4 ms·
If you are in the US your paper spam subsidizes the USPS.
by xfitm3 8y ago
If you are in the US your paper spam subsidizes the USPS.
- bredren 8y agoThe usps is in league with paper spammers.
- dsl 8y agoThe Lumber Cartel
- calvertdw 8y agoI would gladly pay the extra tax to opt out.
- JamesCoyne 8y agoThe USPS is not directly funded by taxes.
- chrisseaton 8y agoForbes says that they're effectively funded by tax payers to the tune of $18 billion a year. http://fortune.com/2015/03/27/us-postal-service/ http://fortune.com/2015/03/27/us-postal-service/
- spaceflunky 8y agoThat’s adding the value of supposeded benefits from congress but not actual dollars. Also congress mandates crazy shit that the usps must do so any benefits are probably wiped out by them.
- chrisseaton 8y agoI think giving someone a tax break or low-interest rate is basically the same thing as giving someone the dollars to pay that tax or interest. Calling that a 'supposed' benefit is silly. Forbes' assessment is the effective value is $18 billion.
- Nasrudith 8y agoThe loan being a benefit I'll call somewhat fair (the money lent to them could potentially get better returns elsewhere making it an opportunity cost) but tax benefits are just reaching as is the supposed value of their exclusivity. They're a government agency - under that logic the IRS should tax itself - not all of its individual agents paying taxes which is fair but that the agency itself being taxed as a corporation. That would just be frankly an exercise in masturbatory paperwork generation when there is real work of value that could be performed instead. Take a simple halting problem approach - if there is no even potential value to the exercise in any form (even including entertainment) just stop. Meanwhile the exclusivity isn't something that should be valued in because it would be stupid to actually sell it to anyone. Tax-farming (selling the right to collect taxes to a third party in exchange for an upfront sum) is a terrible practice which breeds abuse and corruption. One can argue if the purpose is valid but accounting for something which should never be solid is asinine - it would be like trying to account for your value if sold into slavery in your net worth while slavery is illegal.
- MiddleEndian 8y agoI went three or four months without checking my mail and eventually they gave up and stopped delivering my mail entirely, which was a welcome surprise. Unfortunately the 0.1% of mail that is useful forced me to rectify the issue.
- Retric 8y agoNo, mass mail receives a significant discount. At most add to economies of scale, but with significant costs. Look at the actual numbers, and it’s not nearly as significant as the bulk would suggest. https://about.usps.com/who-we-are/financials/revenue-pieces-weight-reports/fy2019-q1.pdf https://about.usps.com/who-we-are/financials/revenue-pieces-...
- brownbat 8y agoThat's why they killed Outbox, which could block paper spam. They later started running that service themselves (until they decide the security challenges are not worth it): https://www.forbes.com/sites/theopriestley/2015/12/08/usps-launches-exactly-the-same-digital-service-it-killed-in-startup-outbox/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/theopriestley/2015/12/08/usps-l... https://krebsonsecurity.com/2018/11/u-s-secret-service-warns-id-thieves-are-abusing-uspss-mail-scanning-service/ https://krebsonsecurity.com/2018/11/u-s-secret-service-warns...
- slumos 8y agoEmailing a photo of the front of an envelope, as Informed Delivery does, is very different from opening mail addressed to another person. I beleive I’m remembering correctly that when I looked into Outbox in 2014, they required a Power of Attorney! When I signed up for Informed Delivery, I had to show id at a USPS office. Seems like fairly strong authentication when compared to any other web or mail service.
- diogenescynic 8y agoYou could sign up for Informed Deliverey online with just an address. There was no verification whatsoever.
- baddox 8y agoIs it not the other way around? I would think that the USPS subsidizes paper spam. I find it very hard to believe that paper spamming would be even remotely economically viable at market cost.
- sjwright 8y agoWhy would USPS subsidize spam? What’s the upside to them? They have literally no incentive I can think of to do that.
- T-hawk 8y agoThey subsidize it by charging a rate per piece that is less than a regular stamped mailing, but at a price level that still turns a profit. It's market segmentation, full price service for those willing to pay it, and a cheaper option for business without enough margins to justify that.
- baddox 8y agoLet me clarify my argument. Ostensibly, the goal of the USPS is to connect all of America with flat-rate first-class mail. The USPS charges as much to send a letter across the country as it does to send it to your apartment neighbor. That means that people in cities (or really, people in routes with high density first-class mail usage) subsidize people in lower-density areas. Let’s assume that we agree that this goal is reasonable, and thus that this subsidy of low-density customers by high-density customers is reasonable. This means that mass-mailers are being subsidized by the USPS’ implementation of this goal of nationwide first-class mail, because presumably they are paying less than the actual cost of mailing their advertisements. I suppose we could go a step further, and say that high-density customers are in fact subsidizing mass-mailers, which I think most people would agree is not a reasonable subsidy.
- depressed 8y agoIf you look at the mass mailing options that the USPS markets on their website, they ask you to basically buy a whole delivery route at a time. There's no routing and sorting they have to do. The carrier just picks up a stack of letters at the start of the shift, and drops one in every mailbox. The labor cost that the USPS has to put in for a mass mailing is a fraction of what it has to do for normal mailing.
- IshKebab 8y agoSame in the UK with Royal Mail (which is now privatised, but it was true before that too).