US Postal Service To Make Sunday Deliveries For Amazon 258
guttentag writes "The New York Times is reporting The USPS has struck a deal to deliver Amazon's packages on Sundays — a first for both. The Postal Service, which lost nearly $16 billion last year, often loses money on first-class mail delivery, but package delivery is profitable. The Postal Service said it expected to make more such deals with other merchants, seeking a larger role in the $186 billion e-commerce market. For this holiday shopping season, Sunday delivery of Amazon products will be limited to the Los Angeles and New York metropolitan areas. In 2014 it is expected to expand to other cities including Dallas, Houston, New Orleans and Phoenix."
Re:Obligatory note: the USPS is intentionally brok (Score:5, Insightful)
Across the Western world, it has been the Right's strategy to privatise popular public services by first deliberately ruining them. Then public perception changes toward, "Oh wow you're right state ownership doesn't work!"
Occasionally, this comes at a cost to human life, such as Thatcher's deliberate underinvestment in the railways, followed by Major's spinning off of Railtrack without any clear identification as to who is responsible for maintenance. But usually it's just a huge fucking waste of money, and the privatised industry ends up enjoying multiple subsidies and regulatory capture.
The way it ought to be...except (Score:5, Insightful)
This, of course, it pretty much the way it ought to be, at least for current employees: Retirement benefits fully funded, instead of vague promises.
Of course, since this money is paid to the government, instead of being put in an independent fund, the government will just steal it and replace it with IOUs
Re:Obligatory note: the USPS is intentionally brok (Score:4, Insightful)
They are losing $16 billion a year because they pay out $5.5 billion a year for future pensions?
Bad math is bad math. If they didn't fund pensions at all, I guess you should expect future tax payers to just pay that, they are STILL behind $10.5 billion a year. Is that a success for your?
Also note, this bill was passed with STRONG bipartisan support as a way to show private business that pensions should be fully funded and how to do it. Revisionist history is revisionist history.
USPS is still important (Score:5, Insightful)
Just remove legislation protecting the USPS, together will any subsidies.
You mean remove the Constitution [wikipedia.org]?
Despite your glib implication that subsidies are not needed, mail remains a vital service and it is important that it be available to everyone, even if this requires subsidies. There is no one else who realistically can replace the USPS including UPS and FedEx. This remains true despite falling mail volumes. Just because the postal service often seems to be mostly a paper spam delivery service doesn't mean it isn't also a vital service for communications. Remove subsidies right now and the USPS will collapse and yes that IS a Bad Thing (tm). While the USPS will need to adapt to modern times, the role it serves is a critical one and that isn't going to change.
And for those of you who remember fondly the good old days - The Post Office used to be open and deliver on Christmas day.
They also used to deliver multiple times a day. So what? We don't need that now. Times change.
Re:Obligatory note: the USPS is intentionally brok (Score:5, Insightful)
Originally, the USPS was a government service, subsidized where necessary. It wasn't designed to operate as a private business or to make money. It was OK if it lost money because it was an overall boon to the economy. It worked fine that way for 200 years before it was privatized.
Now it's expected to operate as a private business and turn a profit in the existence of a competive marketplace while bound by rules and financial burdens its competitors do not have to bear. FedEx and UPS do not have to deliver anywhere they don't want to, to deliver on any days they don't want to; they have unregulated rates, don't subsidize anything and don't have to pre-fund retirement benefits.
It's a recipe for destruction. It might be saved by completely removing all regulations OR by giving it real subsidies in exchange for the regulations it bears that its competitors do not. It can't go on the way it is.
Re:Obligatory note: the USPS is intentionally brok (Score:5, Insightful)
That's not so far off. If the USPS must pay $5 billion per year, then it shows continual losses, and the whole program can be cut. The Treasury then has a surplus of cash that's no longer earmarked for future employees, so it's a simple bit of labeling magic to release it into general funds.
That means that whatever party does eventually kill the USPS gets to claim responsibility for a few tens of billions of dollars additional revenue for the Treasury. With the right spin, the public at large will be aghast at how the irresponsible other party could have let the Postal Service survive so long when it was so obviously financially beneficial to shut it down.
