U.S. Postal Service: salvageable or doomed?

Taibbi wrote about this last week... I didn't know/forgot the bold part:

"The U.S. Postal Service is staring down the same barrel trained at our magazine and newspaper businesses, i.e. its revenue model is being wiped out by the internet.

But politics also plays a huge part in this. In 2006, in what looks like an attempt to bust the Postal Workers' Union, George Bush signed into law the Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act of 2006. This law required the Postal Service to pre-fund 100 percent of its entire future obligations for 75 years of health benefits to its employees – and not only do it, but do it within ten years. No other organization, public or private, has to pre-fund 100 percent of its future health benefits.

"No one prefunds at more than 30 percent," Anthony Vegliante, the U.S. Postal Service's executive vice president, told reporters last year.

The new law forced the postal service to come up with about $5.5 billion a year for the ten years following the bill's passage. In 2006, before those payments kicked in, the USPS generated a small profit. Not surprisingly, the USPS is now basically broke.

The 2006 law also bars the Postal Service from offering "nonpostal services," which means the USPS can't, say, open up a bank, or an internet cafe, or come up with any new entrepreneurial ideas to generate new income, as postal services do in other countries.

The transparent purpose of this law, which was pushed heavily by industry lobbyists, was to break a public sector union and privatize the mail industry...."

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/blogs/taibblog/dont-let-business-lobbyists-kill-the-post-office-20120423

doomed

I understand why you bolded the passage you did, but the pre-funding requirement is even more shocking to me.

This law required the Postal Service to pre-fund 100 percent of its entire future obligations for 75 years of health benefits to its employees – and not only do it, but do it within ten years.

this seems deeply insane xp

Yeah, Congress has created a political problem and dressed it as an economic one, but USPS is probably doomed. Of course, one ironic upshot is that UPS and FedEx will have to cease serving customers in some rural and out-of-the-way places, since USPS is their last-mile carrier. But hey, the free market, right?

yup

salvageable, mainly because its a legit public good and thus doesnt need to be economically feasible.

The problem with going 100% to private delivery companies like UPS and FedEx is that they are not required to serve the entire country, as PhilD said. The more you cut off rural dwellers, the more you create tiers of citizenship, with the rural people turning into ignorant, poverty-stricken peasants, living in degradation. Not quite the thing, imo.

a national subsidy for mailing shit to people in the midddle of nowhere isn't really a legit public good

^^ needs more thought

yeah wth

yeah lets take away their schools too! xpost

I can't figure out your politics sometimes iatee

he hates people that dont live like he does

post very much in character

i mean thats the cliff notes version i am sure it is more nuanced but

actually those ignorant, poverty-stricken peasants in rural areas need to factor the lack of mailable shit access into their cost-benefit analysis

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dkEvLjj_rqc

^ a little video I'd like you to watch iatee

farmers should quit growing food, move to the city and work in private equity

again w/ the farmer thing

almost nobody is a farmer!

and yet we still pretend like half the country is

You can farm just as easily in queens, amirite?

literally as i clicked on this thread a mail truck stopped hard in front of my window. the mailman got out to retrieve a box that had escaped the truck and was lying in the middle of the street.

almost nobody is a farmer!

― iatee, Wednesday, May 2, 2012 4:32 PM (47 seconds ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

That's why they all live out in the middle of nowhere!

Mandatory victory gardens should have been part of Obamacare

fewer than 1% of americans are farmers

iatee, the numbers of farmers are shrinking, but they are still required, bcz, you know, food.

yes

all those people in the middle of nowhere are just getting books sent in the mail that teach them how to build bombs to blow up post offices anyway.

I do think its kind of terrifying to start measuring these sorts of things per economic viability tho - its a sad insight into the creepy economic mental sludge that is going on across the board in politics these days, and makes it even clearer that the neocons have won even while losing.

do you even know what the word neocon means

mail service is a constitutional issue. if you live in the middle of nowhere you still get, like, due process. sending off a letter is the same deal. so what if it's expensive!

all those people in the middle of nowhere are just getting books sent in the mail that teach them how to build bombs to blow up post offices anyway.

Get govmt out of my Medicare!

yes you insufferable little dude xxpost

nah the congress has the *ability* to create a postal service, not a requirement

http://gaffngun.com/forums/images/smilies/avatar54063_2.gif

l-r: ilx threads that even obliquely involve rural vs urban, iatee

The internets are making everything else privatizable, it seems

iatee just curious b/c I have not paid attention to this kind of shitstirring before -- have u lived in a rural area?

is there anything in section 8 that congress "shall have the power to" do, that it doesn't?

iatee, you realize that that's the whole point, that there's a minority of people who wouldn't be able to get service in the free market, but who need it, and whose services, in turn, we need.

Anyway "1% of Americans" is kind of a dumb stat to cite. It's more like 3+% of the labor force.

no I considered moving to one but then I remembered I was not a farmer xp

If the real point is to kill the unions and prove 'they don't work', the Republicans could just mandate that UPS and FedEx, etc..., serve rural areas which they could argue is a justifiable use of the commerce clause and totally wouldn't make them look like Mammon-worshipping hypocrites.

iatee what about all the people that need to live in rural areas to serve those farmers - grain silo storage/operators, farm implement sellers, harvest season laborers, grocery stores, etc etc?

the post office is kinda crazy for sending letters thousands of miles for, like, 50 cents. who does that? crazy people, that's who.

the post office is kinda crazy for sending letters thousands of miles for, like, 50 cents. who does that? crazy people, that's who.

^

p simplistic view of what the post office does imo

tbh guys theres plenty of decent stuff to talk about here and i know its hard to resist but this is kind of a do not feed the iatee sorta situation

They could just order their John Deere combines off of Amazon. Except nobody would deliver them. RIP farmers.

Yeah, who has ever heard of things like "economies of scale," am I right?

anyway outside of the rural/urban stuff this is what the post office does in 2k12

http://si.wsj.net/public/resources/images/MK-BP551A_JUNKM_D_20111005205703.jpg

the post office is bad for the environment and other living things! that's what you're trying to say. i buy that. so many tons of junk paper.

So instead of banning bulk rate/junk mail, let's def. eliminate the post office instead.

a) the rights that inhere to you as a citizen of the US and b) the sovereignty the US government holds over the country are both irrespective of the physical geography of the continent. each person and each square inch of US space is formally the same. if this makes the mail expensive in some places relative to others, that's a lesser concern.

both of those things are somewhat fictive (or abstract, if you like) but so what? i mean shit if health care is going to follow the same logic as rights/access then shuffling paper around the country in some useful, regularized way is nbd frankly.

you can argue that in the 18th cent the intent of the clause in Section 8 is idealized, it's about the state fostering the movement of information and correspondence and not about paper per se, but we're not borg yet so let's just pay for it, jesus.

if you banned them the post office would be even more fucked! xp

Less concerned by actual number of farmers than the idea of telling millions of people that they need to cut all their social/family connections and pack it up for Queens.

All indications are that Americans will continue to naturally urbanize in the coming generations, we don't need draconian bullshit like purposely making life outside of major metropolitan areas more difficult.

I have to admit I wouldn't miss getting mail from every Orthodox Jewish institution in my neighborhood (of which there are many) bcz someone put every plausibly non-Gentile name from my building's directory on their lists. Jesus, Mary, and Joseph....

Kept getting notices from The Nation when I subscribed that the bulk mail subsidy for periodicals had also vanished or nearly so, yes?

I'm pretty sure the post office isn't fucked becauase ppl like me are in charge it is fucked because people don't really use mail that much and, without a doubt, that trend is only going to continue

Less concerned by actual number of farmers than the idea of telling millions of people that they need to cut all their social/family connections and pack it up for Queens.

and they can't even send a return address because there's no Post Office! Yikes!

the junk mail thing is a non starter because the post office is not responsible for the content of the mail you get though xposts

right but its fragile finances atm are built on 50%+ of the mail people get being pieces of paper they will immediately throw in the trash

you can tell all those benefits that postal workers get make them really happy because everyone who works at the post office is always soooooooooo happy. just a bunch of good time charlies. i say release them from their inhuman chains of misery.

post office people are cocks! i like mailmen, though. my great grandpa was a mailman, and almost everybody he worked w/ was a WWII vet. Except for the dudes who worked in the offices, and they were all gov't job placement hacks, and he hated them a lot.

Less concerned by actual number of farmers than the idea of telling millions of people that they need to cut all their social/family connections and pack it up for Queens.

I thought the mail was privatized in Queens.

http://www.officialpsds.com/images/thumbs/Doug-Heffernan-King-of-Queens-psd41765.png

reasons why the junk mail thing doesn't matter

1 - the recipient is not the customer/funder of that mail, so their demands and wishes have nothing to do with the financial situation of the post office
2 - basic economics say that the only reason for the sender to pay for that "junk mail" is that it actually has a higher return rate than the cost of mailing. so no matter what we call it, it works enough for it to be growing business for the post office, and our value judgements about it dont really matter

'basic economics' say that it doesn't cost 50 cents to send a piece of paper anywhere in america

you are amazing

you really think that billions of dollars of subsidies to send paper trash around the country is a good thing because of 'basic economics'

How much does it cost? xxp

do you really think that you can get away with this level of hilariously misapplied argumentation xpost

http://i.imgur.com/7WenP.gif

http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_t5Xqp0AYeg4/S8yJXKVoO5I/AAAAAAAAAPs/pYPHjEyGBNo/s1600/mail+truck.gif

reasons why the junk mail thing doesn't matter

1 - the recipient is not the customer/funder of that mail, so their demands and wishes have nothing to do with the financial situation of the post office
2 - basic economics say that the only reason for the sender to pay for that "junk mail" is that it actually has a higher return rate than the cost of mailing. so no matter what we call it, it works enough for it to be growing business for the post office, and our value judgements about it dont really matter

I just want people to look at this post for a while, just look at it

everyone can learn some 'basic economics' if you just reread that post I think

well apparently you cant but yknow

There's a question on the table about how much it costs to send a piece of paper.

usps works the life out of people and those people can never leave because they will never find better money/benefits and its a vicious cycle and it kinda sucks unless you are a chill rural route carrier but mostly you sell them your soul for good healthcare.

