Matt Yglesias, writing from his new forever home at Slate, talking about the Post Office:
What’s so important about it? Obviously it’s very important that people be able to get stuff delivered to their house. But there’s no reason to think that absent a public entity this would suddenly become impossible. Similarly, I agree with Duncan Black that the culture war aspect to the Postal Service controversy in which people deride USPS and sing the praises of FedEx is dumb. The Postal Service, in my opinion, does a really fantastic job of doing its job—namely providing guaranteed six days a week flat rate mail delivery. But when he says “right now the country still needs universal flat rate postal service” I’m left to wonder: Why? Why would it be so terrible to put up with differential pricing, or with a situation where some parts of the country had less frequent delivery?
I guess it wouldn’t be “terrible”, especially for Matt Yglesias, who would never be subject to differential pricing or less frequent delivery because he lives in the heart of the dream in the promised land. But let’s talk about some poor seventy year-old retired ranch hand living in Afton, WY or Buffalo, SD or Baker, MT instead of an overpaid thirty-something pundit living in metro DC. Perhaps someone barely scraping by who lives more than a few miles from nearest good-sized town could on occasion spend gas money to drive there to get his prescription filled because the mail doesn’t come as often as it used to and he didn’t quite time his refill correctly. And if he budgeted carefully–far more carefully than Matt does, I’m quite sure–he could probably afford the even greater differential delivery cost of every goddam thing that lands in his mailbox, which if you live in the country is a lot of stuff because the cheapest way to get it is via mail.
No, that wouldn’t be “terrible” — it would merely “fucking suck”. Why we must keep screwing over these poor people for what’s really a nothing cost in the scheme of things is an eternal mystery to me. But, according to Yglesias, we can’t just make flippant assertions. No, we need to argue for something that has been part of our basic infrastructure for more than a century, even though he clearly has no fucking clue what the Post Office does in “some parts of the country.”
MattF
Maybe a relatively small point, but a lot of prescription medication is delivered via US mail these days. The postal service does the delivery promptly, securely, and at a low cost.
Walker
Wow. If there was ever an indication that Mat has lived a truly sheltered lifestyle, this is it.
Another Halocene Human
Wow, Yglesias isn’t slacking on bringing the fails in 2012 either, is he?
ericblair
And of course, the people pushing for the End of Mail As We Know It are goopers, which means mostly exurban and rural, who benefit from subsidized and mandated services and would be the first to scream bloody murder when it costs them $5 to mail a birthday card and they have to go to the Walgreens to do it. Just who the fuck do they think is benefitting from the current situation, anyway, commie hipsters living in TriBeCa?
geg6
Gawd, I can’t even begin to articulate my complete and utter loathing for Matt Yglesius. Slate is the perfect forum for him. If it doesn’t affect him, privatize it! If a neighborhood is a bit rundown and working class, gentrify it! If you actually have hair (unlike young Matt), no need to regulate hairdressers or barbers because nothing they do could possibly be dangerous!
Fucking clueless trust fund libertarian. I’d spit on him, but it’s a waste of good saliva.
Linda
Example #437 on Why People Hate Liberals. Having access to goods and services that make your life rock-bottom decent, whether you can afford to hand over a fair amount of cash for them, is really important. To everybody. It’s not a game, and it’s not an abstraction. When we agree to fight for everybody’s access to them, people will remember why folks used to vote for FDR et al.
Every day in my job, I meet people who don’t have what lots of pundits assume everybody has: internet access, information knowledge, and resources to live on. We don’t need to empathize more about the average person, we need to simply know more about their realities. And they need to be our no. 1 priority.
NotMax
But, but – – – Constitutional originalism! Ben Franklin!
Throw their own argument right back in their smug faces.
CarolDuhart2
There’s a ton of small businesses that rely on the USPS for low-cost delivery to customers. I have discount ink coming via USPS. That company relies on the bulk of their deliveries that way, and saves the more expensive services for the few who need faster delivery overall.
Vote by Mail? Several states have gone to it mostly or totally. USPS is securely non-partisan and will deliver and pick up from every district and prescinct for the same price.
Secure middle-class jobs and a strong union? Maybe Yglesias doesn’t understand, but I do. UPS drivers and workers get low wages and a job with little future. USPS have well-paid government jobs that allow people to buy a house and a car.
Lastly, there’s still a lot of non-networked people out there who need information and communication-and the mail is the cheapest and most secure way they get it.
Emrventures
Aggghhhh!!
How the hell do intelligent people discuss privatization or abolishment of the USPS without noting that the private companies who provide similar services do so AT TWENTY TIMES THE PRICE.
I don’t get a whole lot of snail mail that matters to me anymore and I don’t send a whole lot, but what I do get and send, I do not want to pay FedEx or UPS eight bucks to deliver, nor do I want the sender paying that, since ultimately it will be passed on to me.
No private company is going to come to your house and deliver your letter to any locale in the US for anywhere near USPS postage. They are far more efficient than any private company could ever hope to be.
RossInDetroit, Rational Subjectivist
I ship a lot of stuff to individual households and have been for 15 years. FedEx absolutely cannot compete on price on international shipments. I use them only on huge items that have to go by freight out of the country.
Also priority mail is cheap and fast. FedEx has never had a price for a comparable service for one-time shipments. USPS all the way for Priority.
And over thousands of shipments, USPS has NEVER lost or damaged one. Not a single one. And they usually arrive a day or two ahead of schedule.
General Stuck
Why didn’t Matt find McArdle when there was still time?
Mudge
And, of course, those in Baker, MT generally vote blue. They are Sarah Palin’s real Americans. They would typically dislike our Kenyan president and Matt Yglesias on visceral grounds.
But they deserve mail service because they are citizens and providing mail to its citizens is part of what a civilized society does. A society is not a business.
Evolving Deep Southerner
@CarolDuhart2:
I’m a huge fan of the USPS, but the UPS guys I know don’t do too badly, even the worker bees.
foosion
The way to help poor people is to give them money. The USPS is a very inefficient way of helping poor people.
Many of those whose USPS delivery is most heavily subsidized live in states that vote R because they hate the government. It’s odd to be subsidizing them.
The USPS is in financial trouble largely because Congress interferes by forcing it to fund pension obligations way beyond what private companies have to fund and forcing it to maintain unprofitable post offices (largely in R states).
Evolving Deep Southerner
I assume that if the USPS goes away, UPS, FedEx and other will be subject to regulation as utilities just like the power companies, right?
NotMax
@RossInDetroit, Rational Subjectivist
Plus, FedEx contracts with the USPS to deliver FedEx shipments to scads of addresses which are not profitable for FedEx to service on a route.
cathyx
Closing down the USPS will cost a lot of jobs. Yes, private mailing companies could hire some of them, but for minimum wage and little bennies I’m certain. And mailing anything will cost way more and continue to rise exponentially too.
mistermix
@CarolDuhart2: UPS drivers are Teamsters with good retirement and benefits because they are unionized.
Omnes Omnibus
@Linda: Aside from a contrarian, libertarian-curious trustifarian, what liberals are pro elimination of the post office? This is an issue of the right. How do you segue from that into why people hate liberals? Is MY now a stand in for all liberals? BTW the reason people hate liberals is that there has been a campaign to demonize the word for 30-40 years and it has worked.
MattF
@Evolving Deep Southerner: Ha ha. No air-conditioning for you, sucker.
NotMax
@Evolving Deep Southerner
While it may have changed during the ensuing many decades, when I was in college, had a part-time job working the graveyard shift at a UPS hub, unloading the tractor trailers as they arrived and made damn good money.
Mr Zip
While it would be a terrible move, privatizing the postal service would be the biggest red-to-blue conversion project of all time. Finally, the small town low/no information voters would grasp that, yes, sometimes it makes sense to spread the cost over an entire nation so that something can be affordable for everyone. Like, oh, I dunno, HEALTHCARE.
Or maybe I overestimate the number of brain cells possessed by morans …
MattF
@Omnes Omnibus: It seems to me to be a pure contrarian play. “Even the liberal Matt Yglesias” says ‘X’. And, presumably becomes a candidate for an ‘Yglesias’ award.
General Stuck
@Mudge:
Ha! tell that to Mitch McConnell, and his caucus of sticky fingers.
Gopher2b
If I have to subsidize someone postal delivery because they live in the middle of nowhere, the they can chip in for my astronomical urban rent. We’re not entitled to live wherever we want, free of the costs that come with that choice.
Harlan T. Fescue
Typical communist response: ”oh, dear, what about people who NEED something or other?” Well, sir, We who need nothing are frankly tired of living under the tyranny of the needy. If the Peasant is going to insist on living in the middle of nowhere, let it pay for the extra cost of delivering its so-called ”needs” like medications and various other trash.
Chet
Maybe somebody “barely scraping by a few miles from the nearest town” shouldn’t get a massive government subsidy for their lifestyle. Living like that is a luxury, and it’s worth considering whether its a luxury all the rest of us should pay for, given the massive environmental externalities associated with rural living. I think Yglesias is perfectly aware that the end of universal flat-rate mail delivery puts a burden on people who get a lot of stuff through the mail. But that doesn’t address the question of why they shouldn’t bear that burden. You can hardly make the argument that it’s not fair that people pay the market rate for transporting goods to where they live, but if we’re talking about people for whom the government is subsidizing their medications – someone “barely scraping by” is certainly going to be in that category – then they’e not going to see any price increase at all, because the government pays the postage.
Also if you think that a 43 cent stamp covers everything from a letter to a delivery from Amazon, as you apparently do, I’m not so sure you can say Yglesias is the one out of touch, here. It’s not any cheaper to get a delivery in Bumfuck, Idaho via USPS Parcel with tracking than it is via UPS or FedEx, specifically because parcels don’t go at the universal flat-rate postage we’re talking about.
BigSouthern
Christ, what an asshole.
chopper
without the PO, how will i get my barber’s license mailed to me?
ruemara
Why is Y such a douche?
MattF
OT, but does anyone at the NYT read the headline on an article before posting it?
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/2012/08/04/sports/olympics/04reuters-oly-badm-bdwsin.html?_r=1&hp
karen marie
I knew there was a reason why I don’t read Yglesias.
He’s got to be f&cking kidding, right?
@Emrventures: 20x the price AND they use USPS for the more remote areas.
Next person to see Yglesias in person, slap him for me.
dmsilev
Hmmm. Priority Mail flat rate medium box, $11.35 for 2-3 day delivery of anything up to 70 pounds. Let’s say 5 pounds.
UPS 3-day select: $24.53.
FedEx Express Saver: $21.17.
If we go to 20 pounds, which I’ve actually done with the USPS flat-rate boxes, FedEx is $46 and UPS is $49.67.
Baud
@Chet:
Remember kids, being poor and having limited options is a lifestyle choice.
Comrade Nimrod Humperdink
This jihad against the USPS has always fried my ass. The Postal Service isn’t even really a direct competitor with Fed Ex or UPS. Fed Ex and UPS specialize in commercial freight, packages for Gawd’s sake, with some retail stuff on the side. The USPS handles mailings and also does packages, but they go EVERYWHERE, because they’re more or less constitutionally required to do so. It’s like the old universal service idea with Ma Bell, (or here in Australia with Telstra, our own AT&T beast). It’s a government service, and an essential one at that. Do the fucking VA hospitals have to have a profit motive too in order to justify their existence? My old man has slugged away at Amtrak for 35 years, and every single session of Congress since the freight lines washed their hands of passenger rail has featured assholes like McCain and John Mica who insist that any service which fails to make a profit does not deserve to exist.
That single notion, that profitability is the only measurement of value, is right up there with God-bothering on my list of ‘shitty excuses for political principles.’ You see it in public education, transportation, health care… anything that contributes to the broader quality of life for the population is treated as a business opportunity only, and if the opportunity is deemed less lucrative than is desireable, then it’s time to sell off the pieces.
By this logic, how long before the interstates are all toll roads, police and fire departments are basically private security operations, and on down the list? Little instances of this mindset show up all over the place. It’s no way to govern. But it’s a fundamental difference in philosophy between people that consider government to be service work (in the more noble sense of the word) and people that think government is a business with 300 million “shareholders.”
Chet
To hell with them, then. They can just charge more for shipping. Why on Earth should I subsidize that commercial transaction?
You can’t defend a subsidy just by saying that people rely on it. Obviously, if a subsidy exists people are going to try to take advantage of it, and at the margin some number of people will therefore be reliant on it. But so what? There were a ton of buggy-whip makers who relied on a transportation infrastructure built up around horses, too. At one time, the USPS was a necessary infrastructure for commerce and information flow. Now, it’s not. And we’re not talking about ending it – we’re just talking about rural individuals paying the market rate for having letters delivered to their homes physically instead of electronically.
double nickel
As a Canuck, there are very few things about America that i envy, but the USPS is one of them. Cheap flat rate mailing, and 6 days a week! We haven’t had that here in decades.
Fargus
As has been stated over and over again, part of the reason FedEx and UPS can hold their costs down is because they contract with USPS to do end delivery.
It always makes me laugh in these discussions to see the people who assert that when we have universal broadband, we can jettison the post office. Because why again? People will no longer want to have the option to not pay bills online? People won’t still get stuff shipped to them? Will there be a universal computer mandate, or will everyone get a tax credit to subsidize their purchase?
mothra
My first thought; too; MattF. The PO delivers medications. Pretty important function for many folks.
kay
I swear, one would think the liberals who saw the value of a public option in health insurance would be able to extend that concept to mail delivery, or, public schools, or, public colleges but there seems to be a certain type of liberal who gets flim-flammed by libertarians again and again and again.
What happens when we destroy the public option and go to privatized, for-profit? Who benefits from that? It’s not like we don’t KNOW the answer!
PhoenixRising
@Chet: So help me to understand your position: as a rural citizen, I pay taxes used to subsidize the lifestyle choices of urban renters in forms like public transit or the roads that deliver Matt his arugula, loans to the small truck farms that grow it, I could go on.
But the service that urban yuppies help pay for to make it possible for me to run my business from the middle of Dog’s armpit, USPS, is a bridge too far? Because everyone should live in an exurb who can’t afford a condo in a gentrified neighborhood?
Refine pls.
Chet
@Baud: If someone is poor, let’s give them money. No, seriously. That way they can decide for themselves whether they’d like to spend it on postage.
A poor person living several miles outside of town who gets all his or her bills electronically and has no need to be shipped medication receives nothing at all from your “aid by subsidizing postage” poor-relief plan, after all.
“Being poor” and “how much should it cost to send a letter to a rural house in the US” are two completely different questions, and trying to solve the first via the second is stupid.
rikyrah
the GOP set up this destruction of the USPS. they’ve never given a rat’s ass about a working man’s pension fund before, but suddenly, it has to be overly funded.
that right there should have told you that it was a fucking scheme
gnomedad
@Chet:
Thought experiment: cut folks in rural areas a check equivalent to their cost of subsidized postal service and ask them if they’d like to return it to continue to receive said service.
@Chet: Beat me to it.
karen marie
@mistermix: For now they are, sure.
What I don’t understand about these idiots calling for privatization of USPS is why they don’t encourage an increase in postal rates as a way to cure the USPS deficit? It’s insane that they’re prohibited from raising them, yet everyone agrees they can’t work with the budget they’ve got. Privatizing is not the answer, raising rates is.
Shawn in ShowMe
@Gopher2b:
People were living “in the middle of nowhere” before they lived in big cities. From their perspective, maybe you should move back instead of paying astronomical rents.
BrianK
Young master Yglesias has been fully assimilated into the Beltway Borg.
The part about Rx by mail, though, made me think. My insurance has pressured me into Rx by mail, even offering me a discount to switch. I wonder if and how that will change if USPS reduces delivery service.
Linda
@Omnes Omnibus:
The trustifarian gives cover to the largely conservative movement to get rid of the post office, much as “reasonable centrists” give cover to the privatization/dismantling of government programs that put a floor on the welfare of working and poor people. Demonization of the word “liberal” is one cause, but another is that people on the half-assed “left” have not fought hard enough for average people’s welfare to distinguish them from the dismantlers.
BigSouthern
@Baud:
Hey, Afton, WY has an airport! That makes it a resort town for all intents and purposes! And if the people living there were never educated up to the point where they could realistically seek their fortunes elsewhere – or they experienced the very human tendency to stay the same place you were born and raised – then that’s on them!
Baud
@Chet:
First, universal postal service is not just about helping the poor — it’s about connecting the nation as a nation, even the anti-government hypocrites in rural areas that keep electing Republicans.
Second, just giving money to the poor is not a great idea. Money is only useful if goods and services are available for purchase. If there is no mail delivery service in your location, the extra money isn’t going to do you any good.
NotMax
@Chet
USPS tracking number service only available on Express Mail and Priority Mail while delivery confirmation is available on First Class Parcels, Media Mail and Parcel Post. Neither a USPS tracking number nor delivery confirmation is available on First Class Mail Letters.
Happen to live in a place where throughout the entire state UPS or FedEx is, at minimum, 3 times more expensive than USPS prices, and can also be slower than some levels of USPS delivery.
One of the best things about the USPS is that it is purposely designed to be egalitarian when it comes to rates. That’s part of being in the commonweal. I would no more carp about non-urbanites subsidizing urban mass transit than about urbanites subsidizing universal mail delivery.
Rural or outlying or distant does not mean less equal, nor less deserving of quality of service.
Baud
@BigSouthern:
Everyone, at some point in their life, makes a conscious choice not to become a successful libertarian blogger posing as a liberal.
SiubhanDuinne
@Omnes Omnibus: O/T did you have a good birthday?
Chet
@PhoenixRising:
No, backwards. As an urban renter my taxes pay for your roads, your loans, your lifestyle choices, plus my own. Your taxes pay for your roads and loans too, but since its not enough to cover them you don’t pay any for mine. The net tax transfer is overwhelmingly from the urban to the rural.
In addition, your car-reliant lifestyle, your single-family home, the increased distance that your food has to travel – you’re not eating any more “local” than I am, since all your local farms grow is corn and soy – all contribute to a massive increase in your environmental footprint compared to mine, so the very environment itself is subsidizing your lifestyle.
Again, it’s not at all clear why your lifestyle in that regard should be the subject of such enormous subsidy. If we’re all going to pay for you to live – and again, I’m not opposed to paying per se – then we should pay for you to live in a way that doesn’t result in such enormous inefficiencies and negative externalities. By all means, if you’re poor, let’s all kick in for your rent, your food, your transportation, your health care, etc., but why should we pay for you to ruin the environment by doing so? Come live in the city.
Honus
@Chet: Actually, Chet, USPS is cheaper and usually more efficient.
Baud
This is what scares me if the GOP ever takes control over government and implements cap-and-trade.
Suffern ACE
@Fargus: We’ll exchange ideas about things and information about things. The things themselves will never need to move anywhere, since the most important part of the transaction is the information exchange.
BigSouthern
@Baud:
If only they’d worked harder to make sure they had a notable father…
Chet
@Baud:
We have something that does that better, now; it’s called “the Internet.” If there’s a universal adoption problem – and there is – then let’s subsidize Internet service, not rural mail delivery, because it’s ridiculously cheaper. Remember how every year we hear that it would cost half as much for the New York Times to send every subscriber one Kindle than a year’s worth of Sunday Editions?
