Comment by reaperducer | Hacker News Reader

Comment by reaperducer | Hacker News Reader

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that 100B number looks like it includes a whole lot of negative, zero, or low value items.

Clearly not an American, or an adult, or he would have needed the mail for things like:

- Receive unemployment tax statements from the state

- Life insurance forms. Especially converting a group policy into an individual policy.

- IRS notices

- Utility company refunds

- Receive insurance policy documents

- Receive notice of security breach at hospital

- Receive bills for unexpected services like ambulance and medical

- Receive license plates

- Receive vehicle registration

- Auto and homeowners insurance policy documents

- Receive checks for credits from utilities after you move

- My company got a check for $95 million in the mail from the IRS

- Reimbursement checks from insurance companies

- Certain correspondence with the I.R.S. can only be done by letter. No phone calls. No online.

- Get hurt at work? Paperwork from insurance and from the state comes in paper form, not TikTok.

As an American adult, I find your list extremely ucompelling. For the average person, that entire list probably accounts for a handful of pieces of mail per year on average. Several of those items are things I've never received by mail and several others are things I'd prefer to receive by email and immediately throw away if I do get them in the mail.

Maybe it's not all about you and there are a lot of people that are not technically savvy for whatever reason and need to receive things by mail?

I'm not saying the post office shouldn't exist, only that

>Clearly not an American, or an adult, or he would have needed the mail for things like:

is bullshit.

Several of those items are things I've never received by mail and several others are things I'd prefer to receive by email…

this is how government should work, we get one person’s opinion on how they operate and how they use said utility and that ought to do it - problem solved

Email is also a thrash heap. My country has an official "inbox" app that aggregates messages from all agencies.

Is there anything on this list that is so time critical that it would be hurt by postal delivery being dropped to, say, twice a week? I'm not seeing anything obvious, but might see it differently.

Does any of that mean we need to lie and pretend that there's 100B pieces of useful mail being delivered? Just because there's a lot of useful mail doesn't mean there's 100B of it. That number shouldn't pass anyone's sniff test.

Does any of that mean we need to lie and pretend that there's 100B pieces of useful mail being delivered?

I haven't seen any indication that it's a lie. Please post a link to the proof.

Is not a lie simply because it doesn't align with your political view.

Note that what you consider junk mail, other people may find valuable. I know someone who digs those ValPack coupons.

It actually does align with my political view.

Someone else posted some links in this thread already. But OK here: https://www.uspsoig.gov/sites/default/files/reports/2024-09/...

I don't know if it's correct or not, but it doesn't fail my sniff test. It's an average of ~1 piece of mail per person per day. Most people probably don't get more than one piece of useful mail per week, but there are also people conducting business through the mail that might send or receive far more than that.

Does the postal service only have value to you if it delivers 100B pieces of "useful" mail a year, according to some metric of useful? Even if I somehow thought the same way there is no version of a plan where I trust someone in government (or not in government) to decide what mail has value to me. This seems like such a dead end take. Yes junk mail is crappy, just like lots of other worthwhile tradeoffs when designing massive scale policy.

> Does the postal service only have value to you if it delivers 100B pieces of "useful" mail a year, according to some metric of useful?

No, and nothing I've said implies any agreement with the person whose nonsense you were countering. But you were countering it with more nonsense.

Just because your email is 90% junk doesn't mean delivering it once a week is an acceptable tradeoff. Those are 100B items paid to be sent.

Yeah I said exactly that.

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