> Telling everyone where I live just to receive mail sounds insane in XXI.

This is what I thought too. That, coupled with snow plows repeatedly taking out my mailbox in the winter, and the fact that most junk mail doesn't get delivered to non-residential addresses and I decided to just take down my mailbox and receive all my mail at my work address.

I've been doing this for about ten years now, and it works pretty well. There are some unintended consequences though as many places just assume you have residential mail delivery. The first thing that happened was that six months or so into it, the USPS told HUD that my house was vacant. This led HUD to tell my insurance company. My insurance company freaked out and called me in a panic, but I was able to explain it to them and they made a note. The other biggest issue is that I constantly have companies ignore my 'mail to' address and send mail to my residential address, then get all uppity when it bounces. When I tell individuals that they have to send mail to my work because I don't have a mailbox, they often look at me like I'm Ted Kaczynski. I also can have trouble proving residency to places that want a piece of mail showing my address. The poor credit agencies get all confused, as they can't tell what the heck is going on, and seemingly randomly show my residential address as either of the two addresses. The latest issue was the federal 'every household in America can get free covid tests' program. Well, no. It's actually 'every household with a residential mailbox'.

But I definitely don't get much in the way of junk mail...

I had a driver take out my mailbox a few years back, and I left it down for a few weeks because junk mail was just atrocious at the time. My local post office was not amused, eventually delivering a certified letter saying I was liable to pay a fine and a warning that if the mailbox was not put back up, I'd be fined every month. I understand it from their perspective, since its essentially wasted time and effort. I'm surprised it's possible to get away with not having a mailbox! I will try this again next time mine is taken out.

Interesting. Imagine every single person in US register themselves in USPS, getting a "Post number". I'll be PN 1374582347. And I will only tell people "my mailing address is PN 1374582347. And like you said, I can change my address in one place and be effective everywhere instantly!

If actually everyone do this, we will even have an ID number that's not SSN.

> If actually everyone do this, we will even have an ID number that's not SSN.

I had a similar thought but about a bank account.

So apparently the Federal Reserve got into a lot of trouble for just considering giving every person a bank account but what if we actually do it using the post office infrastructure? The post office is secure enough to handle your passport. Why not your money?

Sanders has been trying to build support for the idea for years. It's a great idea, imo.

https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/10/bernie-...

They got into trouble not because the idea is stupid, but because many banks will quickly become redundant.

Centralized postal banking is not a new concept and actually is a long-term trend.

Small savings accounts at your local post office used to be a thing in the US, back in the days when banks mostly catered to wealthy urban customers, and seems to have done elsewhere too:

<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Postal_Savings_S...> <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postal_savings_system>

Seeing the high fees that some banks charge, I'd love to see USPS savings accounts come back as some low-fee competition.

I dont trust the USPS to not lose my passport. I always had a bad feeling when placing it in, knowing how many times they screw up on everything else.

Regardless, I dont want the federal government to be even more nationalized. How do I even begin to disagree with the IRS, for example? On top of that, I thought nationalism was bad?

> How do I even begin to disagree with the IRS, for example?

Have you ever had a bad interaction with the IRS? If so, it is probably because the IRS is chronically underfunded.

Anecdotal but among the people I know, the consensus is the people at IRS are very kind. Contrast that with the people at a state, any state, Department of Revenue. You do not want to make those people mad.

In any case, the answer is as I'm sure you know, to get a lawyer.

I am so saddened by comments like these which come from a position of privilege. They don't know nor understand the kind of pain people go through.

A friend of mine can't get a bank account because her father wrote bad checks in her name. She refused to make a police report (he was already in jail).

To be snarky, I have a bad interaction with the IRS every time I get my paycheck.

I also have a bad interaction with them every year when I have to tell them how much I owe them down to the dollar correctly under penalty of law. Failure to do so is also a penalty of law.

Yeah, fantastic experience.

I think you already know both of these things are handicaps forced by the US Congress.

Isn’t that like Switzerland’s postal banking service?

what difference does it make if it is an SSN, PostalID, or any other government issued ID that uniquely identifies you? as soon as one is agreeded upon, everyone will request it for that uniqueID ability. either way, everything will be known by anyone

It's supposed to be the username not the password. The problem is in treating it like some sort of secret.

The durability of postal addresses are hard to overstate imo. You can misspell so much, there’s a lot of info to intent.

Of course there’s not much when the street number is off… but even then you have the name.

I believe in the case of the USPS there’s also a lot of stuff not going into sorting machines either. It’s not all automated

I think you could do PO numbers for lots of stuff of course, and lots of checksumming could be put into place. But I think that for a lot of existing flows the zip code is super important and relied upon, and obfuscating that level of routing would not be worth it for the USPS

> There should be DNS for paper mail.

is that what a PO box is for? You can give out your PO box instead of an address.

unfortunately, the mailing address is sometime (ab)used by parties that also want your real address.

PO Boxes are tied to specific post offices and/or ZIP codes. There are almost certainly hundreds of not thousands of addresses that are PO Box 271 in the USA. What GP wants AIUI is a single mailable id that can be mapped to any delivery point in the area that the USPS serves.

There are private mail forwarding services that do that https://www.postscanmail.com/services/mail-forwarding.html

True. However then the postal fees are on the receiver. I wish there was a DNS service which would shield my privacy and provide dynamic pricing for the likes of FedEx, UPS, USPS. I enjoy Amazon Prime but don't want Amazon to know where I live.

Before they shut down, Shyp was going this direction. Given your username another person could send you packages without sharing your address.

pretty sure the people paying to deliver the mail would stop paying, so while delivery costs would go down, revenue would drop too...

How about a proxy? Mail forwarding exists

What is XXI?

Cringe way to say 21st century

Not necessarily cringe. Some countries (eg Brazil) use roman numerals for centuries.

I’m not entirely sure, but my guess is that it’s shorthand for 21st century.

I interpreted it as post 2021.

MMXXI

He's just showing off that he can buy beer.