I think you should write a textbook called 'basic economics' where you teach people how the government paying money to send trash around the country is just 'basic economics'

Don't make me use the gavel and call the previous question or w/e.

iatee, you realize that you arent actually fooling anyone here right

no you convinced me w/ basic economics, I'm on your side now

what i heard was USPS actually earns money from junk mailers paying them to send crap everywhere but this was from a pamphlet i received sponsored by awesome patriot junk mailers for america or some such group.

um, you should probably double-check what 'basic economics' refers to, iatee

iatee if you had bothered to read the first post in the thread you'd know that the turn to increased junk mail is in large part a result of absurd pension-funding requirements designed to kill the postal service

1. postal service exists, 2. prices set by (?)(no idea what bulk rates are tbh), 3. business that want to cram your box with coupons use it.

again this seems like a minor problem. solving 3. by getting rid of 1. doesn't make much sense to me.

prior to the passage of the union-busing bush law discussed upthread, the USPS actually managed to break even year after year. the postal service paid for itself. i.e., there is was no subsidy to mail paper around the country.

ppl who think post office ppl are 'cocks obv need to move out of the city

most people in cities are cocks btw

iatee if you had bothered to read the first post in the thread you'd know that the turn to increased junk mail is in large part a result of absurd pension-funding requirements designed to kill the postal service

its obligations have nothing to do w/ its revenue sources - the revenue from traditional mail is going to continue to decline regardless. does anyone believe they will be paying their bills by mail in 2030?

best way to reduce the amount of useless bulk mail would be to slightly increase the cost of sending it. would weed out a few who can't afford or don't really depend on it, while generating more income off the remaining users. i suspect that the post office has already pushed this as far as they can. what's probably required is a subsidy to offset the cost of making bulk mail prohibitively expensive to all but a few users.

i'd say the fundamental problem with the USPS isn't that it sends paper around -- how is the core function of a thing a 'liability'? -- it's that its service (to everywhere the same) and price (the same everwhere, and low) are highly constrained by politics.

the education and blowing-shit-up functions of the public sector don't have to worry about this kind of strict return; the mail is more like that, no matter what a great job UPS and fedex are doing picking and choosing what they send and how, which the mail can't and shouldn't do.

does anyone believe they will be paying their bills by mail in 2030?

― iatee, Wednesday, May 2, 2012 10:19 AM (1 minute ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

not if the gov't succeeds in destroying the USPS

i kind of like junk mail when it's awesome, like cereal samples, coupons for free burgers, $1 bills, fancy CD cases...

well and wrt the current discussion, the junk mail thing is really a red herring, like i said upthread - it makes no sense to talk about junk mail percentage in a conversation about the sustainability of the post office. xposts

i'd say the fundamental problem with the USPS isn't that it sends paper around -- how is the core function of a thing a 'liability'? -- it's that its service (to everywhere the same) and price (the same everwhere, and low) are highly constrained by politics.

well, I agree w/ the second part but w/r/t the first part, it's a business that's in an inevitable decline.

see but it is not a business per se

'the necessity to send pieces of paper across the country is quickly becoming less of a necessity'

yes i don't think it's a business, it's a public service. therefore if it's expensive you do what you can to manage it but ultimately say "huh interesting, here's the check"

they send other stuff, too! not just slips of paper. cheaper than fedex/ups sometimes also!

Do they give away $1 bills in junk mail???

they

'cheaper than fedex/ups' is not actually a good thing if we want to live in a world where the total environmental cost of sending a package across the country gets paid

why on earth would you ask it to 'pay for itself'? does, idk, a district court do that?

per recent foreign affairs article, this gov't is currently spending the GDP of spain to put worthless planes in the air for a few hours a year so the $$ of what's 'worth it' need to be considered in toto

we should start an ilx penpal group, to support the post office and show our support

i remember getting $1 bills as junk mail, once from some local office politician trying to literally buy a vote (the top of the letter read something like "HERE'S A DOLLAR! Now that I've got your attention...") i love this kind of junk mail.

iatee, you should drop the code about "total environmental cost" and just own up to a desire to make rural/semi-rural living less attractive in order to push people out of living that way

UK - Royal Mail

From 60p for mail up to 100g

France - La Poste

1,45 € for 100g

Germany - Deutsche Post

0.90 € for 50 g

'cheaper than fedex/ups' is not actually a good thing
there's no contradiction in raising prices across the board to reflect environmental costs (maybe by taxing fuel?) while still preserving a price advantage. i'm just sayin USPS rocks. I want them to administer health care.

the code about "total environmental cost"

What if it's not code? I can see why the govmt subsidized rural living in the 19th century to secure our new lands and win the frontier from the Indians but why do we have to subsidize it now? I can totally see the benefits of rural electrification and rural delivery on country living but I don't see why everyone shouldn't now be paying their real market costs regardless of what I think of rural living.

voila

like how awesome would it be if your doctor came door to door, did a checkup, then "oh btw, here's an envelope with a dollar in it. no you keep it, it's yours. also here's a coupon for a burger."

From iatee, it's code.

The government subsidizes all kinds of living - rural, suburban, urban. Let's not pretend that the relatively small percentage of rural and semi-rural Americans are getting something no one else does.

uh, you don't have to pretend?

what if we charged people who lived in poorer zip codes more for the cost of police calls into them

If you think we're ever going to get urban and suburban SUV owners to pay $17/gallon for gas just so we can get Mayberry RFD to pay more for first class mail I have some bad news for you.

urban taxpayers pay for "total environmental cost" in ways other than postage ... that's why my highly urbanized state pays more in federal tax dollars than it gets back from Washington.

the subsidy argument only applies if you are willing to say that govt entities should be held to a break even standard which is straight up insane and leads basically to arguments of privitization. i mean unless you want to talk about libraries pulling their own weight then picking and choosing the USPS just because they were dumb enough to actually make some of the money back seems ultraweird to me.

iatee does have a point: even without the bush law, the demand for mail service (outside the bulk-rate business stuff) is declining and likely will continue to decline. this in turn will make the maintenance of non-urban post offices and mail delivery routes increasingly expensive on a per customer basis, with less "service" delivered per dollar spent. some sort of break point will inevitably be reached. figuring out how to manage the transition in the here and now makes more sense than just pretending we can maintain the current delivery model forever.

yeah libraries are institutions where lots of people share resources, the postal service is an institution where millions of pounds of paper gets flown around the country to be thrown away immediately, can you find a difference here

I don't know what's worse, getting mailed a check for 3¢ or getting a nickel stickied to some cardboard flyer.

iatee does have a point: even without the bush law, the demand for mail service (outside the bulk-rate business stuff) is declining and likely will continue to decline. this in turn will make the maintenance of non-urban post offices and mail delivery routes increasingly expensive on a per customer basis, with less "service" delivered per dollar spent. some sort of break point will inevitably be reached. figuring out how to manage the transition in the here and now makes more sense than just pretending we can maintain the current delivery model forever.

― Choc. Clusterman (contenderizer), Wednesday, May 2, 2012 1:46 PM (34 seconds ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

smart people could have figured this transition out except the other bush law abt non-mail revenue sources kind of fucked that up

doesn't it make more sense to think of the post office as a utility rather than a business

In the coming era of big data, market function may get more and more exact. Inasmuch as that leads to efficiency, I'm for it. In as much as both efficiency and the health and beauty of our environment is concerned, I'm all for it.

anyway i just heard the mailman, gonna go see what came today

iatee how do you feel about rural libraries

You mean like how electric companies are now run by Edison or Entergy?

- alumni magazine
- urban outfitters catalog
- greeting card

there is no such thing as rural libraries because everyone is busy farming

america is nothing but nyc and farmers, farmers everywhere

i've probably filled an entire landfill with alumni magazines and fundraising junkmail which immediately gets shit-canned.

are the declining numbers for mail service including parcels? there's more of a compelling anti-waste/environmental argument to de-privatize UPS/FedEx and return their market back to the USPS if that's the issue.

hey jjj, remember what you posted about "do not feed the iatee"

i know i know

the other bush law abt non-mail revenue sources kind of fucked that up

I don't know exactly how the Royal Mail is doing since it was privatized nor what services it offers, but La Poste famously also provides savings and checking accounts replete w/Carte Bleue, Visa or MC and also 'contingency insurance'.

