[errantspark]

What would be awesome is if instead of this we gave a fuck ton of money to the post office and tried to solve this problem for everyone and also eroded amazon's competitive advantage. That's the sort of infra we need, it's frankly embarrassing that we're not looking at amazon as a country and thinking "why don't we just enable remote commerce like this for everyone as a societal good".

P.S. Let the post office do banking too so we can take some wall street's pie as well.

[bogota]

It’s great wishful thinking but I really dont think our government can pull it off at this point. Maybe 30 years ago but not in today’s environment of everyone trying to screw the other side over at all costs.

Personally im happy we at least have one company who can get me stuff in a decent amount of time. But i gets it’s fun to throw out f the big company the government should do that. It’s not like it took thousands of well paid people years and years of work to develop that supply chain so im sure it’s as simple as “let the government do it”.

It’s the same in every Uber/Lyft comment thread. “It’s just a simple backend app why do they need so many people”. “I could do that in a year with a small team”. Yeah have fun dealing with every single state, city, country’s different regulations and requirements. “It’s JUST an app”.

I realize a lot of engineers have this problem. They oversimplify everything except the code they are working on and dismiss it as easy or unnecessary. I did early in my career as well but im surprised how prevent it is here.

[adventured]

> I did early in my career as well but im surprised how prevent it is here.

Most of the people here have never run or attempted to create a business. That's true about the general population as well. As you hint at, it comes from lack of life experience at doing a thing.

You get a similar naivety from the average consumer that fantasizes about starting a restaurant because they have strong opinions about food; they've eaten at many restaurants, they've made food at home thousands of times, how hard could it be.

[akiselev]

> fuck ton of money

> tried to solve this problem for everyone

It doesn't sound like the GP was oversimplifying the problem, quite the opposite - wanting to spend a "fuck ton of money" to try to solve something implies that it is a complex problem that may not be solved with a "fuck ton of money".

[tsol]

Because it keeps being hobbled, on purpose In my industry we rely on mail. A few years ago it got bad around this time, but we'd still get mail. Now we go months without getting important documents in the mail. It gets worse every year. Look who's managing the current postmaster general and how political the appointment is. But somehow in these conversations people forget about these specific issues that bring things down, and feel instead it's just some impossible herculean task that has become entire impossible. Many of the common issues people complain about, are on purpose

[roughly]

> I really dont think our government can pull it off at this point

That's not, to be clear, for reasons of technical capacity. The vaccine drive that started in ~February or so of this year was pretty good evidence that the government is still capable of doing big things.

[xyzzyz]

Hardly any of the vaccine drive has been done by governments. Overwhelming majority of the people have been vaccinated in non-government facilities by doctors and nurses not employed by government. To be sure, a huge chunk of that was paid for by the government, but if the analogy here is to work, you would need to ask the government to pay Amazon a fuck ton of money to run the postal service.

[cbetti]

That's not at all the case in my state. The state and county operated facilities were huge, and moved a significant number of people through the vaccination process extremely efficiently.

For testing, I've been to many facilities. The county run facilities have been efficient and organized, whereas the private ones were not set up as efficiently to get tests issued and results returned.

That said, my primary care office is now set up to return results quickly, so private seems to be catching up.

Speaking from a Maryland PoV.

[tsol]

They use existing infrastructure. We don't have government hospitals and doctors in every city, it's easier to reimburse doctors and clinics to give out vaccines. We have a post office system hundreds of years old, which has worked fine for 95+% of that time. The idea that we need to rely on Amazon to send all postal mail, which they aren't actually capable of doing, is so strange to me

[thepasswordis]

The post office is unfortunately vulnerable to political pressure. Both from their unions, and from the federal government.

Imagine the nightmare of Pete Buttigieg sending down dictates to the post office as he tries to build political career. Look at what’s happening in CA right now: just park the ships far enough offshore that you can’t see them and then claim the problem is solved because there aren’t as many ships waiting, charge the people who are already losing money because they can’t get their containers out of the port fines, and punish them further, claiming this as a political win because it punishes the businesses.

Absolutely no thank you. This is an actual problem that needs real solutions, not politicians grubbing power.

[landryraccoon]

This comment is pretty disingenuous. Your argument implies that ANY public service is not worth improving, because any government agency is vulnerable to political pressure.

