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Comment by jackson1442 | Hacker News Reader

> I sometimes wonder whether the invention of the public lending library could happen today.

Not a chance. You can see this with the US Postal Service today, with some people arguing that it should continued to be stripped because it isn't profitable. It isn't supposed to be profitable!

I think the closest we could ever get would be an "old Netflix" approach, where you have to pay a monthly membership fee based on the number of books you want at once that turns a profit.

As for eBooks, I generally find a spot to buy them online (with or without DRM) and either rip the DRM out or pirate them after purchasing. Voila, it's just like a normal book now!

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US Postal Service at this point is mostly paying people to deliver paper advertisements though.

It has to be about 50 to 1 at this point in terms of the ratio of important mail I get compared to junk mail that goes straight in the garbage.

It doesn't have to be profitable but the cost to send mail should cover the operation. It is absurd that it is worth it for so many companies to flood people with literal garbage.

FedEx and UPS both use USPS to do unprofitable last-mile deliveries, and USPS is the backbone of our identity system (delivering identification documents, credit cards, etc).

> You can see this with the US Postal Service today, with some people arguing that it should continued to be stripped because it isn't profitable. It isn't supposed to be profitable!

That seems unlikely. Why do you think it's given a formal legal monopoly on the service it provides?

While USPS technically has a monopoly on your mailbox, you can send someone a letter via UPS or FedEx--for significantly more money.

And if you send something to a remote area, UPS and FedEx will themselves delegate to USPS precisely because it's not profitable to develop the infrastructure to service remote populations.

It's not profitable to develop the infrastructure, but considering the price of delivering something where I live, I'm sure Fedex/UPS make a nice margin by delegating the last 400km drive to an unprofitable postal service.

> you can send someone a letter via UPS or FedEx--for significantly more money.

Right, the reason it costs significantly more money to use UPS or FedEx is that it's illegal for them to charge less. Paying more puts your letter into a different legal category that is not reserved to the USPS.

Nobody cares about the mailbox. The USPS holds a monopoly on the delivery of non-urgent mail, which is defined as mail that costs below a certain price point to send.

TIL it's illegal for UPS and FedEx to charge less. That was certainly a part of this equation I was missing, thank you!

you can also send an email nowadays, or a <whatever chat>

Because that makes most sense to offset the fact that it also must serve everyone. Problem for postal service really isn't profitable areas, just look at delivery services. It is the unprofitable hard to reach ones. If single company was mandated to serve these too while others where allowed to pick the easy ones or even exploit the single one it would have hard time surviving.

> If single company was mandated to serve these too while others where allowed to pick the easy ones or even exploit the single one it would have hard time surviving.

But this answer explicitly contradicts the idea that the post office isn't supposed to be profitable. If the goal is to make sure everyone gets served at a loss, it doesn't matter that you're taking a loss.

> It isn't supposed to be profitable!

It’s supposed to break even. It’s supposed to be a service that provides value. If it isn’t providing value, it loses its reason to exist.

You can argue that the consumer captures a lot of surplus value from the postal service. But it doesn’t exist just to please people who like public programs.

The same with libraries.

> It’s supposed to break even. It’s supposed to be a service that provides value.

Do SNAP, Medicaid, etc. provide value? Do they "break even"?

Who/what says it has to break even at all?

Provide value != make money

Schools also do not break even.

The point is a good one - we assume that the benefit of K-12 public education is worth spending money on, and that there is a societal benefit to providing that education at no direct cost to students or their parents.

In contrast, (nominally) private higher education seems to do pretty well financially - even "non-profit" universities. Charging up to $80K a year and/or eating billions of dollars in government grants probably helps - so they aren't exactly independent from public funding, but we consider that funding to be wortwhile in terms of research and education outcomes, even when it goes into the pockets of wealthy, elite institutions.

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