If there's no letter to deliver, they don't need to do a full route, unless picking up mail in the box is also a service.

The problem is that the alternative to government ends up being Snow Crash style corporate authoritarianism. I prefer having a society that's fairly egalitarian ,,, Poland has a much lower GINI than the US or even Western Europe. It's great,

Then it will be time to go after the companies hawking the things, legally or otherwise. Or simply go Cambodian on anyone wearing glasses in public :D

That's a very US centric view ... in many EU countries, there VERY MUCH is an expectation of privacy in public. Set up a doorbell camera in Germany that films anything but your own front yard, and enjoy the lawsuits from your neighbors. Store the footage more than 72 hours? More legal problems. It's great ... they take personal freedom seriously. don't just pay lip service to it.

Then knock the ecahnamy down. Maybe it's not worth saving.

Maybe the solution to having less violence is regulating the tools of violence (a handgun is basically a point-and-click destructive device) and having a functional society that doesn't create an undereducated underclass with a culture that glorifies violence. The things that many EU countries that ALSO regulate surveillance in public also do. Also, 50% of homicides go unsolved because no one cares - it's dismissed as black-on-black crime or chalked up to gang violence and seen as deserved. There's a lack of will to investigate, even if the footage were right there. This being said, I'm fine with some murders going unsolved as a tradeoff for more personal freedom in society ... I'm not one of those who bleats "anything to keep the children safe, nine eleven" several times per day.

Bulk it up a bit, stick it in a bubble wrap flexi-pack?

I'm not rooting for it ... this is why I love Poland and prefer it to the US. It kept the best aspects of socialism. The national railway or one of the local successor companies runs trains to virtually every city of 50k people or more, as well as may smaller places. Generally, decently fact, clean electric trains. Public schools and certain higher ed are publicly run and of fairly uniform, if not of top-notch quality. National healthy system. Anyone working on the equivalent of a US W2 is enrolled by default and employers pay ~9% of income for employees getting insurance with very low deductibles ... none of this annual minimum or HSA nonsense like in the US. Feels much like the US and UK in pre-enshittification days, and it's absolutely glorious.

If they're delivering the packages, why not just deliver letters along with them? Basically same infrastructure.

Yeah, and risk their bodies for Big Oil? Or perhaps risk their good names following orders to commit war crimes? Fuck the US military ... anyone with half a brain should stay far away from that band of filth and vermin. War is a racket. Let's create good jobs, not more murderers and thugs.

And yet, we squander over a trillion per year sending our military thugs all over the world, buying them gold plated toys, and on abusive domestic lawn forcement and mass incarceration. USPS is a drop in the bucket. Fuck austerity.

And, I will add, fair is fair. If blue states supposedly inflate their representation, red states deliberately cut their voting rolls ... got caught growing weed in 1985 at age 18? No vote for you since you have a felony drug conviction, and the process to restore your franchise is deliberately tortuous and expensive.

Fuck the majority and fuck you. If this were the old Slashdot, most people here would have been LIVID at the thought of ICE pigs stopping people on the streets at random, asking for their "papers please", and often arresting them or being violent EVEN IF THEY SHOWED PROOF OF US CITIZENSHIP. When did Slashdot become the home of bootlicking bitter old codgers instead of libertarian in bent?

As far as "dumbocrapsee", the rule of the voting rabble (deplorable trash) shouldn't be paramount or unlimited. That's why we have a Bill of Rights. Remember, well over 50% of the rabble, the voting scum, supported segregation in the 1960s, and saw MLK Jr. as a Communistic troublemaker. I'm not for unlimited democracy, and I'm not even the tiniest bit ashamed of that fact.

Again, the law isn't equal to morality. I spit in the face of unjust laws, the legacies of the people who made them, and the good names of the people that enforce them.

Also, what's the functional difference between a letter and a small parcel? Could you drop off a parcel-shaped letter at the post office, with the only difference being that it's not being put into an outdoor post box?

I say keep letter delivery since it's incidental to parcels anyway and mostly needs the same infrastructure ... plus, it keeps people employed. I'm actually very much FOR New Deal style government jobs programs, even if they're "make work." Pure crapitalisim is overrated.