ThresherK
You know how to decide the issue once and for all, right? \ An online poll at Wired should do it.
Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to reset my MiL’s VCR clock.
Gopher2b
@Shawn in ShowMe:
I grew up there. I did my time.
BigSouthern
@Fargus:
Because we’ll have a cable modem in every house and a 3-D printer in every pot, obviously.
Baud
@Chet:
The Internet is great, and we do spend a ton of money subsidizing it to bring it to rural areas. But I don’t know of any person who thinks the Internet is a substitute for postal service yet. Maybe one day, but we’re not even close to that time.
BigSouthern
@Chet:
So what you’re saying is the Post Office should evolve and fulfill it’s duties by becoming an ISP and use its resources to run cheap broadband service to every town with a post office and all points in between?
There’s an idea with some legs.
Chet
@NotMax:
You don’t “happen” to live there, like you woke up one day and someone had planted you there. Sorry that delivery of goods is so expensive where you live, but why should I pay for it?
“Egalitarian mail service” isn’t in the Bill of Rights, for the very good reason that it actually does cost a lot more to deliver goods to some places than others. All your arguments against market-rate parcel delivery come down to “but I’d have to pay a lot more.” Yes, you would. But other people, who don’t benefit at all from your individual ability to have goods delivered to your house outside of Bumfuck, Idaho, would be paying a lot less for it. That seems a lot fairer than the current system where I shoulder all of the costs of living in a high-demand urban space plus a lot of the externalities of your cheap rural rent.
gnomedad
@Honus:
That may very well be true, and would be a valid argument for retaining subsidized service. It’s just a pet peeve of mine that liberals (and I identify as one) too often for get to ask whether a group targeted for help would prefer the proposed service or the money it costs to provide it.
NotMax
@Chet
Holy short-sightedness, Batman. Subsidies that benefit you are separate but more equal than other subsidies?
So let’s do away with the roads and see how fast the cities empty when the foodstuffs stop being trucked (or railed) in. Or privatize the roads to end the subsidies and see how fast the cities empty out when food prices pass through the ionosphere.
Does the term “two-way street” ring a bell?
Say what?
No milk? No wheat? No chicken? No pork? And so on and so on and so on.
MikeJ
@BrianK:
Do you think your insurance company cares if you only get mail once a week? Not their problem. Do they care if you have to drive 10 miles to the post office? Not their problem.
BigSouthern
@Chet:
So people aren’t born places not of their choosing?
hoodie
Yglesias is a superficial tool. He narrows the issue to whether it makes sense to deliver paper to remote areas, overlooking the larger issues that a great nation should worry about how to maintain communications and economic activity across a vast geographical area so you don’t end up with a country full of Appalachias (not everyone can move to DC). People live in remote areas because of things like agriculture, mining and even some forms of manufacturing. People like Yglesias and Chet want to make everyone’s life completely fungible as long as that doesn’t extend to their own lives. Instead of abolishing the USPS, how about letting the USPS go into rural broadband so it can have the benefit of all that technological progress the Yglesias loves? There’s a company, Lightsquared, that is currently bankrupt because the FCC pulled their authorization for a hybrid wireless system that re-uses frequencies originally allocated to satellite communications by terrestrial base stations. The license was pulled because the terrestrial component screws up GPS, but they have a brand-new high-capacity bird launched a couple of years ago that would be great for providing high-speed data to remote locations. Let the feds buy it and prioritize its use for supporting things that address the issues mistermix raises, e.g., supporting rational delivery of medication, distance learning, small business operations, etc. That’s what the Post Office should be doing in an electronic age.
Woodrowfan
@dmsilev:
But unless you’re mailing bricks it’s cheaper to NOT use the USPS flat rate box and to weigh and pay the specific postage instead, which can be less than half the flat rate price. I weigh my boxes on a small postal scale, print out the postage on my PC, and have the postman pick the box up at my door, for far less than I’d pay UPS for mailing the same box.
Chet
@Baud:
It’s certainly a substitute for the routine transmission of information we were discussing. As far as transportation of goods goes, nobody is talking about ending USPS Parcel Post; just ending the massive urban-to-rural subsidies involved in inefficient letter delivery. And, look, if you want letters at your rural house, you can still get them – by paying the unsubsidized rate for having them delivered.
In what way is that not fairer than having urban taxpayers subsidize rural letter delivery?
Mudge
@General Stuck: McConnell and friends are sociopaths. There is no convincing them, just defeating them in elections.
And the USPS issue has become a “me ” issue. Rural folks legitimately want it (it affects ME) and we see what Yglesias thinks (it doesn’t affect ME, let them pay more and/or lose service. Free enterprise uber alles). Sadly the issue has yet to become a “this is what government is supposed to do for its citizens issue”.
John
Yglesias is awful, but this is nothing new. This is a hobby horse he’s been riding intermittently for years now. Of course, in classic Yglesian fashion, he does this by rewriting the same post every year or so, and refusing to take into account any of the counter arguments made on other blogs or his own comments section.
Here he is in 2009 saying that the Post Office is unnecessary.
Here he is last year saying that the Post Office is unnecessary.
His posts do seem to be becoming more radical each time, though.
opie jeanne
It really makes me want to throw things when the Post Office is described as being X dollars in the red. They aren’t in the red, that’s the COST of operating the postal service.
I hope that makes sense. It’s too early and I didn’t get much sleep last night.
Chet
@NotMax: You don’t “grow” milk, stupid.
Todd
There is the added fun of rewriting municipal and county ordinances, state statutes, the US Code, court rules and regulations from sea to shining sea regarding the timing and means of delivery of critical documents. That wouldn’t cost much.
Gwangung
System, folks…we’re dealing with a system.
The USPS in intertwined with a whole mess of activities that people aren’t considering the economic and logistical impacts of.
The law of unintended consequences applies to everyone.
gVOR08
While I generally agree with this post, I think the tone is unnecessary. Matt Yglesias is pretty reliably one of the good guys. Part of the reason conservative messaging is so successful is that you don’t see O’Reilly and Limbaugh publically dissing each other.
BigSouthern
@John:
Yglesais is a lot like “The Simpsons” in that regard. Started out with some good ideas, but then as the years went forward the ideas dried up and the only thing left was to make the balding protagonist dumber and dumber.
Chet
@hoodie: I think you’ll find that government broadband subsidies are exactly what I called for, above. Nobody’s talking about letting rural people fall out of all communication with the rest of the country.
It’s just that nobody’s made an argument for why that subsidized communication should be in the form of hand-delivered pieces of paper. Oh, I guess that’s wrong, there has been one “argument”: “Ygelsias is stupid and so is Chet.” Well, color me convinced!
karen marie
@Chet:
You didn’t think about this at all, that’s clear.
Poor people all have internet and pay their bills electronically?
Here’s a link to a 2009 story about poor people and bank accounts. There was another one more recently but I can’t lay my hands on it.
As for the poor using the internet to pay bills or do anything else:
I’m stunned at the stupid this topic has brought out in a community that I thought was pretty well informed.
P.S. I could have provided more links to more stories about both the banking and internet issues but it would put me in moderation, and I think you know how to use the Google.
TenguPhule
Now sit down Rumplestiltskin, this may come as a shock, but there are still many people who don’t have computeres, or cellphones with wired access or time to spend all day at the library (assuming that wasn’t cut from the local budget too) and need to get their bills, checks and letters from friends and relatives with physical paper.
The USPS connects the nation together. Accept it.
And Kill the GOP. With Fire. From Orbit. Just to be sure.
MikeJ
@TenguPhule: Even assuming everyone did have the internet, you still need to get deliveries of physical objects. The USPS is still the only service that goes everywhere and does it for a reasonable price.
dmsilev
@Woodrowfan: I did actually mail a brick once via flat rate. A large brick. OK, a large hunk of limestone actually, but basically a brick.
Clerk at the PO puts the box on the scale, looks at reading, looks at me: “Oooh, you’re getting your money’s worth on this one”.
RossInDetroit, Rational Subjectivist
I don’t think the GOP really wants to eliminate the USPS. Just hobble it so that private shippers can get a few steps ahead. Then they can ridicule a government program that can’t compete with Free Enterprise, while still taking advantages of Franking privileges.
In fact, that’s exactly what I’d want to do if I was Republican. And evil.
TenguPhule
And all of your arguments boil down to “I’m a gliberterian asshole, FYIGM.”
Government Postal benefits the community and the nation. It is an ESSENTIAL role of government services. There are a lot of things that you personally may not feel you’re getting 110% return on equity, but you might as well argue about the whole concept of taxation as well.
opie jeanne
@Emrventures: I got two packages that had been shipped FedEx this week. Guess who actually delivered them: the post office. I live just a few mIles east of Seattle, and only four miles from Redmond. Not so far out in the country.
different-church-lady
No, not impossible. Merely ridiculously more expensive.
Hey Matt, try taking away all the regulations on electrical delivery to your house, see how cheap your power is then.
Moron.
hoodie
@Chet:Perhaps I’m not clear. The purpose of the USPS is to provide communication for the country to meet national policy goals in a way that isn’t hamstrung by o the short-term profit needs of private entities. Subsidies alone do not do that.
TenguPhule
Yes, but our gliberterian troll believes “just pay more” is the answer. Concepts like volume and traffic just don’t seem to be ringing any bells in that empty tower.
karen marie
@gnomedad: You say that as if handing over cash to poor people is something that is remotely likely to happen. Welfare reform ring any bells? The entire “we don’t want to pay for poor people, especially if they’re brown” thing we’ve got going?
I am having a hard time wrapping my head around the ignorant (whether willful or not) hatred of USPS.
NotMax
@Chet
Ah, I get it. Because you live in an expensive environment, the rest of us must pay.
If it is such a millstone, find a cheaper rental, for starters.
As for the Bill of Rights, let’s go directly to the Constitution to begin with.
I direct your attention to Article I, Section 9:No Preference shall be given by any Regulation of Commerce or Revenue to the Ports of one State over those of another: nor shall Vessels bound to, or from, one State, be obliged to enter, clear, or pay Duties in another.Ports has been deemed to refer to air as well as water ports. Also too, Article I, Section 8 (emphasis mine):
Chet
@karen marie: Subsidizing rural letter delivery doesn’t give even a single poor person a bank account, or help them pay even a single bill, since you can’t reliably mail cash, anyway. I think maybe you didn’t think your post through very well.
MeDrewNotYou
@karen marie: A thousand times this. The poor are already horribly screwed over in this country; the last thing we need is another attempt at ‘efficiency’ that assumes everyone is a member of the middle class.
different-church-lady
@karen marie:
The gates are wide open, and any old moron can wander through them at any time.
Occasionally other communities get bulletins about what’s going on here, and they send moron armies over to check things out.
TenguPhule
Fixed.
Unsympathetic
If the government mandates that FedEx and/or UPS provide service to the same destinations that USPS currently serves, that private company goes bankrupt. Yglesias is not just an idiot – he’s a mendacious idiot, because he ignores facts which glaringly, screamingly point out the obvious falsehood of his position.
Chet
@TenguPhule:
So let’s subsidize some internet access for those people instead of paying ten times as much to subsidize hand delivery of pieces of paper. How many times do I have to say it?
TenguPhule
Neither does trying fart out ponies, which is what you’re doing with this whole “give the poor a bank account” Unicorn Poop. Would you like Compassionate Conservative Hand Jobs to go with that side order of Pedastry?
John
@gVOR08:
Matt Yglesias is not pretty reliably one of the good guys. He is quite frequently one of the bad guys. As, for instance, here. And on education reform, where his elite private school background gives him great insight in the problems of our public schools. And the fact that he hates parks (seriously). Or his opposition to all forms of occupational licensing. And all kinds of other issues.
Chet
@NotMax:
You need to present an argument for this, not simply assert it. Why should the rest of us pay simply because you choose to live in an expensive environment?
Sure, lets. Where’s the part where it says the postage for a letter should be the same everywhere? Article 1 Sections 8 and 9 refer to duties and excise taxes, not postage.
James
maybe you could dial back the holier-than-thou screed.
Chet
@TenguPhule: What the fuck are you talking about?
Linda
@karen marie: The sort of “we don’t need to have X program. We’ll do Y program, which is much more efficient” is standard conservative bait and switcch BS, as you noted. Another is: “the current government programs are tilted for the old, when we should be spending on the young,” when in fact, they wish to spend for neither.
In the field of election reform, the bait and switch was, “we don’t need to have campaign contribution limits, just transparency.” Which they are now fighting hammer and tong.
Mark S.
I find it ironic that the people I know who would get screwed the most by getting rid of the postal service are also the most conservative mother fuckers I know. Unlike Matt Y, they don’t pay their bills online, they mail a bunch of checks. All of the sudden, that would become a lot more expensive to do.
TenguPhule
I am so reminded of the Human Centipede episode of South Park right now.
It just can’t read. It isn’t learning how.
Omnes Omnibus
@SiubhanDuinne: Pretty good. Nothing special. How about you?
JustAnotherBob
I live “somewhat remote”. It’s a 3.5 mile drive on an unpaved road to my mail box, 12 more to the PO, about 40 miles to town.
I think we should have a rational discussion about six day a week delivery. If we could save significant money by going to two or three day delivery it might be worth waiting an extra day to pick up your junk mail. Junk mail is the majority of what I receive these days.
I now get all my bills as e-bills. My checks are direct deposit. The only bill that I get through the mail is my county property tax which is sent once a year and weeks before it’s due.
There may be some who don’t have computers living out here in the woods. I don’t know any.
And I can’t work out a scenario in which someones life would be damaged by not getting mail on Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday if it shows up Monday, Wednesday and Friday.
I want the PO to stay in business. Having it there creates more competition in a field that has too few players to assure adequate competition. If we can make the PO cheaper to run that, IMHO, is a good thing.
NotMax
@Chet
Semantic tomfoolery, to no point other than metal wanking. It is a food product. It is produced. It is produced on farms.
It does not mystically appear to fill the plastic jugs or waxed cartons.
Or were you referring only to things which are, in the strictest sense, “grown” and excluding things such as milk and eggs from your labored diatribe?
TenguPhule
That you’re an idiot talking out your ass and trying bullshit your way through the numbers.
The Post Office is more cost effective and does its job better. That it also provides good jobs is not to be sneered at either.
Give me a working tried and true system over gliberterian wanking dreams of Pony Porn any day.
karen marie
@Chet: The more comments of yours I read, the more I want pie.
Matt
Y’know, I really try hard to care about those folks – but thirty years of them electing a blend of wanna-be theocrats and hard-core antigovernment JBS loons has *really* made it difficult. If they think I’m a dirty hippie commie, why should I keep pushing for their interests against the counterforce of THE REPRESENTATIVES THEY ELECTED?
Maybe it’s time for rural dumbfucks everywhere to get the government they’ve been clamoring for – perhaps after they’re paying $10 a letter to get mail, grinding up their now-unaffordable roads to gravel, and have one sheriff for every thousand square miles they’ll start thinking about what they’ve lost…
Chet
If it helps any, I think Visa and Mastercard are stepping on the government’s monetary authority, and that there should be a government-issued bankcard for electronic purchases, bill pay, ATM’s, that sort of thing. Free to all, no usage fees for merchants or account holders. Fully government subsidized.
Being “unbanked” is a huge problem for the poor and introduces enormous bill-paying costs for them, but I don’t see how paper bills delivered by hand solves that problem, since you pay those bills by check, and the unbanked can’t write checks. Either way they’re driving into town to pay the bill in person via cash.
But it would be a lot cheaper to subsidize internet access for the poor, and a “public option” bank to provide bank-type services, than to subsidize hand delivery of letters to rural people – rich and poor – that doesn’t solve any of the problems of being unbanked in the first place.
gwangung
@Chet: You really are narrow, aren’t you? You can’t take the next step and figure out the by-products of that step.
TenguPhule
Bills and checks. Again, lot of us still do the paper method, individuals and businesses alike. Not to mention government notices, you really don’t want to miss an IRS deadline because the mail never came in time
Chet
@karen marie: So have some pie. But explain to me how hand delivery of letters helps the unbanked, who have to go pay their bill in person via cash anyway. The unbanked can’t write checks, which is how you pay a bill by mail.
mattH
@Chet:
Currently, most light mail is subsidized by the advertizing mail you get. I’m willing to bet a public infrastructure project like “rural internetrification” is millions of times more expensive, with political hurdles you’ll never get over.
I’m a HUGE fan of treating broadband as a public utility. I repeat if EVERY time it comes up, but I’m not stupid enough to think it’s going to be cheap or easy. Perhaps you’d like to explain how corporate-subsidized (remember through advertizing) rural mail infrastructure, which is what we are really talking about, is going to be replaced with internet infrastructure and UPS/FedEx deliveries?
TenguPhule
And Ponies!! With Wings. And Sparkles!
On what planet does the same group of people trying to destroy a cost effective government branch then suddenly turn around and start spending money to help the victims they just screwed over?
Maude
@Chet:
Is that you, Rush?
NotMax
@Chet
Ah, I see it clearly now.
You can assert, but no one else can.
What is there about a variation on price of a government service by a government operation based on physical domicile that doesn’t make it a duty or impost?
You may have the last word; shall ruffle your finely honed sense of personal privilege no longer.
Chet
@mattH: I think you’ll find the reverse is actually true, because junk mail pays a lower rate, not a higher one. The subsidy is exactly the reverse – your 43 cent stamp is subsidizing the Victoria’s Secret catalog.
amk
OT – Serena wins the Olympic Gold.
First woman to win all four Grand Slams and a gold medal in both singles & doubles. Great player.
mattH
@JustAnotherBob:
That is what subsidizes pretty much everything you get that you want to get. It’s the underlying infrastructure created to get you those that makes everything else affordable and reliably received. Not digging at you or anything, but just one of those things?
Chet
@TenguPhule: So we have to protect the status quo at all costs because the only changes we’re “allowed” (allowed by whom?) will be worse?
TenguPhule
Again, citing imaginary numbers made up on the fly.
At least pretend that you’re trying to be serious with your argument instead of coming off as Ayn Rand’s unholy slash fic.
elm
In response to all the trolls objecting to postal subsidies (who are apparently successfully trolling real posters):
I’d like to see how far that $0 subsidy goes to paying for services from UPS and FedEx.
Chet
@NotMax: The fact that it’s not a duty or impost? Words mean things, you know.
Davis X. Machina
@Chet:
It used to.
JustAnotherBob
@TenguPhule:
“”And I can’t work out a scenario in which someones life would be damaged by not getting mail on Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday if it shows up Monday, Wednesday and Friday.””
“Bills and checks. Again, lot of us still do the paper method, individuals and businesses alike. Not to mention government notices, you really don’t want to miss an IRS deadline because the mail never came in time.”
How do we possibly survive not getting mail on Sunday and holidays?
Answer: We plan. Two days without mail is something we experience several times a year.
Baud
If libertarians don’t like subsidizing services in rural areas, whey don’t they just move from urban to rural areas? Why should the nation alter its values to accommodate their lifestyle choice?
Chet
@elm: No, the subsidy we’re talking about is that it costs 42 cents to send a letter to my apartment even if it actually costs 2, and 42 cents to send a letter to a rural homeowner even if it actually costs 3 dollars.
