Posted on 04/23/2020 4:52:26 PM PDT by DoodleDawg
The Treasury Department is considering taking unprecedented control over key operations of the U.S. Postal Service by imposing tough terms on an emergency coronavirus loan from Congress, which would fulfill President Trump’s longtime goal of changing how the service does business, according to two people familiar with the matter.
Officials working under Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, who must approve the $10 billion loan, have told senior officials at the USPS in recent weeks that he could use the loan as leverage to give the administration influence over how much the agency charges for delivering packages and how it manages its finances, according to the two people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the talks are preliminary.
Trump has railed for years against what he sees as mismanagement at the Postal Service, which he argues has been exploited by e-commerce sites such as Amazon, and has sought to change how much the agency charges for delivery packages. (Amazon’s founder and chief executive Jeff Bezos owns The Washington Post.)
(Excerpt) Read more at msn.com ...
Thank you for the correction.
Not for daily mail delivered
Sounds familiar. Most people have no clue how many packages we deliver in a day. Yes, first class mail has dropped, but the package volume is something the USPS has yet to adjust to. It’s costing them millions in overtime pay yet they refuse to charge companies like Amazon an appropriate rate. And Amazon makes out like bandits. Bezos must go to bed laughing over the deal he has with USPS.
Sure you can, if you want to pay for it. It doesn’t cost you anything for mail delivery. It’s free. You can choose to never purchase a product from USPS and you’ll still get mail delivered to you, from someone who purchased postage etc.
Well, I’m glad that the J. Peterman catalog is available online. I like to be able to buy my cabana wear without having to depend on the post office for voluminous catalogs.
Check out this one!
https://www.jpeterman.com/item/msh-6645/107236/cabana-shirt
$115
White/Beige
Collins Avenue, Miami.
Drinks by the pool at The Raleigh.
Three-picture deal. Seven points on the back end. These are your terms.
The valet brings around a 1955 Lancia Aurelia, tosses
you the keys.
You’re getting the hang of this town.
Cabana Shirt (No. 6645). The summer shirt of film stars and deal-makers from Miami to Hollywood to the Riviera. Extremely flattering short sleeve, camp collar styling in striped 100% cotton poplin. Classic one-piece collar lies flat, off your neck, for maximum cool. (Every kind.) Flat hem. Two pleated waist pockets. French placket at center front. Shell buttons. Imported.
They don’t out here-if the shipper you ordered from ships with UPS or FedEx, that is whose truck comes through your gate and down the driveway to your deck/porch-out here USPS does not go inside fences/gates onto private property-they only leave your stuff at the mailbox/ outside of the gate. I suppose handing it off for the last mile works in a less rural area, since the houses are right on a street or less then 100 ft or so from the street-and no gates or long driveways-also, postal carriers in rural areas are all local people who are contract labor who drive their own SUVs and pickups, unlike in cities-rural postal carriers don’t walk, either on their routes-the properties are mostly acreage-too much distance. Some neighborhoods have central mailbox arrangements at their entrances, but not many-they are theft magnets...
If you have Amazon Prime, yes.
Hmmm rural route carriers here are postal employees and either drive their own vehicle or a postal vehicle. And here(Iowa) is pretty rural. And they drive right up to the farm house to deliver packages. Must be different there. But here the USPS is required to service all addresses as required by law. UPS and FedEx are not. Hence , they drop ship to the local USPS to finish delivery, thereby saving themselves time and money. At the USPS expense
I think each state handles rural postal service differently-I don’t know who makes the rules-but they even vary from county to county here-some counties’ rural postal service doesn’t even deliver packages over a certain size-you have to pick it up at the rural post office...
I love the way those descriptions are worded with a story.
Reminds me of Myanmar. It will always be Burma to me.
My outgoing mail flag snapped off my mailbox. I put outgoing mail in the box anyway figuring my mailman would see and take it when he delivered my mail. Nope.
So I called his supervisor at the post office. Told me carriers aren’t required to pick up outgoing mail without the flag up and she couldn’t force him to. Said with a heavy sigh, their Union says so.
The post office is killing itself off...since infrastructure is already in place, new management could turn it around faster than Linda Blair’s head in “The Exorcist”...
That wouldn't be bad. Heck, I might be willing to live with only 2 days a week of junk mail. The postal service is an interesting deal from a Constitutional perspective. It is specifically called for in Article 1 § 8. "To establish post offices and post roads;", so it is actually one of the very few things that the government does that is actually fully Constitutional. There is nothing in that line, though about daily delivery.
Early on in this unconstitutional lockdown, one of the things that I thought was funny was that the entire world could shut down, but I'd still have junk mail in my mail box every day. Interestingly, it seems that the junk finally started slacking off last week.
There was a bunch of work done on something like that when email first became a common thing. One of the thoughts was to map an email address to each current physical postal address. There are a lot of issues that would have to be worked through. Would delivery be made to a location, or individuals made at a specific location? Also, can you just imagine the spam such a regularized PO email address would get? There would be Constitutional issues of blocking spam to such addresses, so spam would have to be handled locally.
I have a mail forwarding service for all of my email and have since 1996. Since that time, I've changed actual email providers many times, but no one that I correspond through email is aware of it, because all they see is my pobox.com address. However, because I have such a long-lived email address, I get tons of spam. Pobox is bouncing a minimum of 50 emails a day. Fortunately their spam filters are pretty good, or it would be a real pain to wade through all the crap. I can just imagine grandma trying to deal with that, and sorting through the junk to find things that are actually important.
Now, the 'secured' part of your proposal is interesting. By that did you mean encrypted? If so, that opens up another huge can o' worms. Where would the encryption keys reside? Locally, or at the mailbox? If the former, you have issues with morons losing their keys due to mismanagement or hardware failure. It would suck to not be able to read your mail because a file got deleted. If the key existed on the USPS servers, that would mean that the government would have complete, transparent access to all of your correspondence. Not a good state of affairs.
Crypto is hard to do right, and if you're serious about it, you always control your own keys. I've been using PGP since the 90s, and have been dealing with some of the issues that go with actually using cryptography securely. It's not something the average American would manage or even grasp for the most part.
There is no need for mail delivery as it exists today. It is an anachronism. It also wastes precious resources. Digitize all regular mail, let the Post Office implement online bill pay and checking and debit accounts, and it'll become solvent and profitable within 3 years.
We shall have to disagree with the 'need' for physical mail delivery. I have certain bills that I much prefer to be physical, rather than just online accounts. It may well be anachronistic, but I actually prefer writing a physical check for my mortgage.
Yes.
There isn't anything requiring the Post Office in the Constitution. It can certainly be "rid of".
Sorry, you're wrong about that. The actual text from Article 1, Section 8 is 'To establish post offices and post roads;'. Doesn't say anything about delivery though. It would be entirely Constitutional to require that we pick up all mail at the PO.
Not a bad starting point for discussion.
Gimme a break. You know the Framers were talking about post offices even though it says roads. There were no offices of such then.
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