Put your tinfoil hat back on. They don't scan the source address. And besides, why would the FBI care who you send mail to? The NSA listens to your phone calls and screens your email for key phrases, but the Postal Service? If the FBI knows whats in your mail, its because the recipient shared it with them.

The only part of a letter that is scanned for sorting is the street address and zip code of the destination.This is converted to an 11 digit barcode that has the zip code (5 digit) + city block ( 4 digit) + last two digits of the street address. This is sprayed on the envelope in UV visible ink. It is then used to send the mail to the right PO, then at the destination is used to sort the mail into the sequence that it will be delivered in by the carrier. Storing images from the sorting process would be pointless, and would take hundreds of petabytes of storage per year. Express Mail, which has a unique barcode on the label, and is tracked, is monitored a little. If the Postal Service sees a package going betwern known drug smuggling addresses, they notify the DEA. But it is a felony for a USPS employee to interfere with the delivery of your mail. Thats why all mail sorting facilities have hidden galleries where they video the employees sorting the mail. The Postal Inspectors have a 98% conviction rate for tampering with the mail. Which is why your package is about ten times less likely to be stolen by a Postal employee than it is with other parcel services. But, the Postal Service handles 500 Million pieces of mail a day ( more than Fedup and UPX combined do in a week). So even with a 99.999% accuracy rate, a few thousand pieces of mail a day get misrouted. Don't mail your cocaine with the Postal Service, but if you really absolutely need your mail get there, do what Fedup and UPX do when they are overwhelmed, and give it to the Postal Service to deliver!

True, the Postal Service does rely on stamp revenue instead of the general fund, but there is no profit motive. They are forbidden by law from losing money or making a profit. If they start to lose money, postage rates are required to increase. If they should ever make money, they must lower rates. And the first class mail is a protected monopoly by the Private Express Statutes. But the important part is that their personnel practices mirror the rest of the government.

And the pension and benefits solve the problem of poor performance how??

OK captain obvious, do you understand the concept of "figure of speech"?

Not all big government systems fail. Ever tracked a package with the US Postal Service? As a government employee, I led the design and implementation of the first tracking system. We had an impossible schedule, and beat it. In one year we went from the start of requirements gathering, through design, development, building out a data center, setting up a 1-800 call center, testing, deployment to 20,000 locations, and training 24,000 employees to use it. We finished a month ahead of schedule, and more than one million dollars under budget on a $180M project. Did you notice the press coverage, probably not, because there was none. The PM of the computer company hired to build the computer system used got a $20K bonus and a promotion to VP. I got a $1000 bonus and a signed plaque. No raise, no promotion. Guess why I don't work there anymore? The thing that kills the federal government on big projects is not that senior leaders don't get punished for failure, it is that the worker bees don't get rewarded for success. The civil service bases pay almost exclusively on seniority, raises are earned by sitting in a chair and not getting fired. Promotions are completely detached from performance. It is actually illegal to give a person a promotion to reward them for success. When senior positions become available, they must be opened up to all interested parties, and the selection is based on multiple irrelevant criteria, of which competence and diligence are almost insignificant. And the root cause is that the agency gets the same money from Congress, whether they perform or not. Without the cruel masters of profit and loss to filter out the weak and the stupid, federal agencies(and the military) become safe havens for them to congregate in. I have a radical idea on how to fix this - do the federal budget by direct democracy. Each year let every citizen choose how much of their tax dollars go to what agency. Then disband the OPM and OMB. There would be a lot of whining and complaining for a few years, but bringing consumer choice and free market forces in to the federal arena would fix a LOT of problems. AND it would prevent demagogues from buying votes with stolen money.

There is in management ranks in many corporations a belief in the power of positive thinking. That maintaining a sunny outlook and "aiming high" motivates people to do their best and overcome hurdles. There is, however, a pathological condition, where positive thinking is out of touch with reality, and instead of motivating people to FIX problems, it motivates them to hide problems and lie to make things look more positive. I have coined the phrase "The power of positive lying" to describe this. Sometimes consciously employing positive lying can achieve outcomes like securing funding, or retaining skilled staff. Some individuals are absolute masters of the art of positive lying. Elon Musk and Bill Gates come to mind. When they are successful, creative liars look like psychic geniuses. Their lies are transformed over time into "visionary statements" and they become famous for their "innovation". Almost nobody goes back and holds them to account for statements about replacing the internet with their proprietary network, or equipping used electric vehicles with AI to make them self-riving taxis worth $500K. But when the individual attempting to leverage positive lying lacks that sixth sense about when and how much to lie, they often get caught out and exposed. The line between business genius and unscrupulous charlatan is razor thin. It kind of looks like Mr. Muilenburg fell off the edge.