Since letter delivery to high-density urban areas is more efficient than sending a truck out to the back acre to hand-deliver to Farmer Brown, universal flat-rate letter delivery is a massive subsidy to rural homeowners by urban dwellers.
TenguPhule
You want to replace one of the best physical transportation systems we have in the world with “The Internet, and make people pay tons more for stuff, also, bank cards that will like totally not be with fees for the poor”
That’s not a plan. Hell, that’s not an idea. That’s something that you’d need to be +5 just to take seriously.
elm
Therefore, we should rhetorically assist the right-wing in privatizing the USPS? For some of us, survival isn’t our highest aspiration.
BigSouthern
@Chet:
Changing the subject doesn’t make you any more sympathetic.
If you have some figures to back up your primary assertion – subsidizing Internet use to the poor and rural is cheaper than operating a Post Office – we’d all love to see it. Especially for people who, as I once did, live in places like the mountain towns of North Carolina with plenty of local farms, but almost no Internet access. There was one ISP, and if I wanted access to the ‘net I would have had to pay them to run the line out to my apartment, which also had no phone line and no cable line. And this wasn’t in the long, long ago, this was 2009. Now, multiply that by as many times are there are people living in rural areas. Is it more environmentally sustainable and something we should do? Yes, absolutely. But we can do that AND keep the Post Office.
And speaking of giving people cash or subsidies or whatever, without a universal Post Office what guarantee is there that rates remain flat for non-trivial amounts of time. If we let loose and just have private companies take over, the subsidy I used last month might not cover what they’re asking for this month. Better and more efficient to just offer a universal subsidy for all users via the Post Office.
NotMax
Wondering if anyone has looked into how many of the thousands upon thousands of people who were without power (and internet) for an extended time during that last major outage in the D.C. metro area got slapped with late fees because they couldn’t get online to pay their bills by the due date?
And how much the companies involved pocketed by not waiving said fees unless by direct request.
And how much impact there was on the credit rating and/or interest rates charged after a late fee showed up in people’s files.
moonbat
Forgive me if someone has already pointed this out up-thread, but a lot of internet businesses have their entire business model predicated on the idea of a nationwide postal service. With states now threatening to charge sales tax for internet transactions, all they need is shipping costs to go through the roof.
I don’t understand these “internet solves all problems” people. The internet is like all systems in our society. It is embedded within a lot of other systems. USPS is one of them.
chopper
@Chet:
but that isnt an actual ‘subsidy’. Words mean things, you know.
TenguPhule
And when something inevitably comes up on those three days and you miss the mail, four days to wait is just the same as two days right? And its not like compressing the delivery times will result in delays in delivery, am I right?
Chet
@TenguPhule: No. I want to replace subsidized hand-delivery of pieces of paper with information on them with subsidized electronic delivery of information, and use the savings to end Visa and MasterCard’s unconstitutional usurpment of the government’s monetary authority, and end a duopoly that has enormous overhead costs for merchants.
Nobody’s talking about ending the USPS, ending the parcel post, or even ending hand-delivery of letters to rural homes. We’re just talking about not having urban dwellers subsidize that luxury. Seems fair to me.
RossInDetroit, Rational Subjectivist
The dog has informed me just now that a government employee has invaded his yard and messed with the letter box.
My wife wants to know why after 10 years of this he still barks at the mailman. Because it works, that’s why. He barks at the invader and the invader leaves.
This is kinda like how the neoconservative mind works. Put two unrelated facts together and conclude cause/effect. But the GOP is a hell of a lot less cute.
Chet
@elm: “Rhetorically assist”? Jesus Christ, what is wrong with you people?
pseudonymous in nc
@John:
Of course, but the comments section consistently points out that he’s wearing Acela corridor blinkers.
Chet
@BigSouthern: No one’s talking about getting rid of the Post Office.
kay
@Chet:
They use money orders. Poor people use money orders for everything.
NotMax
@Chet
Just have to get this in.
To quote yourself: “Words mean things, you know.”
First class stamps cost 45¢.
Chet
@chopper: That is, actually, an actual subsidy.
karen marie
@JustAnotherBob: Increasing rates would go a long way to solving the problem of insolvency. If postal rates had increased at the rate of inflation, the current 45 cent stamp would cost 90 cents.
Scott S.
@Chet:
To hell with them, then.
Modern conservatism in five words.
@Chet:
You don’t “grow” milk, stupid.
That’s right, it appears in our grocery stores fresh from Reagan’s bounty.
mattH
@Chet:
First Class mail is subsidized by the mass mailing of “junk mail”. First Class has a specified time it has to reach you, junk does not. Non-coded First Class has to be identified and tagged, junk is always coded, or is geographically delivered (know the # of boxes, all of them get one). It gets a cut rate because most man-power outside of delivery is in sorting.
TenguPhule
And I’m sure those warm electron fantasies will comfort you when the power goes out.
Chet
@NotMax: Fair enough. I only buy Forever Stamps, and the last time I did they were 42 cents I think.
karen marie
@Chet: Hey, you’re the one made the argument that they pay bills online. How do they pay bills online if they don’t have a bank? You answer first, because it was your brilliant argument.
TenguPhule
Just the important bits.
What, don’t you have two working hearts?
No? My bad.
Mark S.
@kay:
Exactly. Go hang out at a convenience store in a poor part of town at the end of the month when rent’s due, and you’ll see a ton of people buying money orders.
Chet
@mattH: This isn’t hard, matt. First class mail costs more than junk mail, but the same guys deliver it.
Therefore the subsidy is from first-class to junk, not the reverse. Jesus, think it through.
Linda Featheringill
Okay, it’s OT:
An interesting first-person account of living in central Oklahoma, with heat, drought, and fire. Dkos.
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2012/08/04/1116622/-More-Extreme-Heat-Drought-and-Fires
Apparently this family does not live in the current fire zone, which is good.
RossInDetroit, Rational Subjectivist
@Chet:
Wrong again. I have here a receipt from my last trip to the PO.
“Forever Stamp: $0.45”
YOU FAIL.
NotMax
@Chet
Then in the interest of passing on useful information, you may be pleased to know that all first-class stamps are now forever stamps and no longer have a denomination printed on them.
TenguPhule
If A is B then C must be B as well.
Epic Argument Fail.
First class costs more to mail, but junk mail is 1) easier to deliver and 2)There’s a lot more of it
A lot more.
Chet
@karen marie: No, you’re the one who made the argument that the unbanked rely on subsidized hand-delivery of letters to rural homes to pay bills. You just didn’t think it through.
Subsidized hand-delivery of letters doesn’t help the unbanked; whether they get paper bills or online bills, they have to pay them in person. If you want to help the unbanked, we need to subsidize a “public-option bank”, not hand-delivery of letters to rural homes which doesn’t help the poor unbanked, who anyway mostly live in cities. Most of your unbanked poor are paying into the subsidy, not benefitting from it. How are they helped by that? Have some pie and think about it.
Tripod
Well… it’s not as stupid as his Freidmanesque travelogues.
Hey, I spent 48 hours in Oklahoma City. Clearly the solution to all of their urban development and transport needs is tearing down some freeways.
Thanks Matt. Truly enlightening.
chopper
@Chet:
you paying more and me paying less for a service that takes no taxpayer dollars is not a ‘subsidy’. likewise if con ed decides to fix the cost of electricity across the state it isn’t a ‘subsidy’ either.
BH
Yglesias has a far stronger grasp of economics than most of the morons posting here. He asks, but doesn’t presume to answer, an intellectually honest question. Since when do liberals think we should all subsidize big corporate mass mailers or rich people who have vacation homes in the middle of nowhere?
And when you write something as plainly stupid as “even though he clearly has no fucking clue what the Post Office does in some parts of the country,” you are the one who looks completely clueless. Trust me.
Chet
@RossInDetroit, Rational Subjectivist: Wow, that’s just… wow. Fail, indeed.
TenguPhule
Hate to defend the fail troll, but Forever stamps bought in the past for .42 are the same as .45 stamps today.
That’s why they’re called Forever.
opie jeanne
@Chet: Not all of my bills come electronically. Both water companies I use send their bills in the mail, and while I would love to be able to access my account online, it’s not possible.
But all poor, rural people are on the internet now, right?
Chet
@chopper: Yes, it’s a subsidy when I pay more so that you can pay less. That’s exactly what “subsidy” means.
Scott S.
What always amazes me is that the Modern GOP relies mostly on rural constituents to keep it afloat, and Repubs like Chet want to pay them back by fucking their lives over. After all, Chet doesn’t live in the sticks, so why should he care about what happens to them? The world belongs to him, after all.
TenguPhule
We haven’t even funded the post office through taxes since the 1980s, you moron. They were cut loose from the government to be run as their own based on the fees and postage they collected.
Honestly we would be better off if they were run as government funded. They do a hell of a better job with the money then Farm Subsidies, to say the least.
Chet
@opie jeanne: Never said all poor people are on the internet, now. But paying for them to get on the internet is a lot cheaper than paying for rural people, rich or poor, to get hand-delivered letters at their home at well below cost. There’s a whole thread, here. Maybe you’d like to get caught up with it.
PhoenixRising
@Chet: Wrong. The unbanked buy a money order, increasingly at Walmart rather than the PO. But there’s clearly no reasoning with you: the single horned ponies delivering broadband and subsidized wired banking and training to use all those things to Saratoga, WY, are on the way now. So clearly destroying the existing, constitutionally mandated system we have in favor of something that the same batshit Republicans in Congress will not fund adequately is the pragmatic, green option.
Chet
@Scott S.: I’m not a “Repub.” When was the last time you heard a Republican propose nationalizing electronic payments? Try to keep up, ok?
TenguPhule
No, Mr Bond, I expect them to use the fucking post office to send their payment back like anyone with a little common sense would expect them to. Oh, were you planning on dining in today too?
Peter
Chet: You think that flat-rate postage is a massive subsidy for rural populations, but somehow paying to give them universal broadband access wouldn’t be?
I’m not sure how you think you’re being ripped off by paying far and away the cheapest postage in the land, but okay.
PurpleGirl
Not everyone who lives in a rural area is poor, not everyone who lives in a city is rich or even middle income…
People live where they live for lots of different reasons — they were born there and haven’t wanted to move, some moved for jobs or school, they moved to be near other special people, they wanted to be near forests or a beach or near the cultural resources of a city (of whatever kind). (Not an exhaustive list.)
I’d hate to have anyone — government or not — tell me where I had to live.
JR in WV
@Chet:
Chet,
You say you don’t want people to live in the middle of nowhere and expect a subsidy to get mail delivery. “It’s a choice to live out there…”
True, it is a choice, and people who make that choice GROW YOUR FOOD! If you want to eat, people who live in the middle of no where at the people who grow that food. I think getting mail delivered (to supply prescriptions or Ag Bulletins about how to stop nematodes in lettuce growing, for a couple of examples) is a small price for you metropolitan types (who will STARVE if people don’t live in the middle of nowhere and grow your food) to pay to support the agricultural community.
I live in the middle of nowhere where mining takes place to supply you with electricity and steel, and FedEX calls me to come pick up a package the next time I get to town. UPS sends packages back to the sender when they can’t find my house.
The Post Office has visited our residence on Sunday afgternoon to deliver a priority package. UPS only delivers on M-F. Prices are sky high from private delivery services.
The constitution tell the government that it must run a postal service for a good reason. It enables the country to stick together by communicating!
Arrrgh, why do we have a government if not to supply services like roads, the FAA, regulate industry to keep them from poisoning everyone, deliver the mail, etc?
Maybe we should just all live the best we can completely independent of any social organization, and wear gas masks and filter our bath water through home-made charcoal filters and carry a gun to protect ourselves from car-jackers – oh wait, without roads we won’t need cars, will we?
TenguPhule
The last time they were trying to destroy public gains for private profits.
Chet
@PhoenixRising: Walmart charges almost 4 dollars per money order, according to their website. That’s your cheap solution for the poor?
Here’s a thought – why don’t we stop paying through the nose for subsidized hand-delivery of mail to rich and poor rural homeowners, all in defense of a system where poor people have to fork 4 dollars over to Walmart every time they want to pay a bill?
Horrendo Slapp (formerly Jimperson Zibb, Duncan Dönitz, Otto Graf von Pfmidtnöchtler-Pízsmőgy, Mumphrey, et al.)
@Chet:
See, this guy can’t understand the difference between “either-or” and “both-and”. Nobody here is saying that if we keep the Post Office, we don’t need to do anything else to help poor people. I don’t thin there’s anybody alive who thinks that. And, shit, if you want to help poor people–rather than find some way to excuse your selfishness–then it seems awfully dumb to argue for doing away with a service that helps them now for a fantasy where a government that has any Republicans in it will ever be willing to help poor people get bank acounts or give them free computers and internet.
Now, you say we should try to give them those things anyway. All right. Great. Have at it. Let’s see if we can’t lobby our congressmen and senators to put somethig together. But in the meanwhile, let’s see if we can’t also keep the post office running. We don’t have to choose one over the other.
Joel
Yglesias often rubs me the wrong way, especially because he unnecessarily butchers the presentation of okay ideas. I read that as an argument for raising rates and removing the deficit caused by expensive rural delivery.
I would rather rural rates go up, up, up! Than lose my neighborhood postal service. Just a thought.
NotMax
@Chet
Oh, crap. Shouldn’t, but compelled to respond.
But you are not paying more.
People who cannot readily afford to buy 50, or 100, or 1000 stamps at a time are paying three cents more per stamp than you are, right now.
That’s the marketplace. In one sense, they are subsidizing you.
Peter
@Chet:
Facts not in fucking evidence. Especially given that he taxpayer cost for mail delivery is exactly fucking zip, and any investment in rural broadband would cost a lot of money.
(Money I think we should be spending, for the record! But it’s kind of a whole separate issue)
Scott S.
@Chet: Republican Troll says he’s not a Republican Troll, so everyone should believe him.
Republican Troll hates the Post Office, ate chicken sandwiches on Wednesday, voted for Palin in ’08, will vote for Romney in November.
raven
@Chet: I would just like to say that you are a fucking dick head. Back to basketball.
RossInDetroit, Rational Subjectivist
@TenguPhule:
True but he’s not debating the past. First class postage costs $0.45 now. Forever stamps just allow you to put off the next increase by buying excess at the current rate.
TenguPhule
To bomb brown people and give tax cuts to the rich of ocurse! /Caz in a rare moment of honesty
Chet
@JR in WV:
And I pay them for it. In fact, I pay them for it whether or not I get to eat it, or even whether or not they grow it, because of the massive agricultural subsidies supported by urban tax dollars.
Nobody’s talking about ending the Postal Service, and nothing in the Constitution says that you’re entitled to hand-delivery of letters at cheap rates.
karen marie
@Chet: Well, actually, no, that wasn’t my argument, it was your argument that rural areas shouldn’t be subsidized* because they can just use online banking. I merely pointed out that many poor people don’t have bank accounts. You may not realize this but mail is a two-way street. People not only send things through the mail but they receive things as well. For 25 years I did not own a car but until you came along it never occurred to me how badly I’ve been ripped off by having to subsidize other people’s use of the highway system. And don’t bother telling me that trucks delivering goods and services use them as well, because they can just as easily use local roads, and if there aren’t any? Well, too bad. That is, according to you, the cost of doing business.
*As someone else pointed out, the USPS has operated solely on revenue since 1980, so it is in fact not a subsidy.
Bobby Thomson
@Linda:
FTFY. Yglesias ain’t no liberal.
geg6
@gVOR08:
Yeah. Such a great good guy. Maybe you don’t remember his Iraq war cheerleading, but I do. Along with his dozens and dozens of libertarian stands, especially his anti-teacher rants (which is priceless considering that my dog spells better than he does). But that one really stands out for me and represents why he’s never been one of the “good” guys.
JustAnotherBob
@elm:
We should be bigger, more intelligent people than the right-wingers.
Just because they push an idea is not sufficient reason to oppose the idea. That’s the sort of thinking (on the part of the right) which is causing so much of problem today.
“Oppose renewable energy! Hippies thought of it!!!”
I’m in partial agreement with the right. Our government should be efficient. If they come up with a way to cut costs without damaging function then I think we should incorporate it. Even a blind pig sometimes finds an acorn….
Schlemizel
Probably not a lot of you old enough to remember the pre-deregulated airlines. Service was fast, on-time and covered rural America in ways that the current nightmare does not. Also, guess what? The airlines made a profit.
Deregulation has degraded service, particularly to rural America making economic growth there more difficult. Flights are now cattle cars, poorly maintained and stressful – and, unless you hit the exact right moment to buy your ticket, not really cheaper. The airlines are all losing money & demanding government handouts.
It would not be hard to imagine the exact same sort of future if the wingnuts succeed at killing the USPS
Chet
@Horrendo Slapp (formerly Jimperson Zibb, Duncan Dönitz, Otto Graf von Pfmidtnöchtler-Pízsmőgy, Mumphrey, et al.): And nobody here is saying we shouldn’t keep the Post Office, just that we should stop subsidizing hand-delivery of letters to rich and poor rural homeowners.
pseudonymous in nc
@Chet:
But the operation of post offices and post roads does happen to be a specific power of Congress — heard of a guy named Ben Franklin? big on postal service — and by the 19th century, the concept of universal flat-rate letter service was regarded as politically valuable. It still is. In addition, the post office remains the point of contact for the federal government in the big, sparsely-populated parts of the US. I’ll happily cover that subsidy; it’s several orders of magnitude better than the stuff that goes into a farming bill.
As others have said, you and Yglesias are trying to evaluate a public service with an explicit civic function by the standards of commercial freight shippers. That’s dumb.
Bobby Thomson
@Omnes Omnibus:
Or this. Better said.
mattH
@Chet
So, if logically we as first-class mail customers are subsidizing standard-rate mail, why isn’t standard rate going up? Seems like to me, instead of attacking rural mail patrons, you’d be better served going after the direct-mail advertisers, if they really are the issue of why it costs you so much to mail your first class items.
Dennis SGMM
@Chet:
Fuck that half-assed solution; come live in One Big Room in One Big Building. Nobody gets nothin’ for free, see? Ya’ wanna’ take a shit? Bring some quarters for the One Big Bathroom. Ya’ wanna’ cook some food so that you can take a shit? Bring some quarters for the One Big Stove.
It’ll be Utopia, I tells ya’.
Mark S.
@Chet:
Where do you get your information, dude? Wal-Mart charges $0.60 for regular money orders.
Commenting at Ballon Juice since 1937
They already have that. FAIL!
kay
@Mark S.:
Money orders are huge. They were huge when I worked at the PO, too. The nice thing about a PO money order is one can cash it in at the PO.
Poor people have this whole transaction system that revolves around money orders.
When SS went to direct deposit of SS checks, a lot of older poor people were terrified. I used to pull out the SS checks and distribute them first, because they’d be congregating in the lobby. It was just easier and less stressful for everyone rather than making them wait 3 hours while I “sort and case” all the mail.
karen marie
@Chet: What do you think postal service is? Mother of god …
SiubhanDuinne
@Omnes Omnibus: It was nice, given turning 70 and all.
And in keeping with the theme of this thread, I received several birthday cards, real paper ones, addressed by hand, with a stamp stuck in the upper right corner of the envelope, delivered in a timely fashion by the USPS.
