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Comment by GolDDranks | Hacker News Reader

What surprised me was that there is something called "United States Postal Inspection Service" that has some police-like law enforcement powers. Every so often you TIL something about the US.

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You should see a recent job listing for the IRS (Internal Revenue Service - tax department): https://www.newsweek.com/irs-deletes-requirement-that-new-ag...

You need to be in good physical shape, willing to work a minimum of 50 hours a week including irregular hours, be on call 24/7, and of course also not only carry a firearm but be willing to use deadly force.

I'm sure they were flooded with applicants.

Wait til you hear about the UK's Post Office wrongly prosecuting dozens of people based on its arcane technical position as a prosecutor, held since 1683 but very rarely used

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Post_Office_scandal

It's not "police-like," the Postal Inspectors ARE police with their own police academy, their own crime lab, and everything. They are actually one of the oldest law enforcement agencies in the US.

There are a lot of US agencies which have law enforcement functions - with their own armed force and powers to search, detain, seize, etc. US Postal Service has one, so does IRS, Department of Education, Library of Congress, and many other federal agencies. One could be surprised why the Postal Service is dealing with things having nothing to do with delivering mail, but mission creep is extremely common in all branches of federal government.

Not only that, they were the ones that brought in the Unibomber.

In Germany we have this propaganda word "Raubkopie" for pirated copies translating to "rob copy", like a copy that was acquired through robbing, i.e. through use of force.

It is quite ironic considering who really ab/uses the legal monopoly of force to rob others of their copies.

Seems like an adaptation of the word piracy, probably to make the word more compact. "Seeräuber" - another german word for pirate - translates to "sea-robber", and I've never heard of pirates sneaking onto boats to make copies of things without leaving a trace.

If you are into that kind of thing, go ahead and read all U.S. Government Departments here:

https://www.usa.gov/federal-agencies

Some weird ones are there for sure.

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