Alumni mags are at least useful for the momentary pleasure of seeing who from your class you have outlived.

making people pay the "real cost" of their lifestyles makes sense only if we want to entirely deliver rural food production into the hands of a few agribusiness giants. at this point, we do "subsidize" rural living in certain respects, perhaps paying more for on a per-user basis for the maintenance of certain public services in sparsely populated rural areas than we do in more densely-populated urban ones.

if we began to pass this cost along to rural dwellers, we'd very quickly price most of them out of their lifestyles. there just isn't much money out there in the sticks. problem is that we'd in the process annihilate the social support systems on which american agriculture depends. rural roads, post offices and schools would decay and eventually shut down. with them would to rural businesses and communities. all that would be left would be company-sponsored "towns" funded and run according to whims of deep-pockets agribusiness.

this doesn't strike me as an ideal solution, but maybe it's the way things are gonna go eventually, i dunno.

why don't we just skip the middle man and immediately start living our lives like we are characters from Jennifer Government

This is notoriously useful to the poor since the minimum deposit isn't too high.

Actually, I wish the French had a word for entrepreneur since apparently La Poste also hosts websites, runs a mobile phone company (odd), sells retirement accounts, allows you to buy stocks on the Bourse. And also becuase they're a little enamouraché of iatee, they have 'responsible mail', la lettre verte with a carbon footprint 30% lower than normal mail.

america is nothing but nyc and farmers, farmers everywhere

― iatee, Wednesday, May 2, 2012 1:50 PM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

farmers and strawmen out standing in their fields

a) the rights that inhere to you as a citizen of the US and b) the sovereignty the US government holds over the country are both irrespective of the physical geography of the continent. each person and each square inch of US space is formally the same. if this makes the mail expensive in some places relative to others, that's a lesser concern.

i know this is not really a thing BUT i don't see how this point holds true. you can't get overnight to the middle of a national park, you get different priority service times depending on where you live. so you're not getting the same service for the same price, which seems to be an arguing point in this conversation.

yeah, "to the best of our ability" has always been built into USPS delivery expectations, and that obviously has to change over time

The American impulse to see any mixed economic model as a fundamental attack on the genius of the free market perplexes me. As Obama pointed out during the health care debate, the existence of the Post Office hasn't unfairly put UPS or FedEx out of business - they can hold their own - it's just providing a service that the market wouldn't otherwise provide.

you can't get overnight to the middle of a national park

Tbf, the Post Office's mail rockets were frightening the bears

well right, geography doesn't disappear, which is why i brought up the fictive/abstract nature of rights among persons and sovereignty over space.

if you break your leg in a national park it takes a little longer for EMS to get there too. there are arguments ongoing about the cost of those services (witness the jokers who do some dumb stunt and the laws allow the county to stick them with the bill if they get hurt) but we're not saying "leave them there"

we're kind of getting into "if a man gets shot in the forest, is it even a murder" territory

Purely hypothetical in my case, of course

good piece about what happened in the netherlands after the postal service was privatized

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v33/n09/james-meek/in-the-sorting-office

how hard would mail in the netherlands be? anyplace you can't throw a paper airplane to you can bike to in 25 mins

you posted that the last time we argued about this

I've never said it should be privatized tho, just that it is quickly losing its core purpose and that sending parcels anywhere shouldn't be artificially cheap

I think that part of the problem in the US is that ppl will put up w/socialism if it's cheap but if you make them pay a competitive price, they're up in arms.

yup

I don't know if this is why morbs had this in mind but yesterday I was talking w/ him about this subject and said it's a shame the post office wasn't allowed to offer banking services, I would be cool w/ a national bank

I wonder what other topics iatee & I discussed during the OWS march would make for controversial threads?

could bring up the 'isn't it funny that there are no 30-50 year olds here' in the generation thread

Yes, the only thing other thing that would make the lobby of a post office just that much better would be the presence of a bank teller.

I would also suggest having a portrait studio.

as mw mentioned upthread it's not actually that strange of a pratice and already exists in many countries

whereas sending millions of tons of trash to people every day is actually a weird practice

lots of strange practices in many countries, imo.

- "The post office is this weird quasi-public bureaucracy that's forbidden to make money and sends everyone crap."

- " I sure wish they could loan me some money to buy a bass boat."

you realize that destroying the postal service will mean opening up bulk mail to the private carriers and other services, not getting rid of it

private carriers are expensive

I wonder what other topics iatee & I discussed during the OWS march would make for controversial threads?

your admiration for Kurosawa samurai films?

if private carriers can figure out a business model to make money off of bulk mail, you can be sure they will do it

the business model doesn't even have to work all that well, it just has to be profitable

private carriers are expensive

― iatee, Wednesday, May 2, 2012 2:42 PM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

private carriers have no legal access to your mail box. if they did, what would be your basis for claiming that they couldn't establish a cheap bulk mail network?

that outside of extremely dense places or places w/ a centralized mail box it's unfeasible for the ups guy to hit every house in the neighborhood every day for something that makes pennies

To think I thought my son would grow up too late to be a paper boy. Now I know what he can do!

same is true for usps, no?

ok, so people in relatively dense areas (i.e. most people) would continue to get bulk mail, and a few rural people wouldn't get any mail. What would be the benefit of that again?

yeah I didn't mean 'relatively dense' I mean apt buildings, which is not anywhere close to 'most people'

we already have a privatized cheap bulk mail network, it's called the people who leave flyers in the windshield wipers of my car while I'm grocery shopping

but I'm for making it more expensive for ups to transport shit too, so

lets just say 'if there is a business model that depends on people forcing trash on strangers, I am for finding ways to make that business model less feasible'

still don't understand why you're claiming post offices business model doesn't work

because...it depends on people forcing trash on strangers

i can't think of any mass commercial enterprise that isn't in some way forcing trash on strangers.

forcing trash on strangers is the cornerstone of our society iirc

I know right

I'm for making more of that trash digital

I have started w/ ilx

if ILX is a mass commercial enterprise, where can I buy stock?

try the post office in 2020.

as long as I can buy Chik-Fi-A and have my portrait painted

"Have you ever bought stock in a message board...from your post office?

YOU WILL"

but I'm for making it more expensive for ups to transport shit too, so

― iatee, Wednesday, May 2, 2012 2:49 PM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

ok fine, but what is going on here is not some kind of market-assisted environmentalism, its private businesses wanting to take over the profitable and potentially profitable parts of the USPS model while leaving the rest to die. There may come a day when virtually every person in the US is capable of doing virtually every piece of their business electronically, but we are probably decades away from that point both in terms of tech and individual internet savvy and access.

not really no

Halliburton Postal Service

can't believe that we are going to hit 200 posts about a shitty indie band that hasn't even released an album since 2003.

private carriers are expensive

― iatee, Wednesday, May 2, 2012 11:42 AM (21 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

if they're forced and enabled to do the work of the USPS, they won't be. they'll find a way to deliver millions of tons of throwaway crap for private business because where there's a dollar to be made, someone will make it. killing the postal service will do nothing but subject a reliable basic services to mr. toad's wild ride courtesy of the "inherently benevolent" free market.

These would make dope mailbags though for real:

http://www.jamesbondlifestyle.com/images/products/ac026.jpg

re: Halliburton Postal Service

like what's gonna go away if the mail is privatized is not reams of shitty bulk mail delivered to your urban apt building or suburban home. it's the network that allows the delivery of private mail at reasonable prices to anyplace in the US.

again, I am against 'the free market' sending people millions of tons of trash too, and I believe we can find ways to fight this

what if it were really expensive to send people trash and also sending shit far away was even more expensive

what do you propose, a bulk mail tax?

also known as the BMT

well you don't even need a 'bulk mail tax', just get rid of bulk mail pricing to begin w/

I mean assuming it's in the hands of the private sector. You can't just make the private sector "get rid of" a pricing scheme

yes he can, he lives in an urban apartment

well in that case sure, a bulk mail tax

that would make bulk mail profitable for the government and would likely reduce bulk mail to some extent, but by incorporating the former (gov't funding) in your solution, you'd virtually guarantee the existence of bulk mail in perpetuity.

hurting is talking about a theoretical world w/o government postage and now you have just brought government postage back into his theoretical world

you guys there are lots of ways to make the transportation of cheap physical crap more expensive

there are not very many good arguments against it if you plan on being around in 2050 or have kids

but won't somebody think of the pensioners who want their coupons?

leaving the junk mail thing out of this, that pre-funding thing in the OP is just staggering to me. that seems like basically transparent "we will destroy you" legislation and should be treated as such and 86ed, thus solving some/all of the problems for USPS.

yeah they might as well have required the postal service to guess the name of a magical imp in order to receive funding

i was being (partly) silly on here, but for real how far is hawaii from where i live? 6000 miles? 45 cents to send a letter there! that's planes and trucks and cars and i think on the one hand that its COOL but i also can't understand how you can keep doing that forever.

maybe its easier than i think. i mean if they are going there anyway to hawaii to deliver junk mail than it doesn't matter if my letter tags along.

Maybe the costs of short-distance mailing are so miniscule that they offset the costs of sending to Hawaii.

And if I'm not mistaken, you can even mail a letter to Guam for 44 cents.

Less for me because I'm still working through my first roll of Forever stamps.

leaving the junk mail thing out of this, that pre-funding thing in the OP is just staggering to me. that seems like basically transparent "we will destroy you" legislation and should be treated as such and 86ed, thus solving some/all of the problems for USPS.

this assumes that there is a political party that would shitcan such nonsense ... oh wait, we don't have that anymore in the age of Change We Can Believe In!

Maybe the costs of short-distance mailing are so miniscule that they offset the costs of sending to Hawaii.

