I have mixed feelings about privatizing the postal service. As a proponent of the free market and smaller government, it makes sense. Particularly since it can't seem to stay out of the red. Still, there's something comforting about knowing the USPS is there. And maybe it's the result of living in an isolated area, but the benefits of being able to mail something to Barrow, Alaska for 43 cents or whatever it is now is...well, a distortion of the market but still beneficial to those living in remote areas.
All you can mail to Barrow for 44¢ is a letter, and I'm arguing that there's no real need for anyone to mail anything letter-sized ever; the fact that you're on the internet right now means that there's almost no occasion when you really have to send something letter-sized anywhere. For packages much larger than that, the USPS already charges more to send things to/from Alaska than they would if I wanted to send something to, say, Portland or Las Vegas. So I'm not really convinced people in Alaska, except very remote parts (probably places more isolated than Barrow, which has regular flights coming in, a fair number of people working there, etc.) really even get the benefits of USPS universal delivery. UPS and FedEx offer something pretty close to a universal delivery area, and if the USPS monopoly were broken, they'd have even more reason to deliver to smaller markets and compete directly with USPS in the first class mail business. There are all kinds of ways to efficiently structure delivery service to very remote areas,
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I've said the same thing. In a lot of villages, there's no economy to speak of other than government employees and public assistance. When people spend welfare on satellite and soda and expect handouts for everything...
It seems to me that, if a bunch of hateful people sat down and tried to plot out way to keep the people they don't like permanently at the bottom of the socio-economic ladder, that they couldn't come up with a program as effective for enforcing the goals of racists as long-term welfare. There was a time, long ago, when people who recognized the dangers of multigenerational welfare dependency, included a good number of Democrats, like Daniel Patrick Moynihan and Robert Kennedy.
I'm still a registered Democrat, mostly because I'm avoiding pariah status in local politics, but I find myself often-more often in the Obama era-silently uttering Ronald Reagan's line: "I didn't leave the Democratic Party; the Democratic Party left me."
The problem is that there's nothing else in these very remote area. If you're in a village of 300 people, what economy is there to speak of? You choose to live there, but it's likely your homeland. And of course, of those who do move to larger areas with more opportunities, there are another batch of issues for those who don't adjust well to such a radically different way of life.
The entire history of the world is a history of people moving from familiar circumstances to challenging, unfamiliar, but better circumstances. People are resilient when it comes to things like that. Keeping them artificially afloat in a place with no opportunities, dooming them to a life of just barely scraping by, seems to me an unusually cruel act. And even if putting those people on welfare forever was a good idea, it wouldn't justify wasting the efforts of hundreds of thousands of people to keep shipping costs of stuff somewhat lower than they would be otherwise.
All you can mail to Barrow for 44¢ is a letter, and I'm arguing that there's no real need for anyone to mail anything letter-sized ever; the fact that you're on the internet right now means that there's almost no occasion when you really have to send something letter-sized anywhere.
Except, of course, that not everybody is on the Internet, nor wants to be.
You're talking to a self-selected audience. Yes, we're on the Internet, otherwise we wouldn't be reading your LJ.
Surveysindicate that a quarter of all Americans do not have Internet access and do not plan to change that. The percentages are similar here in Britain.
In my own family, my Dad doesn't use email, and nor does my wife's Dad. They could both afford to get Internet access if they wanted, but neither of them wants to. We keep in touch by telephone (the old-fashioned kind, with -- GASP! -- wires) and by mail. We live in England, my wife's family live in rural Idaho, so we depend on both the Royal Mail and the U.S. Postal Service to deliver those letters.
My grandmother is the same way, except she does have and use a cordless phone. Other than that, she has a technological innovation that was introduced after 1987. She could easily afford any computer, from a netbook to an Airbook, and high-speed broadband, but she's not the least bit interested.
I think the USPS is on it's way out, but we're probably about 20-30 years away before it will be completely obsolete. In the meantime, how much money should be thrown at them is very debatable. I'm glad I don't have to make that decision.
I think this is why privatization should be total. If a privatized USPS or Royal Mail was the only game in town offering a network of door-to-door delivery, private mail companies could contract with them at a mutually agreeable price. It's also possible private mail companies could establish their own networks, but offering delivery less frequently in order to make handling smaller total volumes more efficient. Most mail isn't so time-sensitive that a few days one way or the other would make any difference, and if it is, you can pay up for varying levels of express service
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Killing the USPS sooner than later would have the additional benefit of keeping it from getting more laws passed restricting competition. Any organization with over half a million unionized employees is going to have political clout beyond all reason.