If you think your elected leaders are not competent and professional, then fire them and elect leaders that will improve the government. If you want a better post office, we need to FIX the post office, not destroy it.

This sort of argument is the one that leads to hypocritically de-funding the post office by playing politics, then since it's too political pointing to it and saying "See? The government can't do anything right", then completely dismantling it.

Other countries manage to have public services that actually work. I don't believe that the American people are somehow genetically predisposed to having a bad government.

[JumpCrisscross]

> that ANY public service is not worth improving

The argument is specific to logistics. Our government has a poor track record in that domain outside the military.

Instead of doubling down on a concentrated bet, increasing competition would seem to be the solution. For example, the federal government could grant porting rights on its property, thereby breaking the Ports of LA & Long Beach’s monopoly.

[res0nat0r]

The post office has for decades been able to send mail across the country in a few days, anywhere, for less than a buck.

It can work and be efficient just fine if it weren't purposefully hamstrung by people trying to ruin it so it can be privatized.

[b9a2cab5]

The post office is increasingly losing business to low cost shippers and high margin business to same-day delivery tech startups. Not only that, their trucks are older than some drivers and the contract to replace them was filled with government pork.

You're never going to get innovation from people who are just trying to work a job for a wage and pension. That's why Amazon is disrupting everyone with their logistics network.

[fivea]

> The argument is specific to logistics. Our government has a poor track record in that domain outside the military.

US public services have a long track record of being actively sabotaged by governments. See the US Post Office being undermined by Trump's appointment of DeJoy.

[JumpCrisscross]

> US public services have a long track record of being actively sabotaged by governments. See the US Post Office being undermined by Trump's appointment of DeJoy.

Why they have a poor track record is a separate discussion.

[fivea]

> Why they have a poor track record is a separate discussion.

The whole point is that if you're trying to dismiss an obvious option for it's track record, even though it is quite capable and able to do the legwork, then being aware of the root cause of that problem, and the fact that it's an artificial constraint with ideological roots, is very much central to the discussion.

[throwawayboise]

The post office was a mess long before Trump.

[kortilla]

> Other countries manage to have public services that actually work.

Which countries have something competing with Amazon?

> I don't believe that the American people are somehow genetically predisposed to having a bad government.

All governments are bad. The American people just happen to have alternatives that have revealed how bad some of the overlapping government orgs are so they make a lot of noise about how bad government departments are.

> If you think your elected leaders are not competent and professional, then fire them and elect leaders that will improve the government. If you want a better post office, we need to FIX the post office, not destroy it.

The whole thing is fucked from an incentives perspective. No government employee has motivation to try hard or innovate. There is no shared bonus structure to bring that on in any branch of the government.

When government is competing with an industry, it’s either going to need to run at a loss and live off of other tax revenue or it just won’t be competitive for whoever the customers are.

[oblio]

Look up Eni and Enrico Mattei: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enrico_Mattei

Mattei took over the relatively small national oil company in Italy, expanded it aggressively until it was able to compete with the Seven Sisters (Exxon, BP, etc, all not state owned). State owned companies can definitely compete.

Should I add that Mattei died under mysterious circumstances?

[xyzzyz]

You should also add that said company enjoyed a government enforced monopoly on oil and gas extraction, which is basically a license to print money.

[oblio]

Italy barely has any oil and gas resources at a global level. His international deals are what grew Eni.

[wutwutwutwut]

> Which countries have something competing with Amazon?

Amazon have tried to enter the Swedish market and it has been a complete train wreck. The other businesses who were initially worried ended up just confused over how they could screw up as bad as they did.

[adventured]

Amazon has made a lot of mistakes in its history. They can keep trying at the Swedish market perpetually until they get it right.

[wutwutwutwut]

Of course. With the extreme level of incompetence they have shown so far I do wonder if people in other markets have very low standards. Of course you can provide a crappy service if there are few competitors.

[kwertyoowiyop]

Any government employee care to weigh in on whether you’re motivated to try hard and innovate? I don’t think I’m being hopelessly optimistic, believing we’ve got a lot of good people in government service, doing their best.

[confidantlake]

I have a friend that likes the mission at the gov and likes the money at FAANG so he rotates between the two. 2 years at one, 2 years at the other and switch. He could make hundreds of thousands more just be sticking to FAANG.