Bobby Thomson
@gnomedad:
Too often forget? No, there’s a reason you don’t ask people if they would prefer the cash. Most people suck at cost-benefit analysis and don’t plan for the future. If recognizing that most people in this country are fucking idiots makes me an elitist, I guess I am one.
chopper
@Chet:
no, it isn’t. just because you pay more for something and i pay less does not mean i get a ‘subsidy’. if you pay less at the movie theater than i do cause you’re a student, i am not ‘subsidizing’ you.
Chet
@karen marie: And I agreed that many people don’t have bank accounts.
But subsidizing hand-delivery of letters to rich and poor rural homeowners doesn’t help any poor person have a bank account, and it actually harms the urban poor who have to pay into the subsidy instead of benefitting from it.
Well, yeah. You got hella ripped off, because not only did your income taxes pay for roads you didn’t use, a whole hell of a lot of your non-road transportation spending went to pay for roads, plus you suffered all of the negative externalities of living near roads, of having your cities planned around road use instead of walking, of the carbon expelled by car engines burning gasoline, and so on.
There’s actually really good reasons that roads aren’t a universal benefit, that they have negative externalities that fall on those who don’t enjoy the benefits of using a road, and that unique among transportation modalities, roads aren’t expected to run at a profit and thus enjoy enormous subsidies from even the non-driving, non-delivery-receiving population.
None of that is to say we shouldn’t have roads, but it’s worth considering whether we should have roads that benefit the few but place a burden on all. And someone who says “we need to have roads so that poor people can drive in from the suburbs and receive things from Amazon.com” needs to think long and hard about who is out of touch in this discussion.
NotMax
@ Schlemizel
Thank you, thank you, thank you.
Purposely held off playing the airline card in the hope someone else would.
Thank you again.
Those were golden days indeed.
Chet
@chopper: Uh, yes, you are subsidizing me.
raven
@kay: When I worked at the PO we unloaded truck loads of returned records from the Columbia Record Club. I was so happy when they fired me I never looked back.
opie jeanne
@MikeJ: Not only that, but my dad is 94. I do not want him paying his bills electronically. He has a computer and internet service and is not “rural poor” but he is elderly and his understanding about how to avoid viruses and hacking is … well, he’s still on AOL because he thinks that protects his computer from viruses, if that tells you anything. He is not senile, far from it, he’s just not as computer-savvy as some of the rest of us, and he is not alone. (He lives with my sister and she’s just now learning to pay her bills online, which worries me.)
I’m 62, I pay my bills online, even the ones that come in the mail, but my husband who is 65 and a retired engineer would struggle mightily at this, not because he’s stupid or senile, but because not everyone is in love with the internet or interested in using it. I have to keep a notebook with a list of the bills we pay that come in electronically and no longer come in the mail, complete with passwords, because if something happens to me he won’t know how to do this. He’ll probably have to get one of our kids to come over and help him.
Oh, and that’s something else that doesn’t cost me anything right now, my bank mailing out payments without charge for me.
Chet
@pseudonymous in nc: No, we’re evaluating it by whether it is the most cost-effective way to fulfill that civil function. Why is subsidized hand-delivery of letters to rich and poor rural homeowners the best way for the Federal government to stay in contact with Americans?
chopper
@TenguPhule:
OMG, us one-at-a-time stamp buyers are subsidizing chet’s punk ass! he paid less for stamps than i do! fucking city slicker d-bags.
chopper
@Chet:
you need to learn what a ‘subsidy’ actually is.
different-church-lady
The reason junk mail gets discounted is because it’s pre-sorted. You don’t get the discount just on the volume. You get the discount based on the fact that you’re doing the work the post office would have to do otherwise. Dump a million pieces of mail in the system, but don’t bundle it up by zip code and according to postal regulations, you’re gonna pay the same rate Joe Mechanic does to put one piece in.
BigSouthern
@Schlemizel:
Those that aren’t, but would like to read more could do worse than to check out “America: Want Went Wrong?” by Donald Barlett and James Steele. They have a fairly thorough examination of the negative effects of deregulation on airlines, highway buses, and trucking.
chopper
here’s a hint: the pricing structure at the movie theater is not one.
Chet
@chopper: I like to think of it as “buying stamp futures.”
raven
Whew,USA USA.
pseudonymous in nc
@Chet:
No, you’re pulling shit out of your ass, as well acting as if the cost of implementing the “Chet FYIGM Rate” is zero. Stick with trolling Pandagon.
Chet
@chopper: I know what a subsidy is. It’s when I pay more in order to enable you to pay less, like I told you. If that happens at the movie theater, it’s a subsidy. If it happens so that you can get cheap mail at your house in Bumfuck, Idaho, it’s also a subsidy. Maybe you’d like to present an argument besides “nu-huh, you’re a doodyhead.”
gbear
@karen marie:
Agreed. He’s really reduced himself to slinging poo the farther he gets into trying to defend himself. Using the source of milk as a reply to an argument? Really. Low class troll’s gotta troll.
Mark S.
@raven:
How are you watching basketball? I’ve got trampoline in the pinkest venue I’ve ever seen.
Chet
@pseudonymous in nc: If I thought that we were having a discussion about cost-effective policy, then I’d put some numbers together. But people here act like there’s a constitutional right that only rural homeowners have to get cheap mail.
It’s nothing but another enormous bullshit government subsidy for claustrophobes who can’t live without their giant drafty McMansions and ample parking. Fuck ’em.
different-church-lady
@Chet:
Massive?
Chet
@different-church-lady: Yeah, massive. Hand-delivery of letters to rural households actually costs quite a bit.
chopper
@Chet:
pro-tip: actually look up what a ‘subsidy’ is. words mean things, you know.
JR in WV
Chet is obviously an ID ten – T republican greedy butt. There is on point to discussing issues about anything with him as his mind (using the word loosely) is made up about everything.
Anything that doesn’t make a profit is unworthy of his interest.
Chet, put you head where the sun don’t shine, and push hard until you disappear! Never darken my day with a comment anywhere I might read it, because you negatively affect my mental health by transmitting your mental illness to others.
Greed is a despicable way to focus your mind, and it is a shame you have dedicated yourself to raising greed to the highest level of importance.
ETA: You suck, and deserve your miserable outlook on life!
different-church-lady
@Chet: OK. Can you tell me what the ratios are?
NotMax
@opie jeanne
Hear you loud and clear.
My mother, no intellectual slouch (she speaks 10 languages fluently and is in classes for #11) or culturally (maintains a season pass for the Met and makes an annual sojourn to Tanglwood, among other things) has zero facility with home computers (the first time she ever touched one she was already past 80), and keeps up paying for AOL monthly because my now dead step-father had an e-mail account there.
honus
@gnomedad: Also, I’m a bit puzzled about the talk of a “subsidized” service, since the USPS has been required to run at a profit for the past three decades.
Also, regarding subsidies for those who don’t need or deserve them, could Exxon maybe do with fewer than eight carrier groups securing shipping lanes for its product?
ChrisNYC
Just a reminder Megan McArdle wants more USPS service, not less. She is horrified that her letter carrier is so RUDE as to not knock on her door and alert her to packages being left. I believe what she would like is, KNOCK, KNOCK, “Miss McArdle, your package, ma’am. Oh and congratulations on your wedding, ma’am.” That’s her dream, anyway.
mattH
@Chet: Still haven’t got a response. If first-class really is subsidizing standard-rate, and with the number of standard-rate items sent, why isn’t standard-rate increased? A small increase would seem to cover both your whinge (rural prices) and keep urban costs down.
Chet
@JR in WV:
Jesus Christ. I’m literally talking about what I think we should give to the poor for free – health care, internet access, electronic bill pay and check cards, maybe even cash money – and all you can do is ignore my arguments, assume I’ve said anything about getting rid of the Post Office (I haven’t), and figure everybody here is against me, so I must be The Enemy.
How about you go fuck yourself. I don’t vote Republican and I’m opposed to voter ID laws. 100% opposed. I think even felons should get to vote. But, of course, not knowing what the fuck you’re talking about doesn’t stop someone like you from posting.
different-church-lady
@ChrisNYC:
Chet
@mattH: Um, because it’s subsidized by the First-Class rate. When it gets more expensive to send standard mail they raise the First-Class rate to cover it. Thanks for proving my point, and next time, think harder before you post.
different-church-lady
@Chet: Maybe you should ask yourself what you’re doing to invite all this duck hunting into your life right now.
gnomedad
@karen marie:
Actually, I completely agree. One of the reasons we don’t have a sane welfare system such a negative income tax is that it is insufficiently punitive and judgmental — if we gave those lowlifes money, they’d just spend it on booze. So, yeah, in the real world, I support many existing approaches as the best available option.
@Bobby Thomson:
Yeah, well, that’s one of the reasons I support Social Security more or less as is. Sometimes paternalism is appropriate. But, sometimes not.
Chet
@honus: The subsidy, as pointed out above ad nauseum, is that urban dwellers pay a lot more above cost for their mail delivery so that rural dwellers can have mail delivery at the same price.
different-church-lady
@Chet: Yeah. OK. What’s the ratio?
Chet
@different-church-lady: I’m defending a good idea against the Balloon Juice Seven Minutes Hate. I’m standing up for something the hated Matt Yglesias said.
That, apparently, is all it took to earn universal enmity. Oh, and I guess I addressed some people in the condescending, assholish manner they used to address me. Sorry, I must have missed the memo that said I had to wade through a river of shit while somehow keeping my britches clean.
Chet
@different-church-lady: 2 to 1.
different-church-lady
@Chet: Not that those are invalid answers, but they’re not the one I had in mind.
Emma
And the outcome of 193 posts is…. Chet will never give up his views because he prefers to think of his pocket before his fellow human beings.
Libertarians…. pah!
Emma
Oops. It was 198 when I started posting. Fast and furious typing there, folks.
kay
@raven:
I know. Book clubs, CD clubs, I used to get such joy out of stamping them “refused”.
As you know, though, Raven, lots and lots of veterans work at the PO, I was the only non-veteran at a lot if the “stations” I worked, so don’t be too hard on the PO :)
The Postal Service was great for me. I had to learn how to work with 3 different unions, the insanity of the general public, and the terrifying Postal Inspection Service, who have enormous police power.
I quit because I had other plans but I loved the place. I learned a lot.
different-church-lady
@Chet: Have a hard time believing it. Source?
And, personally, if I’m paying 23 cents more than the true cost to me as a near-urban dweller so that Jim in Montana doesn’t have to pay 90 cents, that’s not really something I’m gonna make a big stink about.
Gremcat
As stated it is not a federal subsidy so no one is forcing you to pay for it. If you urban dwellers don’t want to subsidize the rural areas then pay the $8 the FedEx would charge you to send a letter to your next door neighbor.
mattH
@Chet:
Um, no, I didn’t prove your point. Direct mailers use USPS to advertize. It’s their business model. If rates go up, they either pay them, switch to a different carrier, or go out of business. Once again, why aren’t you suggesting we raise their rates? Why aren’t you suggesting we remove their subsidy, much like you suggest we remove the rural subsidy? Or does that just get in the way of you getting your rural hate on?
Jonathan
@chopper: @Baud:
Yes, living in a remote rural areas is a lifestyle choice.
Also, a “subsidy” is routinely used to define government intervention where the market fails to serve people. Clearly, the “market” fails to provide rural areas with delivery of parcels at a flat rate of 49 cents, so yes, we subsidize rural mail delivery to a certain extent. We also subsidize; rural electrification, rural telephone, rural broadband, rural airports, rural railroad (freight and passenger), rural roads, etc. These are things that private market actors wouldn’t provide, because it isn’t worth the cost, and they’re also things that probably don’t generate positive ROI for the taxpayers. That’s not to say we shouldn’t do those things, but it is the case that the rural lifestyle is heavily subsidized.
Also, Mistermix doesn’t have an argument here. Why does anyone need to get mail 6 days a week? Why not 3 days a week? Should we really pay billions of dollars a year to provide postal service infrastructure in every little town because seniors forget to refill their medications? It seems like those billions of dollars could be more effectively spent solving that problem, and others like it, in a more efficient way.
Chet
@Emma: I’m literally talking in this whole thread about what I believe we should give to the poor for free. Even cash money. And I’m perfectly happy to pay.
But I don’t see what purpose it serves to waste subsidy dollars on hand-delivered mail to rich rural homeowners. Why the hell do the Waltons need me to pay to keep their mail cheap?
NotMax
The solution is obviously to require Postal ID to buy stamps.
Urban zip code? Lowest price
Non-urban zip code? Sign over your first born. Plus a dollar.
/snark
(For what it may be worth, lived in midtown Manhattan for some years before fleeing to someplace I could tolerate.)
different-church-lady
@mattH:
Pay attention to what the man actually says (as painful as that endeavor might be).
shecky
Sorry, folks. Yglesisas is absolutely right here. The inability of liberals to face their own bit of unreality is what dooms them in America.
different-church-lady
@shecky: You’re a bot, aren’t you?
Horrendo Slapp (formerly Jimperson Zibb, Duncan Dönitz, Otto Graf von Pfmidtnöchtler-Pízsmőgy, Mumphrey, et al.)
Chet, I’d like to humbly give you a little advice: Fuck off.
All right, that was kind of dumb of me. But I hope you might learn something if I spell out for you why I wrote that. It’s because you’re coming across as a dickwad. I mean that in the best possible way. No, really, I do. See, I didn’t say you were a dickwad, only that that’s how I’ve come to see you in the short time we’ve spent together here.
Now I don’t know you, and I don’t know whether you’re a Republican troll who’s showed up just to fuck with people, in which case I’m wasting my time; or whether you really are trying to make a sincere argument. I’m going to assume that you are sincere for now, though. And let me tell you, again, I don’t know whether you’re willfully misreading what people are writing or whether you’re just bad at this. But either way, you need to work a little on trying to understand what people aree saying. I think that the thing about how we don’t grow milk was kind of telling; I’m guessing that you knew that was a dumb, argumentative, overly semantic dickishness. When you write something like that, everybody else will be a lot more likely to just write off anything else you tell them. They’re also a lot more likely to be rude in insulting to you.
That wasn’t the only thing you wrote that put people off, but it was the worst. I know I might be throwing away my time here, but I’m doing this because, well, I haven’t seen you here before, I don’t think, and I’m guessing you’re new. And I’m guessing that you’ll be back. And if you come back, and if you’re writing here in good faith, and if you don’t want people to jump all over you and write snotty things as soon as you show up, then I’m just saying you might want to look over the stuff you wrote here and see if you can’t learn something from it. If you don’t, then every time you show up, you’re likely to get a chorus of other “Fuck off.”s when we see you. Just a thought, not a sermon.
Chet
@mattH:
Right. And the USPS subsidizes that business model by passing on the increased costs of delivering Standard-rate junk mail to First-Class mail users. That’s why First-Class mail costs increase and standard rates stay the same – the standard rates are subsidized by the First-Class rates. It’s a giant giveaway to junk mailers.
How are you not getting this?
arguingwithsignposts
Well, way late to this thread, but I just wanted to add a hearty Fuck You, You Entitled Little Twit to the chorus wrt Yglesias.
different-church-lady
@Chet:
The Waltons were poor.
Yes, now I’m just taunting you.
pseudonymous in nc
@Chet:
If you can’t discern the difference between a public utility that stresses the common bonds between Americans and zoning laws that stress the opposite, then there’s no helping you.
Baud
@arguingwithsignposts:
It’s never too late for a FYYELT.
pseudonymous in nc
@Chet:
FWIW, I don’t hate Yglesias. I do regret that he remains deliberately blinkered to the lives of people who weren’t raised in privilege along the Acela Corridor, because it seems like an incredibly constrained frame of reference and sympathy.
gnomedad
@Jonathan:
As my other comments suggest, I support asking these kinds of questions, but I have to admit that in the current climate of GOP obstructionism, it’s probably a lot easier to retain an existing, if inefficient, program than to start something new.
mattH
@different-church-lady:
ctrl+f+suburban=2 comments, yours and one not-Chet. He says rural postal service shouldn’t be subsidized. Show me where he’s said suburban. If he meant suburban, he should have said as much, instead of saying rural.
@Chet:
Seems like I “got it”. Now answer the question. If standard-rate is being subsidized, why aren’t you just as forceful in advocating for the removal of THAT subsidy as the rural one? Perhaps to the point where BOTH rural and non-rural are then subsidized at sustainable levels?
Liberty60
The League of Ordinary Gentlemen has a concurrent post on this, so I will just duplicate my thoughts from there-
Why is the USPS such a fixation for the right?
Its established that the unionized, government controlled USPS is competitive with the unionized private UPS, and the nonunion private FedEx; It offers pretty much the same service for about the same price.
Yet we constantly are hearing calls for it to be destroyed.
Why?
The only answer I can think of is that the mere existance of a successful public entity is an irritant to the right, a living breathing challenge to their worldview.
Chet
@Horrendo Slapp (formerly Jimperson Zibb, Duncan Dönitz, Otto Graf von Pfmidtnöchtler-Pízsmőgy, Mumphrey, et al.):
Look, if you can’t exercise judgement, and determine if an idea is good regardless of the attitude evinced by the person presenting it, that’s really your problem, not mine. And I notice that somehow, to you, “acting like a dickwad” only seems to subtract from my position and not those articulated by chopper, karen marie, or Mistermix up there at the top.
Sorry, but when did Balloon Juice become a place where ideas can only be expressed in the politest and least-confrontational terms possible? I notice you don’t seem to have any opprobrium to spare for anyone else. Why is my language the only one you feel like policing?
How about you take your own advice and just fuck right off?
And you don’t think it was “overly semantic dickishness” to have brought up milk in the first place? Really? In a thread about the Post Office? Fuck right off, dickmeat. If you had even directed even a tenth of your sanctimonious horseshit at anybody else, I might have taken you seriously. Take your Attitude Police act somewhere else.
Villago Delenda Est
@Chet:
you.are.an.idiot
Seriously. You have NO FUCKING CLUE how difficult it is to provide fucking electricity to rural areas, let alone internet service. If you left it up to the private, profit seeking sector, the grid would end in the suburbs.
Phone and internet service in rural areas is notoriously expensive to provide, due to the need for the infrastructure to carry it. Private for profit entities are LOATHE to do so, because their return on investment takes much longer to be realized. In the modern age of ADD MBAs, who demand ROI (and their bonuses) in the current fiscal quarter, forget about it. They’re not going to sink their precious money into providing even a slow ‘net link to Bumfuck, SD out in the middle of fucking nowhere.
The same issues that apply to rural post offices apply to rural telephone and internet services.
Gus diZerega
I have long since stopped reading Yglesias. This reinforces me in my decision. There is a concerted effort by the right and stupid supporters to eliminate any concept of “we” of a community of citizens, replacing it with a sociopathic economist’s dream of a bunch of self-interested ‘rational’ choice acolytes of Ayn Rand, all imagining themselves little John Galts.
Horrendo Slapp (formerly Jimperson Zibb, Duncan Dönitz, Otto Graf von Pfmidtnöchtler-Pízsmőgy, Mumphrey, et al.)
