It is great for governments to run responsible budgets, but this was such a unique constraint, it seems designed to strangle the USPS.
Which is to say "fund their pension plans."
It is my understand 75 years is the horizon beyond which no current worker's liability will cost anything. And the difference between 74 and 75 years funding is tiny compared to the difference between 1 and 2 years.
Everyone saying it's not fair because these "defined benefits" plans aren't required of the rest of the government seem to come down on the side that this is a good thing. It's really just an obligation for future taxes to make payments in lieu of current revenue to fund plans equal to the liabilities incurred today.
Saying something like this handicaps the USPS really means they should be able to freely obligate the taxpayer to future payments based on what they do today.
Funding liabilities as they are incurred is the proper thing to do, regardless of whether it is the USPS or some other aspect of the government. Pay as you go is insanity. Defining outcomes through legislation doesn't make it so.
Whether this is to handicap the USPS or not is entirely orthogonal to the issue of actually paying for the promises being made, rather than promising that someone in the future will pay for it.
https://www.congress.gov/109/plaws/publ435/PLAW-109publ435.p...
https://ips-dc.org/how-congress-manufactured-a-postal-crisis...
> The Trump Task Force acknowledged that without the costs imposed by the Post-Retirement Health Care Mandate, USPS would today be profitable on an operating basis.
I missed the announcement where they were opening the subsidized parcel delivery to all businesses, not just ones owned by people with the last name of Bezos that start with an A and end with an N.
If you fully fund the pensions before privatization, you can simultaneously claim that privatization is necessary (look! they're running out of money!) and radically reduce costs once you do privatize (all the pensions are pre-paid, so you can stop contributing to the fund and extract profits for a few decades before you have problems).
This zip code subscription is part of the same plan: Get people used to paying for data from the USPS so it has an additional income stream after privatization.
"Contrary to statements made by some employee groups and other stakeholders, PAEA did not require USPS to prefund 75 years of retiree health benefits" https://www.gao.gov/assets/gao-13-112.pdf
Also the 2022 Postal Service Reform Act eliminated the prefunding and ~$57 billion of overdue payments, but USPS finances were still dogshit afterwards: USPS revenue was $80 billion and expenses were $89 billion in FY2024
Like when you buy food you like instead of the cheapest calories, this can make financial sense, because you value the preferred food more than the additional cost.
At around $20 a household projected loss for 2027, you wouldn't have to try very hard to do better than dismissing discussion of the value it does or doesn't bring.
It doesn't make financial sense because Congress has capped how much the garbage manufacturers have to pay.
For a long time it was in this weird double bind because the federal government mandated generous health insurance for USPS employees, but did not allocate funds for it, because USPS was supposed to provide its own funds to cover all expenses, but it looks like new legislation (PSRA) was passed in 2022 to move the healthcare coverage burden from USPS and onto the OPM.
Anyway it was just a silly joke about how your postal system is state owned but (sometimes) expected to make a lot of money, rather than run at a loss like a normal public service.
Half of their links are dead but they've updated their website to say:
> We help agencies leverage new and innovative capabilities, including super intelligence, machine learning, and robotics.
(Or start a gofundme for it.)
Sadly, you cannot, from what I can tell.
The S-10 itself is a really good farm truck though, so I'd keep your eyes on the market for one. Or maybe the equivalent Ford one.
I'd like to have a Hilux, because the Tacoma isn't as good but that's just not an option here.
I assume you're talking about the LLV?
I had thought the post office bought a small number of 4x4 LLVs, but I don't see anything about it on wikipedia, so probably not. That said, maybe you could bodge something together from S-10 4x4 parts? (wikipedia says the rear axle is from the 4x4 s-10 blazer and the front axle is from the 2x4 blazer ... it might not be easy, but it's probably not impossible to grab a 4x4 front axle and stuff it in... )
I've read that the post office doesn't sell their old ones, but they weren't the only buyer and some of the other buyers do sell them.
Wikipedia does say the NGDV comes in all wheel drive. Although yeah, probably hard to buy a new one.
For the very small bit of time (as you mentioned) - the Commercial Long Life Vehicle, or CLLV: https://www.flickr.com/photos/hugo90/33789231153
>Four quarterly updates with limited publication.
Sharing it with everyone is probably going to get you banned from getting quarterly updates, as there's strings attached. Though I do wonder just how they keep track. Are they fingerprinting the data somehow? Does that make the dataset less useful?
