For a lot of years now I've used private mailboxes instead of USPS and it is great. It costs about the same as a mailbox at the post office but you get extra services like they automatically throw out obvious junk mail, they'll text you when you get a package (and sign for it and the put it in a locker which you can access 24/7 instead of having it left unattended on your doorstep). One place I've used will even open your mail, scan it and email a copy to you on a per-envelope basis. Plus, you get the benefit of not using your residential address everywhere which makes it much harder for anyone with a grudge to come knocking on your door.

On the other hand I found it extremely difficult to cancel USPS delivery to my street address. It got to the point where I just let the mailbox fill up with so much junk mail that the delivery guy couldn't stuff any more in.

They are not incompatible alternatives that can't exist together. My iMac has an SDXC card slot, four USB 3 ports, two Thunderbolt ports (one's connected to another monitor) and a Gigabit Ethernet port.

The MacBook Pro I just bought (refurb) has a Gigabit Ethernet port, FireWire 800 port (up to 800 Mbps), two USB 3 ports, 1 Thunderbolt port and an SDXC card slot.

Nope, that bathroom was never visited by the cats, and only rarely by humans. It was a spare bathroom and didn't get much use. That's why we locked him in there. Also, it was tile, so it was very easy to clean up. And I don't remember him peeing in there at all or making any kind of mess; he happily used the little litter box I made for him. When we let him run around the rest of the house, around the cats (for supervised play), he didn't cause any problems at all. If it weren't for the smell (of the ferret himself, not his pee) I probably would have wanted to keep him.

No, that law doesn't apply to every US company, so with that one exception, it does run its finances like any other company: it doesn't comingle its funds with the US Treasury, it's entirely self-sufficient, just like most normal companies (except big banks, oil companies, and ag companies).

It's already "nationalized", it's just run as a private corporation rather than a Federal agency. It's actually much better that way; most Federal agencies are horribly mismangaged and wasteful; the USPS is actually extremely efficient and well-run. If it weren't for Congress meddling with it, at the behest of lobbyists, they wouldn't have this problem, and they'd be profitable. Also, the USPS has been independent since 1971; that's long before UPS and FedEx were the heavyweights they are now.

Turning it into a Federal agency wouldn't change Congressional meddling. Congress can just as easily meddle with a Federal agency as with a government-owned corporation, and actually moreso. As a separate entity, it's easy to see how the USPS is doing and it has more isolation from stupid politics; Congress has to actually pass laws and such to affect the USPS's operations and behavior. A Federal agency, OTOH, is completely up to the whims of the guy in the White House (as well as the budget-makers in Congress), and things there can change radically every time someone new is elected or Congress decides to do something stupid like cut their budget. The way it is now, Congress has no real say over the USPS's budget or how they handle their money, except for legal mandates like this stupid pension-funding law. Congress can't just yank their funding for no reason, the way they can with every other Federal agency; the USPS is entirely self-funded, and uses no taxpayer money to operate. Change that to a Federal agency, and its revenues would go into the Treasury, and its operating costs would come out of the Treasury, being entirely comingled. It'd be very easy for Congress to simply defund the USPS (regardless of how much money they're making in revenue), cripple it, then point to that and say "look! It doesn't work! We need to eliminate it!" and then pass a new law to eliminate the USPS altogether, or sell it off to a private corporation.

Maybe you should try actually educating yourself about the USPS and the issues involved, and also about how the US government works (which obviously you don't know much about, since you're not American, obvious by your spelling of "nationalise"), before spouting a bunch of nonsense.

The only way to fix the issues facing the USPS is to fix the US government itself, and the corruption which has completely taken it over. The problems with the USPS are just minor symptoms of much, much larger problems with the US federal government, all caused by extreme corruption, turning into an entirely undemocratic, mercantilist/corporatist (some might say fascist) government. The way I see it, it's entirely hopeless at this point, and the only thing to do is wait for it to collapse under its own weight, just like the Roman Empire did.

Google will merge the self driving car technology it has developed with some robots from ai.mit.edu and complete the mail delivery from the cluster boxes to the door. But first it has to complete the robot that will open the mail and merge it with the OCR technology it developed for the Gutenberg project.

Actually, the USPS already takes photos of every piece of mail and saves it. They might not know what's inside, but they can tell the NSA who you've been communicating with.

You don't seem to understand how the USPS works. The USPS is NOT part of the government, it's a government-owned corporation. That means it has to run its finances exactly the way every other company does: it brings in revenue from customers, and then spends that revenue on expenses (operating expenses including salaries, capital expenses, and employee pensions). If they hire more people, then they have to raise their prices to pay them, which means more people switch to shipping stuff by UPS/FedEx, or they just don't send any mail at all. The USPS gets a lot of its revenue from junk mail, unfortunately. If they jack up the price of sending junk mail, then the junk mailers will send much less of it, which equals much less revenue from the USPS to pay all these new employees, which means they go bankrupt.

The USPS is, in fact, quite reluctant to hire ANY new employees at this time, because it costs so much, since they have to pre-fund every employee's pension fund for the next 75 years, thanks to the stupid law Congress passed in 2006 (with both Dems and Reps, so save your partisan bullshit). This is why the USPS has been moving to shut down Post Offices and instead encourage more franchise operations, called CPUs (contract postal units); the franchise operations act as postal clerks and handle normal mail duties like any PO location, but they're separate companies and not USPS employees so the USPS doesn't have to deal with any pensions for them.

It was the same way in several Phoenix-area neighorhoods when I lived in that crappy city. I lived in two different houses, built in the 80s, and they had centralized mailboxes scattered throughout the subdivision; each location had 32 boxes IIRC.

The thing that really sucked about it was that the individual boxes were quite small, and could barely hold all the junk mail. This isn't a bad idea, as long they make the boxes much bigger so you don't miss something if you forget to check your mail one day to clear enough space because it's so full of junkmail that the carrier saves your mail for the next day.

The government doesn't ignore the people. This is still vaguely a democracy so public support is required. Working against the interests of the people is done through hiding the existence of the effort or deceiving the public into believing that it is a good and/or necessary thing. A large enough and vocal enough movement is, for a politician, an opportunity to gain or lose power. No politician will ignore that. The first action may be to step up the misdirection efforts but the movement's desires will be addressed. Whether the movement's aims make any sense has little bearing. The anti-nuclear movement is and remains too large to ignore and too entrenched to misdirect so they often get their way to the determent of saner voices.

Just do an yum update lib.somedamnthing

The smart phones are getting smarter by leaps and bounds, dedicated gps systems with life time map updates are just 100$. The nav package has some minor advantages like muting the car audio, pausing the music, and some easier reach controls. But they nickel and dime you for map updates, and they are way over priced. You are better off not getting them.

Wow, that sounds like a total PITA. I had one briefly, for a few days, which I found outside (probably someone's escaped pet). It was really nice, and we kept it in a bathroom, where it made a bed in the trash can. We gave it to a ferret rescue person as soon as we could. Being locked in the bathroom (to keep it away from our cats), we never saw those other issues, but I just couldn't get over the smell.