This is off topic, but I guess it’s never the wrong time to bring up the fact that Mitt Rmoney is a loathesome snotfuck…
muddy
Chet keeps moving goalposts. Now it’s why should he subsidize *rich* rural people. What happened to the poors that you want to give all the free stuff to – only not postal service. Anything but that. The fact that you bring up your supposed liberal views on completely unrelated topics has nothing to do with the USPS discussion. I suppose you think saying these things establishes some kind of liberal cred, I dunno.
A wealthy Hampton’s woman was arguing with my friend the other day, saying that everything Romney says is true, and everything Obama says is false. Her proof? She’s a lawyer! My friend said, You are incorrect, and my proof is that I have blue eyes. It was perfect.
It’s like that. Personally I think Chet may be DougJ getting back into the swing of things. I mean, how many urban liberals are you going to find named “Chet”?
NotMax
@Liberty60
Or (and giving a lot of presumed credit for foresight here), that once the postal service is privatized, they can advance to going after the post roads, and privatize the entire highway system.
That’ll make for some fun times, huh?
different-church-lady
@mattH:
Agreed. My snark encompassed the idea that it would appear Chet’s rhetoric gets rural all munged up with suburban. When you read the totality of his comments (and I use totality in the same sense an insurance adjuster uses the word “totaled”) you can see that his frothing is getting in the way of little distinctions. Like whether people in rural areas are rich or poor, whether they’re in Bumfuck shacks or McMansions, etc.
Chet
@pseudonymous in nc: I’m not seeing any evidence that this is about being “blinkered outside of the Acela Corridor”; I see a lot more evidence that this is about the same kind of “only rural Americans count as Americans” blinkers that you usually see on Sarah Palin. Only one in five Americans live rurally, but they get something like 60% of Federal and State tax expenditures. We’re literally starving the infrastructure in our cities for cheap rents and services for the minority of rural Americans, hardly any of whom are actually “poor.”
muddy
@Chet: You don’t grow milk, hur hur. But you do grow the grass and other feed for the cows, and you then have to bottle it and drive it around. My milk comes from a local dairy, it’s amazing how far in the future the pull date is, because it’s not traveling all over.
And you know what, I have done a blind taste test on different local milks, and always choose this one. I don’t know if it’s the cows or the grass, but this milk was grown the best.
mattH
@different-church-lady: Sorry, Got personally inflamed, and it sooo seems like you are right.
Once again, my apologies.
ChrisNYC
@different-church-lady: Better! Thanks.
muddy
@Villago Delenda Est: Parts of Vermont did not get electricity at all until 1968, that’s how hard it was.
different-church-lady
The ridiculous thing about some of this debate here is that UPS doesn’t distinguish between rural and urban either. They zone things up according to raw distances. It costs me the same to send something to urban San Francisco as it does to some cabin on the outskirts of Napa.
Chet
@Villago Delenda Est:
Great, but you know what, moron? We don’t send electricity to rural areas inside of stamped envelopes.
Nobody’s talking about privatizing the Post Office, nobody’s saying that privatization is better than public services, nobody’s making any of the arguments you spent all that time and effort responding to. How about you reply to me like you’ve read what I have to say instead of just assuming I’m someone who showed up as a Republican practice target? Stupid asshole.
different-church-lady
@muddy:
And they’re still pissed off about the change.
Chet
@muddy:
Well, yes. Why should we subsidize rich people?
Baud
@different-church-lady:
Yeah, the whole concept of a “subsidy” depends entirely on how one chooses to allocate the costs of an operation.
different-church-lady
@mattH: Ain’t nothin’.
Villago Delenda Est
@Chet:
You’ve moved beyond idiot. Don’t know how it’s possible, but you have.
You don’t understand logistics at all. This is why you fail.
I’d call you dumber than my hammer, but I respect my hammer. It can do useful work.
NotMax
@Chet
different-church-lady
@Chet: I must say I admire your dogged attempts to open up a new front in the class wars.
Chet
@muddy:
So does mine. In fact, the first time I had milk that hadn’t come a hundred miles to my store was after I moved to the city, because even growing up in rural Minnesota – a dairy state! two miles from a huge dairy farm! – it wasn’t cost-effective to have a localized milk distribution chain.
My name’s not actually “Chet”, by the way, just like yours isn’t actually “muddy.” So there’s no need to speculate on whether I’m liberal enough to be right based only on my name. You’ll have to assess my ideas the hard way – by exercising independent thought and judgement about them in isolation from the way in which they were presented.
chopper
@Jonathan:
nope. a subsidy is when the government provides money (either directly or via incentives) to a business or sector to encourage the production of goods or services that would otherwise not be undertaken due to a lack of profit. the PO is self funded. they have this pricing system in spite of not receiving money from taxpayers, not because of it
now, there is one part that does receive gummint money, that is regarding service to the disabled. you could argue that disabled people are ‘subsidized’ with regards to mail service.
Horrendo Slapp (formerly Jimperson Zibb, Duncan Dönitz, Otto Graf von Pfmidtnöchtler-Pízsmőgy, Mumphrey, et al.)
@Chet:
Dude, I’m not telling you that you have to stop behaving like a dickwad; I am pointing out that, on the chance that you are sincere and are trying to sway people to your side, it would behoove (I like that word; I don’t really know why) you to behave less dickwaddishly. And, no, I didn’t single anybody else out here; but nobody has shown the consistent, reliable top-shelf dickwaddishness that you have in this thread.
Yes, I know, the “Fuck off” was unhelpful and rude, but I put that in to show you the reaction that your attitude brings about. Lord knows, you’re free to write anything you want here, and word it any way. That’s one of the many things I like about this place. But if you want people to listen to what you have to say, then it helps not to alienate people.
You say this:
And, in utopia, it would be true. But, people being the social animals that we are, you can’t reasonably ask, if you write snotty, dismissive or insulting things, that people overlook that and answer only the merits of what you’re saying. People don’t work that way. And you’ll have much less reason to feel aggrieved and pissed off here if you bear that in mind.
I’m not the Attitude Police; I don’t have the authority to cast you from this site, and I don’t want it. And though you might not believe this, I’m trying to give you some advice. I know that itself sounds condescending, and I don’t want it to, but you seem to be the one here who’s getting the pissiest on this thread. Some of us find your posts irritating or insulting; some find them more amusing than anythingn else. But you’re the one who seems to feel insulted, attacked and ganged up on. I’m only saying that people here didn’t just randomly choose you to dump their shit on; it’s a natural reaction to what you’ve written. Whether you want to bear that in mind before you hit “Submit Comment” the next time is up to you.
El Cid
Also, why don’t all these people without jobs just go get themselves retrained? I mean, it might be very difficult for them to do so, but it wouldn’t be terrible.
mattH
@Chet:
Hope you mean total types and not total dollars, because most of the money that is sent out that accounts for things like this, the disparity is primarily from military spending, not “subsidies”. Of course the second most is from transportation projects. Not rural so much as political will.
muddy
@Chet:
Because you started out replying to NotMax this:
And then the other stuff was brought up. Indeed, I do believe that it is overly semantic dickishness for you to complain about someone saying milk to counter your idiotic comment about soy and corn. You started that train yourself right there.
Your arguments are along the lines of “I’m rubber and you’re glue”.
Chet
@Baud: In this case, it seems pretty clear, because the benefits are fairly discreet – the delivery of a single letter is a benefit to you only if you’re either the sender or the recipient. Letters that aren’t mailed by you, or to you, don’t really affect you in any way.
So the fairest way to allocate the costs is to charge senders for the transaction cost of sending the letter. We do that via a system of postage. The subsidy comes in when we charge some senders a higher premium over cost so that other senders can pay a discount rate. In particular reference to this discussion we subsidize senders who send to rural locations by charging a premium over cheaper urban delivery.
chopper
i work for a self-funded government office. several of our services are tiered in pricing depending on the size of the client business. this too is not a ‘subsidy’ as its our own internal pricing scheme, there’s no grant of government money encouraging it.
likewise, we’re not a private business in the same manner as the PO. the term does not apply.
Chet
@Horrendo Slapp (formerly Jimperson Zibb, Duncan Dönitz, Otto Graf von Pfmidtnöchtler-Pízsmőgy, Mumphrey, et al.):
So what you’re saying is that nobody but me is acting like a dickwad, and in doing so, I make everybody act like a dickwad.
How about you fuck right off, already? Jesus Fucking Christ you’re an asshole.
muddy
@Chet:
Are you suggesting a different cost of stamp based on your IRS forms?
Chet
@chopper: Subsidies don’t have to be from the government. Private citizens or companies can subsidize, and frequently do. A subsidy is when I pay more so that you can pay less. It’s actually pretty simple. Words mean things.
Chet
@muddy:
If the purpose of all this is to help poor people, why not? I’d be in favor of means-testing postage, sure, if there was a way to do it transparently. But, my guess is, you won’t accept any idea that I articulate, I guess on account of how ornery I am, or something.
muddy
@Chet: Poor Chet has no sense of humor. My name really is Muddy, ask my mom.
I don’t know why they were not able to transport milk 2 miles in Minnesota in the olden days, it’s completely commonplace where I live. Maybe your mom only bought the store brand milk because they make the price lower, as a loss leader.
Shows lack of initiative that you could not walk 2 miles and get some milk for yourself. Should have called Fed-ex I guess. That would have been pretty cost effective.
different-church-lady
@Chet:
Coming up: the $18.35 first class stamp!
I’m beginning to think the “Doug J dicking with us” theory has some credence.
Chet
@Horrendo Slapp (formerly Jimperson Zibb, Duncan Dönitz, Otto Graf von Pfmidtnöchtler-Pízsmőgy, Mumphrey, et al.): Look, one last chance for you not to act like a gaping asshole. Go up there to post 25 and show me where I “acted like a dickwad” in any way that Mastermix didn’t, and somehow thereby deserved the enormous open sewer that has constituted the bulk of the replies.
Chet
@muddy: They wouldn’t sell it to me. They couldn’t -they didn’t even have bottles. They shipped it all in giant tank trucks to St. Cloud or wherever, and that’s where it was cartoned and distributed.
Chet
@different-church-lady: See what I mean? You saw that name “Chet” and you just completely lost your shit, no matter whether it was a good idea or not.
Horrendo Slapp (formerly Jimperson Zibb, Duncan Dönitz, Otto Graf von Pfmidtnöchtler-Pízsmőgy, Mumphrey, et al.)
@Chet:
All right, I will. No sense in throwing good posts after bad…
Sure, you win. Whatever you say. And I guess it would also be assholish to point out that you’re the only one here who’s said that about me. As opposed to all those who have said the same thing (more or less–I want to be semantically precice here, lest you point out that nobody has specifically called you an asshole or something) about you. You keep telling us you’re a liberal, but considering how quickly and preturnatually you’ve pissed off almost every other liberal here, well, maybe we’d all be better off if you weren’t.
O.K., I’m fucking off now.
mattH
@chopper:
Also the fact that they don’t have to pay certain taxes, primarily property and vehicle, but that is a small price to pay for most local economies. So a true subsidy, but one that I am sure is more than made up for by it’s value in commerce.
chopper
@Chet:
you seriously need to look up the definition of ‘subsidy’.
different-church-lady
@Chet: Dude, that’s not even close to what happens when my excrement gets mislaid.
Really, everyone, just take a deep breath, punch up XKCD #386, and try to learn from it.
muddy
@Chet: I’m sure that your notion that everyone bring their tax forms to the PO everytime they want to buy a fucking stamp is a well thought out policy position. And the USPS will be able to tell at a glance if it is true or not. I know, let’s all buy national ID cards that have a different color for the photo background depending on your income. If you go up or down in income you will need to get a new card. I mean, you could go the barcode tattoo route, but it would be harder to change your “proof”.
I will wait until I see Mittens buy a stamp first.
I don’t reject your arguments because they come from a nom de plume of Chet, I reject them because they are silly.
Don’t want to subsidize the USPS, don’t buy stamps. No stamp futures for you! There is no tax money involved, so you can readily take yourself out of the equation.
Chet
@chopper: Why? You’re the one who doesn’t know what it means:
opie jeanne
@Chet: If you don’t send a letter, ever, how are you subsidizing delivery of letters to rural America?
muddy
@Chet: I suggest that in the ratio of replies, yours are the ones at a volume of enormous open sewer.
Horrendo Slapp (formerly Jimperson Zibb, Duncan Dönitz, Otto Graf von Pfmidtnöchtler-Pízsmőgy, Mumphrey, et al.)
Sorry about the double post. I’m now changing it, so that this post, while pointless and annoying, at least will be less repetetive.
val
@Chet: Where did you get that $4 from? I’m seeing .60 as the fee for money orders at Walmart.
From the Walmart website:
They have a bill-paying service (which you can do using Walmart’s prepaid cards) for which they charge varying levels of service fees depending on how fast it needs to get there, but just buying a plain money order to do your own mailing apparently only costs 60 cents.
The post office itself charges only $1.15 for money orders for $500 or less and $1.55 if the amount is $500 to $1,000. Military postal money orders issued through military facilities are 30 cents and even an international money order is $4.45.
Mark S.
@Chet:
Oh dear God.
mattH
Oooo, “Mastermix”, I like that one.
Still waiting to see why making the standard-rate-payers rates, the “captive market segment”, high enough to subsidize both rural and urban first-class rates isn’t a better solution.
muddy
@Mark S.: I know. It’s gotta be DougJ. Please, please let it be DougJ, this is too much.
different-church-lady
Jackie’s at the crossroads again…
NotMax
@Chet
You’re welcome.
As I happen to reside in one of the highest cost of living places in the country – NOT an urban area, but rather decidedly rural, with an average per square foot rental cost, food cost, electricity cost, water cost, gasoline cost, etc., far, far above all but a tiny number of urban centers, including the urban area closest to here, I guess I’m subsidizing you.
mattH
@different-church-lady: But I just got up, my wife’s at work, and the only other thing I’d be doing is playing video games. And it’s hot as hell outside already.
Icewaterchrist
@Chet</a@<a How are you subsidizing anything? The USPS doesn't use a penny of tax money, so how are you subsidizing anything?
xian
@Linda: how is Yglesias taking a liberal position here?
Chet
@Icewaterchrist: Where did I ever say that it did?
Icewaterchrist
@Chet: How is it subsidized? The USPS uses no tax money.
Chet
@mattH: I never said that it wasn’t. Maybe it’s a great solution. The issue here is that the Balloon Juice horde doesn’t seem to think there’s a problem.
Chet
@Icewaterchrist: Jesus Christ, you know there’s like 300 posts here, right? Read some of them instead of asking me things I answered a hundred posts ago. We’ve already covered how “subsidy” doesn’t only mean “tax money paying for things.”
chopper
@Chet:
ah, the old ‘go to the Internet and find the broadest possible definition at the bottom of the page under all the regular definitions’ gambit. so if I drop a dollar in the collection plate at church that’s a ‘subsidy’. right.
so if you’re pissed that dunkin donuts raised the price of coffee a nickel you’d call it a ‘tax increase’ and when called on it point to one definition that says ‘a burdensome charge’. amirite?
wrb
@NotMax:
It is amazing to me that urban customers still get served by walking mail carriers that take the mail right to their doors.
In rural areas you are often lucky to get them to deliver to a cluster of boxes at a crossroads a mile from your house.
Chet
@chopper: Yes, if you donate to your church you’re certainly subsidizing it. I’m struggling to see what the issue is, aside from your penchant of asking people to look up definitions of words and then complaining when they do.
Not usually, no.
tisalaska
The hole in the wall post office is pretty important if you live in a state that has one major road that doesnt connect up to all places or relies on having a road when there is ice to travel over or airplanes to dare the weather. Lets not forget all those little post offices create JOBS for local people to work in so they can buy $8.00 a galllon milk and $10.00 fuel. Matt Y should come check it out. We have plenty of ice floats that can be reserved for him.
different-church-lady
@wrb:
In some places they insert the letters into roadside boxes without ever getting out of the truck!!!
If I were an insane person I’d feel resentful about that and take to the internet to build an argument against rural dwellers.
gbear
Wow. I’ve gotten two loads of laundry done and low class troll is still trolling.
NotMax
@wrb
True. My mail does not get delivered to the door, not are there walking postal carriers.
Still a distinct improvement over when my address in a certain part of Pennsylvania was like RFD #1,000,000. :)
Chet
@tisalaska:
It’s pretty important to you. It doesn’t matter at all to me, because I moved out of the frozen hellhole. Maybe you enjoy it where you live. I hope you do. But I’m struggling to see what public interest rationale is served by making sure you don’t have to pay a market rate for hand delivery of letters. Make-work jobs aren’t in the public interest. If rural people need money, let’s give them money. But most poor people live in the city, which means that they’re funding the subsidy we’re talking about, not benefitting from it.
chopper
@Chet:
hey, I dropped a penny in the ‘take a penny, leave a penny’ tray at the 7-11 this morning. it’s a subsidy!
I do like how you said a subsidy was when you pay more so someone else can pay less, then defended that by pointing to a generic definition of a subsidy as any monetary contribution at all. Jesus, everything is a subsidy then.
different-church-lady
@gbear:
That has been secured in place for you.
wrb
@different-church-lady:
I’ve never seen one get out of the truck, actually.
They make you put the mailboxes in a row right at window hight right at edge of pavement so they can just roll by stuffing.
A carrier might stuff 50 in 3 minutes.
The boxes are often hazards to driving. Always seem to block your view of oncoming traffic when turning onto a road.
Kathleen
@rikyrah: Indeed. Yes, Rethugs really care about making sure the large number of Blah people who are employed at the Post Office get their pensions. That pension mandate exists solely to create “Bain Food” for some vulture capitalists. Or more appropriately, forget the word “capitalists”.
Chet
@different-church-lady:
That’s not even from a comment, that’s from the post at the top of this thread. And you think this is about hatred for rural dwellers? Jesus Christ, there’s just no end to the sanctimony of you carbon-munchers, is there? Make even the slightest argument that hey, maybe it’s a bad idea to heavily subsidize a highly destructive and inefficient lifestyle; maybe that’s money that could be better spent, and you’d better have earplugs because of the shrieking “OMG won’t someone think of the rurals! Stop these city slickers before they condescend to us again!” In the meantime, Tuvalu is sinking into the fucking ocean while you’re choosing to live someplace where the smallest errand requires you to drive ten miles in your towing-capable SUV.
different-church-lady
@wrb: My god, think of the health insurance savings! No wear and tear on the legs! Why must us overburdened urban dwellers subsidize others like this?
I always enjoy what happens around reply #300.
PurpleGirl
OMG, I’ve been off-line almost an hour, gone to Staples and come back… Chet must be the Energizer Bunny. He keeps going and going and going.
chopper
I forgot – I coughed up a sawbuck to someone I know doing a half-marathon for charity. another subsidy! dang, what didn’t I subsidize today?
cole should rename the act blue contribution link/image to ‘subsidize Obama’.
different-church-lady
@Chet: Now, personally, me, I like the city and the country.
And I have this guilty pleasure: sometimes I like to bait the easily baited.
ETA: I read that statement more as a comment on
Yglesias’ elitist attitude rather than a dis on city dwellers in general.
NotMax
@wrb
Further, just for the sake of reminiscing, also once lived in a place serviced by a private Mom & Pop phone company.
Party lines only (our ring was 2 short, 1 long). After the dial 1 technique became established, had to dial “1” to make a local call, dial “1-1” to call long distance.
