OT The Post Office should cut mail days in half and the price of stamps

[LSMFT]

Maybe they should work like the garbage men. Smash the container and throw the lid into the woods.

[George]

But rural now means two things. There is the true rural with farms and folks who live near them to work on or support something to do with farming/ranching/etc and then there is the new rural which consists of urban sprawl largely with folks who don't want to have neighbors. I don't think group two needs to be subsidized by us. Same thing with high speed Internet. I border on what used to be a true rural area which has now become a place for folks who don't want neighbors. As an example there is a two mile long road that has maybe 15 homes and they make constant noise that no one will build out high speed Internet into their area. What would be wrong with having a surcharge? Say Internet costs $40 where I live where maybe there are 250 homes in the same two miles why would it be wrong to ask folks who intentionally want to distance themselves to pay more for the cost of servicing them?

[George]

USPS has agreements with the other carriers for backend package stuff. What is still really broken is the stuff they handle themselves. Send a package to an adjoining state and it will likely take a week.

[jamesgangnc]

That's just silly. How are you going to decide who gets free mail and who has to pay? And what their rates are? Got any idea what the burden of administering such a system would be?

[HeyBub]

Popular Mechanics recently did a series of tests on which of the three major carriers treated your packages the best.

View the results here:

[Tony Miklos]

If they don't fit through a skinny little slot, the rate is much higher.

[Tony Miklos]

Sometimes an early morning order from Texas will make it to me in eastern TN in one day with priority mail.

[Tony Miklos]

I recall for some time the USPS was working with FedEx. I don't think they do anymore? There were FedEx boxes outside the PO. I asked inside and they said they were trying a system where a lot of their air mail flew in FedEx places. Not sure how true that is/was, but without a doubt they did have FedEx boxes outside the P.O.

[Tony Miklos]

I've seen way too many improperly packaged items get damaged in transit. I've been lucky enough to have a 100% good rate with the USPS and UPS. I often shipped circuit boards and when I heard someone bitch about the post office, I'd throw my box with a circuit board in about 10 feet high and let it land on concrete. If they looked scared I'd do it a couple more times. I never had a failure. I believe over 99% of damaged packages are due to improper packaging.

[Larry W]

The Postal Service has proposed several services that use email in one form or another, going back to the late 80s. Also in the late 80s/early

90s, they proposed several fax-based services. In all cases, after lobbying by various interests, the Postal Regulatory Commission (formerly the Postal Rate Commission), the Postal Board of Governors, or Congress has prevented them from implementing any of those proposals.

[Caesar Romano]

On Wed, 8 Dec 2010 21:51:53 +0000 (UTC), [e-mail] (Larry W) wrote Re Re: OT The Post Office should cut mail days in half and the price of stamps:

That's interesting and not surprising for the U.S. I've often wondered why the U.S.P.S. doesn't develop a national secure email system. Now I know why.

[krw]

They still do. I get FedEx packages delivered by my postal carrier reasonably often. It's likely a regional thing.

[George]

Just think if they did. Who would trust "secure email" that was operated by the government?

[George]

Who said anything about free?

[Larry W]

It would be no less secure than what we have now, and if it cost say 1 cent per 100 or so emails, would eliminate most spam, too.

[jamesgangnc]

That's how some mail worked a long time ago. It's still too complicated to administer. The pay when you send model has been universally adopted. Even the private companies do pay as you send and zoned rates. That should tell you something.

[jamesgangnc]

everal services that use email in one

I think the point is that the post office, unlike the private services, can't just look around for new areas to make money. Their operating boundaries are rigidly controlled.

[George]

It all depends "what we have now" means. It is certainly possible to have secure email communications using peer reviewed encryption so you have reasonable assurance it is secure.

Hoe exactly would entrusting the government with your email be secure?

[George]

several services that use email in one

But the only way the initial plan would have worked if the government used its exclusive franchise to carry mail to also carry email and claim that no one else could provide email services. Not sure that would have been well received.

[jamesgangnc]

The idea I saw was you went into a post office and sent your email. It printed out at the post office closest to the recipient. The email got included in the regular daily delivery. So you basically had overnight service for a fraction of the then "express" mail option. I don't remember that it included establishing a monopoly thru regulations. Other overnight services were not prevented around that era.

This was in the days when almost no one had a computer at home and if you did have one the only networking you had at home was to dial up isolated services like bulletin boards. I remember paying $2k for an ibm xt those days. It had a 10 meg hard drive.