I needed to mail a small package this morning, so weighed it on my kitchen scale, went to usps.com and bought a mailing label, printed it on my printer, taped that label to the package, and threw it in the mailbox. In other words, I saved a 30 minute round-trip drive to a mailing facility, along with the inevitable wait in line, and the Post Office gave me a discount and free delivery confirmation for my trouble. I really don’t know how our country can afford to subsidize this kind of inefficiency when the free market provides us with so many alternatives.
Here’s a girl who’s happy about a kiss and an open thread for you moochers and looters.
c u n d gulag
Privatizing the USPS ranks up there with all of the other contenders for the Conservatives Hall of Fame of Fucking Idiocy – right up there with the privatizing of firefighters, police, military, and education.
In the future, we’ll be paying a lot more to private companies to deliver the mail, and getting a whole lot less for our money.
Ah, but that’s the plan, ain’t it?
If it lines the pockets of the few at the expense of the many, than it’s a successful Conservative idea.
Sam Houston
Book rate is one of the world’s best kept secrets.
soonergrunt
@c u n d gulag:
Which is all you really need to know about modern Conservatism.
pablo
I spent 30 years humpin’ mail. My Back is ruined, My feet have both had surgery. My knees are about to go.
I have a outlandish(snark)pension (2002 , 50%)of $22,000.
Thank FSM for the health plan (same as
BoehnersBoners)The Postal Service is in the Constitution, and by law is forbidden to make a profit,or use tax money and cannot make any sensible business decisions because Congress must approve all of them.
Even then The PO has been mandated to pre-pay all health and retirement benefits for the next 75 years within 10 years at 5.5 Billion a year, for Postal workers who haven’t been born yet! Kinda like the Social Security Trust Fund which has been looted by Congress.
If Repugs have their way, FedEx will deliver grandma’s birthday card across town for $11, but only on Wednesdays!
Culture of Truth
The Georgia State Board of Pardons and Paroles has denied clemency in the case of Troy Davis. Execution is tomorrow, although it has been stopped before, all avenues appear to have been exhausted now.
A Mom Anon
@c u n d gulag: I would LOVE to see some numbers regarding how much money privatizing various things actually saves the taxpayers. Just for starters:
1)Military: food service,laundry and all the rest. We know the savings angle is bullshit,but I’d love to see some actual numbers showing contractors v. actual military personel doing the jobs they used to do.
2)Prisons: I find it hard to believe that private prisons are less expensive to run than private ones.
3)Schools: why people are so gung ho about privatizing schools makes no sense to me. Private schools have the same problems and issues that public ones do. Charter schools are no answer either,it’s an effort to bleed money off the public system. I can’t afford to spend a dime on school for my kid beyond the stuff I have to buy as it is. That will decimate education for middle class and poor people,which I suppose is the idea.
There’s a bigger list than that,but I have yet to see how privatizing anything has better results and a cost savings to taxpayers.
Raven (formerly stuckinred)
@pablo: Best thing that ever happened to me was getting fired from the PO in 1972.
Culture of Truth
The USPS is just another Ponzi scheme, like Social Security, mutual funds, the Pentagon and the Girl Scouts.
RSA
Excellent. And all you needed was a kitchen scale, a computer, a printer, and Internet access.
PT&S
I haven’t gone through usps.com for this purpose — I use https://www.paypal.com/us/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=_ship-now to accomplish the same.
I have a vague recollection about the PayPal version being easier somehow, but in any case, it’s another option for y’all.
jeffreyw
I knew it! I asked, “where does that cookie money go?” Answer: “Uh, we bake more cookies, man”.
Belafon (formerly anonevent)
@RSA: With the possible exception of the kitchen scale, what you have listed are some of the things I consider to be part of the minimal definition of middle class.