This may be the case. If so, it's not a unique idea to the public sector either. Plenty of private businesses offset higher-cost/lower-margin items or services, or even money-losing items or services, with lower-cost/higher-margin ones. A private bulk mail service could very well make the determination that it makes more economic sense to offer "direct advertising in all 50 states!" and take a little loss on the hawaii/alaska mail to bring in the business.

weight of a letter = 3 grams

weight of an adult male = 80 kg

number of letters that add up to weight of scott seward = about 26,000

26,000 letters * 44 cents = $11,400

that's a lot more expensive than a plane ticket to hawaii

there are not very many good arguments against it if you plan on being around in 2050 or have kids

haha whoops a letter is 30 grams

$1400, actually about the same as a plane ticket to hawaii

i think iatee is arguing from ideology instead of economics

Letters don't need seats, meals, flight attendants, etc.

carry-ons, luggage, gates, blankets, pillows, air-masks, shall I go on?

They do get movies, oddly enough.

letters may occasionally add up to that much, but you don't have 26000 letters going to Hawaii on every flight
OTOH, as I understand it, a lot of mail piggybacks onto flights to Hawaii that are already heading there

Yep, as I suspected:

The speed of mail traveling between Guam and the states varies depending on size and time of year. Light, first-class items generally take less than a week to or from the mainland, but larger first-class or Priority items can take a week or two. Fourth-class mail, such as magazines, are transported by sea after reaching Hawaii. Most residents use post office boxes or private mail boxes, although residential delivery is becoming increasingly available. Incoming mail not from the Americas should be addressed to "Guam" instead of "USA" to avoid being routed the long way through the U.S. mainland and possibly charged a higher rate (especially from Asia).

and

Because Guam is also part of the U.S. Postal System (postal abbreviation: GU, ZIP code range: 96910–96932), mail to Guam from the U.S. mainland is considered domestic and no additional charges are required. Private shipping companies, such as FedEx, UPS, and DHL, however, have no obligation to and do not regard Guam as domestic.

you guys there are lots of ways to make the transportation of cheap physical crap more expensive

there are not very many good arguments against it if you plan on being around in 2050 or have kids

yeah, sure, i agree with you on an ideological, goal-oriented level. everyone here probably does. but the solution is not destroying the USPS, privatizing all mail delivery, making rural people pay a "fair rate", and taxing bulk mail. pragmatically speaking, that might reduce bulk mail volume somewhat, but would merely set up a system guaranteeing its perpetuation. and it could be accomplished without destroying the USPS.

sure

wait only 'sure'ing the last part, 'would set up a system guaranteeing its perpetuation' is nonsense

if the government got tax revenue from every pizza coupon and crate & barrel catalog sent, you can bet they'd do whatever they could to keep the paper flowing

that might be hyperbole. hmmm... let's just say that it would reduce their incentive to stop junk mail.

In a country where we can't even get a gas tax that even approaches the true cost of driving, and where people will pay Amazon.com $70 a year just to get free shipping on all their $15 DVD orders,I wish iatee great success running for office on his "make cheap crap more expensive to transport" platform. (Not to mention his glib dismissal of how far we are from a paperless/everything online society when I can't even get decent cable internet speeds or non-throttled 4G wireless data in a major city, let alone In Buttfuck, Montana.)

'cheap crap for all forever and always' platform is pretty hard to run against I agree, I do not think I will run for office

yeah, one or the other of the two major "cheap crap for all forever and always" parties has won almost every major american election in the last few decades

everyone is invited to the cheap crap for all forever and always party

the great gasby

Alls I'm saying is we're all fucked anyway so please do not take away my first class mail in the meantime. My Aunt Lottie has sent me a birthday card every year for 42 years and I kinda enjoy it.

Netflix will take over USPS. Subscription based model.

anyway countries that offer postal banking:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postal_savings_systems

france! germany! brazil! korea! japan! america until 1967!

it's not a super crazy idea

and we have a country filled w/ amazingly shitty banks

They should put banks in Waffle Houses since they only accept cash anyway.

Chik-fil-A was another good idea. After all, them and the post office are already shut down on Sundays.

Waffle House takes credit.

If I could get a Waffle House Visa, though, that would be the only card I ever used.

Big move on their part. I guess they figured out that keeping an ATM on the premises wasn't the wisest thing to do.

But the Waffle House atm only put out credit vouchers (or at least that's how it went here.)

Ours were the same skinny machines you see at the gas station and handed out twenties only.

is iatee gabbneb?

no gabbneb loved heartland america

he would always give people vacation tips

i haven't read enough of yr posts to get that joke sorry, not sure i'd noticed you until ppl above pointed there's this guy and he's got this schtick and i thought 'o hey, gabbneb'. but apparently gabbneb went beyond insider baseball centrist mystery pollster stuff to full on loathing and trolling, which doesn't settle it (if dude or you snapped a username change would make sense right?), and responding in the negative doesn't clear it up either (which begs the question why'd i bother to ask...). anyhow better luck next time you try to buy stamps or whatever the fuck happened.

there's this colin cowherd commercial where you just pay for yr postage and print it on yr computer or some shit maybe try that.

wait a minute.

JESUS CHRIST.

are you colin cowherd?

you should read ilx more I guess

YES DEFINITELY

CLEARLY

even after reading colin cowherd's wikipedia I am not sure how offended to be

he's named "cowherd", so...

Colin Cowherd is the worst person in America, no joke. So worshipful of power and prestige, he'd eagerly man a gas chamber just to please his substitute daddy.

I've seen iatee shit up some threads before but this is really a bravura performance. "flag post" deeply unsatisfying in situations like these imo

i dunno, i think iatee was arguing in good faith here and wasn't trying to be a pest or a troll.

'first-class mail, which is the post office's most important and profitable service, is in an inevitable decline, this is true even before you factor in the health care mandate'

'we're already at a point where the majority of what the post office handles is paper trash and there is no reason to expect that ratio to ever get better'

'a shift to flexible pricing and non-postal services could not only save the post office, but could provide the country w/ a massive, trustworthy banking system, that's actually a fantastic opportunity'

I prob said something trolly somewhere but none of those statements is particularly controversial:

http://about.usps.com/news/national-releases/2011/pr11_124.htm

first class mail dying, flexile business, hey wow postmaster general has some good ideas

like maybe I should have said "I care deeply about the fate of rural america and its proud residents such as jjjusten and balls, but it's really not that hard to find something foreboding in this trend"

http://about.usps.com/who-we-are/financials/10k-reports/fy2011/images/mail_volume_trends.gif

the post office, incidentally, read the tea leaves and attempted to set up a system for online bill paying long before it was popular:

http://www.cnbc.com/id/47126893/What_Really_Keeps_US_Post_Office_From_Making_A_Profit

I didn't say he was trolling, I said he was shitting up the thread, which he was & will continue to do. iatee with his hi-density living schtick is like when I bring up the war on reproductive rights on the thread that was supposed to be Siouxsie and the Banshees: Classic or Dud?

lol, did you really do that?

not as of yet

well now you have a task for today

"The Sweetest Chill" is the best song on Tinderbox - NOW GO!

iatee-underaero-jjjusten beer summit at my apartment

I straight up don't understand how you can look at the post-office's long-term finances w/o bringing up the rural issue but I think it's sorta related to how you like to bring up abortion rights w/o factoring in the political power of half of america. this thread, which actually started from a conversation where I was telling morbs 'it's a shame the post office can't diversify its business, that's why it's fucked' is not about the post office's finances, its about ~american values~

When I was a kid, we'd go to Cothern's Grocery to get our mail. All the mailboxes were lined up on a wall facing the cash register. I'd reach into the cooler and pull out a bottle of Coke while Mom would go talk to the postmaster behind the window. I remember she'd make me finish it in the store so we could get the deposit back on it.

About 20 years ago, I noticed that all these little brick post offices out where I was raised were being replaced by these chic glass and mortar buildings. I never understood why the usps went in that direction and not consolidating with a local business like it was at Cothern's. I agree with you iatee that maybe rates need to be pro-rated by distance, but eliminating a post office in the sticks isn't going to save money because a truck no longer has to drive up there to deliver the mail. It only means that a township of 300 people are now going to send 300 cars down the highway to the big postal center to get their mail.

Along the lines of your whole "paper trash" line, maybe the post office not only needs to eliminate Saturday service, but also eliminate Tuesday-Sunday service. It's funny that I usually get my coupon flyers on Wednesday, the same day I take my trash out. I pull the mail out of the box, sort it out at the curb, and toss what I don't want into the recycling bin, already at my feet.

imagine if USPS partnered with Pottery Barn. You can get mint-scented candles with your stamps.

iatee seems to have no sympathies for the unabomber.

We still have a little brick PO in my Brooklyn neighborhood (w/ the most abominable customer service I have ever experienced at one).

the biggest slut in Babylon

I remember she'd make me finish it in the store so we could get the deposit back on it.

I'm imagining a long, burpy car-ride home.

I'm imagining a long, burpy car-ride home childhood.

We have quite a few brick POs left in Miami-Dade but the one that opened in 2005 literally two blocks away from my apartment looks like a Target and is always crazy full.