I worked as a lifeguard many years ago, first for a private company and then for the local government. I tried hard at both jobs, but I was more motivated working for the gov and more importantly much better trained.

The private company worked to maximize revenue which meant minimize training costs, aka one training class every 3 years. In an emergency we would have been totally unprepared.

The local gov trained us every 2 weeks (2 hours on a Saturday) plus random spot testing (threw a dummy somewhere in the pool, you would have to notice it and respond as if it were an actual drowning person). We were extremely prepared.

I certainly have my gripes with the gov (dmv I am looking at you). But the idea that no profit motive equals no one tries hard is so annoying because of how simplistic is. And I constantly hear it from otherwise smart people.

[kortilla]

You either hear from outliers then or there is systematic oppression of this innovation in you claim to hear of. If the government was filled with innovative smart people we would see innovative results.

[fragmede]

> Which countries have something competing with Amazon?

All of them? Mail-order catalogs preceded the Internet, even! If you're referring to which other countries have let capitalism run amok to the same degrees - none, we're the only ones that stupid.

[kortilla]

Then why does Amazon do so well in other countries?

[bllguo]

> I don't believe that the American people are somehow genetically predisposed to having a bad government.

I sure do. Nothing is going to change until rejection of authority is no longer foundational to the culture. We literally convinced ourselves that dysfunction and gridlock are features of the system, not bugs.

[jen20]

That’s cultural, not genetic.

[bllguo]

sure, that's more accurate. I kind of assumed that's what they meant. in any case changing either significantly is a long shot

[throwawayboise]

In the USA, the best and most competent and professional people have better options than elected office.

[spamizbad]

The post office does things that private carriers are unable to do: deliver a high volume of units to any valid address. FedEx pushes a fraction of the volume of USPS and is buckling under the strain of the current labor shortage[1]

[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-11-04/labor-sho...

[lern_too_spel]

FedEx is so bad now that I avoid buying from sellers that use FedEx for shipping. The last few times I had a FedEx delivery, the delivery status went to pending twice, and the deliveries were a week late. Looking at the Google Maps reviews of the distribution centers where the packages sat, I consider myself lucky to have received the packages at all.

[pxeboot]

The Post Office doesn't actually deliver to every address. There are hundreds of rural areas where residents get a free PO Box in the nearest town, without the option of home delivery.

[tsol]

So doesn't that mean effectively it does? Last mile shipping is difficult for everyone

[micromacrofoot]

Amazon doesn’t really seem to have a long-term solution… they had to ease drug testing requirements at one point recently because their turnover is so high that they were running out of people.

Their last mile drivers are contracted companies that treat their employees so poorly that it’s somewhat typical for them to leave their keys in the van and quit on the spot.

[wolverine876]

The US Post Office delivered the mail on time for generations until the prior administration got its hands on it.

[tsol]

It's so strange how easily people can be convinced "this never worked, it's not worth even trying". Certainly that's by design

[jorblumesea]

Those people are in theory at least, elected by the American people. Meanwhile Amazon is beholden to whom, wealthy board members and stock holders? How is that better?

[GhettoComputers]

Look at reality. Do you want packages stuck at harbor?

[jorblumesea]

My packages are stuck in a harbor regardless. Many major shippers, both public and private are having issues.

[newhotelowner]

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/09/18/trump-a...

[cronix]

Amazon doesn't send me shit I don't order and don't want. More than 95% of my mail is junk mail and there's nothing I can do about it. Circulating what the vast majority of people would consider as junk is the only thing really keeping the USPS in operation. Well that and they don't have to turn a profit and also have the protection of law to keep them going.

[deep-root]

Alternative take: USPS is really quite a remarkable business and worth learning about as a case study - from their fleet, to eating 90s darling FedEx alive, to overcoming artificially created political pressures (eg PECA), to becoming Amazon's chief US delivery partner, and much more.

Was curious: "marketing" mail was 18% of USPS revenue[1] (2020) and dropping. Low share of total earnings compared to Meta, Google, and soon Amazon's ad revenue.

[1] https://about.usps.com/newsroom/national-releases/2020/1113-...

[alpha_squared]

USPS would be, and historically has been, profitable if it weren't for the politicians actively trying to drag it down with arbitrary, arcane rules to protect their donors.

