they are being forced to pre-pay their pension obligations (something no other government entity has to do). Other entities simply rely on the full faith and credit of the United States for their pension payments. Congress is using the pension payments to pad the budget. It's politics, pure and simple. The post office is one of the few things that makes our nation great.

Also, when you think about the postal service and what they do, it's not just mail. It's the infrastructure and standards to send mail. Without standardized addresses, ZIP codes and the like, the private delivery businesses built on top of that model would never be able to succeed. What, FedEx is going to directly interface with every county in the nation to maintain its address database? I don't think so. Sure, in the digital age we send less physical mail, but the post office is uniquely positioned to get into the identity business, something we really need and something I don't trust the actual government to implement. In many other countries, the postal service also became the telephone company or internet provider, because they were already well versed in the procedures to manage communications. An IP address isn't that much different than a street address, when it comes to delivering packets. With IPv6, it's certainly possible for the USPS to acquire and assign an IP address or subnet for each physical address it knows of and give everyone in the country their own location-sensitive IP address. I think the list of other things they could do could be expanded drastically with a little thought.

Without standardized addresses, ZIP codes and the like, the private delivery businesses built on top of that model would never be able to succeed. What, FedEx is going to directly interface with every county in the nation to maintain its address database? I don't think so.

Actually yes, they do. A zip code is not required by Fedex, in fact, they don't want to rely on it because their shipping routes don't match up to zip codes. Zip codes are for USPS facilities and delivery routes.

Fedex maintains their own database, which is why they can handle out-of-zone fuel surcharges and the like. And believe it or not, there are places without physical USPS addresses that Fedex will deliver to. Think houses way out on back-country farms that have an in-town or near-highway shared mailboxes, but Fedex can deliver directly to door.

USPS was entirely self-sufficient on postage fees alone, with surplus revenues, up until Congress passed legislation that mandated USPS pay forward *75 years* of retiree health benefits within *ten years*. No other organization, business or government, has such a mandate.

"Taxpayer-funded" kicked in after that point, as you'd expect it would.

Wealthy congresscritters want to kill off USPS so their cronies in the private sector will benefit, IMO.

http://blogs.reuters.com/felix-salmon/2012/07/20/how-congress-is-killing-the-post-office/ [reuters.com]
http://www.politifact.com/georgia/statements/2011/nov/11/sanford-bishop/bishop-signs-letter-saying-post-office-faces-big-p/ [politifact.com]