Are you in favor of the post office to switch to an all electric fleet

@Adogslife Well, that's gonna cause a nationwide crisis.

@Adogslife school bus ran over my mailbox last fall, I haven't put one up yet

@MarineBob What fucking idiot was driving that school bus? Somebody needs to get fired.

@BlueMetalChick I agree, but they’re about as adept as the Indians and smoke signals.

Split them up like any old, outdated “monopoly”. Their services can be divided amongst UPS, FedEx and Amazon as far as I’m concerned… hopefully with an option to opt out.

I don’t need to pay for them to deliver me junk mail and Christmas catalogs.

@Adogslife You wanna bust up a publicly owned and funded institution and privatize it? Do you even realize how bad of an idea that is?

Also, how the hell is the post office a monopoly? For that matter, the police department is too.

@BlueMetalChick Umm, monopoly is in quotes. Look back at the breakup of AT&T. Basically one phone company handled everyone’s home phone. They broke it up to provide competition. Look where we are now. How many people even have a home phone.

Doesn’t everyone that bills you ask/beg you to go paperless? Mail is going the way of the home phone. Bank on it.

@Adogslife AT&T is a privately owned business. That's why it was a monopoly. The post office is a publicly funded government institution. Just like police department, fire department, the ATF, the garbage men, and so on. You apparently don't know what monopoly means if you think the post office is monopolized.

@BlueMetalChick Jesus “monopoly” implies pseudo. I’ve already said that. And, how it’s funded is irrelevant. Libraries are publicly funded too and they’re soon to be extinct. They just have much lower overhead. They also don’t pay librarians 80k a year like many postmen. You just can’t pay that type of wage to unskilled labor and have any expectation of success.

Times change. Some publicly funded services can be privatized. The post office could. It’s an outdated, redundant infrastructure that’s done better by public companies. You could privatize prisons too. Libraries would have to stay public. There’s just no potential rate of return there.

@Adogslife You’d prefer to pay twice as much for UPS and FedEx to deliver your packages?

@LeopoldBloom This all started with me saying I don’t want any packages. So anyone can deliver me zero packages rather affordably except the post office.

@Adogslife And, would you consider libraries to be a pseudo monopoly? Is the public library system in need of being busted up because there's not enough competition?

That's the question here. Do you think it necessitates separation?

@Adogslife [quote]This all started with me saying I don’t want any packages. So anyone can deliver me zero packages rather affordably except the post office.[/quote]
Yes that's nice but you do understand that the vast majority of the country requires mail to be delivered to them, right? Because you, personally, don't need it doesn't mean it's not an essential institution. The post office doesn't say "Well, Adogslife doesn't require mail delivery, so I guess we're obsolete."

@BlueMetalChick People don’t write letters anymore. Bills can be paid on line from your bank account. That leaves junk mail, packages and the occasional piece of mail that’s actually important - though I’m not sure what that is.

The USPS is essentially bankrupt because few actually use their services and even fewer need to. That’s why they’d be much less obsolete if they were absorbed privately. That’s why their trucks are archaic. They’ll fail because paying someone 80k/yr to basically deliver junk mail isn't a sound business plan and never will be. And, that’s before benefits.

@Adogslife Most people still get paper bank statements in the mail, along with a wide variety of state documents. And even if they didn't, the advent of online shopping means that packages are probably more common now than ever. The post office is just as relevant and essential as it has always been. Its competitors are privately owned businesses that just charge you more money.

@Adogslife Without the postal service, UPS and FedEx will be fucked. They rely on it to do a shitload of their work for them.