>Each Party acknowledges and agrees that a breach or threatened breach by LICENSEE of any of its obligations under this Agreement would cause the LICENSOR irreparable harm for which monetary damages would not be an adequate remedy and agrees that, in the event of such breach or threatened breach, the LICENSOR will be entitled to equitable relief, including a restraining order, an injunction, specific performance, and any other relief that may be available from any court, without any requirement to post a bond or other security, or to prove actual damages or that monetary damages are not an adequate remedy. Such remedies are not exclusive and are in addition to all other remedies that may be available at law, in equity, or otherwise
> "Does that make the dataset less useful?"
Changing the value of the least-significant decimal place for a couple of points in a polygon is unlikely to significantly change the shape or reduce the accuracy so significantly that it reduces the value of the data.
You can request any already-existing dataset (which this now is). And they're required to charge only reasonable duplication costs and respond in a timely manner... And such FOIA response would not come with the same restrictive license.
Instead, what they are, are collections of mail delivery points. The "full" 5+4 zip code represents one mail delivery route that a postman follows to deliver mail. And the "fuller" 5+4+2 zip code has the last two digits of the street number.
So couple issues with trying to make polygons from zip codes:
1. There is no guarantee that a given zip code has a finite area. There are several zip codes that exist at a single street address. So... is that a point? Is it the footprint of the building where the mail is delivered? Maybe a hexagon with some minimal side length? Examples: Several IRS return addresses, and some large hospitals.
2. There is no guarantee that a given zip code has a contiguous polygon representation. It depends on the algorithm you use to generate polygons from address points.
3. There is no guarantee that a given zip code has a fixed geospatial representation. Example: the armed forces zip codes for delivering mail to overseas personnel on deployment. The AFPO zips represent "wherever the troops happen to be today". How do you represent that as a polygon?
This is why the USPO has long resisted publishing polygons. It doesn't make sense at the conceptual level, so there are a bunch of weird edge cases you wouldn't expect if you naively treat them as polygons.
ALSO: The census does publish zip polygons. Some of those have zero people living in them (like the hospitals and IRS locations), so you can get weird div-by-0 effects if you aren't careful.
1. A given land parcel may not have mail delivery (think: rural land, even with people living on it), so... what is its zip code? Does it even have a zip code? Remember, a zip code is defined as a set of mail delivery points.
2. A given land parcel may have multiple mail delivery points, each of which may have a different zip code (think: a large mall or commercial building with multiple tenants, where it may be more convenient for the USPS to deliver from two or more mail routes). Does that land parcel have more than one zip code or do you arbitrarily pick one? If it has more than one, does the whole parcel have both codes (so, overlapping polygons), or do you try to subdivide it somehow?
[Users of zip code polygons often want to preserve the capability to look up the zip code from a given lat/lng point. So they will yell at you if you choose to have overlapping polygons or two zip codes for one polygon.]
3. What about AFPO addresses that represent the current location of a group of people who move around all the time? An aircraft carrier out in the Pacific is not near any land parcels.
"Many postcodes for particular lat/lon" should be part of the polygon delivery schema, i.e. you get a list all the time.
Seems like a non-issue for most use cases.
> 2 means some polygons overlap which is fine too
For some use-cases, sure, but not all. One common use-case for zip code polygons is "I have a lat/lng, just give me the zip code, damnit!" Your users might expect that a lat/lng point can have no zip code, but most won't expect that it can have multiple (because no address has multiple zip codes).
At a minimum that leaves you scrambling to explain "well, but it only happens in a few edge cases where a land parcel has multiple mail delivery locations from different postal carriers, and it's super-rare, pinky swear".
> 3 means some zipcodes are excluded from scheme, as one might not be legally allowed to know where a particular unit is.
Another very common use-case for zip code polygons is "I have a zip code, just tell me where it is, damnit!" Maybe they want to estimate shipping distance without hitting the shipper's API.
Part of the problem here is that the AFPO zips do have a physical location for this purpose, which is the facility where mail and parcels are delivered from the USPS to the AFPO. And your users will probably expect you to know that's what they mean. So when you try to explain that "actually an aircraft carrier is constantly moving and we're not allowed to know where it is", they will think you are being pedantic and condescending, and look for someone else to sell them polygons.
But let's say the user actually wants to forecast sales of the new ThingyWidget 3000 by estimating the average weather by customer zip code (by getting the polygon for each zip and the doing a spatial join to weather data). When they do that for the AFPO drop-off point, they're going to get a completely wrong estimate of the weather because the people receiving mail at the AFPO zip are not physically present at that place. So when you explain that "actually that is the physical location of the AFPO facility" they will also think you are being pedantic and condescending, and look for someone else to sell them polygons.
Notice how you're damned if you do and damned if you don't?