Re:Obligatory note: the USPS is intentionally brok (Score:5, Insightful)
let's also remember the current post office is protected from many searches by the government, private entities are not. That is also a driving force here.
Re:So Saturday Bad, Sunday Good? (Score:5, Insightful)
Delivering packages every day = good. Only stop at the the places you need to.
Delivering letters and junk mail to every single mailbox on Saturday = bad. No extra revenue, and those letters can wait until Monday.
Re:what? (Score:4, Insightful)
The too big to fail mentality was invented by the government and corporations.
No, "Too Big to Fail" is a natural consequence of the fact that not all aspects of business are self-regulating, as illustrated by the old adage that "Nothing Succeeds Like Success". In engineering terms, that's a positive feedback loop whose ultimate termination is extinction for the losers and monopoly for the winners.
In real life, actual mileage may vary. Capital-intensive businesses tend to be more likely to go that route because cost per unit tends to decrease the more units you buy. And because the entire reason for having a capital-based business is because other forms of business organization lack the resources needed to establish themselves and grow. Nor is it a "pure" model across the board. Even with the dominance of large pizza chains, mom-and-pop shops remain popular, but you're not going to find many steel refineries or chip foundries in that state.
Of course, once you reach a certain size, you can afford to start buying political favors, but the options available when you have lots of money to throw around expand in many different directions. That's just one of them.
"Too Big to Fail" isn't just a slogan. It's an acknowledgement that if you do fail, you'll cause major damage to the rest of the world in the process of collapsing. You will, in fact, have leveraged the cost of your own failure to the point where the collateral damage greatly exceeds the damage you yourself will receive and that therefore you have a gun to the figurative head of the economy.
The best way to ensure that Too Big To Fail doesn't occur is to put a choke on the positive feedback loop. Once a business begins to get so large that its likely to reach that point, limits should kick in. That is, in fact, what anti-trust laws were designed for.
In recent decades, though, we've been bombarded pretty much continuously with the mantras that Government Control is Always Bad and Unfettered Markets are Always Good. We de-fanged the laws that had been created as a result of the Great Depression, we did little or nothing to regulate monopolies (see, for example, Microsoft), and have even seen broken monopolies such as AT&T slowly rebuild themselves from their erstwhile breakup components like an old horror movie villain coming back for a sequel.
Then, to add icing to the cake, we've encouraged the get-rich-quick culture that says it's better to buy and sell and plunder and loot other businesses than to invest in one's own business.
Re:what? (Score:5, Insightful)
It makes sense because it's part of basic infrastructure, that enables other services and businesses to function more efficiently.
You don't need to pull profits from basic infrastructure, if you can instead collect taxes from companies attracted by superior infrastructure that enables them to do business much more efficiently, and often do business where it would be otherwise impossible to do. It's called "synergy" - infrastructure enables more business, and pays for itself with taxes collected from them.
Re:what? (Score:5, Insightful)
All you need to incentivize spending money wisely is privatization; if you waste money you suffer consequences (get fired),
I'm not saying the other guy is right, but you've never held a real corporate job have you? Waste is rampant in all major companies and the executives responsible for it don't get fired (they may leave for "family reasons", but they take their bonuses and parachutes with them).
The problem with Michael's argument is that just because a company is in the red doesn't automatically stop waste. In fact in some cases it makes it worse as all the little fiefdoms within continue to fight for their piece regardless of how it impacts the rest of the company or if they really need it.
Signs you are dealing with a mouthbreathing moron (Score:0, Insightful)
would of
the people who retiring now would not have the monies that they are suppose to get
Re:what? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:what? (Score:5, Insightful)
Mr. Anonymous? I think you need to stop swearing, calm down, and look at a very important question that you (accidentally) raised.
What IS basic infrastructure?
Roads. Sewers. Electricity. Water delivery. Education. Hopefully decent health care. Working law systems. And yes, even something as basic as package delivery. Internet?
See, I run a business. I NEED those things for my business to function, but I'm too small to buy them for everyone, let alone to buy them for myself. I need roads so my workers can get to work. I need roads so I can ship things. I need electricity or my machines can't run. I need water delivery and good sewers so all my customers aren't dying of dysentary. I need basic education so there is a half assedly educated workforce available for me to hire. I really do need decent health care so _I_ don't have to provide it for my workers (god what a headache). I need basic law systems so I can have legal protections or sue someone who tries to take unlawful actions against my business (or me). Package delivery? Yeah, I depend on that. I build widgets. I NEED parts delivered. My business wouldn't exist without the postal service.