Chet
@different-church-lady: I’ll be honest, I kind of hated living in rural areas before I came into this, but thanks to you I really hate the people who live there too, now.
fasteddie9318
This thread has led me to a life-changing decision; I’ve decided to stop watering my plants and just let them die. I enjoyed the tomatoes and whatnot, but I’m tired of subsidizing the oxygen supply of my neighbors.
scott
Any post that points out the tendency of folks like Yglesias to be more interested in their own shiny abtractions than in the lives of real people is OK by me. The fact that many people celebrate this guy as a progressive is pretty amusing to me, when his basic stance is for unregulated capitalism albeit with a (fantasy) safety net. So it doesn’t surprise me that he wants to privatize everything because he’s a big fan of market outcomes, regardless of whether the market actually delivers the social services we want it to, especially to people in vulnerable situations or in underserved areas. Because Yglesias could give half a shit about any of that.
different-church-lady
@Chet: So many people to hate, so little time…
Ben Johannson
@Chet
The only subsidy dollars being used are from those who choose to utilize the services of the Postal Service. It isn’t taxpayer funded. if you don’t want to subsidize rural delivery, then don’t use the postal service. If you don’t want to subsidize inexpensive movie tickets for students, don’t attend that theater.. Your entire argument is absurd, because you aren’t being forced to do anything. You are choosing to spend your money in places which conduct business in this fashion.
Chet
@scott: Where do you see that he wants to privatize the Post Office?
wrb
@Chet:
Yes it is very strange. The dance they do to avoid facing the fact that the biggest driver of CC it the urbanization of Asia- because urban living burns so much more carbon.
The carbon munchers never figure in air travel either. A single overseas flight will increase the footprint so much that it makes that of the bicycling transit rider as large as that of the person who commutes 40 miles a day. Urbanites fly much more than rural resident, who are pined down by livestock and garden. Someone who flies 4 times a year has a Godzilla-sized footprint compared to the person who pokes around in a big pickup.
Not to mention that while the rural resident is eating veggies fresh from the garden the urban carbon muncher is dining of fish flown from Chile and cheese from Italy.
But nooo, all that is invisible.
chopper
@fasteddie9318:
easy solution. just troll around the internet until you find a definition o ‘neighbor’ that actually excludes the people next door. problem solved.
Chet
@Ben Johannson: What I’d like to do is send a First-Class letter at the market rate. Let me know when you figure out where I can go to do that.
scott
@different-church-lady: That’s the way I read the post, too, not as an attack on urban dwellers but as a defense of the rural folks. On this view, it’s Yglesias who is insisting that we all conform to the urban standard of living, and it’s the post pointing out that we don’t all live that way and that some tolerance/understanding ought to be given to others.
Chet
@wrb: If rural Americans lived like rural Chinese, that would be one thing. But they don’t, and in direct comparisons, even including the other factors you mention, rural Americans have a much larger footprint than urban Americans. Rural Americans aren’t any more likely to eat locally; they’re less likely due to rural monocultures and distribution inefficiencies. (We covered this, above.)
Living rurally is enormously destructive to the environment. That’s abundantly clear from the evidence, your nonsense about who flies more notwithstanding. (I flew a low more when I lived rurally because that was the only way to get anywhere that mattered.)
different-church-lady
@scott: I didn’t even read it that way. The place Yglesias inhabits is not the city per se, but the magic kingdom of abstract, self-centered intellectualism, where things and people outside of direct experience are nothing but theoretical.
Chet
@scott: You’re free to all the tolerance and understanding you like – I don’t see anything in Yglesias’s post that was intolerant of rural Americans. The question isn’t about tolerance, it’s about what’s so special about you that you deserve subsidized hand-delivery of letters simply by virtue of where you live. I think it’s instructive that the same people who complain about how it would suddenly cost twenty dollars to send a letter from Bumfuck, Idaho are the ones who complain that $250,000 isn’t much of a salary for a New Yorker because it costs so much to own or rent in New York. Look, you can’t have it both ways.
NotMax
@Chet
Easy peasy.
Look in (or find on the holy internet) the Yellow Pages and look under “Messenger Services.”
First class service. Might be kind of pricey, what with travel costs and all, but whatever the market will bear….
scav
If Chet had to argue this hard, this long, and this it’s because he doesn’t really have a winning argument, merely functioning lungs and fingers.
scott
@Chet: It’s where I think this debate eventually leads. Once you go from a model thinking of this as a universal public service and start subdividing it in terms of market pricing and other variables, I see the slow erosion of the first model in favor of more private service or a hybrid model. I also think that’s where Yglesias wants it to go because of his philosophical commitments to market-based services free of the dead hand of the state (this is a guy who will write mouth-frothing posts about the evils of zoning and business licenses!). So, yeah, I worry about yet another instance where we have a public service that many are happy with but that people want to “improve” by subjecting it to market mechanisms. I don’t like it and don’t think that’s necessary in the big scheme of things.
Yutsano
@Chet:
The USPS is a government service. It is required by law to not run at a profit. Therefore they ARE charging the market rate. They just elect to charge it universally. Why? Because it encourages the maximum amount of participation in the system. You just feel like fucking over people who choose to not live exactly like you.
Older
Chet, you make me so tired.
The Postal Service has accountants who know to the tiniest fraction of a cent what it costs to deliver each class of mail, and each class of mail pays its own way. I know it’s a popular belief that business mail (called “standard rate” these days) subsidizes first class, or that first class subsidizes business mail, but no. Every class pays its own way, and every class has its own rules as to how postage will be charged. Parcels, for instance, normally cost more to send farther, while first class and business rate don’t.
Now, as to why business rate costs less than first class; yes, it is a lot easier to handle. All sorting is done by the mailer. That’s the first saving, and it is huge. Then, you say that it costs just as much to deliver. As a former mail carrier, I am here to tell you that just isn’t so. Neatly presorted business mail saved me literally hours in some cases. You see, there’s more to delivering the mail than just walking or driving around the route. We used to spend about as much time in the station prepping the mail for delivery as we did out on the road. Recent advances in the handling of the mail have reduced that greatly, but the carrier is still ultimately responsible for accurate delivery, and that means taking care,and that takes time.
Another thing the army of postal accountants does is they set the rates to conform with the Postal Commission’s rules concerning profit and loss. The Post Office is not supposed to lose money, but it’s also not supposed to make money, or not much at any rate. The goal is to break even long term. This is why they budget for three years at a time. They set the rates so that ideally, the PO will be ahead after the first year, break even the second year, and lose (but not too much) the third year.
I’m pretty sure that this information is publicly available, so perhaps you could avail yourself of it.
One more comment: A rural mail carrier is more than just a guy (or gal) sticking the mail into a box. He or she is a traveling mini-post-office. They sell stamps and money orders, they accept parcels to mail and collect the postage on a later trip, etc. So it won’t be a terrible blow to the rural resident to “discover” that he can’t pay his bills by mail because he has no checking account. Cause that just won’t happen.
On the other hand, I live right in town now, and I have broadband service (and need it for my current job), and I have a checking account, which I had hoped to keep entirely clear of the internet, because my experience with the internet and money has been that I really need that ten-foot pole. Unfortunately, my husband recently opted for “paperless statements” and now I can’t get mine by mail, and neither of us can print a copy, should we need it, and we do. So I don’t think giving every rural resident an internet connection is going to be the answer. (Was you planning to pay for them connections yerself? Cause I don’t think a lot of the rural folks can afford it.)
Late note: Where I carried the mail, some of the patrons lived forty-five minutes out and over a mountain from the post office I worked from, and even when they got there they were still between fifteen and thirty minutes from the nearest Walgreen’s or equivalent.
opie jeanne
@Chet: Oh, fuck you.
I posted that right as the thread exploded. There were 56 comments showing, so my comment ended up that late in the thread because ComCast sucks.
Chet
@scav: Don’t mistake the intransigence of my opponents for some kind of impotence on my part. No argument can be convincing to those who won’t take the trouble to think about it.
scav
I’m sure he’s also the sort of lofty-brow purist that sits his kids down at age 3, tests them six ways to Sunday to evaluate their potential future earning stream and feeds them according for the rest of their time under his roof and whines when they don’t contribute as per plan to quality of his retirement.
ETA: In other words, you are missing a fundamental part of the equation and don’t even know it.
different-church-lady
@Older:
Wait… you actually know something about the topic? Do internet traditions allow you to post here?
mattH
@Chet: @Chet:
Ah. Concerned with being right, not really with solving the problem. All about you and your needs. You’re a liberal how?
muddy
@Chet: No you don’t want to send mail at the market rate. The market rate is currently 45 cents, and you have boasted of your stamp futures where you bought them at 43.
scott
@Chet: It’s not about being special at all. In my opinion, I think that all of us deserve universal public mail service. As I said elsewhere, I don’t think that’s too much to ask for in the big fiscal scheme of things, and what that means is that you get whatever service you may want and I get mine. Maybe I need it more than you do, or the other way around, but we all get something that makes our live s a little better in a tangible way. I think that’s a good thing. I don’t think it’s a good thing to get into into arguments abut who’s more morally “deserving” just based on where they live. “Use every man after his desert, and who should scape whipping? Use them after your own honor and dignity—the less they deserve, the more merit is in your bounty.”
Chet
@opie jeanne: Well, then blame the legions here who showed up to oppose the idea of subsidizing your broadband access. Ask Mistermix or church-lady why they oppose you beng able to afford effective internet service.
different-church-lady
@Chet:
Has it crossed your mind that perhaps your argument has been thought about?
(FYI: that was, indeed, a rhetorical question.)
Ben Johannson
@Chet:
This is an entirely different argument than you were originally making, and it gives the impression of disingenuousness. You wrote innumerable comments communicating your outrage at how you’ve been forced to subsidize mail. Now you’re saying the subsidy isn’t the problem, your subjective impression of insufficient market signalling is the real problem.
This is right-libertarian nonsense.
muddy
@Chet:
Damn those food producers! Let’s have co-op cows on the tops of highrises! Means tested, of course.
Icewaterchrist
@Chet: Then what are you complaining about then? Use one of the more expensive private services to send your mail and never have to gnash your teeth over it again. I mean, do you get mad at the old lady who gets the clerk to bring her groceries to her car because you paid the same amount for your groceries as she did and you didn’t get the same service? Thereby subsidizing her?
NotMax
No need.
Your impotence is stark and self-evident.
Remember, you first brought up the mention of impotence.
Words have meaning.
Chet
@scott: I don’t see why “universal public service” has to be equivalent to “universal flat-rate public service.” That’s Yglesias’s point and mine. And we can’t simply sit here and not challenge the status quo simply because conservatives might seize the chance to make things worse. The solution to that is to not let them, not capitulate in advance.
Because sometimes those are used for evil! What’s “liberal” about preventing competition among florists by requiring – but only for new entrants – florist licenses?
different-church-lady
@Chet:
That, sir, is a slanderous statement.
Mnemosyne
@Chet:
http://www.ups.com/
http://www.fedex.com/
What, you thought that your mail rates would go down once you started making all of those looters and moochers in rural areas pay their way? Silly boy. Their purchases of postal services subsidize your low postal rates just as much as your purchases subsidize theirs. Take their contribution away and make the Post Office pay all of their urban expenses out of what they can make with urban deliveries and you’ll be paying $5 in postage to send a birthday card across town.
sneezy
@NotMax:
I suppose they might have been, if you could afford to fly at all. But in real terms, airfares under regulation were 2-3 times higher than they are now.
Many more people can afford to fly now. From 1979 to 2002, the number of air miles travelled in the US increased by about 225%, while the population grew by about 28%.
The days of heavily regulated air travel were not as halcyon as some people like to claim.
different-church-lady
@Ben Johannson:
At least it’s not just contradiction.
Chet
@Icewaterchrist: I’d complain if she doesn’t tip. But this isn’t the thread to complain about what poor tippers seniors usually are.
muddy
@Chet:
It’s called citizen equality, Chad.
mattH
@Chet:
Oh god, you are such a troll.
sneezy
@different-church-lady:
To get the best rates, you don’t just have to sort it by zip code, you have go further and sort it by carrier route. So bulk mailers save the USPS even more work than you (otherwise correctly) suggest.
Chet
@Mnemosyne:
Um, just by simple mathematics it can’t work like that. Remember that the Post Office delivers all the mail at cost; that was stipulated above since the Post Office takes no tax dollars.
And it can hardly be more expensive to deliver mail to a high-density area than to a low-density one, due to the economies of scale. That should be a pretty simple comparison for even you – you can’t send half a mail truck out to the Brown farm, you have to send the whole thing. So rural mail delivery must by definition have higher operating costs than urban.
So we see that, no, they don’t “subsidize mine as much as I subsidize theirs.” By definition that would be no subsidy at all. Your post doesn’t even make mathematical sense. And its proven by the fact that the only Post Offices the USPS is considering closing in response to their externally-inflicted (and I share the view that their unique pension funding requirements are an attempt by conservatives to kill another public service) budget woes are ones in low-density areas.
pseudonymous in nc
@Chet:
I’m talking about Yglesias’ sphere of reference being Manhattan, Cambridge and DC and nowhere else. I have serious doubts that he has ever set foot in a public school. He has no real understanding of working a fixed 40-hour week.
Of all the government functions where the rural population gets a good deal, the postal service is by far the one that’s most worth providing. To pick up on what Older said, there is social and civic value in being able to leave a couple of quarters in the mailbox with a letter and have the carrier buy the stamp and leave a nickel; there’s social and civic value in having the mail carrier knock on someone’s door to check they’re okay if mail hasn’t been collected for a few days; and if you’re going to suggest wonkish alternatives to that broad-based social and civic role, they’d better be more than half-baked.
Chet
@muddy: What’s unequal about paying what it costs to have mail delivered to where you chose to live? That seems like perfect equality. Inequality, to me, seems like the massive wealth transfers to and overrepresentation of rural people, on the basis that only rural Americans count as citizens.
muddy
My mail carrier brings treats for the dogs he encounters, they are mostly so happy to see him, but still it can be a hazard. I sometimes give him a bag of treats to be going along on, so I consider that I have subsidized any number of letters being delivered safely.
They should give me a discount on my stamps futures.
Chet
@pseudonymous in nc:
And nobody’s talking about not providing it.
Icewaterchrist
@Chet: I”m not talking about tipping. The store provides a service to some people that need it that you don’t get. Yet you paid the same for your groceries. Do you get mad about that too?
different-church-lady
@Chet:
USPS is considering closing two offices in my town.
My town’s population is about 31,000. My town’s square mileage is about 4.4.
Your move.
pseudonymous in nc
@Chet:
If you want to pay market rate, go with a private carrier, just as you can pay for a case of bottled water if you’re sorely offended by paying the same water rate as someone two miles up the road. Once again, you seem very confused.
muddy
@Chet: It’s clear we need 2 classes of citizens, the thrifty urban and the carbon spewing rural.
pseudonymous in nc
@Chet:
Somebody’s saying that it needs to be provided at a bullshit “market rate”, because somebody is a bullshit merchant.
wrb
@Chet:
If urban Americans lived like 16th century Londoners, that would be one thing. The stench and the buboes might get to be kind of a drag though.
Calculation of the carbon impacts of urban life are distorted because so much is conveniebtly left out- like the impact of air travel, food from exotic locations, and the huge cost in supplying a huge concentration of people living above local carrying capacity.
Before cheap energy, before the auto and train, with very few exceptions, no more than 20% of populations actually lived in towns and cities. In ancient Greece it was 10%. Urbanization is a result of cheap energy.
Pre-auto settlement patterns are more disbursed than current ones. Now, someone living in a rural situation may choose to consume a lot of energy, but it isn’t required by the form– if energy become scarce they can simply drive less and live more like people did before the car. In petroleum-era cities that isn’t a choice- they need huge energy inputs to survive to bring in material and flush waste. Regardless of what the average might be today, the rural floor is lower- it is possible to go lower in energy use.
Living urbanly is enormously destructive to the environment. That’s abundantly clear from the evidence, and from the last 300 years of urbanization.
Chet
@pseudonymous in nc:
How is that social/civic value “broad-based” if it applies, at most, to only a microscopic number of Americans? Again, this is just rural people and their cheerleaders being unable to conceive of the fact that the vast majority of Americans have no experience with mail carriers who will buy some stamps for them or pop their heads in to make sure they’re ok.
I know it’s hard for you to believe but those of us who live in cities count as Americans, too, and we’re entitled to the civic and social benefits of what we’re being asked to pay for. Because, in fact, there’s no broad-based social and civic virtue in subsidizing hand-delivery of pieces of paper to a small number of rural Americans.
NotMax
@sneezy
Chet
@Icewaterchrist: You can have someone carry your groceries out, if you want. Same as if you can use the electric cart-scooters even if you’re not disabled or would have trouble being on your feet that long.
No grocery store has “only old people” carryout service. They’ll do it if you ask.
muddy
@Chet: No you don’t want to get rid of it, you just want to complicate and fuck up the whole system, based on airy fairy ideas such as means testing stamp rates FFS. Damn Chad, it’s hard when you are silly but it isn’t even funny.
Moar absurdity needed.
Sasha
Well, I gotta side with Chet and I do live out in the country. There are huge external costs to living in rural areas that are borne by society at large. The need for the postal service to deliver mail is one of them. We cannot have a rational discussion about what we, as a people, will or will not subsidize without being honest as to what is actually, currently being subsidized. Home delivery of mail to rural areas is subsidized by urban users; it’s why the government closed down a local letter carrier in New York City several years ago.
If nothing else, being up front about the subsidization of rural mail delivery will at least let us tell the “the guvmint never does nothin’ for me” folks to STFU.
It’s also worth pointing out that there are intermediary steps that can be taken to lessen the cost of rural delivery. My SIL, who lives 25 miles outside of Albuquerque, does not get mail delivered to her house. Her mail is sent to a bank of mail boxes that is less than a mile from her home. I live in Suffolk, VA which has rural and urban parts and in the sections farthest out as well as in the surrounding rural areas, the post offices are open 4 days a week, or half the day, or some combination of the two. Our main post office, too, has shortened their hours and now closes for lunch.
I love the post office. I think they do an amazing job and I’d still think that if we had 5 day a week delivery or had to pay more. But there a lot of unseen costs and subsidies exist and it makes sense to be clear about that.
Also, I still have forever stamps that cost 42 me cents. I bought way too many years ago and almost never use the.
Chet
@wrb: No, that’s inaccurate. Living industrially is destructive to the environment, but living urbanely mitigates the destruction. The problem is that modern rural Americans are even more industrial, and reliant on cheap energy, than urban ones.
Chet
@Sasha:
I hope you’re wearing your Nomex knickers.
Mnemosyne
@Chet:
Economies of scale don’t do jack shit when it comes to rent, property taxes, gasoline prices, and maintenance of your vehicle fleet, all of which are — surprise! — higher in urban areas. So, no, even if rural customers are charged more, you’re not getting your postage for 2 cents, because it still costs a lot of money to pick up, sort, and deliver mail in an urban area.
I see you’ve been ignoring the comments from people who actually live in rural areas who point out that rural areas don’t actually get door-to-door service. Ten or 12 customers have their mailboxes in a cluster.
The “high cost” of that rural post office is the person running it, who has to be paid a salary and health benefits and a pension.