[rileymat2]

https://www.forbes.com/sites/ebauer/2020/04/14/post-office-p...

It is interesting, because shouldn't the expectation be that a pension be funded as the benefits accrue? That seems like the safe sustainable way to run things.

[lotsofpulp]

It absolutely should be. The question should not be why USPS was asked to fund accrued benefits properly. The question is why all the other city, county, state, and federal government accrued post employment benefits are not funded properly.

[gruez]

> arbitrary, arcane rules to protect their donors.

like what? The ones I heard of were prefunding the pension plans, but I’m not sure how that benefits any of “their donors”

[ceejayoz]

> I’m not sure how that benefits any of “their donors”

You can't see how kneecapping the USPS might help FedEx, UPS, and Amazon?

The point of making the USPS pre-fund their pension obligations was to be able to turn around and say "look at the horrible state of their finances, government is clearly so inefficient, we should privatize it".

[lotsofpulp]

USPS was simply required to fund accrued post employment benefit obligations, something that all non governmental entities have to do.

The reason governments can offer ridiculous post employment benefit obligations, such as above average defined benefit pensions and retiree healthcare, is that the laws governing funding for these benefits only applies to non governmental entities.

Not a surprise that politicians exempted governments from the same funding rules, opting instead to kick the can down onto future taxpayers and opt for offering voters lower taxes now. The real question is why only the USPS was asked to fund accrued benefits, and not every single other governmental entity in the US.

[ceejayoz]

https://about.usps.com/who-we-are/financials/annual-reports/...

> Unlike any other public or private entity, under a 2006 law, the U.S. Postal Service must pre-fund retiree health benefits.

[pzduniak]

USPS being weak (AFAIK primarily because of this law) benefits their competition, who are lobbying against "fixing" it.

[cronix]

> if it weren't for the politicians actively trying to drag it down with arbitrary, arcane rules to protect their donors.

Is there a sector/program in the gov't where that isn't the case? Every entity that is created is just a new fiefdom to expand and lord over from the time it's created to infinity.

[thepasswordis]

If the USPS wasn’t a government agency, I would weld my mailbox shut and never look back.

USPS is profitable because we all accept the idea that companies are allowed to pay somebody to load literal trash through a hole in the side of my house.

[tsol]

I mean I also get important mail in there, as so I expect most people. Same way Google delivers multiple times more trash to my Gmail account but I don't say I need to stop using email

[hk__2]

> More than 95% of my mail is junk mail and there's nothing I can do about it.

This can be fixed. In France for example, it’s illegal to put junk mail in a mailbox that has a “stop pub” (= no junk mail) sticker on it. I have one, and as a result <5% of my mail is junk mail.

[GhettoComputers]

Not in America. It’s not illegal and it seems you still get junk mail.

[decebalus1]

> Amazon doesn't send me shit I don't order and don't want.

It did to me! I received about a dozen packages ordered from Russia/China and this stopped only after escalating with customer support to the point of cancelling my Amazon account.

> also have the protection of law to keep them going.

The law is actually what makes them weaker. Do some light research on why the USPS is not 'profitable'.

> More than 95% of my mail is junk mail and there's nothing I can do about it.

There is something you can do about it. See https://www.consumer.ftc.gov/articles/how-stop-junk-mail.

The USPS is a service, not a corporation, it shouldn't turn a profit. Does the army turn a profit? Or the navy? Why isn't anyone talking about the ATF 'losing' 1.2 billion a year while having overlapping responsibilities with countless other TLAs? How much money is our Coast Guard making us? Perhaps we should privatize the Coast Guard. Just saying..

As someone who didn't grow up in the US I never really understood the hate the USPS is getting. They've been systematically fucked by both sides of the political 'divide' and yet they still deliver my election ballot on time. They aren't even allowed (see both sides of the political divide) to set their own package prices, yet there is this continuous annoying stupid propaganda that they need to be profitable.

It's fine. in 20 years (if we survive as a country by then) when A-Z Epistle™ by Prime™ will be the only mail carrier for $9.99/month (or bundled with your Prime membership). They'll definitely find a constitutional loophole to make that happen.

Next time someone asks why the USPS isn't profitable, I'd gladly invite you to explain to me what is our ROI for the $83 billion spent sustaining the Afghan government.

