I once sued because the jail was selling Forever stamps at 49c but Congress had reduced the price to 47c. The government's argument was that they had purchased 10,000 of them at 49c, so selling them at 49c was legal as they weren't "ripping anyone off." The appellate courts did not agree with that argument.
Also, funny thing in jails, the sticky leftover gutter parts of the stamp books had value because they could be used to repair torn things like books, photos and magazines.
Can confirm, I laser cut wedding invitations out of 1/4" plywood and mailed them out like that. I think it required some "non-machineable" stamp or similar, but they all arrived at their intended destinations.
Sadly this experiment would cost in the high tens of thousands of dollars. We may try with titanium some day. That would only be ten thousand dollars.
Where'd you get the magnesium cube?
Osmium is about twice as dense so yeah that would still be shippable at around 60 lb... I don't think that's even tens of thousands at that point? Isn't it going to be in the millions? I'm just thinking that like if you went for gold instead, 50 lb is 800 oz, at $3300/oz these days doing this with gold is $2.64M, no? And surely osmium blows gold out of the water by like 10x, right?
Jokes on you when the $100 of insurance is all you get back from the post office...
Edit: a sibling comment points out that you can probably do this under $100 with tungsten too and get up into that 50lb+ range.
DU is harmless unless you eat or breathe it but alas it's now illegal to possess more than a minute quantity of it.
Tungsten is actually slightly denser and it has the advantage of being obtainable.
That's why our use of big lumps of DU as door stops was considered "safe" (at that time several years ago) but in labs where people machined the stuff they were a lot more careful.
A buddy of mine used to cast and paint figurines. Well, someone ordered a bunch of lead ones and they used a flat rate to ship it. The box weighed something like 80lbs. It was basically just a block of lead
It's probably coincidence but a few months later a weight limit was placed on flat rate boxes. It's still crazy high. We always thought the timing was funny.
Small flat rate box, 21.9 x 13.7 x 4.12 cm = 1236 cm^3 = 14kg; you can fill 100% with lead and mail it. Tungsten is also allegedly fine, but it will weigh 23 kilos and be quite difficult to pick up (can't get a finger under an edge...)
Medium flat rate box = 95kg; you can fill it 33% with lead, or ~45% with steel and mail it.
Large flat rate box = 144kg; only 22% lead.
For solids at room temperature and pressure the best you could do seems to be osmium or iridium, unless you have access to heavy transactinides.
mass/kg substance
2.57e5 small flat rate box
2.26e5 osmium
2.25e5 iridium
2.65e5 meitnerium (theoretical)
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meitnerium#Stability_and_half-...
If you've got a particularly slothful postal worker you might consider topping up your meitnerium with a similarly sized sample of roentgenium-282. If you don't have any to hand then perhaps you'll have better luck producing tennessine-294 and waiting a couple of minutes. Amusingly your trip from Tennessee to x-ray land will take you via Moscow and Japan.
(Beware that you might end up making the box bulge a bit, since you'll necessarily go over the size limit by including less dense materials as well as necessary apparatus.)
"Forever stamps" were introduced in 2007. What other stamps before then didn't have a face value? I don't remember any.
E.g. this collection of 8000 stamps is $75: https://www.ebay.com/itm/396477663178
Looking at the pictures, many are more than $.01 value.
Assuming they’re uncancelled, you’ll end up multiples of your money ahead if you rip the collection apart and use it to mail stuff.
The challenge would be having enough surface area on your package to plaster on 6-cent stamps.
It’s not too hard if you mail paper that can’t be folded.
Can also cover what you can and get the clerk to print you a label for the rest.
That's true of pretty much all stamps from all countries since WW2. Postal agencies have discovered that collectors will buy new issues and never mail them, preserving them as "mint". So it's pretty much free money for the Postal agency. Many countries (including the USPS) constantly come up with new designs to sell to collectors.
I noticed that when I began collecting as a boy, thinking the post WW2 issues were all just "soup can labels" and had zero interest in them.
From a set of year 2000 USPS experiments:
> Helium balloon. The balloon was attached to a weight. The address was written on the balloon with magic marker; no postage was affixed. Our operative argued strongly that he should be charged a negative postage and refunded the postal fees, because the transport airplane would actually be lighter as a result of our postal item. This line of reasoning merely received a laugh from the clerk. The balloon was refused; reasons given: transportation of helium, not wrapped.
https://improbable.com/airchives/paperair/volume6/v6i4/TMP-1...
Image links are dead, including on archive.org :(
https://improbable.com/annals-of-improbable-research-july-au...
The article has lots of info about what clerks said and did at delivery, but little about when they were sent, which suggests to me that there's something about how USPS works that different from how it works where I live that's assumed to be obvious to the reader. You can't just drop a deer bone or a lemon in a mailbox right? It wouldn't fit, would it?