Baltimore is a “low-density” area? Washington DC? Charlotte, NC? Cincinnati? Dayton, OH? Minneapolis-St. Paul? Seattle? New Orleans? San Antonio? All “low-density” areas?
You know, it would help if you had the faintest fucking idea what you were talking about before you started posting. It took me 30 seconds to Google that up.
different-church-lady
@Sasha:
Some actual numbers would help the rationality of this discussion, but nobody has offered any reliable ones yet.
muddy
@Chet:
Urbane is the last word I would associate with you, Chad.
JoyfulA
@Chet: Junk mail pays less because of volume and presorting by zip code. It’s still profitable for the post office because the mailers do a lot of the work.
If you send enough Christmas cards, you, too, can get a discount if you presort. Just ask your local post office.
different-church-lady
@Mnemosyne: Forget it, Jake: Jackie has chosen her path, and it isn’t the good one.
wrb
@Chet:
Mail trucks don’t go to individual farms.
Where is the data to back you imaginings?
I’d venture that you’ll see pretty high costs in older urban and suburban areas and lower costs in regions more recently developed. The reason is the post office seems to be hesitant to reduce grandfathered service in high-service areas where people already have mail slots cut in their doors.
But if it is a new or rural neighborhood they will require ganged mail boxes that can be served by truch or force people to get boxes in a PO.
wrb
@Chet:
Urban Americans must live industrially, that is why big cities were a product of the industrial age. Rural Americans can, but needn’t- it isn’t demanded by the form.
Chet
@muddy:
Thank you for proving, then, that your concern for the poor when you justified subsidizing rural hand-delivery of letters was just a convenient pose.
opie jeanne
@different-church-lady: They do that here, deliver from the truck to boxes set in a cluster at the corner. Yesterday, the package that was sent FedEx was delivered by my mailman, who drove up my driveway and rang the doorbell.
different-church-lady
Wouldn’t it be weird if all trolls on the internet were actually Doug J?
Icewaterchrist
My point is that old people need the service and it is offered to them because of that fact, like rural postal service is provided despite the fact that it costs more. Scooters are not provided with the intention that healthy 35 year olds can scoot around the store, they are there for the elderly and disabled and the cost of them is passed along to us. I highly doubt that you’ve seen able-bodied people using the scooters in supermarkets and I’m also sure management would ask them to relinquish them is someone who actually need one asked.
General Stuck
400 plus comments. I had no idea the mail was that popular.
muddy
@Chet: A convenient pose that I have been taking all along, in that your ideas are crap.
Please detail how you would implement a means tested stamp buying program, one that would be fairer to administrate than the current simple system.
different-church-lady
@Icewaterchrist:
If only we had a way to transparently means test the cost of a silverware organizer at Target, then we could solve the carbon footprint issue caused by electric scooters!
different-church-lady
@General Stuck:
And yes you did.
Chet
@Mnemosyne:
Those are exactly where economies of scale help, dumbass. Jesus Christ.
But it doesn’t cost more money. It costs less. That’s the point. You can’t end subsidies and then see prices rise across the board because that makes no sense – if the Post Office isn’t charging anybody at least what it costs to deliver their mail, then how do they get any mail delivered? You’re not even trying to make sense, here.
Yeah, and at my apartment building 250 people have their mailboxes in a single cluster. (We don’t get “door to door” delivery either, but I did when I lived rurally in town.) Takes a single truck to service us, once a day, six days a week. Compared to 12 per truck out in your sticks.
Yes. And you can’t hire half a Postmaster, which means the cost per letter is a lot higher if we’re talking about the Postmaster of Cyrus, MN as opposed to Silver Spring, MD.
The Post Office isn’t closing every post office in Baltimore, Washington, Charlotte, or Dayton. Stop acting like a fucking moron.
Corner Stone
@Chet: Your entire premise has been full of fail as it conflated at least two separate issues. Poor/rural vs adequate dispersion of the commonweal in the form of subsidies.
Primarily, when someone pays more for a good or service than someone else, this is not a subsidy. They are not de facto subsidizing the good or service offered. You can continue to assert that, but you will continue to be wrong.
Second, the USPS is a national security issue. Until, and when, one can assert that a society can achieve a modicum of related connectivity, then the USPS is the answer.
I personally have grown tired of your matoko-chan esque ability to deflect an argument away from your primary argument when you have been shown to fail.
Your freshman level posits that we can somehow exchange the USPS for internet access for the rural poors has been the most amusing thing I have read in quite some while.
Thanks
opie jeanne
@Yutsano: Hi Yutsano, how are you doing? I’ve been wondering about you; hope you’re healing up nicely.
Tripod
@Sasha:
Yeah, lots of heat and not much light in this thread. Mostly trolling and knee jerk team blue cheer leading.
Here is the GAO report.
Mail volume and revenue will continue to decline for the foreseeable future. Starving the pension plan shouldn’t be an option for anyone but RMoney type vultures. Raising rates will only further pinch volume. So they need to retrench infrastructure.
Get the best possible terms for the people and communities being impacted, rather than kicking the can down the road. Denial is an open invitation for a GOP screw job.
General Stuck
@different-church-lady:
I admit I just sat down at the computer and haven’t read many comments. I should have known, however. you are correct./
Chet
@Icewaterchrist: You’ve retreated so far from your original point that there’s nothing left to address. Grocery stores offer the scooter carts as a convenience to their customers; it’s merely a social norm that they not be used by the able-bodied. It’s not something the grocery stores put themselves into the position of enforcing because, in fact, they don’t want to be in the situation of determining who counts as disabled enough to use the scooters.
Corner Stone
@Chet:
And this, specifically, is one the stupidest things I have read here in quite some time.
Chet
@Corner Stone:
You’ve misrepresented my argument (very motoko-chan-esque of you.) A subsidy isn’t necessarily when I pay more and you pay less. But it is very much a subsidy when I pay more to enable you to pay less, and everyone has agreed that that’s the purpose of universal flat-rate First-Class postage. Everyone.
muddy
@Corner Stone: Good post. Succinctly hanging some Chad there.
And Chad, how is it less driving when your carrier has to bring a truckload to one building. Then drives back for the next bldg’s mail, then the next, then the next. My carrier drives a circuitous route, only once. I wonder how much carbon is being emitted by your mail trucks driving back and forth to the PO and probably hanging in heavy urban traffic throughout?
xian
@kay: I think liberals do see that. I don’t get how opposing the USPS is being framed as a liberal position.
Chet
@Corner Stone: So show how, dickmeat. If all you can say is “Chet is stupid”, you’re proving Yglesias’s point that nobody here has any argument about why it should be the focus of the Post Office to provide subsidized hand-delivery of letters to rich and poor rural Americans.
I frequently hear “this is the stupidest thing I’ve ever read” when I’ve just said something that nobody has figured out yet.
opie jeanne
@Chet: You are so damned dense you’re like a brick of lead.
ComCast sucks and it has nothing to do with how rural I am. I live just outside of Seattle. I live four miles from the MicroSoft campus. I have broadband service. I have the fastest broadband available anywhere, or at least that’s what I”m paying for.
And I have neighbors next door on both sides who are not computer savvy enough to pay their bills online (which I do), nor will some of them ever be able to become savvy enough because that’s just not within everyone’s skill set. These are not stupid people, either, nor are they all senior citizens.
And I pay two different water companies through online banking but neither has an online presence. They both send their bills by mail, much as I have pleaded with them to join the 21st century.
Chet
@muddy:
It’s less driving per letter delivered. Surely I don’t have to explain the notion of an economy of scale? Do they just not teach algebra anymore?
muddy
@xian: Because Chad wants to give free everything to the poors, even actual cash money instead of mail service, and this, as well as his self-description, shows he is a liberal.
So there.
xian
@Baud: it’s also in the fucking constitution. some argue that the spirit of that mandate should extend to universal Internet access. can you imagine the boom that would follow (not a Dow 36,000/Rmoney fairydust boom, but an actual boom) connecting everyone in the US to a fat broadband access?
Chet
@opie jeanne:
That’s fine! Those people can continue to pay bills via the post office, which absolutely nobody is talking about preventing them from being able to do.
Icewaterchrist
My point, which I have repeated in each reply is that there are inefficiencies in pricing everyday, everywhere. Do you spend your day being mad about all of them?
@Chet:
This is so divorced from reality that I will drop this discussion here.
chopper
@Chet:
you’d think that you would have issues with tipping, since it is a ‘subsidy’.
Chet
@xian: Nobody’s opposed to the Post Office, Xian.
opie jeanne
@muddy: I guess I should stop growing my own veggies, then. Geez, the damage I’ve done to this property…. oh, wait, I did create several places for the wild things to live and thrive at the edges of this horse acre, where there were none before. It was all mowed grass before we got here. And I don’t mind sharing a bit with the bunnies, squirrels and birds, although I do draw the line at the robins stripping every cherry and blueberry off of my plants. They get plenty, but not all.
opie jeanne
@different-church-lady: I recognized it as such. It was ridiculous.
muddy
@Chet: It’s not less in daily cost.
Chet
@chopper: Everybody should have issues with tipping, since servers don’t get tipped enough. I think restaurants should charge mandatory gratuities instead of leaving it to skinflint customers.
But they don’t, and I live in a tipping culture, so I tip and try to tip well. Maybe you can explain to me why defending the exploitation of service workers is the “liberal” position.
muddy
@Chet: It might prevent them if suddenly the stamp cost $20.
Chet
@Icewaterchrist:
You mean, do I post on my blog about them, a blog which you read and choose to comment on?
No, as a matter of fact, I don’t do that. Mistermix does, though, so why don’t you ask him about it?
Sasha
They do here. At least the delivery vehicles do. I don’t know what criteria the post office uses but every part of Suffolk, the physically largest city in Virginia, gets home delivery. I don’t think that’s true for places even farther out than we are but I’m not sure. I don’t know why we get delivery and my SIL doesn’t.
I don’t have figures although I do feel comfortable saying that it is self-evident that it is more expensive to deliver mail to rural areas than urban areas. If it weren’t It wouldn’t cost me more to get deliveries for which I always pay a surcharge (not UPS but truck deliveries). Often, I could knock off twenty dollars or more, if I could have something delivered in town.
I used to live on Staten Island in a apartment that was one of two twenty story buildings each with twelve apartments per floor. It took one mail man less than a few hours to deliver mail to 480 homes and we were not his only stop. Our current mail man drives to every home which are several hundred feet apart, idles his vehicle while he puts mail in the box. on the busy street leading to our street, he often has to wait a minute or more at each house to get back into traffic. By simple observation, I can say that it is more expensive to deliver mail to the rural areas, just as it is more expensive to deliver mail to suburban areas.
Baked into any flat rate fee (whether mail delivery or public transportation) is the subsidization of some by others because it simply defies reality to suggest that it costs the same amount of money to deliver mail under such different circumstances for exactly the same cost. Maybe it’s different for others but I have no personal relationship with my mail carrier and while I’d like to believe he’d notify the police if no one picked up our mail, I think any carrier would do that.
chopper
@Chet:
one reason I tip well is because I know that others don’t. more subsidies!
besides which, bullshit. when you pay full price at the movie theater, that isn’t done in order to allow old people to get a discounted rate. if you paid 2 bucks less like they do the movie houses would still make bank.
Chet
@muddy: You don’t pay postage by “daily cost”, stupid. You pay to have one letter sent.
muddy
@opie jeanne: Yes, I am rural and like to ruin the environment by growing food, and buying food from nearby. I especially like the way the milk is “grown” here, but damn those cow farts are killing the environment. It’s sure not easy being green.
But at least I have commie stamps.
Chet
@chopper:
Doesn’t seem like the Post Office “makes bank”, though, does it? So maybe the movie theater wasn’t such a terribly good example for you to have raised, now was it?
wrb
@Chet:
The great benefit in the one-price postal rate is to the sender. It is the great freedom of being able to drop something in a mailbox addressed to anyone in this country and know they will get it, wherever the hell they life, without having to calculate their special rate. That is a great freedom and convenience.
opie jeanne
@Chet: At most, you’re worrying about paying a few cents extra for every letter you send. I don’t know your habits, but if they’re similar to mine, we send a letter by mail less than once per month.
When I was a child postage cost 4 cents to send a letter anywhere in the US. That rate represented a HUGE percentage increase over the previous rate of 3 cents and people griped about that percentage even though it was only a penny. A PENNY.
I think your complaint about having to subsidize the rural poor (or rich) in this manner is about as silly.
sneezy
@NotMax:
@NotMax:
Please point me at a reputable study to support the “no” part of that.
Fees for bags, pillows, headsets, etc., while obnoxious, do not double or triple the cost of a ticket.
I don’t understand why that matters. I didn’t say anything about why people are travelling by air, just noting that in the aggregate, they do a lot more of it. Presumably, they consider this a benefit.
I don’t see that that entry is relevant to my point, which is that under the pre-1979 regulations, air travel cost a lot more than it does now, which is a fact. Look, I dislike air travel about as much as anyone does, but claims that under heavy regulation, the system was much better than it is now can only be true if you totally ignore prices.
Would I like to fly in manner I could have in 1978, with all the amenities, etc.? Sure, that would be a lot more pleasant. Would I like to pay the prices I would have paid then? No freakin way. At those prices, I would just fly a lot less, as people in the aggregate then did.
Corner Stone
@Chet: I haven’t misrepresented your pathetic argument at all. In every case here someone has mentioned (ala movie tix) you claim the price point differential is in fact a subsidy. The theater business doesn’t subsidize students at the cost of full cost paying attendees. They price point in a way to allow the max paying audience.
Dickmeat.
xian
@Chet: you’ll probably say it many more times without explaining how the internet can deliver a bottle of pills.
Chet
@muddy: Yeah, look – agriculture actually does ruin the environment. Your garden vegetables are actually pretty expensive in terms of carbon inputs per calorie produced because of the incredibly small scale of production. It turns out that the carbon footprint to produce and ship a domestic greenhouse tomato is a lot higher than the footprint to produce and ship a tomato from Chile, even if the consumer lives near the greenhouse. It’s actually more carbon-efficient to ship produce from where it can be grown in exactly the right climate, than to try to overcome the climate near where the produce would otherwise be shipped to.
You’ve confused the fact that gardening seems natural with it actually being good for nature.
chopper
@Chet:
so I guess the movie theater situation isn’t a subsidy after all? now you’re moving the goalposts.
muddy
@Chet: I am saying if you compare the daily cost of mail in my town to the daily cost in your town, it will be more. You were the one complaining about rural people ruining the environment by driving around and stomping their sasquatch carbon footprints all over the ground. As to whether they put 1 item in your box and 100 in my mailbox or vice versa isn’t the issue. I didn’t say, “per piece”. I said, per day.
The fact that you cannot comprehend sentences does not make me the stupid one.
However I think spending time on this BS is making me feel I must be a bit stupid, you are a waste of time, so I’m going fishing. It’s better than your trolling because I get a zero carbon supper out of it.
Chet
@xian: I never said that the internet can or should deliver a bottle of pills, and nobody’s talking about ending parcel post. We’re not even talking about ending hand-delivery of letters to rural homes. We’re talking about ending the subsidy of hand-delivering letters to rural homes.
wrb
@Chet:
Well that’s conclusive there.
Obviously you weren’t enjoying a rural life.
You were a globe-trotting urban carbon muncher, temporarily misplaced.
Chet
@muddy:
Right. And when you divide that daily cost by the smaller number of letters delivered during that day, the cost per letter is a lot higher.
Which means that, to be fair, if you sent a letter into or out of that postal zone where it costs a lot more to deliver it, you should pay more, not be subsidized by those who send letters in or out of zones where it’s much, much cheaper per letter to do so.
Jesus Christ, you’re an idiot, This honestly isn’t that complicated.
But you don’t pay per day, stupid. You pay per letter.
I bet you’ll drive fifty miles there and back and pat yourself on the back for “eating local.” What a fucking moron.
chopper
@Corner Stone:
exactly. old people don’t get discounted movie tickets at the expense of everyone else. shit the theater near me dropped student rates recently. regular ticket prices didn’t go down in response.
chopper
@Chet:
There are plenty of years where the post office makes a profit.
muddy
@Chet: Some giant factory farms may well ruin the environment, but to say this about agriculture is silly. It’s good for filling bellies. I’d like to see how well you would be fed without evil agriculture. Maybe algae tablets or something?
So the choice comes down to means tested stamps vs. eating dinner. Quite a conundrum.
opie jeanne
@muddy: Bingo.
Chet
@muddy:
It would be impossible, of course. But agriculture being a necessary environmental evil, it makes the most sense for us to concentrate, specialize, and seek the highest return on input and environmental cost available – not compound the damage by distributing inefficient, destructive small farms.
Again, not that complicated. You’re just not very bright.
xian
@Mark S.: he pulls them out of his ass. he also is claiming this is someone’s “solution” when in fact it was a response to another one of his ass-produced assertions about poor people being unable to pay bills via the mail.
opie jeanne
@chopper: That’s why the theater extends that same discount if you go to an early show, or go on Tuesday (whatever the discount day is). They put butts in those seats.
opie jeanne
@muddy: I think I hear some peas calling me; they need picking and shelling.
muddy
@Chet: “Stupid, idiot, fucking moron”. That’s sweet. And you don’t know why people are annoyed with your postings.
Look, festering pustulent oozing asshole (since you prefer to converse this way), the mail truck is going to go on the route whether there is mail for every box or not. This is why a per day figure means something.
And no, I don’t go 50 miles to fish, I go less than a mile, and capture my own bait as well. Thanks for making up total BS on topics you kow nothing about. But then you were the one who was excited to get milk less than 100 miles from home. Ooh 100 miles for milk! How much more local does it get?
xian
@different-church-lady: i love when a series of unfamiliar commenters show up with the same glibertarian talking points.
Chet
@muddy:
They’re annoyed because I’m addressing them in the exact same terms they’re using to address me, and some people don’t think turnabout is fair play. Fuck ’em, and fuck you too. You can’t tell me I’m an idiot and then complain about getting personal.
Omnes Omnibus
@Chet: Why do things need to be done at market rate? Government and business are different. They should not be run under the same principles.
Chet
@xian: The response was to katie marie’s poorly-thought-out objection that the unbanked poor need cheap postage in order to mail in checks to pay bills.
Chet
@Omnes Omnibus: Ok, but what’s the principle that says that the government has to offer universal flat-rate First-Class mail? I’m just asking for that to be defended. A lot of people have said that if we didn’t do it that way, it would cost rural Americans a lot more to send or receive a letter, but so what? News flash – rural Americans aren’t the only Americans who count, no matter what Muddy would prefer to believe.
eclecticbrotha
Why is the end of USPS so important? Its only so important because 1.) it’ll throw thousands of workers onto the unemployment rolls, 2.) letting USPS go under would further weaken the economy and 3.) a lot of those losing jobs will be black and brown people, two demographics that are disproportionately unemployed at higher rates during economic downturns.
These are three more things Matty Yglesias does not have time to concern himself with as he fine-tunes his liberturdian bona fides in hopes of securing his next big promotion.
muddy
@Chet:
Opinions differ about my level of brightitude, you are in the minority however. So now gigantic factory farms feeding people food filled with disgusting chemicals and are bio-engineered is the way we should eat. You know absolutely nothing about small farms. I would invite you to Vermont to see how well it works, but seriously I hope you never darken our doorstep. Not sure how you are knowledgeable about agriculture anyway, since you couldn’t even bring a pitcher to buy milk only *two* miles from your house. Poor Minnesota has to buy milk that may as well be from Argentina, as far as you are concerned.
