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Did you include your $3.75/hour pay to imply it was a low salary? $3.75 in 1975 is $20.97 today. A quick search shows starting pay for a mail carrier today is

Did you include your $3.75/hour pay to imply it was a low salary? $3.75 in 1975 is $20.97 today. A quick search shows starting pay for a mail carrier today is $16/hour. The federal minimum wage is 7.25/hour which would be $1.3/hour in 1975. You were actually paid very well at $3.75/hour compared to today.

mvandermeulen 4y ago
Thanks for this, it’s always good to have up to date information. What did you think of the rest of the story?
- windowsrookie 4y ago
  The story made me think of two things. First is my school, they had a huge shelving unit divided in ~4"x4" squares on the wall where all of the employee mail was placed. Second was a story I read on hacker news fairly recently. There is a Latin American country (I forget which one) where the street addresses are essentially unusable and the mail carriers have to find the final location by using their own knowledge of the area.
  - PretzelPirate 4y ago
    Was it the Costa Rica story?
    - windowsrookie 4y ago
      Yes! That is the story.
  - owenmarshall 4y ago
    > There is a Latin American country (I forget which one) where the street addresses are essentially unusable and the mail carriers have to find the final location by using their own knowledge of the area. There may be more than one, but Costa Rica is definitely addressed this way. A hotel I stayed in was 70 meters behind the church of Saint somebody, there was a great restaurant who was “near the old tree” (and everyone knew which one!). It was impressive.
  - Aeolun 4y ago
    I recently discovered that all of the newly built houses in my street in Japan have the exact same address. I thought the delivery guys were just wankers when they asked 'where do you live', but apparently me and all my neighbors share the same address, so delivery people have only the nameplates on the doors to go on. Don't understand why they didn't create new addresses when they subdivided these plots from 2 to 6 houses.
    - alistairSH 4y ago
      That’s really odd, if nothing else, it’s a problem for emergency services. If somebody has a heart attack, where does the ambulance go?
      - lozenge 4y ago
        The streets aren't numbered anyway, so once you have a block (ban) you still need to loop round it to find the building by number (go) Bad title but- https://geoawesomeness.com/how-the-crazy-japanese-addressing-system-works-explained/ https://geoawesomeness.com/how-the-crazy-japanese-addressing... I can't find an image, but I was lost in Japan and had the address I needed, and a shopkeeper took out an ultra local map where each /shop/ was about the size of my thumb, to find where the address actually was.
    - steveBK123 4y ago
      Addresses in Japan have always been perplexing to me as a visitor. Tokyo has the x-y-z kind of grid system of increasing granularity, but then within the final level of granularity you kind of have to "know", or have a business card with a map on it to find anything. The building number addresses on a given street are more chronological than directional.
      - ghaff 4y ago
        In spite of having been there a number of times, it was only GPS that got me to the point where I didn't need to basically give up finding something a few times a trip.
  - gumby 4y ago
    > There is a Latin American country (I forget which one) where the street addresses are essentially unusable and the mail carriers have to find the final location by using their own knowledge of the area. This is definitely the case in India and I used to look for a postman when lost.