Thinking about YouTube and its annoying commercial intrusions, I can't wait for AI advertising! I'll be driving down the road when my sunglasses will detect that I have been licking my lips and decide that I'm thirsty. Suddenly my view of the road is blocked by my glasses showing me a commercial for cold beverages available at the next truck stop. Or I'm on the couch next to my girlfriend, she kisses me, and the fitbutt on my wrist detects my elevated pulse. Suddenly it blares out an ad for "RAMIT" brand condoms! Since most AI development will be funded by the profit-driven need to SELL MORE PRODUCT, life with AI equipped wearable devices will a living hell.

Out of all of the civil-liberties violations that are enabled by ubiquitous video surveillance, the author chose to object because porch-cams might put thieves in jail? SRSLY? THAT is what is wrong with video surveillance? Why not object to people who DON'T leave their keys in their cars, or people who lock their front doors, or women who carry rape whistles? Jimminy tap-dancing-crickets! One might almost suspect that the author is a double agent who is trying to make the case FOR installing video cameras by making ludicrous arguments against them.

The OK sign is also the American sign language hand sign for "@sshol3". I suspect that someone is playing ADL for a fool here. As in "You are an @sshol3 for believing in left-wing conspiracy theories!" https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

As someone who lives in a rural area, finding a physician can be a real schlepp! Add to that the fact that doctor error is the number 3 cause of death in the US, and you can easily make a case for taking the doctors ( except maybe surgeons) OUT of medical care. A doctor is nothing but a walking database, and they really SUCK at their jobs. With AI replacing humans you get: 1) Better, more accurate care 2) MUCH lower costs 3) More access in areas where doctors don't want to live (Inner cities and states with low pay) IF, in addition to implementing AI, you shorten drug patents to ONE year, then the free market will fix outrageous drug prices with competition (the way capitalism is SUPPOSED to work) AND you have pretty much solved the healthcare crises with no socialism required!

How do you expect Microsoft to make a profit from providing services to terrorists and drug dealers if they find out the government can access the information they store in the Azure Cloud? I mean , c'mon this is America, where corporate profits are the highest possible moral good.

You are obviously the kind of lame juvenile that "believes in science they don't understand. But you make up for itvwith threats and bullying. Typical climate zombie. CO2 gives of much less heat when hit by sunshine than the ground does. That is why it COOLS the planet . Mars has a 98% CO2 atmosphere, and the planet is -20degrees F at noon on the equator. The Moon has no atmosphere, and it is 210 degrees F at noon on the equator. You are such a gullible moron.

The statistical correlation between carbon dioxide and temperatures is NOT proof of causality. Two other candidates come to mind: the first is of course, ELECTRICITY. The world uses something like 11 trillion Joules of electricity right now. There is a very strong correlation between increases in use of electrical power, and global temperatures. What if CO2 is just a by-product of electrical generation, and the CO2 correlation with temperature is a false-positive result? Then ceasing to use fossil fuels will merely break the correlation between CO2 and temperatures, while doubling the earth's electrical usage by converting to electric cars will seriously accelerate the warming trend! The second is Solar Coronal Mass Ejections (CME). The Earth's magnetic field is currently collapsing at the rate of 5% per decade in preparation for a change in polarity that happens once about every 50,000 years. Already the CME's are disrupting telecommunications and power grids. But what are they doing to atmospheric temperatures? A 10,000 degree plume of nuclear plasma 8,000 miles wide sounds like a TERRIFIC way to warm up the air, doesn't it? Wait till the magnetic field collapses further, and the CME's could be penetrating down to the lower atmosphere. While we are futzing around with wind turbines, our butts will be fried to a crisp by solar flares. Maybe we should be building underground shelters instead?

Electricity travels at roughly the speed of light, which is very roughly a foot per nano-second, in terms of raw distance, the 5 milliseconds would be a little less than a thousand miles. But you lose a millisecond or two for every router you pass through, and you have to account for server response times. I suspect that the big argument here is not for physical distance, but using a plethora of servers that don't build up a long queue of transactions waiting for service.