Any choice you make for polygonalizing zip codes will be wrong for some use case, and it will be spectacularly wrong for certain edge cases in very intuitive ways that certain users deeply care about and will blame you for.
Which brings me back to the point: You can make a set of polygons for zips which is "good enough" for many use-cases, but ultimately you cannot represent zips as polygons in a way that is suitable for all use cases because, once again, zip codes are not polygons!
If I was developing something that required dealing with US GIS I'd very much prefer a service that does the above, and handle the edge cases, than have no such service at all.
APO/FPO is a good counterexample, though even these presumably have domestic delivery points where the UPS hands off mail to the military (not that their locations should matter to postal customers).
makes sense as its really enterprise level activity -- polling/marketing, government, banking, insurance, etc -- who live or die by zip code data
the rest of us should be good with US Department of Commerce's free (last time I looked anyway) geo services. Google em down
:lightbulb: :huggingface:
I really don't understand the justification for withholding operational data like this. We are trying to make the job of the USPS easier with these tools. It's a lot cheaper and faster for everyone involved if I can query the database while the customer is still standing in front of me.
I don't know why the taxpayer should subsidize fintechs.
Most of this address data is made available in order to enable pre-sorting of mail, which makes the job of the USPS easier. Presorted mail can also have a lower mailing cost, but I wouldn't be surprised if the USPS doesn't pass on all of the savings.
We can help the USPS by using a very cheap API to ensure that data we are entering into bank core systems is accurate.
Yes, the entity is for-profit. The bank is for-profit. Everyone is for-profit. Who gives a shit. This isn't a zero sum game. Everyone can win, including the USPS and the taxpayer.
There is a ideology of some people that think that taxes are a magical way of funding anything they feel is a common good. Most of the time these are well intended thoughts of public good. However they NEVER take into the account the unintended consequences of their ideas. It stops with tax more = more public good.
Meaning it's much easier to start a government program paid by tax dollars than it is to remove one, especially when the program is no longer needed (objectively).
>LICENSEE shall use the Database and Data for the Permitted Use only and shall not disclose, release, distribute, or deliver the Database or Data, any portion of the Data or Database, or any other information derived from the Data or Database to any third party without LICENSOR's prior written consent.
How the heck are you supposed to do anything with it if you're not allowed to produce results that are derived from it somehow??
Would take way more than one letter to make USPS profitable.
Their core business has been declining for the past 20 years and business mailer lobbyists work very hard to keep the current price caps. This idea that we should let the finances spin out of control and raise taxes is entirely new idea.
Standard communication (including addressing) is such a basic, critical function of government that it only makes sense to do it at scale and just fund it with taxes.
Your approach leads to exploding federal budgets, which are already the bane of the US, Canada, and the EU. When will you learn? Everything is not the exception, everything is the problem.
When will you learn? Taxes are not “the bane” of the EU, taxes are why It’s a nice place to live and America isn’t.
New developments incur impact fees to offset their immediate effects on the roads, sewers, and sidewalks. Police charge a fee to connect your alarm system to their dispatchers, an hourly wage for an off-duty cop to stand guard at your commercial premise, and a fine if you waste their time with false alarms. Fire services tend to send you a bill for a false alarm, a fee for an inspection and, if you did it on purpose, a criminal charge plus the full cost of the response. And lord forbid you accept EMS services…
All are tax-funded, but all gesture at apportioning costs proportionally to use. If they send this much junk mail while it’s quarters-a-pop, how much would they send if it were free…
(It's also not a surprise that the Congressional mandate to run the USPS as a for-profit has been used as much to make the USPS profits a slush fund of "free money" that Congress can use for non-USPS projects, including pork barrel projects. The for-profit mandate isn't just for threatening the shutdown of USPS services.)
Comparing today to 40 years ago: as far as I can tell, letter mail is virtually always used for the purpose of transacting business these days. Forty years ago, it was used for business and personal purposes. If I wanted to communicate with family on the other side of the country, it was more likely than not done by mail. Even 25 years ago, a long distance call took some thought because it was charged by the minute. These days, at least in Canada, all but the cheapest of mobile plans comes with nation wide long distance and we have the Internet. Both services are available for less than basic phone service back then.
Parcels are a different story. I can't guess how people's personal habits have changed, but the business front is very different as far as I can tell. Mail order was the exception in urban areas back then. It would have been different in rural areas, but in my explorations of the country I discovered that some towns were places where people lived while other towns were regional hubs for businesses. There would have been some mail order and a lot of doing without, but I suspect it has seen a shift where proportionally more parcels are commercial in nature. On top of that, the standards for delivery have changed. When I was a kid, it could take weeks to receive something via the postal service (from across the country). Now shipping times are more aligned with couriers.