Raven (formerly stuckinred)
@Belafon (formerly anonevent): Back in the day a triple beam balance scale was a must!
beltane
I live in a rural area and I absolutely loathe FedEx and try to avoid using it whenever possible. I don’t particularly value the service of a company that continually delivers packages to a similar address in the next town based on a GPS guesstimate made by one of their underpaid contract employees, and which then tells me it’s my responsibility to hunt down the package. This has happened often with FedEx, but never, ever with the USPS, where our postmaster actually knows who I am.
Shipping things via FedEx requires a long drive to a different part of the state. I did it once; I’ll never do it again.
Brian S
@Sam Houston: For things that are just a little too big to go First Class, no doubt. When I was regularly selling signed copies of my book (still available–makes a great gift!), I was mailing them anywhere in the US, large envelope first class, for a buck and a half. Got there in 2-3 days most of the time.
Samara Morgan
Cowards.
the US is planning to blame Bosnia-Herzegovina and Nigeria if the Pali statehood vote fails. BH is MOOSLEM ppls and Nigeria and Gabon are BLACK ppls.
I think the Sauds can smell cowardice…the outcome will be the same.
The strong horse coming out of this is going to be Iran.
The Saud monarchy should be aware of how we treat our “allies” after Mubarak.
:)
RSA
@Belafon (formerly anonevent):
Me, too. Even though I know mistermix was writing tongue in cheek, sometimes it strikes me how easy it is to assume that everyone’s middle class (for me at least).
beltane
@A Mom Anon: When services are privatized, you not only have to pay for the cost of the service, but you also have to pay for the multi-million dollar salaries of the corporate executives, you have to pay for shareholder profits, and you have to pay for the costs of lobbyists and a multitude of other assorted hangers-on. In short, privatization always involves the payment of a “parasite tax” to the Galtian geniuses who get rich feeding off the work of others, kind of like a tapeworm in an expensive suit.
Stefan
I spent 30 years humpin’ mail. My Back is ruined, My feet have both had surgery. My knees are about to go.
I have a outlandish(snark)pension (2002 , 50%)of $22,000.
If you’re Rep. John Fleming (R, of course), you’re barely getting by on $400,000 a year.
If you’re a retired postal worker, you’re soaking the rest of us for your princely $22,000 a year.
See how that works?
Brian S
@beltane: We had FedEx tell us recently that we’d provided the wrong zip code for something we’d ordered, and wound up having to give them directions to our place. Mind you, we’re a block from a major thoroughfare and three blocks from a major intersection, and the USPS said we had the proper zip code, but no, we were wrong and they were right.
We eventually got the package, fortunately,
Stella Barbone
Anybody who complains about the speed of the lines at the USPS has not had to drive half way across town — past at least 3 or 4 POs — and waited in line for a pickup at FedEx.
Petorado
A crafty Dem could possibly accomplish this USPS broadband concept if it’s attached to the second amendment. If broadband were there as part of regulating a well-regulated militia (notifying the modern day minutemen that the British are coming) it might put the R’s in a tough spot. … But of course “regulating” a militia would be soshulism so it might be a tougher sell than expected.
If we could get the interstate highway system built for national security reasons, a national information superhighway should also fit that description.
Linda Featheringill
Yes, I know this is OT even on an open thread. However:
Comment on IMF article in The Guardian:
No, the IMF doesn’t see blue skies tomorrow.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2011/sep/20/us-europe-double-dip-recession-imf
PurpleGirl
@Belafon (formerly anonevent): They are also required for running a small business, in which case replace the small kitchen scale with another kind of scale. And these machines are probably cheaper than buying a postage/mail machine to boot.
When I worked for the non-profit we had a machine and did almost all of our own mailings. We also called the USPS to add postage. Only time I took packages to the post office itself was when I needed something post marked by and got the paper attesting to that. The Postal Service has been innovating with services for years.
Stefan
@A Mom Anon:
I would LOVE to see some numbers regarding how much money privatizing various things actually saves the taxpayers.
Tada:
In the past year, congressional Republicans and right-wing extremists have ramped up their long-standing campaign against federal workers, claiming their pay is too high and their benefits too generous compared to private-sector workers. A new study shows how wrong they are.