Man do I wish internet was a basic infrastructure....
Anyway, if these were provided by private companies, they would be a fucking mess. Just imagine private roads. Multiple roads in parallel, starting, stopping, the legal hassles of right of way, the tolls, fees, the collusion, the even larger tolls and fees... No. It's a nightmare!
So, businesses and individuals NEED the government to create this basic infrastructure. What the poster is saying is even that businesses are attracted to countries that HAVE this infrastructure. I sure wouldn't want to run my business in Somalia, that's for damn sure. Maybe the market is there, but the act of running my business would be far harder due to the lack of infrastructure. Ew. No Thanks.
In short, you benefit so much, and you take it all for granted. That you DO take it for granted is a sign of how WELL that government provided basic infrastructure works. You benefit FAR beyond what taxes you put in because it's a collective effort.
Also, you ignorant twit.... You want to whine about government waste? Sure. Go ahead. But be civil about it. The OP raised a good point, an intelligent point, and you were so busy being angry that you missed it. Calm down and LISTEN next time.
Also, we all pay taxes. Seriously, quit whining.
Stop subsidizing junk mail (Score:4, Insightful)
My mailbox is filled with junk mail every day. In fact, I bet I get 3-4X as much junk mail as I do legitimate mail. I probably get 1-2 newspaper-like ads every week from grocers that I've probably never opened.I bet the USPS would start making money if they started charging these guys closer to regular rates. Well, assuming they can't get the pension pre-funding fixed in Congress.
Re:what? (Score:5, Insightful)
"It actually makes sense for an entity like the postal service to be losing money."
Socialism is truly a mental disorder. Do you realize what you just said? Do you have to be reminded to breathe?
All you need to incentivize spending money wisely is privatization; if you waste money you suffer consequences (get fired),
The state is the only organization where you would find people saying 'it is better to waste money', because the money they waste is not theirs, and the supply is unlimited - they can always tax more or print more.
But you are advocating pissing away MY MONEY. I just wish you would have the balls to tell that to me to my face. But we all know you are nothing but a pathetic lying statist thief and a coward.
God I fucking hate socialists.
The post office is self-funded. It has not received taxpayer funding for a long time.
So, they're not pissing away "your" money.
Besides, the only reason they are officially losing money is because they were forced via an act of congress to pre-fund a retirement that is extremely onerous and far beyond what any private company would have to do. This was done so that the republicans can say "hey, look, the USPS isn't working! Let's privatise it!".
Sorry to burden you with facts, it looked like you had a good head of steam up there for your frothing libertarian rant.
Re:what? (Score:3, Insightful)
Somalia
I wasn't necessarily agreeing with you, but at least I was listening to you, until this.
Somalia is not a libertarian society, and equating it with the libertarian ideal is an intellectually dishonest rhetorical tactic meant to conceal rather than reveal. Now, you can say we libertarians are wrong that markets can provide infrastructure, and fair enough if you do, but our ideal is no better represented by the overlapping collection of theocrats, warlords, and the occasional functioning republic that makes up today's Somalia any more than the progressive ideal is represented by Cuba or North Korea.
By the way, the belief that healthcare can only be provided by government or by employers is a false dichotomy. Better than either if people simply pay out of pocket for routine expenses and maintain insurance only for catastrophic, unplanned expenses, just as they do for gas and oil changes vs. collisions.
Re:what? (Score:4, Insightful)
I think the question of whether or not something should be government-run (or at least involved) vs free market is: Are we, as a society, okay if some people don't get this service?
If the answer to that is 'yes', then free market is probably the way to go.
But if the answer to that is 'no', then free market won't work -- free market requires the voluntary participation of buyers AND sellers.
Don't care if some people don't have health care or education because they can't afford it? Free market is the way to go.
Think health care & education are important for a civilized, well-functioning society? Probably need to have government involvement then -- which is not to say our current systems are perfect (far from it!) but "free market" is not the solitary answer.