I realize there are economic benefits to subsidized mail, but I'm not sure that subsidizing businesses should be a priority.
Maybe some amount of messaging connectivity, for a narrow set of cases like court summons and other official messages, could be run as a public service at the taxpayers' expense. But likely the bulk of it should be run as a paid service, either regular businesses, or/and non-profits that still are expected to break even.
However municipalities should be allowed to, not forced to [or not].
This isn't really accurate. USPS had a break even (not profitability) legal mandate since 1970-2006. They would adjust prices each year to hit break even. And that's what happened - they roughly broke even each year.
After a 2006 with broad bipartisan support, the UPS was able to make a profit (not just break even) but a price cap was added (to be reviewed every 10 years). They couldn't raise costs beyond inflation. A stamp to send to anywhere in the USA - anywhere (Alaska, Guam, etc.) - currently costs 82 cent. The postal union is against this, usps management is against this, and business mailers are for it. Dont you love all the ads USPS delivers you?
They have not been break even since 2007. They currently lose about $9B/year with $2.7BM being controllable and the rest largely being pensions, retiree health plans, and workers comp charges. Their core business (mail) has been declining for 20 years and no end is in sight. In 2020 they loosened the cap a bit (allowing USPS to raise prices). Business mailers tried to sue them but lost.
So this attitude that they should just lose a bunch of money and be backstopped by the taxpayer, when mail is less critical than ever, is an entirely new idea and is aligned with business mailer lobbying interests. It seems obvious to me that they should just go back to the break even mandate.
(I have all my mail sent to a CMRA and basically never see any of this stuff, though.)
Not when combined with the idea that spam mail senders should be legislated out of legality.
Also the 2022 Postal Service Reform Act eliminated the prefunding and ~$57 billion of overdue payments, but USPS finances were still dogshit afterwards: USPS revenue was $80 billion and expenses were $89 billion in FY2024
Small price to pay for something as extraordinary as the USPS.
The (non-navy) military has no constitutional mandate at all, it’s an industrial scale cash incineration device which the postal service can’t hold a candle to, and we don’t blink at it wasting 10x or more of the postal service’s opex.
You wouldn’t see UPS or fedex running a mule train to make sure an area still gets mail[1]
If we let other companies take over and kill the USPS we’ll just see a ton of areas of the country not get delivered too because the profit margin isn’t there.
The finances of your police and fire departments, your libraries and public schools, and the military, are all “dogshit” by this absurd reasoning.
It’s weird how people bring this up. It was very unusual for the usps not to have to set aside money now to pay for pensions in the future.
What? Maybe my reading comprehension is a little off this morning but are you saying a company offering a pension plan must set aside hundreds of thousands of dollars day 1 every time they hire a new employee?.... That math doesn't math.
No because they are still deep in the red, about $9B a year.
USPS and the US military are both, at their heart, logistics engines and systems, and both should be valued as such. "The whole is more than the sum of its parts." If you do not maintain and treat said systems with respect, the capability will not be ready when you need it, or will not contribute to the ongoing success of the jurisdiction in which it operates.
True, but isn't this because everyone knows that USPS is a dying business already?
I was confused by this until I realized you are missing some logical steps in your (accurate) argument.
The 2006 law took away the safety net (ie the ability to charge whatever is needed to break even).
The “you can now make a profit” rule actually made it HARDER since it came with a price cap.
It told the USPS: You can keep any profits you make, but you cannot raise prices above the rate of inflation to get them.
This forced the USPS to absorb rising costs through internal efficiency rather than passing the bill to mailers
By no means was I implying that the ability to profit means they did profit. Im just stating what the law was.
The vast majority of first-class and bulk-rate mail is not anything can't wait a few days. For truly urgent deliveries, use a courier service or pay a higher postage that covers the expenses of that.
And that's why it (unfortunately) won't happen lol the USPS is as much of a jobs program as it is an actual mail delivery service.
As the guy above you pointed out, the postal workers union exists, and would fight this tooth and nail. Additionally, without legislation forcing it, management at USPS doesn't really have any incentive or ability to fire 1/2 to 4/5ths of their workers, those saved tax dollars don't really matter to them.
As much as I agree it could be made much more efficient, doing so would probably be very unpopular politically. For as often as people have negative experiences with the USPS, no one wants to see their friendly neighborhood post carrier (who walks around in a fun outfit dropping off letters and packages to them) get canned.
People receive tons of mail, it's just packages. The USPS handles packages, but we've allowed it to be replaced by labor-unfriendly private organizations like UPS and Amazon.
