A World Without the Post Office

[Sarge]

http://www.numbersleuth.org/trends/usps/

This was pretty detailed!

[FORD]

About the only thing they forgot to mention is that the USPS is the largest union employer in the US, and the second largest employer overall (sadly, WalMart is still bigger).

And that has everything to do with why they are a target of the right wing.

They DID mention however, that the post office gets ZERO tax dollars (because it operates on it's own revenue from stamp sales and other services). Which means it should have nothing to do with the budget slashing austerity nonsense.

[Nitro Express]

There's still enough volume to make money. The post office is top heavy overhead wise and I bet you could cut it down to where it would be profitable. Heck with legal documents most corporations send them Fed Ex or UPS because they don't trust the postal system. If the USPS can't make a go of it and goes broke, someone else will.

[FORD]

The artificially created "financial problems" of the USPS exist for one reason.....

Because some Kochsucking shitheads in Congress forced them to budget for retirement 75 years in advance.

Or in other words, for employees who aren't even BORN yet.

No other entity on earth - public or private - is required to do that. And this wasn't designed to preserve the Post Office, but to kill it.

And living in Wyoming, the LAST thing you should want, is the end of the Postal Service, because the rural, mostly empty states will get scalped the hardest by privatization.

I ran the shipping department for a Bible software company in the 1990s. We had a lot of customers in the rural "red" states. And I know exactly where FedEx and UPS "2 day shipping" is more a theory than reality.

[Nitro Express]

Also with the government intruding into our E-Mail and who knows whom else, maybe if you want something secure you go old school. Send a sealed letter. I was listening to a program on computer security they said that just may come back. I know in the legal world everything is still on paper with notaries and signatures.

They want everything digital so they can control it and track it. They would love to get rid of radio and they would love to get rid of libraries. We need to keep some of the old way of doing things. I go to our local library and it's still busy. Sure we have Kindels but people still like books and the batteries don't run out and they don't go haywire when left in a hot car.

[FORD]

I don't really like the Kindle, because the device doesn't seem useful for anything other than reading e-books. Kindle pretty much has admitted this by creating the Kindle Fire, which is more of a general purpose tablet (yet not on the level of an iPad or a Samsung Galaxy or whatever.

As far as libraries go, admittedly I have only visited mine twice within the last decade, and ironically enough both times, it was because Comca$t was screwing me over and I had to use the library's shitty internet access to pay Comca$t's extortion.