Yes, indirect benefits and taxation is core to how government services work. You can lose money in one sector and recoup from the gains in others. Cheap and reliable post service has been a backbone of the US economy since its inception, these are like force multipliers. You'd have to show me the USPS has always been "profitable" as a counterexample.

You even use "acceptable cost" so you get what I'm saying, we are just arguing over the amount that is acceptable.

Yes I will excoriate Republicans because they have never, ever in my life cared about root causes.

You want a return to pre 1970s USPS which means fully government controlled. Republicans don't want this. You want USPS reform, Republicans don't want this, they want to divest and privatize it.

Democrats may sometimes throw goodoney after bad but they also get actual governance done, they pass bills. Infrastructure, Chips act, inflation reduction act; all passed under Biden and those bills have project Republicans are taking credit for even while most voted against it.

Republicans can't govern, they have never cared about root causes because they are forced under positions and chose a leader who simply does not understand the concept.

Can you point me to one speech or anything where Trump understand the cause and solution to a root cause issue?

Because automakers stopped giving car buyers some variant of the single-DIN/double-DIN dash cutout with standardized wire colors for a wire harness, so owners could put whatever they want into the dash if they didn't like the OEM offering. Carplay/AA was the loose successor to that; users had some agency with app selection, but GM has famously torpedoed that solution. Their arguments were so bad that it was almost transparent that they did it just so they could try and get subscription revenue from customers for functions Carplay provides out of the box.

Now, you might reasonably argue that a means of returning to user-replaceable infotainment head units is basically what you were getting at with "secure mount"...but my point is that these shouldn't be mutually exclusive. A stock stereo *should* have Carplay/AA, along with a means of replacing it if the user deems fit...but i do think it's reasonable to ask for both - base trims of econobox cars include Carplay; it shouldn't require aftermarket hardware to implement, and the owner shouldn't have to be stuck with a panhandling screen if they *don't* buy an aftermarket stereo.

Well then we *mostly* agree. I would say the USPS should dissolve it's quasi-private structure and just return to it's pre-1970's structure and exist as a mostly public service. First class mail has such a wide ranging benefit for all other sectors of the economy that I don't really care if it runs at a bit of a loss. For packages and bulk mail service it can operate at the break-even level as described.

One things for sure, if reform is what we want the onyl path for it is the Democrats, even if we consider us cringe. I won't stand for Republicans disparaging it or pretending like they care or have solutions though.

Sure but even with that said one party is willing to keep the USPS operational and funded while the other wants to privatize it.

Do you care about the USPS or just playing word games?

It would be good for the US and the world if I were wrong and you were right, but go see what the LLMs predict when you ask them. Gas in some places in some states is already at $7 or higher from time to time, I was really genuinely talking about national average. But you have to feed in all the context: remind it that the Straits were first closed on March 2nd and haven’t really opened up, and then ask it to consider comparable oil shocks.

I’m saying the US is more car dependent now than in the 70s. Roads infrastructure has been developed more fully, and public transit infrastructure has been damaged, looking across the country as a whole. Just take a look at a picture of an American city in the 70s compared to today: massive suburbs, freeways everywhere, giant parking lots, lack of sidewalks, retail pushed out.

SPR = strategic petroleum reserve. The yikes is everywhere.
https://x.com/JavierBlas/statu...
https://tradingeconomics.com/u...

I don’t want to be immodest, but I live on a road where the average house price is way above £1m and literally no-one on this road has a summer and winter car. Nearby in the very poshest roads in Hampstead there are houses worth £10m or more, sometimes a lot more, and people still don’t do that. They may have a weekend fun car, eg a Lambo or a McLaren, they may have a fleet of cars for the household, but there’s no such thing as winter cars here. My kids were schoolfriends with the kids of at least four billionaires and countless other super-rich people, and went to their houses from time to time, so I am really pretty confident on this. It’s just not a thing.

If you are talking about the "concept" of an EV, you can't assume a price premium. That premium has been steadily decreasing with time as EV economies of scale get better. In fact, most of that premium has evaporated. The recent EV lineups announced from Toyota/Subaru and BMW are actually at price parity with their ICE cousins.

