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Comment by exabrial | Hacker News Reader

Why are we _still_ delivering paper?

There is 0 reason to be doing this in the communication age. Millions of tons of CO2 and acres of forests could be saved.

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Paper records can't be remotely hacked, accessed, and deleted. Most finance people I know operate digitally but archive using paper.

Vint Cerf, an integral figure in internet lore, fears that much of the knowledge gained in the 21st century will eventually be lost due to our inability to preserve and reformat digital data[0].

Going fully digital has its costs too.

[0]: https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-31450389

I know such people too. The problem is that when things go south, those paper backups mean next to nothing. No bank is going to ever use your paper reciepts to correct something electronic.

> No bank is going to ever use your paper reciepts to correct something electronic.

Sure they will. When the court orders them to, they will have to.

Pray you never have occasion to be in court with a major consumer bank in the USA.

Case law on these matters is very clear. They're not going to argue. I'll admit to not ever going to court with a bank, but I had several spats with Bank of America over money in several old accounts from when they bought out Security Pacific (I became treasurer of an old mutual benefit corporation). Lawyers even got involved, but the fact is, they cannot refuse to acknowledge a duly signed contract or not obey notes they issued. That is the law, and it is very clear.

> No bank is going to ever use your paper reciepts to correct something electronic

What's your basis for this? Attaching a copy of paper documents to formal requests is routine. Those original receipts, furthermore, are admissible as evidence in court.

Ya, but the bank doesnt accept the paper. The court accepts the paper (with associated witnesses) and the bank accepts the court order. There are just too many cases of fraud involving paper. Waving a balance statement in front of a bank manager will get you nowhere.

The court accepts the paper (with associated witnesses) and the bank accepts the court order.

This would contradict your earlier assertion, "No bank is going to ever use your paper reciepts to correct something electronic."

There are just too many cases of fraud involving paper.

Having a paper trail is still worth more than just someone's word.

Waving a balance statement in front of a bank manager will get you nowhere.

My wife is an underwriting manager. She has had someone try to apply to her bank for a loan using screenshots of bank web-apps. It did get that one potential customer nowhere, in the end. That said, there are some customers of her bank that have corrected the bank using paper documentation. I've even heard of businesses that lost records, asking for copies of printed customer statements to help reconstruct their data.

The world used to run on paper records. They still mean something in 2019.

I know of a case where a banking system was corrupted due to a software problem, and account transactions were re-built by using paper receipts.

Now granted this was ~1995 era, but as far as I know, banking mainframes haven't changed much since then.

Paper letters and artifacts that show up in my actual physical mailbox that someone had to put an actual stamp on to get delivered gets my attention in a way that email rarely does.

All of my email accounts are a dumpster fire of spam. Gmail, private servers, work accounts via Office360, all of it is overflowing with trash. It is now common practice for someone to call or text after sending an email to make sure that people know to look for it.

And one of the most important senders of mail is the government. Don't take that away or we'll have "The Sheriff is calling" scammers taking it to a whole new level.

That's why we're still delivering paper. Because it costs more than email.

I'm fine with the delivery of paper mail, but the idea of unsolicited paper mail is unacceptable. Nothing should ever be delivered to my house that I didn't agree to.

That unsolicited mail is what keeps it cheap though. Without that, a stamp would cost a few dollars each. Chances are all the people who send you paper that you do want would want to charge you for the privilege if it cost that much.

I think it should be worth it to us to subsidize mail in some manner that doesn't involve tons of paper waste. Anyways ,there are much better ways for the post service to save money, chief among which is the closure of unneeded stand alone physical locations like Canada has done. Up in Canada most post office locations are embedded in a different retail location (like a 7/11 or Shoppers (basically CVS))

That sounds terrible to me. I fully support the idea of paper mail costing a lot if it reduces the amount that is sent.

I don't think there is any paper that I want.

Is there for anyone, other than maybe magazines?

My mother in law likes the grocery ads. She even takes ours for extra coupons.

I like them too, study them every week. No coupons though where I live.

One possibility is to simply attach an advertisement to each piece of mail sent. If you disclose what's inside (often done for insurance purposes), then they can even match it up to the best ad.

Advertising is a form of waste in our society - we need to stop coming up with ways to excuse it and just work on eliminating it entirely.

Meh. I love mail advertising. Get all my coupons in and pay less for the same stuff.

That being said, thank you for paying full price, so I don't have to!

I don't pay full price in that scenario, I pay over full price. You end up paying full price.

At any rate, I actually just avoid the supermarket near me that has a circular and go to the one that averages lower prices but without those "killer deals". I'm not doing poorly for myself so I'd be happy to subsidize people less well off (which ideally would all be consolidated into my taxes) but I think the cost in terms of time and paper goods couponing levies on society is simply not worth it.

The Direct Marketing Association has a "Do not mail" list that's much more effective than the "Do not call" list. It doesn't eliminate all junk mail but most, if not all, DMA members honor the request. For me it eliminated somewhere between 80% and 90% of the junk mail I used to receive. https://dmachoice.thedma.org/register.php

This is much appreciated. Thank you for informing me.

$2, FYI

That's an unfortunate development. When I signed up a few years ago, there was no processing fee. Wonder if they added it as a form of identity verification rather than just a way to cover costs.

And how exactly do we do that? By having the government track every piece of mail every person sends and receives?

USPS is already scanning the front (and maybe back) of every piece of mail, you can sign up to have those images sent to you ~1 day before the mail itself arrives in your mailbox[1].

1: https://informeddelivery.usps.com/box/pages/intro/start.acti...

For one you could apply something similar to the canned spam act for paper mail. It shouldn't be so difficult to opt-out of a company sending you regular spam.

USPS doesn't just deliver letters. Their parcel/box volume is on the same scale (if not greater) than the private carriers like UPS and FedEx (and in fact includes a considerable amount of UPS and FedEx volume via SurePost and SmartPost, respectively; these self-driving trucks probably won't be carrying much of that, since SurePost/SmartPost are only last-mile, and these trucks are the opposite of last-mile).

The USPS is largely funded by the direct-mail advertising industry, all the "junk mail" that ends up in your favorite mail receptacle. It's sad but that's the state of affairs Congress has forced them into. Switching to electronic delivery makes it much easier to avoid those promotions and also removes the primary revenue source for the USPS.

>It's sad but that's the state of affairs Congress has forced them into.

I'm not sure what's being asked here. So direct mail is a source of profits for the USPS that effectively subsidizes first class mail (and perhaps other things). Personally, I'd not be in favor of a sharp price increase to mail a letter as the price for getting rid of direct mail. (Which, in any case, covers a fairly wide spectrum of "junk" from stuff I throw away unopened to catalogs that I'll at least flip through to offers that I'll at least consider.)

Among unsolicited contacts, direct mail is pretty far down the list of things that annoy me.

USPS is forced into this arrangement by Congressional mandate they pre-fund pension agreements. We could fund the USPS as a social good, if people would realize what is actually good in their lives and worth funding.

I get vastly more spam paper than actual mail. As long as it is effective as a spam vector it will continue.

Odds are you're burning coal right now so that you can read this comment. It's so funny to me when people cite the environment when taking of paper. Paper requires no power to use, and is therefore miles better for the environment than your laptop is.

Actually, nuclear, wind, and natural gas where I live. :)

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