Obsolete

[amurderofcows]

Earlier this year, a photo developing store in my neighborhood posted this notice in its window:

Comments

[john1082]

We ought to do lunch sometime when I'm in The City.

[amurderofcows]

Let me know when you'll be around. I travel a fair amount, but I'm in The City a fair amount too.

[tko_ak]

It seems odd to post that 11 months late.

I have mixed feelings about privatizing the postal service. As a proponent of the free market and smaller government, it makes sense. Particularly since it can't seem to stay out of the red. Still, there's something comforting about knowing the USPS is there. And maybe it's the result of living in an isolated area, but the benefits of being able to mail something to Barrow, Alaska for 43 cents or whatever it is now is...well, a distortion of the market but still beneficial to those living in remote areas.

[amurderofcows]

All you can mail to Barrow for 44¢ is a letter, and I'm arguing that there's no real need for anyone to mail anything letter-sized ever; the fact that you're on the internet right now means that there's almost no occasion when you really have to send something letter-sized anywhere. For packages much larger than that, the USPS already charges more to send things to/from Alaska than they would if I wanted to send something to, say, Portland or Las Vegas. So I'm not really convinced people in Alaska, except very remote parts (probably places more isolated than Barrow, which has regular flights coming in, a fair number of people working there, etc.) really even get the benefits of USPS universal delivery. UPS and FedEx offer something pretty close to a universal delivery area, and if the USPS monopoly were broken, they'd have even more reason to deliver to smaller markets and compete directly with USPS in the first class mail business. There are all kinds of ways to efficiently structure delivery service to very remote areas,

[tko_ak]

I've said the same thing. In a lot of villages, there's no economy to speak of other than government employees and public assistance. When people spend welfare on satellite and soda and expect handouts for everything...

[amurderofcows]

It seems to me that, if a bunch of hateful people sat down and tried to plot out way to keep the people they don't like permanently at the bottom of the socio-economic ladder, that they couldn't come up with a program as effective for enforcing the goals of racists as long-term welfare. There was a time, long ago, when people who recognized the dangers of multigenerational welfare dependency, included a good number of Democrats, like Daniel Patrick Moynihan and Robert Kennedy.

I'm still a registered Democrat, mostly because I'm avoiding pariah status in local politics, but I find myself often-more often in the Obama era-silently uttering Ronald Reagan's line: "I didn't leave the Democratic Party; the Democratic Party left me."

[agriking]

I've long maintained that the USPS has become obsolete because its allowed itself to do so. Actual mail has become digitalized; I don't even get bills via mail anymore as most of them come via email. Parcel post and bulk delivery, ie magazines etc., can't be digitalized and that's where the postal services efforts should be concentrated on but they seem unwilling to attempt to compete with private carriers. This is a perfect example of evolve or parish.

[amurderofcows]

It's all pure momentum. If I travel, it's easy for my e-mail to follow me wherever I go. My physical mail just accumulates underneath the slot in the front door. The disadvantages of physical mail are countless; the advantages are pretty much zero.