  - ghaff 4y ago
    >the mail carriers have to find the final location by using their own knowledge of the area I imagine it's pretty uncommon these days especially after all the E911 rationalization of the past 2-3 decades. But when I was growing up in a hardly back of beyond Philadelphia suburb we had a rural delivery route which was just a street name. I imagine most everyone at a university in the US these days still has a physical inbox of some sort. But working as a not-officially-remote worker at a company, you basically can't get a work package to me unless we make special arrangements. (I basically give you my home address on the rare times I need something physically delivered.)
  - el-salvador 4y ago
    > There is a Latin American country (I forget which one) where the street addresses are essentially unusable and the mail carriers have to find the final location by using their own knowledge of the area. Nicaragua and Costa Rica use a landmark based addressing system, where "From the park, 1 Block South" could be valid address.
candyman 4y ago
There’s something weird about hourly wages to me. I had a grading job in 1983 that paid $12/hour. Which definitely felt good then, especially because I could grade papers while watching football games on Sunday. I know the math would make that number much higher, ~$36 in “current dollars.” What’s weird is that it didn’t feel that way back then or now. It’s just how I process it in my head I guess. The tuition at the school then I think was $17K/year and now it’s over $80K.
- windowsrookie 4y ago
  I use my great-grandfather as an example of how stagnant wages are. He was a bowling alley manager, he supported a family of 4 with just his salary. This was the 1950's. When he retired he built a brand new home on a lake. He lived in a fascinating time of growth and expansion in the USA. He was born on a farm without a car or electricity. And he lived until the early 2000's with a cellular phone in his pocket.
- lozenge 4y ago
  I think this is because inflation in the US has two tiers. There's the big "essential" stuff- housing, healthcare, education- which have skyrocketed in price and nowadays take a higher percentage of people's salaries. Then there's groceries, consumer goods, electronics, restaurants, which have gone up much slower. So in a way, that $12/hour was good in terms of the amount of non home cooked food you could get (or live music tickets or whatever other things you considered luxuries at the time).
  - steveBK123 4y ago
    The tiers are not essential vs non-essential. The tiers are relative to the labor component. Goods & services that have gotten more efficient over time as we've introduced technology, automation, (what we do on this site) or been offshored.. have gone up slower than inflation. Everything that has a fixed, domestic labor component has gone up faster than inflation. There's really no other magic trick to it. Food is a great example. Something like 40% of the country lived & worked on farms in 1900. That number is now about 1%. That means 40% of the entire countries labor was required to feed 100%, and now it only requires 1%. So a 2.5:1 to a 100:1 ratio change of food labor consumers to providers. Other areas like education & healthcare, the lack of efficiency is often a selling point. Look at colleges that advertise student:faculty ratios or K-12 districts that talk about classroom sizes. In my experience we've probably actually gotten less efficient as everyones gotten much more precious about the education their kids receive.
tomcam 4y ago
Indeed. IIRC it was .25 over minimum wage. I worked 20 hrs/week and that paid all my living expenses-apartment, utilities, food, bus pass.

