Given that Jeff mentioned writing with a quill, methinks he meant bodice as in corset rather than bodace as some noun form related to the classic 80's movie, "Bodacious Ta-Ta's"
Jeff: You buried the lead in a footnote. Everything was fine until a few decades ago pencil pushers with an agenda decided the USPS pension system was "doing math wrong" and the USPS was actually bankrupt. LOL. Hilarity ensued.
How about 3 days a week? Seriously, I think it’s good to have cheap service to bumfuck wherever, but if you can wait delivery time to get something, you can wait 2-3 days extra
There was actually an SNL sketch from 2009 about this that wasn’t even really a sketch, kind of a legitimate advocacy piece - very unusually direct for SNL. Jason Sudeikis plays the executive director of the Alliance of Direct Mail Marketers and explains how the junk mail deluge that makes our mailboxes borderline unusable is actually directly subsidized by government policy.
Like, there wasn’t any real joke in the sketch, except the detailed description of the system itself, which, like you say, is a joke.
If mail gets any more haystack-y, I think the idea that mailing something to somebody qualifies as adequate notice for anything, or as a means of guaranteed access, will fall away over time.
Thank you! It drives me crazy when people talk about the USPS as though it’s a business. It is not a profit-making business, nor should it be: it’s a service that people pay for through our taxes.
I hear this all the time from my fellow postal workers. Even a service business has to make enough revenue to cover its costs and to continue to invest in the service: electricity, heat and AC, wages and salaries, fuel, maintenance of facilities, etc..The economic illiteracy of Americans astounds me.
The line about giving $20 to a charity in ‘09 and being punished for it. That’s the thing that pisses me off. And since they won’t accept your gift unless you also give your email - that’s the reason I think twice and then don’t give most of the time.
And yeah, I generally wait till trash day or recycling day to check the mailbox, so I don’t have to actually bring the crap into the house.
My mail slot drops into the garage, right next to my recycling bin, which is very convenient for sorting, but also helps to reinforce that literally 90% of mail goes directly into the bin.
Welcome to the heck that is urban and suburban living. My mom (suburbia) gets a grocery bag of mail a month. I, in Amish Country where the nearest business is Bubba's Guns and Gas (mostly true- gas station/hunter supply store, just not named Bubba's) some 10 miles away, get a few pieces of mail a week and most of them are actual bills (the trash company doesn't do fancy stuff like credit cards or internet- pay by check or cash and check Facebook if it snowed to see if pickup will be delayed by a day).
Sunday drivers can be a pain though- one morning my 2 hour hike involved getting passed by 30 vehicles, 20 of which were buggies (did you know that faster moving ones will pass slower ones over what is nominally a double yellow line were there in fact lines?). The lack of sidewalks (the nearest is about 15 miles away), shoulders (Lord knows), road markings (3 miles to the first yellow ones, 6+ to white ones), make the roads fun.
Jeff, I sent you two letters back in autumn. You must notta got em. There probably was a problem at the post office or something. Sometimes I scribble addresses too sloppy when I jot em.
If you were to get rid of junk mail, and decrease the demand for paper, you'd actually wind up with fewer trees, not less, and then the environment would actually be worse off.
Yeah, nobody sweats the cost of stamps, but most people do not complain about delivery fees when they order something from Amazon, so I say dissolve the USPS and let UPS, FedEx and Amazon deliver any paper mail. At this point, the only entity benefiting from the USPS is whoever manufactures those funny looking cars with the steering wheel on the right side.
Totally disagree. I have a disability so I’m even more dependent on packages than the average person nowadays, and USPS is MUCH better than the others with literally everything. The tracking is excellent (the ‘Informed Delivery’ service), and when a package up to a certain size gets delivered I know exactly where it is (the locked package door in the mailbox unit). With UPS or FedEx there is guesswork involved - front door of the main building? (which I don’t actually live in) or side door of the main building? (which I can at least see from my apartment and which I’ve specified as the delivery spot, to both of them on their websites) or in front of my next door neighbor’s place? (which I can’t see from here). And they promise delivery by 9 pm so I’m anxious about it all day long and it doesn’t show up and then at 9:15 there’s an email - Sorry, see you tomorrow! This has happened innumerable times. I think simply raising the price of junk mail and a modest cut to five days a week, as suggested here, would solve most USPS problems.