Along the lines of your whole "paper trash" line, maybe the post office not only needs to eliminate Saturday service, but also eliminate Tuesday-Sunday service. It's funny that I usually get my coupon flyers on Wednesday, the same day I take my trash out. I pull the mail out of the box, sort it out at the curb, and toss what I don't want into the recycling bin, already at my feet.

saturday's def not gonna be here in a few years, but one problem w/ going beyond that is that it makes the postal service less competitive w/ ups/fedex when it comes to parcels

We already go to the post office to pick up packages -- half the time they either need a signature or it's too big. And no one ever tries to leave a package for pick-up at their home, do they?

Wrt mentioning the French PO, the number of complaints has risen by 47% since 2009. Ironically, the PO says this is because they nopw have a 911-style 4 digit complaint line (80% of the complaints are made this way) and also complaint link on their website.

http://www.lefigaro.fr/conso/2012/05/03/05007-20120503ARTFIG00424-la-poste-mecontente-ses-clients.php

Being France, Le Figaro tends to see this as relatively benign and a union rep says it's 'cause of lay-offs.

My doorman takes all my packages, one of the main reasons I don't wanna move.

We already go to the post office to pick up packages -- half the time they either need a signature or it's too big. And no one ever tries to leave a package for pick-up at their home, do they?

you can order a pickup even w/ usps but I don't think it's worth it unless you ship regularly + live somewhere where you don't mind leaving a package in public. I don't know how the price w/ that service compares to the private carriers.

but basically my point is that outside of places where the usps is the last mile, cutting down from M-F service basically ensures that it won't be able to offer a comparable service to ups/fedex. basically there's either a slow death by cuts where one day a week service could very likely be the endpoint or a radical restructuring of the organization, its finances and long-term purpose. I don't think the first scenario is unlikely, I just don't think its the best one. neither do people who run the post office, which is why they've always been pushing to diversify the business.

Maybe the post office could bring me a pizza with my mail.

You'd probably end up throwing that right into your compost bin

I've never heard it called that.

Are stamps a topping y/n?

I've never heard it called that.

Here in the Utopian Progressive Paradise of SF, we have landfill, recycling and compost bins. Failure to sort properly leads to mandatory stays in Fresno.

today the mailman got out of his truck carrying too much mail and dropped a huge pile of it on the wet street.

and he's driving like a kia soul or something, not an actual mail truck.

the deal, iatee, is that to argue that the USPS is doomed, you point to the chart you posted above re. the decline of paper mail over the last five years & say it's gonna extrapolate out. & "this is true even before you factor in the health care mandate". The USPS is doomed, privatize, diversify it, or shut it down. that's what the market has decided, you can't argue with dollars.

whereas others think "the health care mandate" you poo poo is actually important in explaining why the USPS is doomed right now.

poo poo'ing a right-wing policy, & actually being happy with a right-wing outcome: that's why you come across as right-wing.

"but eliminating a post office in the sticks isn't going to save money because a truck no longer has to drive up there to deliver the mail."

http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/politics/2012/04/senate-passes-postal-reform/

"The Postmaster General last year agreed to delay until May 15 obligatory closings of an anticipated 3,600 post offices nationwide, in order to give Congress the opportunity to help with legislation. The bill splits the number of mail processing centers the Postal Services currently wants to close — from 252 to 125."

except I never said privatize it or shut it down and it lost 5 bil *before the health care mandate* last year and I think the solution is gov't banking ~that's kinda sorta not right-wing~

maybe I 'come across as right-wing' because people read whatever the fuck they want into my argument

it lost 5 bil *before the health care mandate* last year

I believe he was referring to the 2006 health benefits funding law mentioned in the thread starter. ("In 2006, before those payments kicked in, the USPS generated a small profit.")

There's a difference between being a right-wing market apologist and seeing that something is economically unsustainable.

seems to me that privatizing the USPS would make the junk mail problem worse, since, if junk mail is 50% of the postal service's business anyways, I don't know why a privately owned mail supplier would turn that away, on top of the fact that in order to stay competitive these privatized companies are certainly going to use the services they provide as a primary means of advertising...

so be prepared for a large increase of junk mail, much of which are fliers trying to convince you to write letters to dear far-away friends and relations instead of just emailing them

WASHINGTON — The U.S. Postal Service ended its 2011 fiscal year (Oct. 1, 2010 – Sept. 30, 2011) with a net loss of $5.1 billion. The year-end loss would have been approximately $10.6 billion had it not been for passage of legislation that postponed a congressionally mandated payment of $5.5 billion to pre-fund retiree health benefits.

source: USPS WEBSITE

seems to me that privatizing the USPS would make the junk mail problem worse

literally nobody has suggested privatizing the usps

itt

I stand corrected xp

(NB I'm sitting)

i think people are reading as right wing the fact that whenever anyone gets into the idea that postal service is a public good you slam in with a bunch of half-assed ideas about why the post office is doomed that seem to all have as their endpoint "fuck people getting things that they dont pay for, why should i foot the bill" which equals exactly the attitude that i hate most (well one of them) about right wing dudes.

I am not suggesting privatizing but when the price of postage was brought up, I was quite curious to see what the Royal Mail, which has been privatised, was charging since that would likely represent a sustainable price leading to profits in the UK.

well when I say 'fuck people getting things that they dont pay for' it's because I think there can be environmental consequences from underpricing distance not because I believe there is some 'deserve' thing see: everywhere else where I argue for a swedish welfare state

xp

"fuck people getting things that they dont pay for, why should i foot the bill"

At its worst, this is just deludedly selfish whining. Why delusional? 'Cause most public goods end up benefitting everyone whther directly or indirectly. However, saying that we should pay for a public good regardless of cost is not defensible either. It is ppl's money and just 'cause everyone likes something doesn't mean we should pay an exorbiatnt price that deprives us of other good things.

I mean, I can be down w/leftist ideology that wants to progressively tax the rich but not with leftist ideology that doesn't understand the fundamentals of economics and iatee has the good economic sense to feel that many goods and services are underpriced because the market presently doesn't take into account their real long-term costs.

to be charitable, IF a) the post office is primarily and increasingly a 'service' of shuttling junk paper around the country and b) that activity is getting more and more expensive, then, ok, it is basically destructive and on par with building ships that rot and planes that do nothing well (nb both of these things are truly happening right now)

but i don't think that's the right way to think about what the postal service is for and where it should go next. i mean, reading over this thread again, apart from balls trying to throw his weight around, and people hating iatee already, i don't think anybody really disagrees about what to do?

getting packages in and out of distant & sparsely populated areas is always going to come with greater costs. my opinion is those just have to be borne by the public for social/constitutional reasons. i don't think 'subsidy' is the right way to look at the mail.

the postal service running in the red is a slightly difft issue and could be solved by preventing congress from destroying the postal service.

i guess i'm saying 'salvageable if things were sensible, so, probably doomed'

getting packages in and out of distant & sparsely populated areas is always going to come with greater costs. my opinion is those just have to be borne by the public for social/constitutional reasons. i don't think 'subsidy' is the right way to look at the mail.

exactly how much of the cost - which is going to continue to rise, inevitably w/ transportation costs and the collapse of first-class mail?

another side of this is that 'arguably too cheap' parcel postage to anywhere in the country is basically what's been killing retail

how the fuck should i know!

actually if you want to go after whats been killing local retail it has much more to do with internet exemptions from collecting sales tax than postal rates

As I pointed out upthread postage is more expensive almost everywhere else and rural issues are not just an American issue. Yesterday's presidential debate brought up the ruinous effect of high gas prices on French ppl living in the country.

esp considering that local retail is just as much a beneficiary of inexpensive postal rates wrt incoming product

that's an element too, but that doesn't mean that online retail doesn't benefit from cheap transit to anywhere in the country

xp

goole's point is well-taken. If we just nixed the F-35, the USPS could be easily saved.

its a pretty minor aspect tho, the cost for larger packages (like over a few pounds) shift pretty quickly to UPS vs USPS, which means that the shipping aspect is pretty negligible.

aspect aspect everywhere

esp considering that local retail is just as much a beneficiary of inexpensive postal rates wrt incoming product

nah there's no way you can say 'just as much a beneficiary' - when transit costs are high, it gives a comparative advantages to people who are buying in bulk ie (most of) retail

I mean to have market apologists look askance at mixed economy public sector institutions/public goods like the USPS but not look askance at the train-wreck which is the development of a fighter plane desperately wanted by the military/industrial complex, an example of wrong-headed 'socialism' if ever there was one, is to miss sight of a very important economic and philosophical debate for a shallow political one.

'a comparative advantages' = 'a comparative advantage'

nah there's no way you can say 'just as much a beneficiary' - when transit costs are high, it gives a comparative advantages to people who are buying in bulk ie (most of) retail

but the retail opposition here is between smaller businesses and amazon etc right? so unless you are saying that amazon et al are being crippled by cheap postage i dont get how you can argue that at all

heres a real world example - lets say that some dude is buying a thousand dollar guitar which costs $15 to ship. as someone in a place with approx 7% sales tax, would i rather compete with that, or the fact that the guitar is $70 cheaper from him because i have to charge sales tax?

It really is about storage and delivery to a great extent. Amazon is at a great advantage because their stocking and ordering is far more pinpointed and efficient than a local retailer's is and the cost of delivery, even if slightly higher from an online retailer, is still borne by the buyer.

also note - even if you raise the price of shipping to $69, amazon still has a competetive advantage

somehow I missed M White's French presidential debate thread.

chances of multiplying that shipping cost by 5? so not going to happen

again I don't think sales tax is a non-issue, but the fact that some dude can buy a thousand dollar guitar from *anyone in the country* or increasingly from the amazon-borg which can demand steeper discounts than you get and better shipping prices too, is a bigger problem xp

this btw is def a whole different thread topic and i dont want to derail, but retail survival is a fairly weak argument against low postal rates is all im saying

somehow I missed M White's French presidential debate thread.