So, Chet, Chad, David, Andrew, whoever you are, you go on eating that environmentally nasty food, I truly hope you enjoy it. I mean, if there are economies of scale then that leaves money free in your budget for your next round of stamp futuring.
I’m off to the bridge for fish now, hopefully no trolls pop out from underneath, this is just tiresome.
xian
@chopper: perhaps it figured we wouldn’t click the link and see that it had skipped over the first two definitions?
xian
@Ben Johannson: i think the references to market rates shows the key to the glibertarian thought process. the almighty unregulated market is the answer for everything. there is no such thing as society.
Chet
@muddy: I actually grew up on a small farm, muddy, unlike a lot of morons who, like you, think a pepper garden in the back yard somehow entitles them to opine like an expert on agribusiness and supply-chain issues. And thanks to a degree in biochemistry I know a whole hell of a lot more than you ever will about “disgusting chemicals” and genetic engineering. Someday you’ll be forced to learn the difference between feeling “green” and actually helping the environment, but it won’t be soon, because you have too much growing up to do.
chopper
@opie jeanne:
personally, i’m sick of us night-time theatergoers subsidizing those lazy matinee people.
Omnes Omnibus
@Chet: Because it can. Because the ability to communicate throughout the country is a social good. Why does it piss you off so much?
Baron Jrod of Keeblershire
@Chet: Yes, we have a system that saves everyone money and provides a great service to millions of Americans, but who cares about that? What’s truly vital is that America conforms to some libertarian asshole’s sacred first principles. Like the principle that everything should be available at the prevailing market rate, whether it be postage or human beings. Because the market is a magical godlike entity, and not simply one way among many that human beings might choose to allocate their scarce resources.
Your argument is literally that things should be worse for some people (at no profit to anyone other than a handful of private companies that aren’t actually hurting right now) simply because your principles say so. Well the rest of us say your principles are garbage.
arguingwithsignposts
oh, c’mon – we can do 500 with this bullshit, surely.
John
Chet:
What a load of goalpost shifting. Nobody thinks it’s good that the unbanked have to rely on (expensive) money orders to pay their bills. The point is that they don’t pay their bills in person in cash, as you have repeatedly claimed they do. They buy money orders, which they then mail in using the postal service.
muddy
Yes, your degree in biochemistry supports your view of stamp rates very well. You should have brought that up much earlier, and probably no one would have argued with you at all, when faced with that level of authority.
You don’t know the degrees I hold, nor do you know the total of the green living that I do. Please stick to discussing biochem in the future, if you actually have some knowledge there.
I have current, not antique, farming knowledge and experience, not a fucking pepper box in the yard. Well, there is a raised bed of veg near the house, but it is far from the whole shebang.
I’m so sorry to hear that your own family farm really sucked. I genuinely feel bad for you, it seems to have left some scars.
mclaren
This is all part of America’s headlong rush back to the Dark Ages. I’ve been reading Jane Jacobs’ 1998 book Dark Age Ahead, and it’s startling just how far we’ve gone down the path toward cultural amnesia.
You can see this process with “elite” pundits like Yglesias. He’s in the process of losing even the memory that daily mail service was ever a part of American life. Next, people will forget that basic things like municipal water service and electricity were ever part of American life.
Eventually people like Yglesias will wind up pounding maize into tortillas on the fractured remnants of empty highways, which they will ascribe to the work of “lost gods who lived in this land long ago.”
xian
@muddy: true but i wrote my comment long before the elaborate dance of sophistry had reached the sixth veil or so
xian
@Chet: Republicans are.
sb
@arguingwithsignposts: My contribution. :)
xian
@Chet: no, you’re not, because you haven’t explained how to end this so-called subsidy.
xian
@Chet: i wasn’t talking to you and i’m not interested in your selective framing of the discussion.
Chet
@muddy: You don’t pay “daily cost”, stupid, you pay per letter. And this is the second time you’ve tried to flounce and failed. Do you think you could get it right on the third try, please?
muddy
@arguingwithsignposts: I’m giving it the old college try, but once the dog saw the fishpole come out, he has been prancing about by the door. I dunno if I can stick it.
Maybe Chad will make more wrong assumptions about me, my education and way of life though, one does feel a need to defend one’s honor.
C’mon, Chad…let’s make it 500, I know you have it in you! You could just post 20 more times and do it on your own. We wouldn’t need to subsidize the posts at all.
Chet
@xian: We end it by charging people what it costs to send a letter to where they want to send it.
Pretty fucking simple, actually.
xian
@John: it’s not going to acknowledge what you just said. it is making tactical arguments one by one, using sophistry. it also misrepresents why other people are countering its earlier arguments and the context of those responses.
arguingwithsignposts
@muddy: Well, he’s giving it a good go. I must confess I’ve not seen such dogged determination from a libertarian-curious “liberal” here in quite a while. Must be disappointed in the Olympics or something.
WJS
@Chet:
pseudonymous in nc
@Chet:
The principle of the commonweal. If you literally are incapable of perceiving that argument, then you have far greater problems.
Chet
@Omnes Omnibus: I’m fully in favor of people being able to communicate throughout the country, and if you read my posts above you’ll see that. The question is why we should subsidize that communication only in the form of messages on pieces of paper, hand-delivered to rural homes.
If we’re going to subsidize communication throughout the country – and just so we’re clear, I agree that we should, very much – why don’t we subsidize something more useful, like internet access? First-class mail only gets you paper. The internet can be used not only for sending the 50 pages or so that First-Class mail tops out at, but for sending entire books, images, audio, video, or software.
Isn’t that a better use of our subsidy dollars? And, look, I’ve been completely polite to you. Why cop the sudden attitude?
Chet
@WJS: Oh, I’m sorry, was I supposed to register my biography somewhere before I could use it to correct people’s mistaken assumptions about it?
I notice you only objected to my factual revelations about my biography, not to anybody else’s mistaken assumptions about it, like the guy who said I voted for McCain. Why is that?
wrb
@Chet:
If only sheep were bred to be slower and more submissive, there would be fewer angry Chets snarfing up carbon in the cities.
Edit: just the topic for post #500
pseudonymous in nc
@Sasha:
There are huge external costs to maintaining the integrity of a large country as opposed to a city-state. Of those costs, maintaining a postal service with universal flat rates is trivial compared to, say, the location of military bases.
xian
@pseudonymous in nc: exactly. the problem with glibertarians is how willing they are to pick at the threads that weave society together in order to introduce “market efficiency” into every goddamned aspect of life.
Chet
So now subsidized hand-delivery of letters to the rural rich is a “thread that weaves society together”? I know it’s difficult for you to imagine, Xian, but rural Americans aren’t the only Americans who count.
muddy
@wrb: Those damn MN sheep. Here in VT the men are men and the sheep are nervous.
And congrats on the 500, I wish there were a door prize. It would have to be delivered by email though!
Oh, pieces of paper are so wrong and old fashioned. We even vote on pieces of paper here, but this is probably only because we don’t have broadband everywhere in the state. Nor do we have cell service or the ability to use a tv antenna everywhere. So backward, buying food and services from our neighbors and whatnot. Then again our unemployment rate is under 5%. Just goes to show how shitty rural states are.
muddy
When I have to use the lower curve of the hook to pop out a fish’s eye if I run low on bait, I will be thinking of you, Chad. Good day, sir.
Chet
@muddy: Third try. Good luck this time, Muddy!
Baron Jrod of Keeblershire
@Chet: Yes, it is a thread. A thread. One of many. Remove too many of them and the whole cloth falls apart.
pseudonymous in nc
@Chet:
Yeah, it is, even if you try wordin’ it all funny.
Keep fucking that sheep, Choad.
taylormattd
@Emrventures: Because lil Matty has always been libertarian contrarian-curious. When he and his buddies first started blogging back when they were like 19 or something stupid, I would see pictures of Matt and his bestie Julian Sanchez, libertarian-tard extraordinaire.
different-church-lady
@xian:
Batlights — the internets are filled with Batlights.
muddy
@different-church-lady: Batshit batlights.
And I waited too long here, it has started thundering nearby. Twilight’s a better time for fish anyway.
Thanks Chad, for keeping track for me, I’m glad you care enough to do that.
different-church-lady
@Chet:
Was it in your biochem classes that they taught you that you were never ever wrong about anything?
WJS
@Chet:
Oh, bullshit. Bullshit!
rikyrah
this thread has sorta been depressing. I’ve lived in urban areas my entire life – except for school. Some things just shouldn’t have to turn a profit, and even though Politically, I can’t stand Rural America, it should have the Post Office. this country should have the post office. don’t be dumb and try and tell me that private entities would do better. the USPS is not going broke. it was driven into bankruptcy by the GOP – two totally different things.
Evolving Deep Southerner
Man. 514 comments. You never can tell about some threads.
JoyfulA
@mattH: Re subsidy of property and vehicle taxes for the disabled, that must be a state decision, because it doesn’t apply in my state.
Also, the post office subsidy for the disabled applies only to, as far as I know, the audiotapes for the blind, which are shipped to and from the disabled person free. (Or were; I wonder if the government is still producing these unabridged tapes.) It might apply to some narrow categories of similar items, although I can’t think what that might be, but disabled people don’t get to mail their bill payments free.
Chet
@muddy: Wow, failed a third time. Amazing. Are you ever going to do anything you promise to do?
xian
@pseudonymous in nc: another gib trick is to isolate single piece of the social machinery, marginalize its users (tell the riches it’s poor people, tell the poor people it’s the riches is one way; works with race too), and try to sell it off, all the time mocking the idea that there are any common shared goods in society that need not be priced on a pin-work basis.
xian
@Chet: ssh, the grownups are talking.
i don’t respond to straw-man arguments or sophistry.
(for the sentient members of this community, it is the reductio of “rural Americans aren’t the only Americans who count” i’m referring to now. note how “we’re all in it together” is somehow framed as “why are you saying only [group x] counts?”)
Joel
What would the USPS sliding scale look like? I’m actually curious. If the USPS adopted a UPS-style postal rate, what it would take to bring the company back up to black.
Horrendo Slapp (formerly Jimperson Zibb, Duncan Dönitz, Otto Graf von Pfmidtnöchtler-Pízsmőgy, Mumphrey, et al.)
I have to ask Chet at this point, what are you getting out of this? Seriously, everybody here is sick of you calling them “stupid”, “moron” and whatever else you’ve thrown at them. (And, yes, I see the irony of my bringing that up since I did tell you to fuck off and said you were behaving like a dickwad.) But at this point, is there anybody on this thread you haven’t insulted? You seem to be taking this far too seriously. You really need to lighten up. How would it be if I just tell you that you’re right about everything? O.K.? You’re right about everything. All the rest of us are dead wrong, and we’re bad, awful, stoopid assholes to boot. Is that good enough? Just what are you really after here?
wrb
@muddy:
We have Icelandic sheep and I think Chet’s experience must have been with sheep like them: Fierce, canny and strong.
After all, they spent 800 years grubbing their existence from ice, fighting off polar bears, narwhals, bigfeets and shit.
I weigh 220 lbs and if I grab one for shearing or shots I know it is likely to be 40′ before before I’ve got it stopped and if there is a tree or a rock it can bash me against, I’ll be bashed.
I imagine a young romantic Chet, 98 pounds of pubescent awkwardness, grabbing such a sheep, hopefully, imagining that they will care for each other- and have no trouble understanding why he turned out like he did.
Older
@different-church-lady: Yeah, probably there’s a rule against it …
Older
@Chet: Chet, that checking up on patrons who might need assistance? I carried city-side too, and for your information, both rural and city carriers actually get trainings on checking up on folks they know to be elderly or handicapped, or for any other reason might need extra help. I’ve gone the extra mile for folks mostly during blizzards, but it floods where I live too.
Older
@wrb: “Mail trucks don’t go to individual farms.”
??? The hell they don’t! In my current job, I drive all over a large valley mostly engaged in agriculture, and I see their individual mail boxes every day, and often their mail carriers as well.
wrb
@Older:
Where is it?
I’ve noticed that the PO still honors grandfathered high- service routes, mostly on the east coast and around old cities, but there is no way they will start offering that level of service elsewhere.
Here in the rural west, you gotta put your mailbox in the gang at the crossroads, if they have delivery at all and don’t make you get a PO box.
The remote mail box in the box cluster is really a pain when it come to certified mail and packages too big for the box.
Since the deliverer won’t come to your house, you just get a pink notice to pick up your mail at the PO, but when you go there they say, once and once again, that it is on the truck, “out for delivery.” But since there is no one to sign at the box cluster, it isn’t delivered and you get another pink notice.
This is something that an otherwise great service doesn’t handle well.
Older
Allow me to now address the question of large blocks of mailboxes.
First, those rows you see all modern and all alike, rectangular brushed aluminum? Those are on a city route, and here’s why. Prior to their introduction, every city mail box was a one-off. Individual in shape material and location. Especially location. This meant that the carrier had to walk to every box, and if he was a substitute, he might have to search for it as well. The Postal Service decided that all new construction would be served by the new boxes, concentrated at corners or in front of apartment houses. The reason is that it takes less time to serve them; the carrier has to get out of the truck only once for each group of boxes. But he does have to get out of the truck, they can’t be served from the street.
Now, consider the rural mailbox. You do often see large groups of them on a shared stand, but they are individual boxes, bought and maintained by the individual patron who gets his mail there. The reason they are where they are is that the Postal service does not run routes up roads that are not maintained by the county or by a recognized organization. So when the road gets real small, and windy, and potholey, the PO doesn’t (routinely) go there and all the people who live farther out put their boxes there.
The rural routes do not use the modern grouped boxes that are used in the city, because the carrier would have to get out of the car (most rural carriers drive their own cars) to serve them and that would take longer.
In both cases the decision was based on how long it would take to serve the boxes, plus, in the case of rural routes, road maintenance.
Footnotes: Not all rural areas are served by rural routes, and not all city areas are served by city routes. So once in a while an anomalous situation will be seen. Also, on both kinds of routes, a carrier may go to the actual home or office of an addressee, if he knows where it is, if he has a parcel or an accountable item (certified, insured etc), and if there is no safe place to leave a parcel otherwise.
Farms are almost all a) on rural routes, and b) not sharing mail box stands with other addresses (but this depends on the exact layout of driveways etc).
Again, these rather different reasons for rural and city grouped boxes are, I’m sure, available to be learned quite easily. If all else fails, your mail carrier probably knows.
So, Chet? If you did so well in school, you ought to know how to research an unfamiliar situation. Give it a try next time.
Sorry, guys, I’ve been away from the internet for a while. The vigor of this thread surprised me, but it’s probably because yes, people do like the mail.
Older
@wrb: wrb, I strong>am in the rural west. If you’re in a “rural” area, and don’t get the rural level of delivery service, you’re probably in a newer development. Which is to say, you’re in a suburb, and you’re probably getting city service. Which isn’t bad, but no way is it rural service. That said, I do live in town, and I get all the old service. The carrier knocks on my door with packages or accountables (alas, I’m not usually home, because as I said my work involves driving around). I have a highly eccentric mailbox, located on my front porch. I do not, and will not, have to get my mail in a grouped box, because my carrier is already on foot (it’s an older neighborhood) and there’s no way he can be speeded up by moving my box. He does serve a couple of apartment houses at grouped boxes though.
I do have to admit that there are post offices where the regulations are not observed well, and the system for complaining about it does not and never has worked, so I can’t make any constructive suggestions for your situation. Except maybe move to a community where they still know what postal service really is.
wrb
@Older:
Although in rural routes in the west they NEVER do, that is only the sort of service that those on the east coast, or in urban areas, get.
wrb
@Older:
No, it is an old 100+ yr old rural area, but the PO doesn’t deliver. They will come within a mile, to a ganged box, but for certified mail or packages you are fucked.
Older
@wrb: @wrb: I’m sorry, you are wrong.
I cover, in my ordinary daily driving, an area of approximately 100 by 120 miles in a river valley which is mostly engaged in agriculture, and I know what kind of mail service those thousands of square miles are getting. And you can’t get a lot more west than where I live, except by going to Hawaii. I don’t know what kind of service they get there these days.
Do you live in California? Or near Seattle maybe?
One thing I should point out to you: Having been in the business, I can pretty much tell what kind of service people get everywhere I go. I don’t travel a lot out of my immediate area any more, but when I did, I saw the same sort of service in a lot of places in the rural west. But that’s not up-to-date information, because I haven’t traveled much since about 2002.
Best never to say “NEVER”, you know?
wrb
@Older: @Older:
How so?
I wish I’d actually seen a mail carrier do more than leave the pink slip saying,”you have certified mail, or a package, that you could pick up at the PO.”
HyperIon
shorter mistermix:
that’s easy for you to say, Matt.
constate
@CarolDuhart2:
Worked for UPS, the pay is very good as are benefits. Does not mean the USPS should be trashed
constate
@CarolDuhart2:
Worked for UPS, the pay is very good as are benefits. Does not mean the USPS should be trashed
Chet
@Older: Look, I just don’t see how that’s going to be possible for the majority of a mail carrier’s route; I know for a flat-out fact that our carrier doesn’t get any further than ten feet inside the front door at my apartment building, because that’s where the mailboxes are. She’s not heading up to check on anybody, much less my disabled neighbor or the Korean grandmother down the hall.
So what you actually mean is that mail carriers are trained to check on homeowners, the small minority of Americans who receive door-to-door mail service. But, heads-up – homeowners aren’t the only Americans who count. You can’t sweepingly defend the “social and civic virtues” of hand-delivered mail as “broad-based” when they apply only to a small number of Americans. That’s all I’m saying
Ok, I guess, but you were talking to WRB. Might want to check your targets before you let loose with the sass, mkay?
Older
So Chet, let’s see:
1. If it doesn’t happen where you live, it NEVER happens ANYWHERE.
2. Everyone in the country either owns their own home or lives in an apartment.
3. If your carrier doesn’t — or can’t, due to the construction of the building, check on the old folks, then no carrier does, anywhere, ever.
In short, 4) You are the measure of all things and everything in the country is exactly as you see it. And if it’s not, the reasons don’t matter, regardless of what they are.
I’m the postal employee, you’re not. I’ve carried mail in several different areas, of several different types (rural, city, suburban, business core), but that doesn’t mean I know anything about it. As someone said about, it probably means I’m not allowed to discuss it.
I do apologize for the mis-aimed response. It’s kind of hard sometimes to make out who’s speaking and who’s just quoting. Certainly I wouldn’t want anything intended for Chet to land on anyone else.
Bye now. Have fun with your wonderful self.
Some Loser
Shit. I know this is necro-posting, but I just had to comment. I mean, well damn. I don’t think any (non-ABL) thread has ballooned to this side in the last couple of years.
evodevo
@Mark S.:
I am a rural mail carrier in a small town in Ky – we recently got our marching orders – closing down the small local PO. Guess who rallied the loudest and called the Congresscritter in the biggest numbers to SAVE OUR PO? the local teabaggers, of course.
It will always be about the gored ox.