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Comment by alar44 | Hacker News Reader

The tradeoff is that you can mail anything anywhere in days for extremely cheap. Mail is cheap because of spam mail.

Awful tradeoff.

I’d rather pay very slightly higher taxes to subsidize mail if necessary rather than having the USPS be self-sufficient as a spam expediting services for businesses.

I'm with you. Ignoring the inconvenience of sorting through junk mail every day, just thinking about the energy required to move all that trash to people's mailboxes, only to then be thrown in the trash and moved to a landfill, makes me itchy.

i think it goes to recyling, not a land fill.

honestly it takes me < a minute where I get to chill and see what's on offer. 1/100 times i might even not think of it as junk.

the problem with you people is you're

1) spoiled out of your minds 2) lazy as fuckkk

Well as you know in the US, taxes are a mortal sin. 0 chance that will ever happen. So we are stuck with junk mail.

I don't mail anything. I've considered removing my mailbox altogether.

While one can increasingly do a lot of things electronically, there are certainly documents that governments send that expect a valid mailing address. And may have legal consequences if you don't respond to them. I receive a number of local bills for example that I'm not aware of an electronic option.

Yes, I also ultimately decided to keep the mailbox.

You cannot run an online business relying on location services (e.g. Google My Business) without a mailing address to send a verification post card. Many states also require a mailing address to send a driver license. Many countries require a mail address for an online national id (e.g. https://www.realme.govt.nz/ in New Zealand).

In a time before electronic bank statements, I had a long back and forth with my bank trying to put a stop to receiving any or all of my accounts' paper statements and eventually just claimed that I moved out and no longer had an active address to update my accounts to.

They threatened to close all of my existing bank accounts if I couldn't provide a valid mailing address, and then made me verify it when I gave them the same address they already had.

Whether it should be the case or not, it's hard in the US not to have a legit residential address--and workarounds not involving "living" with someone you don't may or may not work. It doesn't help that state residency actually matters for reasons of taxes and ID.

Elsewhere in this post it’s noted that spam is something like 20% of USPS revenue, perhaps less than expecrsdy

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