In the US, post offices generally have drop boxes outside for letters (since you normally just need a stamp), and a larger drop box for packages inside, since you can often get pre-paid labels for stuff like item returns.
TIME
July 4, 1988 12:00 AM EDT
What is the cheapest way to get 6,000 concrete blocks and 4,600 bags of cement to a remote Eskimo village? Answer: mail them. Sam Krogstad, a construction supplier in Anchorage, is sending the individually addressed blocks (postage: $4.33 each) and bags ($4.27) about 700 miles north to Wainwright, where they will be used to build a small harbor on the Arctic Ocean. Krogstad’s bill for stamps will be about $45,000, less than what other shippers would charge.
The Postal Service is not pleased about the shipment, which will cost about $180,000 to deliver by truck and plane. But the agency can find nothing illegal about Krogstad’s parcels, which weigh a few pounds less than the 70- lb. maximum for regular mail.
We could have had our own homegrown Temu, in America.
It helped a bit that my apartment was directly above the Auke Bay PO.
Before forever stamps were introduced people would have to add a 1 or 2 cent stamp next to the 20 or 25 cent stamp in order to reach the current rate for mailing a letter.
Can you elaborate? I don't know what this means, and other commenters seem confused as well.
From your description, it sounds like they very much have value -- 60–75% as you say.
And what are face stamps?
However, the post office apparently forgot to void the stamps (usually they draw over them with a pen), so his next step was to commit mail fraud. He steamed off 60 cents or so worth of unvoided stamps from the box and sent me a letter at school. That one went through just fine too.
USA: https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/26/7208 U.S.C. 7208.4
(4)Reuse of stamps
(A) Preparation for reuse
Willfully removes, or alters the cancellation or defacing marks of, or otherwise prepares, any adhesive stamp, with intent to use, or cause the same to be used, after it has already been used; or
(B) Trafficking
Knowingly or willfully buys, sells, offers for sale, or gives away, any such washed or restored stamp to any person for use, or knowingly uses the same; or
(C) Possession
Knowingly and without lawful excuse (the burden of proof of such excuse being on the accused) has in possession any washed, restored, altered stamp, which has been removed from any vellum, parchment, paper, instrument, writing, package, or article; ... shall be guilty of a felony and, upon conviction thereof, shall be fined not more than $10,000, or imprisoned not more than 5 years, or both.
https://www.law.cornell.edu/cfr/text/27/479.163#:~:text=prev...
§ 479.163 Reuse of stamps prohibited. A stamp once affixed to one document cannot lawfully be removed and affixed to another. Any person willfully reusing such a stamp shall be subject to the penalty prescribed by 26 U.S.C. 7208.
Canada:
Section 55 of the Canada Post Corporation Act deals with evading payment of postage, and it is an indictable offence under Section 60, punishable by up to 5 years imprisonment. This means that individuals who intentionally avoid paying for postage or who use the postal service without paying are subject to legal penalties, including potential incarceration.
https://laws-lois.justice.gc.ca/eng/acts/c-10/FullText.html Evading payment of postage
55 Every person commits an offence who, for the purpose of evading payment of postage,
(a) encloses a letter or any writing intended to serve the purpose of a letter in mail not paid at the rate of postage for letters;
(b) uses in payment of postage any previously used postage stamp;
E.G. If a letter is prepared to be mailed, but it's realized the address is wrong before it's mailed, would it then not still be the first use if the to be sent envelope had it's stamps removed and placed onto a corrected envelop for the first use of the stamps? (Yeah, this would make no sense today with the cost of labor and general stuff, it's a hypothetical.)
I've got a bunch of water color paper post cards from my days of random vacations and a large format camera. I recall that they also had a slightly more than post card rate postage on them (though not excessively so).
I used Polaroid type 59 film (peel apart) in the field and did a transfer right there. Take a picture in Yosemite? Pull it out, roller it on to the paper and drop it in the mail box. It was a one of a kind. The damage incurred while mailing (blunted corners, scuffs and such) was part of the nature of the art.
There were also families who were curious about the process and I'd sell them a sheet of film at cost for them to do what they wanted - be it have a photograph or go through the process of making a post card themselves. There was also the "this is what an old time camera looks like and how it works" that interested some of the younger children - the heavy black cloth and the upside down image.
Cheap postage hack: Nearly all U.S. stamps issued since World War II don’t have value. You can buy old stamps on eBay for about 60–75 % of face value as “face” stamps—and they’re perfectly valid for mailing.
Unconventional postcards: A thin sheet of plywood with a Sharpie address label is a fun postcard. (it just costs a lot more than a normal postcard)
Small Flat Rate Box physics: With a 70 lb limit, you’d need something exotic—say, a primordial black hole—to exceed the weight cap.
Spare the carrier’s back: A Medium Flat Rate Box packed with 10,000 pre 1982 copper pennies tips the scale at roughly 68 lb. Maybe ship the coins another way—your postal carrier will thank you!