Um $50.00?
Access to Full Service NCoA (National Change of Address) for developers is $175,000.00 per year.

CASS/DPV (the delivery standardization specs) is $10,000.00 a year.

USPS does lobby congress, as does the mailing industry as a whole. I'm not saying that Fedex/UPS has no advantages over USPS in regards to the universal service obligation, but that two of your examples were incorrect.

You wouldn't like the cost of FCM without Standard mail. Automation of the mail is the reason you can send a one ounce letter from California to Maine for $0.44. Automation requires a large volume of mail to be economically feasible.
Also, its not like mailers get a subsidy just because they are nice people. They clean the addresses, update for moves, pre-sort the mail to USPS specs, and put a barcode on so the mail can skip several steps. The subsidy is for this work, it's called "work-sharing."
Raising the rates on advertising mail always drives volume away, and at this point in time, the USPS needs every scrap of volume it can get.
As for the semi-privatization, that was a stupid idea. The USPS needs freedom to react, and 536 "CEOs" is no way to get that freedom. Congress is all about the USPS saving itself, but won't let it close a Post Office that serves 50 people and is less than a mile from anther Post Office. And at the same time Congress steals $5.5 billion a year to fund deficit spending. If any private company embezzled that amount the executives would be behind bars.

The thing is that the USPS wouldn't been doing as bad if congress wasn't constantly meddling.
They set up "retirement health benefits pre-funding" at approx $5.5 billion a year. Now pre-funding retirement benefits is a good idea, but that's not what this money is used for. That $5.5 billion goes into the federal coffers. This is after the USPS was forced to overfund their previous pension by $75 billion.
USPS would have been profitable in 3 of the last 4 years without the pre-funding requirement.
I work as a "Postal liaison" for a commercial printer. Which pretty much means I have to watch every minute detail of the USPS in the news. I think they are headed for a hard fall, but not because their business model is broken, but because of the meddling of 536 "CEOs".

ternet?
nteret?
teret?
I'm obviously missing something. . .

Instead, his buddy stood in front of an open pneumatic tube, mesmerized by a 9-foot-long python that had escaped from one of the labs above.

I would just tell the company that they had upgraded the routing computer using python.

I can't tell if you're trying to be funny or serious (I'm leaning towards funny, this is /. after all. . .)
I don't care how great a photo you see of a work of art, it in no way is equal that work in person. Take this image of Richard III for example.
In person, this painting is truly stunning, the detail is absolutely beyond belief. However to see it require looking both closely and from a distance. I don't know of any photographic technique that can capture the level of detail, the changing perspective, and colors of a true masterpiece. I say this a photographer who has tried to capture some art on film, and never been successful (though this could say more about my skill as a photographer, than the challenges of this technique).
And lastly, there is something about a museum that is sacred (it does derive from "temple of the muses" after all.) The space is holy, a shrine to Man's limitless potential and ability, as well his infinite inspiration found in the wonders of the Universe.

If you want an excellent good value Scotch, I'd recommend Edradour 10. It is one of the smoothest 10s you will ever taste, beating some 20s+ that I have tried, and only being beaten by a Glen Grant 50 (Gordon and Macphail bottling).
You can probably find Edradour for 20ish. And it should appeal to your "homebrew" mentality, it is the smallest distillery in Scotland, 3 men work there, and one only handles the books.
http://www.edradour.co.uk/main2.html

They will be, it's the reasons for the new postal barcode called the "Intelligent Mail Barcode." (IMB)
The current barcode (Postnet Barcode) cannot be used for tracking, it only has delivery information in it. Every piece of mail to your address has the same barcode, that makes it impossible to tack.
The IMB will have the option of being serial numbered, and tracked through to the destination Post Office. They are not considering scanning at the delivery point, because of the volume of mail (average of 4.7 pieces per stop) that is delivered makes manual scanning impracticable.
Now the real question is will any of the big mailers avail themselves of this feature? Probably not many. BOA might, Citi might, but Netflix won't.
Netflix knows that you only get good scan logs with Confirm service if your pieces are processed on Delivery Point Sequencers, and they also know that most of their mail is not (and almost none of their return mail is). because the mailers are truly non-machinable.
The uncentered disk causes too many jams in the outbound processing, and the return envelope usually folds in half, covering the address. Because of this they have no incentive to pay $25,000.00 per year to find out their discs aren't being scanned, they already know that.
I seem to recall that the OIG wrote to Netflix telling them to redesign or else, but I'm not sure if anything came from it.

There are some sheetfed digital presses that can print out finished bookblocks at 150+ppm. The quality is pretty close to Offset Lithography for text, the only truly noticeable difference is the slightly raised text (toner sits on top of the page, ink goes into it.) The cost to the producer is probably about $0.009 per impression or less (not including paper, which I can't comment on.)
I don't know what this company is using, but my company does some print on demand for clients, mainly manuals and training material.

What is this "Junk mail" you speak of? I can only guess that you are referring to a great offer sent to the wrong person. Seriously though, Standard Rate mail drives the economy. It is the most successful advertising method generating more than twice the sales dollars as any other form. ( http://printinthemix.rit.edu/fastfacts/show/159 ) And that number is going to rise, the thing that keeps is down is unscrupulous mailers who "Spray and Pray," content with a 0.5% response rate. As Mailers increase the quality of the data they use (i.e. not sending mail to where you used to live, but updating your address through the USPS.) the response rate starts to climb. On a side note, Printing is a very environmentally friendly process. Most paper is 30% recycled, and the rest is made from virgin fiber that was grown to be paper. Those trees never would have been planted if there wasn't a printing industry. Ink is mainly wax, and other safe chemicals. And a lot of shops use soy based ink. Okay, off my soap box now.

About a year ago, I had a strange report on sitemeter, it said operating system unknown, and browser google 0.9. The weirdest was the ip was Microsoft's Redmond offices. here's a picture of it I thought it was weird then, and I still think it is weird. ~Thursday