I had a Sarko vs Royal thread back last time. This time I just posted 'eugh' on this thread:

J'ecoute le debate entre Sego & Sarko

haha I wanted to watch that is it up somewhere

maybe the USPS could make residential delivery services (except for expedited packages etc.) an option during three or four days per week? how would that really hurt anybody?

good afternoon! What's the scorecard so far?

I won the debate and then everyone agreed I won

maybe the USPS could make residential delivery services (except for expedited packages etc.) an option during three or four days per week? how would that really hurt anybody?

it hurts it when it comes to competition w/ fedex/ups for package delivery

chances of multiplying that shipping cost by 5? so not going to happen

Apparently online retail is a viable commercial model, regardless of what we think about what it does locally and I think the consumer's will likely trump the local retailer's interest. Taxes are not presently fair to both sides, though. USPS is still going to be useful to both sides.

Hands, please? Who regularly plans their online orders around shipping or only uses faster shipping, i.e. non-USPS?

maybe the USPS could make residential delivery services (except for expedited packages etc.) an option during three or four days per week? how would that really hurt anybody?

― fka snush (remy bean), Thursday, May 3, 2012 5:26 PM (4 minutes ago)

well your house might get burned down during the great netflix riots of 2012

It's kind of funny that the stuff that made online retail interesting a decade or more ago, books, music, movies are all going to be largely digital downloads or streaming digital whereas the amazons of the world are now shipping out hair conditioner and mustard and clothes and whatnot.

I think this very germane to this thread. Letters will soon be (if not already so) entirely quaint and soon so will bills and notices. What will we still have to ship and by whom?

I am no more going to learn to download than my mom has learned to use a DVD player.

i'll send you a carrier pigeon with a USB strapped to its leg

you don't have to download, you just go to the netflix site and press 'play'

i dunno if anyone has priced it out yet, but i suspect the overwhelming trash to signal ratio in digital delivery might be a larger eco disaster than our current catalogpocalypse.

I just read all the Patrick Melrose novels on my gf's Kindle and I'm awfully torn over whether to get one or not. It's a really good interface and you can buy and obtain a book in seconds but I'd rather kill the planet, tearing down trees and using up gas (and paying USPS salaries) and waiting to receive and read an actual book, tbh, but how long is that going to be a realistic option?

What are you talking about Philip? My dick is huge and I have a Nigerian fortune and I know a skin care technique that has local dermatologists absolutely livid.

I don't even think the catalogpocalypse element of the postal service and the 10 billion pounds of waste is that important in the big picture, but the fact that we're already at a point where half of every mailtruck is trash does sorta highlight the need for serious reform

or bigger mail trucks

Maybe the USPS could just get into the waste collection business

They could swing by with a truck full of junk mail and you'd have to pay them not to deliver it.

it already is in the waste collection business, it's just a middleman

Admit it, it's super efficient plus I kind of like the idea of putting the mob in charge of a major national government institution, or at least a different mob from the lot we've got now.

http://1010.co.uk/images/WASTE.gif

i'm not sure, but i think the environmental costs of kindles still worse than paper/fuel, at least for now. there's the electronics, etc...

I see that the gif is called waste but in what context? Is there some variant of cuneiform with curves?

xpost

Kindle's environemtnal impact depends...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WASTE

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Crying_of_Lot_49 xxp

Lot 49 is largely a meditation on the failure of communication, both in the present, and between generations. As in V, it is impossible to know what really happened in history, or even to distinguish fact from forgery in historical texts. The central mystery in Lot 49 is the symbol of the muted horn, which appears linked to an underground mail system (known as W.A.S.T.E.), and is also associated with a mysterious historical group known as The Trystero. The muted horn (the stoppage of communication) appears on the postage stamp of the W.A.S.T.E. system, but also on old postage stamps—perhaps forged. Oedipa also discovers that the unmuted horn appeared on the stamps of the old Thurn and Taxis courier service, the official mail service of the Holy Roman Empire, until its demise. Lot 49 plays around with the indistinguishable mix of fact and fiction.

well if nothing else the demise of the usps has reminded me how awesome lot 49 is and i think i will read that again tonight

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/20/business/seeking-revenue-postal-service-plans-to-deliver-more-junk-mail.html

“Given our financial situation, continued e-diversion, and increased competition from alternative delivery services, this is one example of how the Postal Service is pursuing innovations and new products to increase the value of mail and retain our business customers,” the agency said in a statement.

they ought to deliver every piece of that shit those who sponsored the bills making it unsustainable.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/07/us/postal-service-plans-to-end-saturday-delivery.html

http://www.theonion.com/articles/postal-service-and-wait-until-you-cocksuckers-see,31189/

:)

haha

http://www.esquire.com/print-this/post-office-business-trouble-0213?page=all

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-08-02/understanding-the-post-office-s-benefits-mess.html

http://sanfrancisco.cbslocal.com/2013/03/07/berkeley-councilman-proposes-email-tax-to-fund-postal-service/

hahaha what a moron

sullying the wozniak name

I would support privatization, albeit with some regulation to ensure rural areas get decent and affordable postal service even though its not profitable, and ending the USPS monopoly on mailbox use (or at least allowing/encouraging a second mailbox of the type once common for newspaper delivery if necessary to avoid confusion). The growth and success of the private shipping business (which was nonexistent when the USPS was established) has rendered the once-essential government-provided postal service largely redundant. UPS does a far better job IME than USPS for reliability and decent shipment tracking.

privatization, albeit with some regulation to ensure rural areas get decent and affordable postal service even though its not profitable

This is basically what the USPS in its present form is supposed to be.

'decent and affordable' can mean a lot of things

basically i meant it not costing more for postage to or from rural areas than urban ones, at least for envelopes, by urban customers essentially subsidizing rural customers so every pays the same price. This could be made law for private mail delivery too.

well then yeah that's basically the way things are now

The growth and success of the private shipping business (which was nonexistent when the USPS was established) has rendered the once-essential government-provided postal service largely redundant. UPS does a far better job IME than USPS for reliability and decent shipment tracking.

Then ALL of my mail could not be delivered to me when I'm at work. Looking forward to finding the UPS slip on the floor next to my door letting me know I can take the train to their nearest office to pick up that wedding invite my friend payed more to have delivered to somewhere within a couple miles of my apartment.

It's not just rural housing, but apartment buildings, and all sorts of other locations that private companies just can't reach.

I live in the city. Does my landlord hand out keys to every asshole with a muted horn patch on his jacket? Or to we just put cubbies on the outside of the building and cross our fingers? Maybe my landlord could contract with a mail receptacle service that will work with all the competing private postal services to collect the mail and get it into a secure place that I can access. Efficiency!

that's not some impossible problem that can't be solved but the usps's long-term problems aren't due to the govt being inefficient at delivering mail so its a nonstarter

the usps long term problems could be solved by congress fixing the idiocy of their pension requirement

those are its short-term problems

nope

i mean i guess its other long term problem is idiots thinking that govt agencies that are public goods should somehow be required to turn a profit but hey until we force all the republicans to get gay married and realize that they like it that isnt prob going to happen

http://www.zerohedge.com/sites/default/files/images/user5/imageroot/2013/01/USPS%20Volume.jpg

long-term problems

wouldn't be a problem if the USPS went back to being subsidized by the American taxpayer

until when? for how much?

I dunno, forever? Why not? It's cheaper than tanks.

we just have email now

handwritten letters are cool but i'm pretty sure if god gave adam and eve email we wouldn't be so attached to snail mail

would support USPS being repurposed as our nationalized broadband provider

I said upthread we just need it to be a national bank

bank+broadband also works tho

bank+broadband+capsule hotels

+juice bar

don't see why less mail means usps has a long term problem. it can just ramp down slowly. also stamped, first-class is probably not its key profit center?

like that's def the category of mail that is disappearing most thanks to internet stuff, but is the decline in that particular category key to the ability of the postal service so sustain itself?

first class mail totally was its profit center, now it's shifting to junk mail

the usps is profitable were it not for the pension funding requirement which was basically designed to kill the usps

it still has the best package delivery system around, given the ubiquity of online commerce I say we should save the usps

the problem with a slow ramp down is that your mail carrier bringing you one letter a day isn't half as cheap as your mail carrier bringing you two. it was benefitting from huge economies of scale and a monopoly on a certain service and it's losing both.

what seems most likely is delivery service keeps gets chopped down one day at a time. this limits its ability to compete for parcel delivery, which is where the business is gonna be. ie saving the post office (saving it...from operating as a competitive business) just means killing it slowly.

xp

...or getting rid of the pension requirement and restoring those appropriated funds to the post office

again it's only making money because it's an advertising company now

http://business.time.com/2012/03/22/why-the-post-office-loves-junk-mail/

or a 'jobs mail' company I guess

who cares

i don't really care that it sends me junk mail as long as it also sends me packages and provides me with a way to send packages for cheaper than UPS and also lets me pick up packages at the many convenient post offices located near the places I live

who cares that the government is currently running a program to send 100 billion pieces of junk mail out?

i don't really see what the concern is

The USPS is created as a government agency under Title 39, Section 101.1 of the United States Code which states, in part:

(a) The United States Postal Service shall be operated as a basic and fundamental service provided to the people by the Government of the United States, authorized by the Constitution, created by Act of Congress, and supported by the people. The Postal Service shall have as its basic function the obligation to provide postal services to bind the Nation together through the personal, educational, literary, and business correspondence of the people. It shall provide prompt, reliable, and efficient services to patrons in all areas and shall render postal services to all communities. The costs of establishing and maintaining the Postal Service shall not be apportioned to impair the overall value of such service to the people.