There aren't going to be many people draining their battery to 3% every other day because that would imply 150 miles of driving a day. That would imply driving over 50,000 miles a year. A few people may do that, but not very many. DC charging is considerably more expensive than home charging, so there is a built in incentive not to DC fast charge all the time.

Well here's the thing, that was passed in 2006 and you need a Democrat President in office (since Trump isn't signing that) and you also need 60 votes in the Senate. Or you need to vote in the primaries for Democratic Senators that will undo the filibuster.

The only time Democrats had 60 votes in the Senate was for 79 days in 2008 and while they didn't get that done they were the most productive Congress in our generation.

So my point stands, Republicans are ghouls who want to gut and privatize the USPS and the Democrats while far from perfect are at least stable stewards of government and they are the party that would most likely support the USPS. That's just reality chief, accept it.

You do have people doing that in the UK, but it is more people with million pound incomes.
I also lived in the midwest and never had seasonal cars. Now I have a car and a truck. I drive the car unless I need the truck.

I dunno, I think Renault, Kia, Hyundai and BMW are all doing pretty well at weathering the storm of the Chinese OEMs.

Harsh truth but if you all just voted for Hillary then Iran wouldn't have a nuke, we wouldn't be in a conflict and we wouldn't have used up like half our missile stocks, along with a host of other things, but nobody wants to hear that do they?

What this is is an admission that they use fiction as part of their training data, and have no way of indicating to the system being trained that fiction and non-fiction are two different categories of information. That should be a terrifyingly stupid admission, but being in this world, it's just par for the course.

If fiction is allowed as part of the training data for systems that are to be relied on for analytics and business use, perhaps there should be some consideration given into "teaching" the systems to differentiate between fiction and non-fiction. The fact that fiction was allowed such a role that the AI adopted tactics used by AI in fiction as part of its own actions indicates something is not going right here. In our rush to implement AI systems, we're not even trying to make them correctly. We're literally doing the, "Throw everything at the wall and see if any of it sticks," method of building these systems. And that has a very high potential of creating the exact issues fiction has always portrayed AI systems being capable of.

It's going to get substantially higher than $4. I think it could end up pushing 7 bucks. Historically, the US has tolerated recessions more lightly than it has gas above 5 bucks. So this is a really really big deal, not least because demand destruction through mode shifting is much less tenable than in the 70s due to greater car dependency, and the SPR is already extensively drawn down ahead of winter. A whacking great recession may well be on the way.

Senate passes $107 billion overhaul of USPS, lauding mail agency’s role in pandemic response

House Set to Approve $25 Billion in Postal Service Funding

House Democrats hope to sign, seal and deliver legislation this weekend that will buoy the U.S. Postal Service with $25 billion in emergency funding...

But regular commentary from President Donald Trump that he will not fund the Post Office, despite requests from its own board of governors to do so...

Am I here to argue Democrats are perfect or don't have glaring errors? Absolutely not but fact is one party does in fact want to reform things for the better and actually *pass legislation* and one party is the Republicans.

So who are you voting for? Or do you actually care about this issue or just want to pretend like you straddle an imaginary fence?

You love to take on this persona of someone able to step back and see the bigger picture, but you are so wildly parochial and US-focused and ignorant about the rest of the world. Low cost EVs that are as cheap on a like-for-like basis as ICE cars are common across almost all non-NA markets. Here in the UK, we have the Citroën ë-C3, Renault 5, BYD Dolphin, Hyundai Inster, Dacia Spring, Kia EV2, GWM Ora 03, BYD, Fiat 500e, Vauxhall Frontera, Leapmotor T03, Cupra Raval, Nissan Micra, BYD Atto, Skoda Epiq, and we're about to get the Renault Twingo and VW id.Polo and a bunch more Chinese models. I'm sure my list isn't comprehensive, either. This might be hard for US OEMs to replicate (although Stellantis owns several of these brands), but it's not hard in principle and it certainly doesn't cost hundreds of billions of dollars.