> is an recent idea
> This isn't really accurate. USPS had a break even (not profitability) legal mandate since 1970-2006.
No, the idea that USPS should break even is a recent idea. 1970 is recent.
There is a union involved, a union which can be counted on to vote loyally. For this reason, the USPS will exist 900 years from now.
I would be just as happy if it were dissolved and no longer existed. It is as obsolete as the Pony Express. If your counterarguments are "but it delivers Amazon!", then you are subconsciously admitting that its purpose has already ended.
One can argue whether this approach, which is followed by no one either in the private or public sector is appropriate (I’m torn. I see the benefit of this change), but what isn’t arguable is that the way it was implemented, falling on USPS almost immediately without a gradual transition period, was ridiculous.
It forced USPS to make decisions that were harmful in the mid to long term, solely to meet an accounting change.
Requiring the post office to be profitable is like requiring the highway system to be profitable from tolls. The freeway system being free generates so much more economical value for the country than what it costs to maintain them.
I would say the post office should be free, if it were not for the insane amount of spam mail we already get.
but that "value of being cheap" is provided to the people using the mail (or other delivery services) for that transaction; it does not benefit people who are not involved in the transaction but have to pay the subsidy. The economy operates most efficiently when things cost what they should or as close as possible.
what Microeconomics is about is calculating what is cost efficient and what is not; free mail services are not; less free mail services are not; rationally priced mail services are.
I personally get a massive benefit from USPS being cheap, despite the fact that I send no mail. It provides a massive low-cost physical delivery network across the country, with service to every address. This is a benefit to me because it makes business and personal communication simple and reliable. If I need it personally, it's there. If I don't, I still rely on thousands of parties who do.
Your position is like claiming the interstate system is useless because you don't have a car, ignoring how all those goods your life relies on actually get to you.
Maybe you're an autodidact like many other engineers, and maybe you would have done better without schooling. Such people are a minority.
Like many, I think you're confusing "the school system is flawed" (it is) with "school bad."
If the schools in a given country were pumping out geniuses year after year then maybe you would have a point.
Poor community? Sorry Timmy, your schools SUCK.
Rural community? Get to farming Timmy. You dont deserve a GOOD education either.
Living in a rich suburb of a big city? Congrats, your schools are well funded and low student:teacher count. Your education will actually be pretty damned good.
The unintended consequence of this is all the junk mail that makes regular mail a horrible experience to interact with.
Raise the prices , remove the spam.
When things cost as close as possible to their MARGINAL cost. The marginal cost of mailing a letter is very low, almost certainly closer to $0 than $0.83, especially if you accept letter carriers have to run their route every day regardless.
The problem of course is the USPS has enormous fixed costs, including I would argue the pensions (honestly not sure how they would be accounted for in a GAAP sense, I'm absolutely not an accountant)
Federal funding has long distinguished between the two for other things like transit. You're only allowed to use federal funds for capital expenses, not operational expenses. USPS getting a taxpayer subsidy for their fixed costs doesn't seem that nuts.
The only steel-man argument is that USPS provides coverage for that last 1%, living in the boonies, unable or unwilling to use a computer. But that’s at huge cost to everyone else, so much so that we should just give those people a computer and a 1Mbps Starlink connection for free to enable us to get rid of USPS.
They want it to suck, and, in turn, fail. They are trying to dismantle public services in favor of private enterprise, preferably those of their buddies.
It seems like corruption to me.
And this same version of the API (the latest incarnation) is also very picky about addresses, to the point where many more addresses must be "verified" before it will let a label be generated. Sure, you can just set 'ignoreBadAddess' to TRUE, but then you're just kicking the can down the road. They knew exactly what they were doing when they released this new service with free address validation, and then did the rug pull. Fucking drug dealing dark patterns there.
In reality, USPS is starved of resources, and like with all other open source things, some billionaire would make millions out of it without contributing anything back.
But the cost of preparation isn't, government humans are still involved
For example in Seattle people can request body cam footage arbitrarily. But the faces and identifying info of witnesses and victims need to be redacted which takes time and money. Someone started bulk requesting almost all body cam footage, and that placed a big cost on the police department. Now they charge $17 per body cam request.
As a result of that, and address verification services, our de facto address is our mailing address. Except for the handful of times a year, usually pertaining to state taxes directly or indirectly, when we have to ask which address is actually needed/intended. Even in those cases, it's the source of confusion since the two differ by the addition of "West" to the town name and two digits in the ZIP code.
With a growing population town A decided to start delivering their mail something like 20-25 years ago. I can see it being a bigger problem now with autofill addresses and such.