According to the Project on Government Oversight (POGO), the federal government pays more than twice as much to private contractors than it would cost federal workers to perform the same work. The government spends some $320 billion a year for services by private contractors.
http://www.pogo.org/pogo-files/reports/contract-oversight/bad-business/co-gp-20110913.html
http://blog.aflcio.org/2011/09/13/private-contractors-are-double-the-cost-of-federal-workers/
cleek
@Brian S:
as someone who has spent the past two years smothered in the algorithms used to parse, validate and correct US postal addresses, i gotta say that it’s amazing anyone gets any mail at all.
OCR + decades of vague and ever-changing rules + misspellings + ambiguities = nightmare.
cleek
FYI, DADT: DIAF.
Obama has failed us again.
Villago Delenda Est
@Stella Barbone:
Actually waiting in the line is not the issue.
It’s better to wait in line at a for profit entity than at a non-profit. Because you’ll feel better knowing that someone is making money. It might be by causing you to be inconvenienced, but since critical thinking skills are actively discouraged in the teabagger movement, you’ll never notice that your pocket is being picked.
beltane
@Brian S: Dealing with corporations like FedEx is like dealing with a Soviet-era bureaucracy. They really do go out of their way to make you feel as small and insignificant as possible.
SiubhanDuinne
@Culture of Truth:
This makes me both sad and outraged to be a resident of Georgia. Just unconscionable.
schlemizel - was Alwhite
We have had problems with FedEx not delivering for one lame reason or another in the past. When given the option I always chose USPS. Nobody does it better or for less.
Years ago we lived in Saint Louis Park, MN. Friends in MI sent us a Christmas card but got interrupted while addressing it. It had our name & address but only Saint Louis – no Park, no MN, no zip code. The card got to our door a couple days later, after a fruitless trip to MO. Someone had to manually look up the street name, Zarthan, and forward it to the correct PO for delivery. Imagine FedX or UPS doing that. Imagine them delivery in an ever changing environment without USPS to sort out all the moves, all the zip coed changes etc.
28 Percent
Remember when McArdle wrote a screed about how she had to get stamps for her wedding invitations and they were oddly sized envelopes that she got at a discount from India, so they couldn’t just go standard first class, and so she went to the post office and there was a line which was totally unacceptable and would never happen at a private shipping company and she was outraged that she’s required by the government to queue in this line because she’s an iconoclast who buys discount indian wedding invitations? And then her commenters pointed out that usps.com will deliver stamps in any denomination plus self-service vending machines in the lobby? Good times.
beltane
@28 Percent: Megan McArdle is walking dumb-blond joke except that she is not a blond. You’d think that someone who spent so much time scouring the earth for wedding invitations would be able to figure out how to buy a stamp. If someone wanted to incite hatred against the upper class, they could do no better than to have people read the collected works of Megan McArdle.
Social outcast
If it wasn’t for reading McArdle, I would never know which coffee maker she bought for her kitchen. This is very important information that must be distributed beyond her immediate family.
Amir Khalid
@Samara Morgan:
You were the one saying the US was going to abstain in the UN Security Council vote, weren’t you?
Luthe
Anybody know why the troll population has exploded recently? My pie filter is starting to reach ridiculous lengths.
Brian S
@Luthe: No idea, but if anyone knows how to implement a pie filter on an iPad, I’d love to hear about it.
Fucen Pneumatic Fuck Wrench Tarmal
@cleek: i’ve worked with some of the ambiguities and ever changing rules. you have to love how the suburban sprawl overlaying rural, small town, and middle of nowhere non-addresses like and i shit you not “other side of the holler”. that’s it, no street address, because there were no streets back when it was built and wired..
Poopyman
@Luthe: @Brian S: My guess is that it’s because BJ has been quoted on other blogs recently. Also too, the blogowner has been twittering in all caps, which seems to attract a certain crowd.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
Even making allowances for a partisan sample and news bubble, this is remarkable:
from TPM
soonergrunt
@Poopyman: The firebaggers in particular are coming out in droves since that twit Hamsher’s escapades during the whole Bradley Manning/Quantico thing a while back, and especially after ABL called out that twit Hamsher. Also too, a lot of other PUMA-types are asserting themselves these days.
