Mail makes you angry? That's a likely a transferal displacement reaction.

Why do you feel that your mother didn't love you, and when did you first become aware of this feeling? :-)

Right. The existing economy of institutionalised graft, extortion and threat of incarceration is infinitely preferable.

Inefficiency is a point of view - a pipe through which one may look at a system. Efficient to what end? Are you accumulating fat for winter? Or are you efficiently burning everything from your intake?

Some inefficiencies are virtues.

A LOT more.

BTW: I asked my Dominatrix for a "happy ending".

She sang me "The Pina Colada Song", and sent me home.

Trope.

Truism.

Bad analogy.

I could go on...

Unlike the REAL pretense of servicing financial derivatives, or selling cable subscriptions to watch "It's Always Hot in Cleveland"?

All value in an economy is not transactional profit.

In fact, that is the difference between an "Economy" and a "Marketplace". The difference is not taught, and in fact? The confusion is actively promoted.

But the difference between these two things is analogous that between the concepts of "Strategic" and "Tactical".

Oh yeah. Highly and effectively managed...

I remember when Reagan had the limits on commercial message length lifted. All night movies disappeared in months, around '82.

Welcome, Real Estate Seminar Infomercial! John Wayne and Bette Davis gave way to Thom Vu and Sy Sperling.

Culture? Died.

One IS a constructive activity. :-)

I won't labour arguments about that. It is fairly self-evident that one scenario involves violation of property, coupled with an element of coercion and violence. Let's not think of the ramification of encouraging a certain segment to violent, destructive action, while inuring another segment to the inevitability of such violence...

The other involves a sequence of activities that generate marginal commercial value and opportunity for greater social benefit.

So.

Mail carriers too, had their own "greatest generation". :-)

Signaled with lamps, lit in the church steeple. "One if by land..."

Subsidising "entertainment" in media mass markets? That's just sending money to lawyers.... ;-)

Yes. Your points are taken. It does seem that a healthy economy might treat the USPS like a WPA works program: employ as many as possible in a function that binds the social fabric more tightly than without it.

Then? Get rid of FastTrack, and begin offering employment domestically in Toll-booths. :-) Instead of in Malaysian or Vietnamese RFID factories...

Re-nationalise it. Now.

This was spun out so that it WOULD fail - creating opportunity for the FedEx/UPS bastards. They funded the campaigns of House Committee chairmen, and similar "Grima Wormtongue" types, to betray YOU and sell as a franchise, that which was core to national identity and shared purpose.

When they say "Free Market" they really mean regulatory policy to advantage themselves. You ARE smart enough to be a free thinker, and reject knee-jerk conventional wisdom, are you not?

Which operate over the PUBLIC airwaves, which by rights should also be under the appropriate level of management as national infrastructure - serving the purpose of a great nation, subject to the consent of it's people as a whole.

What's true for the post should have been true for the Telegraph - as it was in much of Europe after Napoleon.

That is, until the pirates and grafters took over completely, and brainwashed you lot into believing that if it didn't turn profit, then it had no value.

Without this "almost free" mail, another segment of the economy collapses. Print shops would disappear, for one.

Look at it this way: Advertisers hire people to create copy and design layout, which goes to print shops that buy ink and paper, then bulk send the result via a postal service to my home - where I retrieve the contents and promptly deposit them in the recycling bin.

But it doesn't end there! Then the waste management company comes to collect those, deliver them to paper mills that supply the print shops... Cue Elton John! It's the "Circle of Life"!

Somebody is gainfully employed at every stage of this pipeline, and it is no more or less absurd than any other form of socially connected human endeavour. Everything is social policy, like it or not. Wait on the mail? Only at an overall social cost which, like the beat of a butterfly wing, may be of inestimable consequence.