[GhettoComputers]

My brother in hated of USPS being an unnatural monopoly! https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=GhettoComputers&next...

Its incredible how many people support this horrible service and think selling stamps makes it profitable.

[throwawayboise]

You can make a big dent in your junk mail by opting out at various direct marketing associations. It's a bit of a pain, and won't stop all of it, and you have to redo it periodically, but it does make a difference.

Now I just bin everything that's not first class, directly addressed to me by name before I even bring it into the house.

[pixl97]

>Amazon doesn't send me shit I don't order and don't want

Give it 10 years when Amazon is looking for new ways to increase profitability and shit's shipped to your door that you have to schedule a ship back or you'll end up being charged for it.

[kevin_thibedeau]

They already do it by hiding the "add to cart" button in favor of periodic shipments for certain consumables.

[tsol]

They'd send that by another carrier if there was no USPS. Everyone along the way profits from those adverts even if you don't-- that's why they pay valuable money to do to

[fma]

> Amazon doesn't send me shit I don't order and don't want.

Their equivalent are the ads you get on their home page or when you search for things.

[cronix]

I can ignore those digital ads and mostly do as the vast majority of the purchases are for things I know exactly what I want. In the case of physical mail I have to take periodic physical action to empty my mailbox (and physically recycle 95% of it, which I have to indirectly pay for) or they will quit delivering the mail and mark it as vacant. I don't think they are equivalent. I wonder how many waste disposal/recycling people this subsequently helps employ along the chain if you were to add up all of the tossed junk mail for a year. We're paying for all of that.

[derefr]

Counterargument: as someone who doesn't live in the US, I personally benefit from the international logistics infrastructure built by private US companies fed mostly by demand from US private citizens. But I don't benefit at all from well-funded US public domestic logistics services.

International logistics can't really be solved at the national level, because the interests involved aren't national/unilateral — they're international/multilateral.

(You could maybe make an argument for treatied multilateral investment into public logistics infrastructure tied to said treaties, maybe led by the Universal Postal Union — something similar to the Paris Agreement, but with global-economic goals rather than global-ecological ones. But that's a very different thing from just saying that one country's citizens should demand their own government nationalize a particular service.)

[GhettoComputers]

US citizens don’t benefit from forced spam, or bad service from from USPS either. They could go paperless for most official documents but they need to give these spammers a reason to stay afloat: “official documents”.

[AngryData]

Many parts of the US still do not have reliable internet or anything other than degraded phone lines that barely service 56k with cell service that gives 1 bar part of the time, which is a huge barrier to paperless service. Also they still need a way to send government documents, jury and court summons, ect. My own internet is wireless microwave transceiver which only works because I live on a hill, the people around me in the bowls and swamps barely have workable cell service even outside their house. And that is all on top of the fact that internet and devices to connect to the internet cost a significant amount of money to maintain, and paying private companies should not be a requirement to live your life on your own property.

[GhettoComputers]

The USPS doesn’t serve all households, you of all people should know that. Degraded phone lines can fax. They’re lucky they don’t get spammed.

[ozzythecat]

Unless the Post office has some strong incentive to compete, such as a private company, there’s no reason to believe the Post office would be even half as effective as Amazon.

Amazons incentive, whether you agree with it or not, is to grow their company and show value to stakeholders. It’s quantitative numbers. They can certainly lie, but at the end of the day the market will punish them.

The USPS is driven by what incentives? Politics? Future pension obligations?

In reality, government ends up being a bloated mess, waste of tax payer dollar. Don’t believe me?

How many campaigns have we seen just in our own lifetimes of candidates promising “change”, “making America great”, fixing healthcare, infrastructure, reforming education. One of the two parties does win every election. Fundamentally, what has changed?

Regulating private companies might be the answer. But government has proven itself to NOT be the answer.

[goostavos]

I agree. I'm kind've stumped by people's belief that you can just throw money at something and have it work. Doubly so for a government organization that's steeped in politics. Amazon is freaking lightening in a bottle. Last night, I was ordering Christmas presents at 12:30am, and they were at my door by 9:30am. That's completely insane.

Government programs are frequently and mysteriously hamstrung by not having enough money as the sole explanatory variable for why they failed at X or why business Y performs more efficiently. It's never an organizational failure, the wrong people, the wrong incentives, just more money is all that's needed. If we'd properly funded the USPS 20 years ago, surely we'd all have same day shipping for pennies, right...? Money would've enabled that?