Under paragraph (d) of Title 39, Section 101.1, "Postal rates shall be established to apportion the costs of all postal operations to all users of the mail on a fair and equitable basis."

i mean thats pretty clear

and again any benefit compared to ups/fedex is gonna be going away as this advertising company ends up operating on 4 and 3 day schedules

that's not some impossible problem that can't be solved

get rid of the pension funding requirement and it can remain an advertising company that delivers 5-6 days a week

ya for example we could turn it into a bank, but that's not gonna happen

i don't see what the connection is

that was an xp

currently the taxpayer input into the postal service is about $100 million, which pays for free mailing service for the blind and mail in ballots. good luck getting fedex or ups to take that on for that kind of money.

there are alternatives such as blind people using computers and also voters using computers

yes of course it would cost way less than $100 million dollars a year to ensure that everyone who is blind and every overseas absentee voter has full access to a computerized system that can do everything the postal service does, great point

well as the 3-day-a-week-advertising company post office continues to collapse into irrelevance the costs of replacing its remaining capabilities will certainly go down

lol u r so dumb

yes one could get rid of the free mail for the blind and mail-in ballot services (not that i advocate it but whatever) and at that point it would have a fractional impact on the revenue of the postal service and wouldn't matter about the viability of it one way or the other.

post office is fine. it ships packages good. i like my mail. its year-over-year volume + revenues are actually increasing in "competitive sectors" (i.e. its services that go head-to-head vs. ups etc are gaining). its structurally the "market dominant sectors" that are in a decline. but the extent of the decline remains to be seen. things that go up don't keep going up. things going down don't necessarily go down forever. sometimes they just... adjust.

but fuckit we should all pay landlords half our income and pay the rest to private enterprise because the goverment is just the... worst, man.

iatee you should print out this trenchant piece of advice from noted thinking mans comic "zits" and staple it to your forehead:

http://arnoldzwicky.s3.amazonaws.com/ZitsArguing.gif

why do you think I hate government when I'm suggesting a public option for personal banking

anyway while its true that there might be a bottom, we are at the moment not anywhere close to 'everyone pays and receives all their bills electronically' but we will continue to go down that path and its effects will be felt. iirc the post office actually tried to get involved w/ electronic payment systems and was prevented by congress? again, it's not that it's run by incompetent people, it's that it's not allowed any flexibility.

xp

its true it has its hands crippled by lobbyists yah, that's a huge issue. but the idea that mail is just vanishing is ridiculous. also it wouldn't have needed to be a bank to be a payment clearinghouse anyway.

it wouldn't have needed to be no, but it happens to have locations in every city in america and we have shitty banks so

again most of the arguments I'm making (allow it operational efficiency and to diversify its business) are made by the people who run the post office so the idea that I'm some secret libertarian or w/e is kinda lol

the best way to ensure that it dies is to pretend like the post office in 2025 should or can operate like the post office in 1940

who cares that the government is currently running a program to send 100 billion pieces of junk mail out?

― iatee, Thursday, March 28, 2013 6:39 PM (52 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i don't really see what the concern is

― 乒乓, Thursday, March 28, 2013 6:41 PM (50 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i think there are some pretty legitimate environmental concerns tbh

this thread is interesting. my parents worked for the post office. i hope it continues to exist. what could it conceivably look like, other than a PO/bank hybrid? (also, why does this have to be about rural v. urban?)

bcz iatee

because the entire postal service is run as an urban->rural transfer program.

and are the distances between people really at the heart of the matter/the main thing to consider? (not a rhetorical q, just haven't thought about that way)

yes. it costs more money to get things to remote places and to keep offices open in places fewer customers. the post office isn't given much flexibility here to adjust like a normal business.

places with

but the solution must surely be more complicated than asking people to not live remotely?

USPS should become the facebook public option

sry the social network public option

I've asked before it never works xp

People have a right to get things delivered to remote places by the federal government. It is a just use of state powers.

And while we're at it, FedEx and UPS should be penalized more for competing against the state. Their competition lowers the efficiency of the state's economies of scale.

We should outlaw email too, because that really ruined economies of scale for the USPS.

i have no idea if those posts are serious or not

new board description

'competing against the state'

iatee too literal

clover otm

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/04/us/monitoring-of-snail-mail.html?hp&_r=0

interesting

if you go to live in the woods they will probably just have a division that uses birds to spy on you

Home delivery ending in Canada within five years:

http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/ottawa/canada-post-to-phase-out-urban-home-mail-delivery-1.2459618

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hox-ni8geIw

Home delivery ending in Canada within five years

...urban home delivery.

http://www.newrepublic.com/article/116374/postal-service-banking-how-usps-can-save-itself-and-help-poor

big in japan, right?

"A document unearthed in proceedings before the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) reveals why the APWU is adamant that the Postal Service’s deal with Staples – and others like it – must be stopped.

The March 26, 2012, document exposes the secret privatization recommendation a Postal Service consultant made to USPS management: Eliminate most retail facilities throughout the country, along with the work of APWU employees.

The document is covered by a “protective order” that prohibits its disclosure, but the Administrative Law Judge presiding over the case has ruled that the contents can be summarized and brought out from behind the veil of secrecy.

As described by the judge in his order, the document reveals that the Postal Service’s consultant made a number of proposals to the USPS, including that the Postal Service invest in high-traffic Postal Service locations and that it eliminate the majority of the standard-volume Postal Service locations and migrate that work to retail partners that are not staffed by APWU members...."

http://www.apwu.org/news/web-news-article/secret-document-exposes-usps-privatization-planning

USPS is so great and I will miss it fiercely if it ever goes away

I'm really feeling the damage the Trump admin has done to the USPS. I still use the mail to send in payments for about 10 monthly bills, but two bills have failed to show up in the last couple of months and one payment (for ACA plan) failed to get there, requiring me to make a quick online payment on 12/31 to have coverage in 2021. I'm thinking about changing to all online payments but I hate that this seems to be part of the conservative plan for privatization. Break shit > say "see, shit is broke" > private sector takeover > profit!

We’re gonna need investigations into a lot of things. This should be one of them.

yep

Book that went out right before the holiday crush still hasn't been delivered.

Book that went out on the 21st of December still hasn't been delivered, and shows that it hasn't even reached a main sorting facility— just that "the label has been created."

A package filled with cookies and other things (sent by my long-suffering aunt every Xmas to everyone in the family) arrived a month late.

In the meantime, things I ordered a week ago are arriving on time, and so is tons of useless fucking junk mail.

I know the decimation of the post office under Trump has been dire, particularly during Covid, but the policy of slowly dealing with the backlog while keeping up with mail delivery isn't cutting it— there simple should be a two-month backlog of important mail sitting in post office sorting facilities while I'm getting offers for credit cards.

*there simply should NOT be a two-month backlog

It's insane, but I have to say I've seen things wildly inconsistent, in the most inconsistent ways. On December 27th, I dropped two packages to family members in the mail at the same post office. One to my dad and one to my sister, who both live in different small towns about an hour and a half away from me. Both sent First Class. My dad got his the next day. My sister got hers last week.

I've had some packages coming to me take over a month, but others come within a day or two. The inconsistency I've experienced is what is the most weird.

The policy in Philadelphia is now to slowly deal with the backlog while simultaneously continuing to deliver regular mail, so what's happening makes sense, but it is also MADDENING.

yup. first-in-first-out is broken. i sold a book to someone in utah and it got there in just 5 days. i have not received two DVDs from netflix (yes) i was supposed to get on january 2. but i still get bed bath and beyond coupons.

Even the junk mail I get is late— I got a postcard for some sale that ended long before the postcard was delivered.

also makes scamming easier. my bestie bought a switch from someone on Craigslist and after sending the money, the USPS tracking number showed as "label created, not yet in system", for the first two days, and it was hard for us to tell whether it was a legit problem or the slowness of USPS tracking updates, as I've seen them update much slower than usual.

unfortunately, it was a scam and she got ripped off of $200.

had to file IC3 crime report which probably will go nowhere as I am pretty sure seller was using a pseudonym

I sure as hell turned off mail order for my prescriptions

I ordered packages that both got sent out the beginning of this week and have both arrived before the estimated delivery date, so I don’t know what’s going on.

anything that gets sent to me via USPS via Amazon seems to show up on time. Bezos jumping the line

anything that gets sent to me via USPS via Amazon seems to show up on time. Bezos jumping the line

That answers it

It's going to take a long time to get this back to any reasonable working order, huh? In my experience, it is currently far worse than at any point in 2020 and seems to be going downhill with each passing week.

Latest twist I'm really enjoying is getting notified, daily, that something is out for delivery, only to have it continually get pushed back to (allegedly) the next day. Been riding this cycle every day since last Wednesday for one particular package, it's put on the truck for delivery every single day but for some reason just can't make it to my door.

our local mail deliverers are overworked and as such prone to mistakes. we constantly get stuff missdelivered, and unfortunately the last victim was my mother's water pills.

they put it in another neighbor's box and instead of bringing it to our door like every decent human being does, they returned it to sender.