Just because some people don't want change is no reason the majority should be expected to have their money seized in order to subsidize the reluctance of an ever-shrinking minority. I'm not philosophically opposed to having letter delivery for people who want it; I think it's just like any other service: something users should pay for, and something which should be open to competition. Unless your grandmother lives in an abandoned leper colony on a particularly remote island in Hawaii, there's a decent chance a competitive, privatized first class mail system might offer her better service for less cost.
Not everyone is on the telephone system, nor wants to be, but people who opt out of that are going to face some obstacles in the conduct of their daily lives, and I think the internet has reached that level now. Getting the final quarter onto the internet would be vastly cheaper than keeping the US Postal Service limping along. I'm sure that, when telephone penetration was 75%, the remaining 25% included a lot of people who said they didn't want telephones
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As for 11 months late, I take pictures faster than I sort through them, so I have a few thousand random things on my hard drive. When I saw the Postal Service story, it seemed to me like the perfect time to dredge up the picture I took of the sign at the photo place.
I wish I'd taken a picture of the VCR repair shop as well; it was pretty sad looking. There's now a spiffy-looking dental office in its place, and I'd like to have done a before-and-after, especially with the Metro PCS store in place of the photo place right next to it. I spent years wondering how those two places stayed in business. Or who would walk into the VCR repair shop without a hazmat suit.
I'm also starting an effort-we'll see if I follow through with it-to post at least one picture a day to my Flickr photostream. Some of them will have stories meaty enough to make for an accompanying LJ entry, or at least so I'm hoping. I'm trying to prompt myself to do something at least a little creative on an ongoing basis.
I have mixed feelings about privatizing the postal service. As a proponent of the free market and smaller government, it makes sense. Particularly since it can't seem to stay out of the red. Still, there's something comforting about knowing the USPS is there. And maybe it's the result of living in an isolated area, but the benefits of being able to mail something to Barrow, Alaska for 43 cents or whatever it is now is...well, a distortion of the market but still beneficial to those living in remote areas.
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I'm still a registered Democrat, mostly because I'm avoiding pariah status in local politics, but I find myself often-more often in the Obama era-silently uttering Ronald Reagan's line: "I didn't leave the Democratic Party; the Democratic Party left me."
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All you can mail to Barrow for 44¢ is a letter, and I'm arguing that there's no real need for anyone to mail anything letter-sized ever; the fact that you're on the internet right now means that there's almost no occasion when you really have to send something letter-sized anywhere.
Except, of course, that not everybody is on the Internet, nor wants to be.
You're talking to a self-selected audience. Yes, we're on the Internet, otherwise we wouldn't be reading your LJ.
Surveys indicate that a quarter of all Americans do not have Internet access and do not plan to change that. The percentages are similar here in Britain.
In my own family, my Dad doesn't use email, and nor does my wife's Dad. They could both afford to get Internet access if they wanted, but neither of them wants to. We keep in touch by telephone (the old-fashioned kind, with -- GASP! -- wires) and by mail. We live in England, my wife's family live in rural Idaho, so we depend on both the Royal Mail and the U.S. Postal Service to deliver those letters.
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I think the USPS is on it's way out, but we're probably about 20-30 years away before it will be completely obsolete. In the meantime, how much money should be thrown at them is very debatable. I'm glad I don't have to make that decision.
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Just because some people don't want change is no reason the majority should be expected to have their money seized in order to subsidize the reluctance of an ever-shrinking minority. I'm not philosophically opposed to having letter delivery for people who want it; I think it's just like any other service: something users should pay for, and something which should be open to competition. Unless your grandmother lives in an abandoned leper colony on a particularly remote island in Hawaii, there's a decent chance a competitive, privatized first class mail system might offer her better service for less cost.
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I wish I'd taken a picture of the VCR repair shop as well; it was pretty sad looking. There's now a spiffy-looking dental office in its place, and I'd like to have done a before-and-after, especially with the Metro PCS store in place of the photo place right next to it. I spent years wondering how those two places stayed in business. Or who would walk into the VCR repair shop without a hazmat suit.
I'm also starting an effort-we'll see if I follow through with it-to post at least one picture a day to my Flickr photostream. Some of them will have stories meaty enough to make for an accompanying LJ entry, or at least so I'm hoping. I'm trying to prompt myself to do something at least a little creative on an ongoing basis.
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