Comment on something to be reinvented

_chris@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

• dan@upvote.au ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  It’s the same with public transit. Some people think the government shouldn’t invest in it because it won’t be profitable, but… it’s not supposed to be. It’s a public service, just like libraries, firefighters, parks, public schools, road maintenance, etc. That’s literally what taxes are for.

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  • Mardukas@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    It’s crazy. I mean even if you are against taxes and everything it is a shared pool if resources. What are we supposed to with it if not pay for these things? Pay for the salaries of politicians that do not utilise these resources? All the time you hear from these people what the government should not be spending tax payer money on but you rarely hear anything about what the money should be spent on.

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    • CH3DD4R_G0BL1N@sh.itjust.works ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      you rarely hear anything about what the money *should* be spent on.

      You must not be listening cuz plenty of people talk about spending it on bombing more foreign children for the good of the military industrial complex.

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      • baggachipz@sh.itjust.works ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

        And cage fight matches in front of the white house

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  • FishFace@piefed.social ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    It’s because public transport isn’t always profitable that it needs subsidy, because the indirect effects of a mobile population are extremely beneficial.

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    • Pat_Riot@lemmy.today ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      Public transport should not be profitable. It should be public . Paying for a public service with money from taxes is not subsidy, it’s a provided public service.

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      • FishFace@piefed.social ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

        I don’t think you’re really disagreeing with me except on minor matters of terminology.

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• Rivalarrival@lemmy.today ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  The USPS needs to take a long, hard look at their Money Order, and pivot toward basic consumer banking. They were the first widespread service for money transfers. They need to return to that core competency. They should issue checking accounts and bank cards (rivaling Visa and Mastercard) for anyone who wants one. They should provide fee-free basic consumer banking services to the general public.

  At this time, their operational model is “advertising platform” that happens to occasionally provide delivery services. Their reason for continued existence is bulk mailing. They aren’t a government service. They are a de facto business. They fund themselves, and they produce a revenue stream for their sole shareholder, the US Government. If they were actually a government service, they would be publicly funded, and junk mail would be broadly prohibited.

  The USPS is currently a garbage delivery service. Neither snow, nor rain, nor uBlock Origin stays these ad peddlers from littering “Or Current Resident” with their stamped trash. They should shift their focus to parcel delivery, and consumer banking.

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  • ZombiFrancis@sh.itjust.works ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    The whole ‘run government like a business’ idea usually entails running it into the ground. It’s just a more diplomatic way to express wanting to remove social services from people.

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    • Rivalarrival@lemmy.today ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      Exactly. The USPS should have pivoted from daily physical mail delivery to telecommunications services by the 1920s. The breakup of AT&T’s monopoly in the 1980s made the Internet possible; we could have had the internet 30-40 years earlier if we had pushed the USPS into telephone.

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  • Jtotheb@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    Nobody’s really willing to have this conversation. Much like the TSA, the USPS is a jobs program. The bulk mail justifies the ongoing maintenance expenditures on the mail sorting equipment that will be unnecessary if we stop pushing so many Valpaks and predatory “I want to pay cash for your house” mailers. And a lot of people who process the mail will be out of a job, and a good chunk of people who deliver the mail will be out of a job, and the remaining carriers will have a radically different job as the load is lightened and they would have to travel much further distances on their routes to justify a full day’s wage, but the economics of traveling that far start to raise questions about whether 6 day a week delivery to every address is a reasonable burden for the USPS to shoulder… presumably management would be unaffected.

    This will all be in limbo til the nation is ready to talk about what work and life look like in a world where we’re all pretending to need to work 40 hours a week to live. And with the state of mass media as it is, the citizens don’t really get a say when it comes to what we’re talking about this week. Ironically, the USPS is well positioned to reach its customers and get the ball rolling… but taking a stance on the right to life would be deemed political.

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  • _chris@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    I’d argue that is what it became, not what it started as or should be.

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    • Rivalarrival@lemmy.today ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      Absolutely. It was an excellent system a hundred years ago.

      They failed to expand the postal service into telecommunications between 1890 and 1940, leading to AT&T’s monopoly on the phone system until 1982. They failed to expand their money transfer system into consumer-oriented electronic banking services in the 1990s, leaving Visa and Mastercard with a stranglehold on payment processing. We’ll have to break them apart soon.

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• pineapplelover@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  My dad (a conservative) works in usps and thinks that there’s no way they’ll go after them.

  He gets fed up saying how DMV workers are so slow and disrespectful and them glazes up his work in the dmv saying that their agency is the one that gets overworked the most.

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  • explodicle@sh.itjust.works ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    There’s a potential future where we could get rid of the DMV. Like we could simply require insurance through AAA or whatever. If you can’t get insured by any branch, then you shouldn’t drive.

    Cops should have to get malpractice insurance too. Issuance is a good solution to a lot of stuff.

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    • turtlesareneat@piefed.ca ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      AAA is a nonprofit, if they privatize the DMV it’ll damn well be a corporation with a CEO that can make kickbacks to all the right people and keep the poors below him at bay.

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  • trackball_fetish@lemmy.wtf ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    You might wanna tell him they’re on elons hit list (iirc)

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