Elie
From a commenter on one of last night’s threads — some “reality” about jobs and what is happening for trends…
http://motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2011/09/who-will-tend-machines-tend-machines
The whole Post Office and related issues swirls around the type of jobs we are going to actually need to keep the economy afloat versus jobs we need to keep people afloat. Long after Obama is gone, we have this facing us and right now, few answers on how to address..
Hat tip to Kevin Drum who has been laying out thoughts/ideas on this recently.
Judas Escargot
@Brian S:
My previous first-floor tenants accidentally had a large package delivered to my address by FedEx (they had moved to the other coast). FedEx were supposed to come pick it up and re-deliver it to the proper address. Four tries, and they never managed to see the huge package on my back steps, with the words “FOR PICKUP” written in Sharpie in large letters. Morons.
The Lady Escargot calls FedEx and talks to the rudest “customer service” representative of all time. Essentially accuses us of trying to steal the package (which we never asked for in the first place). Turns out it had never occurred to them to look out back, despite the “ALL DELIVERIES TO BACK DOOR” sign posted on our front porch, which every other company has no problem seeing and respecting.
Fvck FedEx. I’ll be using UPS or USPS from now on.
Elie
@Luthe:
I never bother with the pie filter. Let ’em roll, I just don’t read them, definitely almost never comment or link to them and its pretty easy. There are a few Troll Lites who I like to poke at once in a while, but mostly its like talkiing to your adult friends at a kid’s party — keep on talking and the kids will play and scream in the sandbox around you, but that is what kids do.
flukebucket
@Raven (formerly stuckinred):
I can’t remember the author that was fired from the post office and told his friend, “all of my life I will be at the beck and call of people with money but never again will I be at the beck and call of every son of a bitch that has two cents to buy a stamp.” I am thinking it might have been Fitzgerald
FFrank
Another way to deal with libertarians.
Yutsano
@Amir Khalid: How do you say “hornet’s nest” in Malay? :)
trollhattan
@28 Percent:
Wow, I must have missed the snarkfest that followed that clusterflock. How long did it take somebody to connect it to George Costanza poisoning Susan with the discount wedding invitations? McSuderman was so close….
Corey
I know this blog has almost gone full Obot, but there has to be a post coming on DeLong’s excerpts of the Suskind book.
I mean – the passages about Obama’s ignored order to nationalize Citi, and the one about his extremely weird thinking about unemployment (it’s because of productivity gains, not aggregate demand) should illustrate who it is we’re dealing with: not a progressive, reality based president, and a poor manager to boot.
Stan
William Faulkner
Judas Escargot
Thread appears dead, but one more pro-USPS datapoint: There are things that FedEx and UPS refuse to ship, making the USPS the only option.
I recently ordered some nitrocellulose spraypaint and cleacoat from TX for a hobby project (I’m building a guitar kit). Good stuff, but highly toxic, and potentially explosive, so FedEx and UPS won’t ship them.
USPS was the only option for shipping. Took a week, but it got here, and nobody had to die.
KXB
Using a small postal scale and Stamps.com software – I was able to weigh 8 packages to be shipped to customers and print out the postage in under 10 minutes. I then leave it for the mailman to pickup on his regular rounds. It takes me longer to enter the sales data into my spreadsheet and print out labels than it does to print postage. When I saw I was running half-way through my supply of Priority Mail boxes, I just went to usps.com, and ordered more at no charge.
Considering that the post office has to function with all 535 members of Congress dictating to them where they can open a facility, and setting their prices (instead of the market), I’m amazed the post office functions as efficiently as it does.
Samara Morgan
@Amir Khalid: i still think we might.
i think it would be the best gamespace move available to Obama. it depends if the Palis get 9 security council votes or not….Obama has not yet decided.
:)
/shrug
we will find out friday.
:)