"If you were to get rid of junk mail, and decrease the demand for paper, you'd actually wind up with fewer trees, not less, and then the environment would actually be worse off."
Even presuming such supply side effects exist in lumber - I'm not qualified to say - would it not just decrease the demand by the amount of trees that are planted to create the junk mail?
Like, you were planning [x] trees, [y] trees are needed to create our junk mail, so you are now planting [x-y] trees and no longer manufacturing any junk mail. Isn't that a push?
But you make a good point which is that paper production is actually an environmental problem because of EMISSIONS and pollutants involved in making and transporting paper, not deforestation. There are three trillion trees and it's easy to make more.
I think there would also be a net decrease in the amount of trees because when you reduce demand you also reduce a higher level of future demand because you have to create a surplus to reinvest in or to return a profit to ownership, and there will be some trees that won't be replaced when they die from natural causes. It's like how NYC's city run grocery stores are doomed because if you don't turn a profit you can't absorb future higher costs; as the city population grows, the grocery store will have to buy 2 bushels of apples tomorrow instead of only one bushel today to make sure that due to the increase in people, everyone will all be able to eat one.
UPS, FedEx, and Amazon have no interest in delivering paper mail. First class mail is a declining business and no company in its right mind would spend any money subsidizing the cost of junk mail with reduced mailing rates as the USPS does.
I mentioned to my mailman about this very thing - all the junk mail that we get. he agreed but also said without junk mail he wouldn't have a job. 😳
The man speaks truth.
I’m surprised no one here has mentioned Newman the mailman on ‘Seinfeld’ who had the same opinion, and that was 30 years ago.
Careful, Jeff. Lest you bring upon yourself the wrath of... Wilfred Brimley.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k8M9LF7Gz4E
He gets real irritated when someone calls him away from his golf.
JaRG: Thanks for that!
100% worth clicking on the link.
“Bodice” not “bodace,” Jeff.
Fixed! Kinda mad at spell check there.
What if he was abbreviating bodacious?
Given that Jeff mentioned writing with a quill, methinks he meant bodice as in corset rather than bodace as some noun form related to the classic 80's movie, "Bodacious Ta-Ta's"
He probably got confused because guys liked to say "bodacious" back on the day.....
Jeff: You buried the lead in a footnote. Everything was fine until a few decades ago pencil pushers with an agenda decided the USPS pension system was "doing math wrong" and the USPS was actually bankrupt. LOL. Hilarity ensued.
But yes, conditions have changed.....
is there any reason usps can't raise the price of junk mail? if not, is there any reason to believe they're not at the revenue-maximizing price?
They can raise the price of junk mail and I think that they should.
We can raise the price of junk mail, in the same sense that we can eliminate the Export-Import Bank and farm subsidies.
How about 3 days a week? Seriously, I think it’s good to have cheap service to bumfuck wherever, but if you can wait delivery time to get something, you can wait 2-3 days extra
There was actually an SNL sketch from 2009 about this that wasn’t even really a sketch, kind of a legitimate advocacy piece - very unusually direct for SNL. Jason Sudeikis plays the executive director of the Alliance of Direct Mail Marketers and explains how the junk mail deluge that makes our mailboxes borderline unusable is actually directly subsidized by government policy.
Like, there wasn’t any real joke in the sketch, except the detailed description of the system itself, which, like you say, is a joke.
If mail gets any more haystack-y, I think the idea that mailing something to somebody qualifies as adequate notice for anything, or as a means of guaranteed access, will fall away over time.
If someone sent me a telegram, I’d at least not miss it. Some person comes to my door and reads it out. Memorable.
The mail isn't supposed to be for making a profit - it's providing a service.
Thank you! It drives me crazy when people talk about the USPS as though it’s a business. It is not a profit-making business, nor should it be: it’s a service that people pay for through our taxes.
I hear this all the time from my fellow postal workers. Even a service business has to make enough revenue to cover its costs and to continue to invest in the service: electricity, heat and AC, wages and salaries, fuel, maintenance of facilities, etc..The economic illiteracy of Americans astounds me.