mvandermeulen 4y ago

Thanks for this, it’s always good to have up to date information. What did you think of the rest of the story?

windowsrookie 4y ago
The story made me think of two things. First is my school, they had a huge shelving unit divided in ~4"x4" squares on the wall where all of the employee mail was placed. Second was a story I read on hacker news fairly recently. There is a Latin American country (I forget which one) where the street addresses are essentially unusable and the mail carriers have to find the final location by using their own knowledge of the area.
- PretzelPirate 4y ago
  Was it the Costa Rica story?
  - windowsrookie 4y ago
    Yes! That is the story.
- owenmarshall 4y ago
  > There is a Latin American country (I forget which one) where the street addresses are essentially unusable and the mail carriers have to find the final location by using their own knowledge of the area. There may be more than one, but Costa Rica is definitely addressed this way. A hotel I stayed in was 70 meters behind the church of Saint somebody, there was a great restaurant who was “near the old tree” (and everyone knew which one!). It was impressive.
- Aeolun 4y ago
  I recently discovered that all of the newly built houses in my street in Japan have the exact same address. I thought the delivery guys were just wankers when they asked 'where do you live', but apparently me and all my neighbors share the same address, so delivery people have only the nameplates on the doors to go on. Don't understand why they didn't create new addresses when they subdivided these plots from 2 to 6 houses.
  - alistairSH 4y ago
    That’s really odd, if nothing else, it’s a problem for emergency services. If somebody has a heart attack, where does the ambulance go?
    - lozenge 4y ago
      The streets aren't numbered anyway, so once you have a block (ban) you still need to loop round it to find the building by number (go) Bad title but- https://geoawesomeness.com/how-the-crazy-japanese-addressing-system-works-explained/ https://geoawesomeness.com/how-the-crazy-japanese-addressing... I can't find an image, but I was lost in Japan and had the address I needed, and a shopkeeper took out an ultra local map where each /shop/ was about the size of my thumb, to find where the address actually was.
  - steveBK123 4y ago
    Addresses in Japan have always been perplexing to me as a visitor. Tokyo has the x-y-z kind of grid system of increasing granularity, but then within the final level of granularity you kind of have to "know", or have a business card with a map on it to find anything. The building number addresses on a given street are more chronological than directional.
    - ghaff 4y ago
      In spite of having been there a number of times, it was only GPS that got me to the point where I didn't need to basically give up finding something a few times a trip.
- gumby 4y ago
  > There is a Latin American country (I forget which one) where the street addresses are essentially unusable and the mail carriers have to find the final location by using their own knowledge of the area. This is definitely the case in India and I used to look for a postman when lost.
- ghaff 4y ago
  >the mail carriers have to find the final location by using their own knowledge of the area I imagine it's pretty uncommon these days especially after all the E911 rationalization of the past 2-3 decades. But when I was growing up in a hardly back of beyond Philadelphia suburb we had a rural delivery route which was just a street name. I imagine most everyone at a university in the US these days still has a physical inbox of some sort. But working as a not-officially-remote worker at a company, you basically can't get a work package to me unless we make special arrangements. (I basically give you my home address on the rare times I need something physically delivered.)
- el-salvador 4y ago
  > There is a Latin American country (I forget which one) where the street addresses are essentially unusable and the mail carriers have to find the final location by using their own knowledge of the area. Nicaragua and Costa Rica use a landmark based addressing system, where "From the park, 1 Block South" could be valid address.

candyman 4y ago

There’s something weird about hourly wages to me. I had a grading job in 1983 that paid $12/hour. Which definitely felt good then, especially because I could grade papers while watching football games on Sunday. I know the math would make that number much higher, ~$36 in “current dollars.” What’s weird is that it didn’t feel that way back then or now. It’s just how I process it in my head I guess. The tuition at the school then I think was $17K/year and now it’s over $80K.

windowsrookie 4y ago
I use my great-grandfather as an example of how stagnant wages are. He was a bowling alley manager, he supported a family of 4 with just his salary. This was the 1950's. When he retired he built a brand new home on a lake. He lived in a fascinating time of growth and expansion in the USA. He was born on a farm without a car or electricity. And he lived until the early 2000's with a cellular phone in his pocket.
lozenge 4y ago
I think this is because inflation in the US has two tiers. There's the big "essential" stuff- housing, healthcare, education- which have skyrocketed in price and nowadays take a higher percentage of people's salaries. Then there's groceries, consumer goods, electronics, restaurants, which have gone up much slower. So in a way, that $12/hour was good in terms of the amount of non home cooked food you could get (or live music tickets or whatever other things you considered luxuries at the time).
- steveBK123 4y ago
  The tiers are not essential vs non-essential. The tiers are relative to the labor component. Goods & services that have gotten more efficient over time as we've introduced technology, automation, (what we do on this site) or been offshored.. have gone up slower than inflation. Everything that has a fixed, domestic labor component has gone up faster than inflation. There's really no other magic trick to it. Food is a great example. Something like 40% of the country lived & worked on farms in 1900. That number is now about 1%. That means 40% of the entire countries labor was required to feed 100%, and now it only requires 1%. So a 2.5:1 to a 100:1 ratio change of food labor consumers to providers. Other areas like education & healthcare, the lack of efficiency is often a selling point. Look at colleges that advertise student:faculty ratios or K-12 districts that talk about classroom sizes. In my experience we've probably actually gotten less efficient as everyones gotten much more precious about the education their kids receive.

tomcam 4y ago

Indeed. IIRC it was .25 over minimum wage. I worked 20 hrs/week and that paid all my living expenses-apartment, utilities, food, bus pass.