USPS plans rural slowdown after election to cut costs | Hacker News Reader

USPS plans rural slowdown after election to cut costs

washingtonpost.com

24 pointshoward94119 comments

How about stopping Saturday and Wednesday mail delivery? In fact you can stop delivering mail to me right now.

> Allowing marginally slower service to rural areas, which often drag down on-time rates, could improve the agency’s delivery metrics, experts say.

That's a funny way to think about it.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law in action.

They’ve gotta rush all that political hate mail before they can wind down deliveries I guess.

It's really weird. Like grocery store checkout magazines weird. Plus additional hate.

I wish we could just phase out the USPS altogether and make better use of email. Get the big providers on board with some sort of signed delivery and receipt confirmation system, with an optional tie in login.gov identity verification for official matters.

The only mail I've gotten in the last 20 years is spam and receipts from old school companies they refuse to go paperless (usually some form of insurance).

It's such an antiquated, annoying system, and I wish it didn't exist so that agencies and businesses would be forced to use a more modern alternative.

How about make it a publicly traded corporation, like the soviets did during privatization. but require it to stay public, until some other corporation is doing a better job and gets declared the usps, and then make that one stay public…

As someone who deals in both the administration of email servers and lives in a country where the postal service was privatized and later shuttered, I can't imagine a more hellish suggestion than this.

The amount of privilege it takes to describe the USPS as an "antiquated annoyance" is incomprehensible. USPS is a literal gift from the gods as far as I'm concerned.

Unrelated to this, I remember in 2020 there was a lot of controversy about Postmaster General DeJoy being a Trump appointee and how he was going to slow down mail in ballots, etc.

But since DeJoy has stayed as Postmaster General throughout the Biden Administration, does this mean he wasn’t a Trump crony after all, like we were led to believe? Would appreciate if someone has info on this.

The Postmaster General doesn't serve at the president's pleasure. The administration can't remove him.

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Postmaster_Gener...

Yeah DeJoy is still a not good. You Don't run the post office like a business that's meant to make profit.

Murica!: Where public-private "partnerships", for-profit health insurance, for-profit prisons, and the "invisible hand" of greed are considered beneficial.

What's next? A reversion to for-profit fire rescue services where the firefighter extorts protection money to not light your house on fire?

For profit public company seems more accountable and efficient than a private non profit or a government monopoly.

If a faang got caught building a fire fighting business by doing arson, the stock would take a hit for sure not to mention all the shareholder lawsuits and securities fraud allegations on top of the arson criminal charges…

The problem with private prisons is probably that they are private and not publicly traded corporations.

Insurance works fine as publicly traded corporations.

Let me know how for-profit health insurance works out when they decide you're not worth giving a life-saving procedure.

Insurance doesn’t really make that decision. Doctors do. it they decide to not pay after the procedure, the doctor / hospital can fight it out with the insurer.

In practice government monopolies ration care much more.

That’s crazy. How on earth has he been allowed to hold his position?

Especially going into an election after it was proven he was working against the American people?

Most of our politicians are arguably working against the American people...

This is exactly what I'm asking about. Was that actually true? Where was the proof? I remember reading that he was some evil guy, but clearly he's still there and nobody seemed to care once Biden got into office. So was the fear mostly politically motivated and not actually objectively true?

If he's still doing those things, wouldn't the media care to report about it since we're in another election with the same candidate who everyone was claiming that DeJoy would help out. (this is a genuine question, I don't have an opinion on this)

Others have said that the PMG is not appointed by the President, but the board of governors (who picks the PMG) is appointed by the president. So there is some indirect control.

Local mail here is delayed like a month it’s crazy.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com