The line about giving $20 to a charity in ‘09 and being punished for it. That’s the thing that pisses me off. And since they won’t accept your gift unless you also give your email - that’s the reason I think twice and then don’t give most of the time.
And yeah, I generally wait till trash day or recycling day to check the mailbox, so I don’t have to actually bring the crap into the house.
My mail slot drops into the garage, right next to my recycling bin, which is very convenient for sorting, but also helps to reinforce that literally 90% of mail goes directly into the bin.
Welcome to the heck that is urban and suburban living. My mom (suburbia) gets a grocery bag of mail a month. I, in Amish Country where the nearest business is Bubba's Guns and Gas (mostly true- gas station/hunter supply store, just not named Bubba's) some 10 miles away, get a few pieces of mail a week and most of them are actual bills (the trash company doesn't do fancy stuff like credit cards or internet- pay by check or cash and check Facebook if it snowed to see if pickup will be delayed by a day).
Sunday drivers can be a pain though- one morning my 2 hour hike involved getting passed by 30 vehicles, 20 of which were buggies (did you know that faster moving ones will pass slower ones over what is nominally a double yellow line were there in fact lines?). The lack of sidewalks (the nearest is about 15 miles away), shoulders (Lord knows), road markings (3 miles to the first yellow ones, 6+ to white ones), make the roads fun.
I’ve enjoyed over the years watching Jeff slowly age into a 2009 Mitch McConnell Conservative.
I think Jeff is going to go crazy and turn into Lysander Spooner…
finally, something that you and me and Andy Rooney can all agree on
Jeff, I sent you two letters back in autumn. You must notta got em. There probably was a problem at the post office or something. Sometimes I scribble addresses too sloppy when I jot em.
If you were to get rid of junk mail, and decrease the demand for paper, you'd actually wind up with fewer trees, not less, and then the environment would actually be worse off.
Yeah, nobody sweats the cost of stamps, but most people do not complain about delivery fees when they order something from Amazon, so I say dissolve the USPS and let UPS, FedEx and Amazon deliver any paper mail. At this point, the only entity benefiting from the USPS is whoever manufactures those funny looking cars with the steering wheel on the right side.
Totally disagree. I have a disability so I’m even more dependent on packages than the average person nowadays, and USPS is MUCH better than the others with literally everything. The tracking is excellent (the ‘Informed Delivery’ service), and when a package up to a certain size gets delivered I know exactly where it is (the locked package door in the mailbox unit). With UPS or FedEx there is guesswork involved - front door of the main building? (which I don’t actually live in) or side door of the main building? (which I can at least see from my apartment and which I’ve specified as the delivery spot, to both of them on their websites) or in front of my next door neighbor’s place? (which I can’t see from here). And they promise delivery by 9 pm so I’m anxious about it all day long and it doesn’t show up and then at 9:15 there’s an email - Sorry, see you tomorrow! This has happened innumerable times. I think simply raising the price of junk mail and a modest cut to five days a week, as suggested here, would solve most USPS problems.
"If you were to get rid of junk mail, and decrease the demand for paper, you'd actually wind up with fewer trees, not less, and then the environment would actually be worse off."
Even presuming such supply side effects exist in lumber - I'm not qualified to say - would it not just decrease the demand by the amount of trees that are planted to create the junk mail?
Like, you were planning [x] trees, [y] trees are needed to create our junk mail, so you are now planting [x-y] trees and no longer manufacturing any junk mail. Isn't that a push?
But you make a good point which is that paper production is actually an environmental problem because of EMISSIONS and pollutants involved in making and transporting paper, not deforestation. There are three trillion trees and it's easy to make more.
I think there would also be a net decrease in the amount of trees because when you reduce demand you also reduce a higher level of future demand because you have to create a surplus to reinvest in or to return a profit to ownership, and there will be some trees that won't be replaced when they die from natural causes. It's like how NYC's city run grocery stores are doomed because if you don't turn a profit you can't absorb future higher costs; as the city population grows, the grocery store will have to buy 2 bushels of apples tomorrow instead of only one bushel today to make sure that due to the increase in people, everyone will all be able to eat one.
UPS, FedEx, and Amazon have no interest in delivering paper mail. First class mail is a declining business and no company in its right mind would spend any money subsidizing the cost of junk mail with reduced mailing rates as the USPS does.