Oh yeah, the amount of misdeliveries around here is skyrocketing. I've pretty much built in time every other day to redistribute mail to others and our neighborhood email group is just lousy with "anybody get my mail" and "I got so-and-so's mail" notes.

yeah we usually get knocks on the door from neighbors saying "I got your stuff", it's how we meet each other here.

I've still yet to receive a few things I ordered in December, yet items that I ordered three days ago show up no problem.

https://www.inquirer.com/news/philadelphia/usps-tracking-package-shipping-delays-philadelphia-december-20210116.html

same, I have three packages from Germany that appear to be trapped in customs, one was shipped on Oct. 15th.

So, yet another day this particular package was marked “out for delivery” but wasn’t delivered. Guessing this means it’s likely gone for good. I’d almost feel better if it had just been sitting in a distribution center without an update.

I know things are insanely slow, I totally get that. I've just never had a package show as "out for delivery" for a full week before. Basically wondering if I just need to chill longer, or if this is a case where I might want to contact the USPS sooner rather than later.

I'd just contact them. If it's a non-corporate seller, contact the seller directly after contacting the USPS and try to work something out.

If it's a corporate seller, demand a refund.

The only times I've ever been in the situation you describe, it's been an Amazon package (yes, excoriate me, hard to get to the store when one is on chemotherapy and one's partner works full time), and they refunded me immediately.

Thanks, I'll see if it comes today, if not I'll get in touch with them. If this were Amazon, I'd be less worried, just annoyed because this is a subscription based thing that is otherwise sold out now and I'm not sure I can even get a replacement.

Any chance this year of Biden/Congress repealing that stupid law passed in 2009?

That would be nice, for sure.

Reading that article table shared makes me wonder how they are going to be able to dig out of this hole. I mean, it's not like the pandemic is over and people still aren't mailing/ordering things at record levels. Surely the holiday bump has died down, but it seems to me like the backlog isn't going anywhere while new stuff continues to pile on top.

instead of the dumbass Space Force, they should make the Postal Service the fifth branch of the US military, thereby forever removing any need for any fiscal responsibility on their part for all time

Space Mail

that's my superhero name

Case in point: book ordered right before Christmas is still in a warehouse somewhere, it seems.

Today I received two chapbooks from a friend that were mailed from Albany, CA, on Monday.

"sorry sir, your package was accidentally jettisoned with our waste from the shuttle it was on. we're trying to locate it now and hoping it doesn't come in contact with our waste first"

I thankfully haven't had the kind of issues y'all are reporting but I have spent the past week watching a package bounce between a succession of FL postal facilities for some reason (nb, I am in IL). Will report back if it ever achieves a velocity sufficient to escape the state.

Oh right, there was another package last week that made its way across the entire country in one day and then sat at my local PO for four days.

I come from postman stock so I am rooting for their success against nigh-insurmountable odds. At minimum rooting for DeJoy to get sucked into a sorting machine ASAP.

Oh, I mean I am rooting for postal workers and the postal service. I know who to blame here, and it isn't my mailman or the lovely women who run the local post office location.

So I finally called the local post office since it also didn't show up today... apparently the label got wet, rendering the address "unreadable" and it was returned to sender. So I guess I have to pay triple or quadruple on the secondhand market now. Dammit.

I had to order a part for out shower, basically a 95" long piece of plastic. That's really long, so I was shocked it could be mailed at all, but I still did not expect it to arrive literally bent in half, the long mailing tube torn and bent in half as well, with a bunch of USPS "damaged" tape wrapped around it. Um, OK. So I processed the return and printed out a pre-fab UPS sticker, stuck the postage sticker over the old sticker, and brought it to the UPS store. The guy behind the counter's jawed just kind of dropped and he made a funny noise. "We can send it," he said, "but we can't guarantee it will get there in one piece." "It already arrived at my house in two pieces," I told him. "That's why I'm returning it!"

And that's my most recent tale of the mail.

can't you contact the label and have them re-mail it?

Definitely going to try, but I don't know that there are any copies remaining to send. And I just have zero faith that my copy will even make it back to them before July, considering the absolute mess that the USPS right now.

i'm def not doing mail order for meds anymore unless it's CVSs home delivery thing

Yeah, I would strongly recommend paying for alternative shipping methods for the foreseeable future, if it's an option and you can afford it.

sorry, I meant re-mail the actual copy that was returned, when they get it.

Yeah, I would hope so. I've emailed them to let them know the situation, but I have little faith in a good outcome.

In my head I hear the FunkyFour Plus One More shout “it’s DeJoy” instead of “it’s the joint”.

dah-dah-dah-dah-dah QUIT, DeJOY!

it's all about that mail
in yo sack
(it's DeJoy)

why the fuck has he not been fired yet

Maybe this is already covered, but as I understand it only the Board of Governors can fire him and there are currently three vacancies on the board, which will presumably filled by Biden appointees. I'm guessing they are waiting until the new appointees come to take any serious action.

There are four vacancies on the board at present.

Postmaster general’s new plan for USPS is said to include slower mail and higher prices

Postmaster General Louis DeJoy is preparing to put all first-class mail onto a single delivery track, according to two people briefed on his strategic plan for the U.S. Postal Service, a move that would mean slower and more costly delivery for both consumers and commercial mailers.

DeJoy, with the backing of the agency’s bipartisan but Trump-appointed governing board, has discussed plans to eliminate a tier of first-class mail — letters, bills and other envelope-sized correspondence sent to a local address — designated for delivery in two days. Instead, all first-class mail would be lumped into the same three- to five-day window, the current benchmark for nonlocal mail.

That class of mail is already struggling; only 38 percent was delivered on time at the end of 2020, the Postal Service reported in federal court. Customers have reported bills being held up, and holiday cards and packages still in transit. Pharmacies and prescription benefits managers have told patients to request medication refills early to leave additional time for mail delays. The agency has not disclosed on-time scores yet in 2021.

The new service standards are part of a strategic plan that DeJoy, a former logistics executive and major Republican donor, is set to roll out in the coming days. While the change is not expected to have a significant impact on local service, the people said, they have commercial mailers, including banks, insurers, retailers and publications, worried they may aggravate existing slowdowns for nonlocal mail.

The plan also prevents first-class mail from being shipped by airplane, said the two people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss confidential conversations, forcing all of it into trucks and a relay of distribution depots.

The operational shifts would coincide with a push for significantly higher postage rates — which DeJoy has said was “imminent” — after the agency lost $9.2 billion in 2020 due to steep, pandemic-related declines in mail volume. It also has $188.4 billion in liabilities, the bulk of which is tied to pension and retiree health care obligations. Leaders have long sought to raise new revenue and, in 2021, are expected to pursue the first big postage rate increase in more than a decade, which could add up to a 9 percent jump compounded annually.

Jesus, sounds like it could get worse.

I'm sorry, but I don't buy at all that there were "steep declines in mail volume" last year. Just, no way. How can they possibly complain about "steep declines" when the website right now literally says "unprecedented volume increases"? Such bullshit.

Sorry if we discussed this but .... why is DeJoy still at USPS?

protip to USPS: priority mail (esp. flat rate), pretty fast, with tracking (signature release for a small add-on) and insurance. 3 days to Hawaii from California, 4 days to NYC even mid-winter.

Sorry if we discussed this but

two posts above yours

can't believe nobody's mentioned Insane Clown Posse

If we don't get mail today, it'll have been a full week since we last got any mail delivered at all. Now obviously Monday was a postal holiday and we got slammed with a snowstorm that makes things difficult. But even with past storms and inclement weather, I don't remember ever going a full week without mail delivery. Seems like something bigger than just weather delays is going on.

Our mail has been pretty erratic the past couple of weeks, due to a confluence of reasons. There's all the snow, for one. Then there's some serious understaffing, too, more than partly due to covid. The frustration I keep coming across is from customers who just wanted some sort of a heads up, some announcement of what's going on, rather than just days with no mail. I think I saw that post office employees are actually forbidden from making public statements?

I think you're not alone in having messed up mail. Seems to be a bit wayward over here too.

mail is EARNED, not a right!

The frustration I keep coming across is from customers who just wanted some sort of a heads up, some announcement of what's going on, rather than just days with no mail.

Yeah, I think some communication would go a long way. Obviously weather is an issue, but it just feels weird to go days and then nearly a full week without anything at all. More sensitive around here since my wife's main consulting gig still sends her paper checks, so a week without mail does make things a little more nerve wracking.

Package that was mailed 1/15 showed up overnight, meaning it might have been either a) delivered on a late truck, or b) was wrongly delivered to someone else, and they put it in our mailslot late.

In any case, I finally got a chapbook that I ordered before Christmas.

Well it wasn't just me, at least. Someone in our neighborhood group sent out an email asking about mail delivery, and about 15 people have responded so far and it appears that no one in our neighborhood has had mail delivery at all since Friday, the 12th.

maybe someone's eating the mail

I mean, I guess DeJoy ultimately got his way. He's completely crippled it.

Oddly throughout this whole experience I’ve had basically no delayed packages or mail here in Seattle, including receiving a package from my parents outside DC that reached me in a timely fashion whereas the equivalent packages reached my east coast relatives weeks later.

All these past few months I've only had one delayed package of note, so I'll take my good fortune there.