Going Anti-Postal (2012) | Hacker News Reader

Going Anti-Postal (2012)

thehumanist.com

35 pointsTomte29 comments

It seems to me that the postal system has become little more than a subsidized marketing channel that is difficult to unsubscribe from, and a lazy communication choice for the most inefficient companies. It should at the very least be priced based on the costs of operating it. In it's current subsidized form it produces incentives to keep using it and makes electronic alternatives seem more expensive.

For environmental, business efficiency, and personal reasons it seems like we would be better off receiving far less physical mail.

Maybe you should reread the article. It plainly says that the USPS is not subsidized.

I'm pretty sure the article is incorrect on that topic, in that the postal service receives indirect subsidies that some estimate to be worth $18B a year: http://fortune.com/2015/03/27/us-postal-service/

I'm sure you could argue with the dollar amount estimate, but not that it isn't a form of subsidy.

However, one thing everyone agrees on is that most of the mail I receive sucks. :)

The dollar amount is preposterous and I don't see how those are subsidies that encourage physical marketing.

18 billion is the correct amount

https://www.google.ca/webhp?sourceid=chrome-instant&rlz=1C1C...

That's not proof, that's a number of different stories using the same crappy report.

... although it should be IMHO. Also I agree with the case made for a public internet.

Why should the USPS be subsidized?

The theory is that (as, at one time, with rural electrification and universal telephone service), there is societal value to having more or less universal mail delivery. That said, as the importance of physical mail as a communications mechanism declines, it becomes harder to argue that the USPS shouldn't need to cover its costs.

What is the societal value? Only the two people who send and receive benefit.

Not true. Society as whole benefits from greater communication and spread of ideas. We aren't just talking letters to Grandma but magazines and journals. Yes, you can argue that paper mail is now only one of several methods of long-distance communication (and one which isn't preferred by many), but is still the one with the least capability of censorship (yes, it can be done, as Communist and Fascist dictorships did, but it requires massive manual effort).

If I discuss ideas between me and another person society does not benefit; only the two benefit.

If I subscribe to a magazine and journal, only I benefit.

So, why should the people who don't use mail pay for the people who do use mail?

> but is still the one with the least capability of censorship (yes, it can be done, as Communist and Fascist dictorships did, but it requires massive manual effort).

Why do you think it has the least capability of censorship, especially versus the internet?

The development of science and technology was only possible with scientists and engineers communicating their results via mailed journals, for starters. Everybody benefited from that, not just the scientists and engineers themselves. As for censorship, Internet censorship (as in the "Great Firewall of China") is rather easy to automate (and is getting harder to avoid). Paper censorship (such as in East Germany) required thousands of workers to open and read mail physically in order to check if anything subversive was being discussed. Maybe with modern OCR it could be automated a bit more, but still not as easy as just blocking a website.

> The development of science and technology was only possible with scientists and engineers communicating their results via mailed journals, for starters. Everybody benefited from that, not just the scientists and engineers themselves.

Then you can improve patent protection or other mechanisms for compensating scientists. Subsidizing mail for everybody is inefficient.

A country should IMHO guarantee its residents access to mail. And nowadays, internet and phone lines.

Why not subsidize any form of mail, including those through private companies?

But wouldn't it be more equitable (people will send different amounts of mail) and more utilitarian to just directly transfer the cost of the subsidy to everybody below an income or wealth threshold?

Instead of the government saying "you can only spend this on mail", let people decide whether they want to get access to mail, or buy other things.

The problem here is that you're taking for granted that people would want to spend that money on mail rather than other things.

>But wouldn't it be more equitable (people will send different amounts of mail) and more utilitarian to just directly transfer the cost of the subsidy to everybody below an income or wealth threshold?

No.

Why?

Regarding USPS "subsidization": I've seen it written that a big part of why USPS budgeting shows huge losses is its benefits expenditures for retired/disabled employees, and this is accounted/reported in a different way from other Federal employees (i.e. more like the private sector). Does this ring a bell for anybody else?

This article seems to be missing something important: the postal service is still subsidized by the federal government, even if there isn't a direct transfer of taxpayer money.

The mail I receive through USPS is ~90% unwanted (maybe more, if you go by weight), despite my ongoing efforts to "go paperless" and opt out of marketing mail. If I could stop this constant flow of junk, I would gladly pay UPS/FedEx twice as much money to deliver the small amount of mail that I actually care about.

The USPS is greatly subsidized because of these print advertisements. If they did not exist, you would not get your mail, or it would cost like 10 bucks to send a letter. Priority Mail for 5.95? Try 25.95.

There's a reason why it costs 11 dollars and some change to ship a small box with UPS/FedEx -- that's just the cost of shipping.

We are so blind to the true cost of shipping. What would be better is if we got rid of UPS and FedEx, in my opinion.

I was with you until the last sentence. Why on earth would we want to get rid of competition that has driven a lot of the innovation in the shipping/logistics space?

Well, I will preface and just say it's my own opinion, and I don't know too much, but my thinking goes something like this -- as you said, the innovation has already happened. There's really nothing left to innovate. As far as I see, FedEx and UPS aren't working on driverless technologies or drone delivery, that would be Google, Amazon, etc. Also, because we have 3 or 4 select giant online retailers, and then the giant big box stores that have the onus to pressure the USPS to innovate. It would drive down costs for everyone on a whole, as well as the retailers. Anywhere up to 80% of the cost of physical goods is transportation, and about half of that is on that last mile. The added benefit of the USPS being a federal agency (well maybe not so much with Trump), we could pressure the politicians to ensure customers are getting good service.

Now I have to assume you're just being funny.

"The added benefit of the USPS being a federal agency (well maybe not so much with Trump), we could pressure the politicians to ensure customers are getting good service."

No, the innovation hasn't already happened. Just because UPS and FedEx aren't doing PR stunts like Amazon's 60 minutes advertorial built around drone delivery the day before Cyber Monday doesn't mean they're just sitting still.

As for autonomous vehicles. Lots of people are working on the tech and once it becomes interesting for last 100 feet delivery in a few decades UPS and FedEx will have plenty of options to deploy it.

>The added benefit of the USPS being a federal agency (well maybe not so much with Trump), we could pressure the politicians to ensure customers are getting good service.

Please tell me this it's a joke.

When you start being cynical and think democratic processes are a joke, then yes, they won't work. But I refuse to give in to cynicism. These agencies are to operate for the public benefit.

To make a different argument - because Fedex and UPS cherry-pick the profitable routes and leave USPS to handle the undesirable markets they are required by law to serve. This would be highly problematic if the USPS didn't exist on those routes as a very subsidized backstop.

That's about the only argument you can make, and I'm not certain it's a great one. Additionally one giant national parcel company in theory should have scale working for them and thus lower per unit costs - in practice I think the opposite holds true for large monopolies. But reasonable minds could disagree here.

Maybe GP just prefers DHL?

the idea that mail provides any functional redundancy over the internet is based on a scenario in which the government censors some kind of content that a person requested?

That person would then ostensibly, through a subsidized mail service, be able to send the original purveyor of that content a letter, requesting a facsimile of the webpage they were requesting, and then that provider would send such a facsimile to the requester.

Or perhaps they mean some sort of other redundancy?

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