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Who would have thought that giving an outdated system a monopoly on all letter would lead to backups and failures?
A NY postal worker has recently been arrested for hoarding 17,000+ letters in various places in his home, car, and work locker. Overwhelmed by the volume, long time employee Germash claimed he prioritized "the important mail". At this point in the investigation, the oldest mail to turn up is dated 2005.
The sad thing is, according to The New York Times
The Postal Service investigated 1,364 employee mail cases and arrested 409 employees between October 2016 and September 2017, according to the service ...
Some of the most egregious cases involve the theft of valuables like jewelry, money orders and bank checks, though abandoning thousands of letters and packages and hoarding them is not unheard-of.
In 2014, a Brooklyn mail carrier was discovered to have hidden 40,000 pieces of undelivered mail — a total of 2,500 pounds — over nine years.
If 409 Amazon employees were arrested for theft, everyone would know and everyone would be mad. The thing is, since the postal service is legally the only agency which can ship letters, we can't take business elsewhere and getting mad won't fix anything.
It seems like the best way to unclog the system and improve speeds for everyone is to let any company in on it. The best provider will rise to the top and presto! All you have to do is allow people to do what they want to do and the problem is solved.
Decentralization should've been done ages ago. The postal system is clearly inefficient, decentralize and privatize the damn thing
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Exactly. It worked extremely well for packages, and frankly I'm not exactly cool with a government agency in charge of delivering sensitive information.
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What worked well for packages? UPS and FedEx both use USPS
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It's far from perfect. I worked in a bike shop and UPS drove a forklift through a really high-end bike. We stopped doing business with UPS. Thanks the value of private companies. If we don't like the provider, we can use another.
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And I would say privatize it or eliminate it completely. There's no need to have the taxpayer liable for a bureaucratic entity performing a task that the private sector is performing far more efficiently and soundly. People don't understand how different the incentives are between bureaucracy and business. Businesses have an incentive to produce a quality product or service as efficiently as possible. The only incentives a bureaucrat has are self-preservation and securing a larger budget from the government.
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Totally. Postal services are plenty important, that's why I would rather have private agencies provide it. They are incentivised to outperform each other. The USPS can perform as inefficiently as possible and they still get payed.
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But who is going to send me valpak and my credit card offers?
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but who is gonna build the roads? :p
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The reason the postal service does not make money is not due to centralization it is due to it being managed by congress, they always make shitty decisions that hamstring the postal services ability to make money.
you mad bro? ;)
Amazon employees get busted for that shit all the time but no one seems that mad about it, seems like the cost of doing business, Amazon of course would not be possible without the postal service, UPS and FexEx both depend on USPS.
So one out of about every 1500 is getting arrested annually?
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The profitability isn't the thing I take issue with. My problem is the chronic mismanagement and overloading of an outdated system because it is monopolized. If private companies could provide the service, then it would lighten the load across the entire system. Maybe the USPS would improve as a result.
I personally do not purchase from Amazon because of their business practices. I am frankly not all that surprised. At least in the case of Amazon, as far as I can see, thieves haven't carried out their thieving for literal years. One postal worker had 9 yo mail and the other had 10. They have made themselves the only provider of delivery for letters, so the fact that it happens at all is flatly inexcusable.
Just because FedEx and UPS currently rely on it doesn't mean they have to or should. They are taking advantage of a system that exists currently and doesn't need to be profitable.
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Curated for #informationwar (by @wakeupnd)
Relevance: Sharing the truth.
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