[pbhjpbhj]

>there’s no reason to believe the Post office would be even half as effective as Amazon.//

I never understand this argument, take Amazon now. Pay everyone the same to do the same job, but don't pay dividends, reinvest profits (or pay them as if taxes). How does it suddenly become everyone is incompetent and can't do their job?

Why is it capitalists think people can only work if there's a rich person creaming off a profit?

Explain, please.

[s1artibartfast]

The problem is bureaucratic and union capture.

You would have very different results if you took the same people, removed performance bonuses, removed merit promotion, instituted seniority promotion and seniority pay scales.

You remove all incentive to take risks, perform, or innovate.

In such an environment, there is only downside to do anything more than the bare minimum. Because nobody is ever fired, the minimum is very low indeed

[kevinventullo]

Pay everyone the same to do the same job…

The federal pay ceiling in 2021 is $172,500 per year. That’s about what a SWE new grad at Amazon makes in their first year out of college.

[joebob42]

Specifically, it's less (made 220, although did have what I think was a strong offer due to internship that went well)

[whiddershins]

Because logistics is mind boggling difficult.

I would say the burden of proof is on anyone who thinks they could fund or create an org that can match Amazon’s.

[stale2002]

> but don't pay dividends, reinvest profits (or pay them as if taxes)

This is literally what Amazon is already doing, right? They don't pay dividends, and are just re-investing all the profits already, with no profits being skimmed off at all.

[kortilla]

> Pay everyone the same to do the same job

That’s the crux of the issue. Government employees across all branches are capped into pay scales that don’t compete with private. More importantly, that absolutely cannot get anything like profit sharing or stock grants so nobody is invested in the financial success of the operation.

> Why is it capitalists think people can only work if there's a rich person creaming off a profit?

Because in the real world, all of the employees are benefiting from the profit as well. Every company has bonuses/promotions for exceeding performance doing good for the company.

Why is it that socialists thing working for a company produces the same incentives as working for the government?

[ozzythecat]

> Pay everyone the same to do the same job, but don't pay dividends, reinvest profits (or pay them as if taxes). How does it suddenly become everyone is incompetent and can't do their job?

Amazon doesn’t pay dividends on their shares. They reinvest profits. Bezos was known for thinking about the long term, as opposed to politicians who think about the next 2-4 years, or whatever it is that will get them re elected. Did you not know that?

An Amazon SDE 1 earns over $165-170K fresh out of college. An SDE2 earns $200+. SDE 3 earns $300K. A regular software engineering manager earns $350k. The higher you earn, the more they (and other tech companies) pay on company shares. I’m not even talking about directors or VPs who make significantly more.

And Amazon has a reputation for being fast moving, with many people actually complaining that it’s too fast, that people burn out, etc.

That’s how Amazon operates. Whether you like their business model or not is besides the point. They enter new business verticals, move at a lightning fast pace, etc. and that’s how you order something and get it delivered within hours.

Please explain to us how Amazons equity compensation model will work under a system that isn’t capitalist and doesn’t pay these engineers equity. You want them to have a 9-5 work schedule, no on call, no extras - great.

And show me one example of a US government agency even a quarter efficient as Amazon. This isn’t a rhetorical question.

The government never really re orgs or changes it’s mission. It never evolves its practices. It never tries to compete. When the government doesn’t work or when tax payers wonder where’s their money going, the government just says, “we need to raise taxes! It’s not that we’re doing any wrong or have low performers. We just need more money!!”

[JackFr]

> What would be awesome is if instead of this we gave a fuck ton of money to the post office and tried to solve this problem for everyone and also eroded amazon's competitive advantage.

Amazon solved a problem and reaped a reward.

Your response to that is to take everyone’s money, and give it to someone else in the hopes that they can solve the problem. Sure, I suppose, no reason for it not to work.

On the other hand “why don’t we just enable remote commerce like this for everyone as a societal good” is beyond simplistic and naive. Amazon is very good at what they do and what they do is not easy.

[kwhitefoot]

Post offices in Europe did banking for many years. Most of them have been broken up now though.

I think there should be an even more general effort made to remove the competitive advantage that comes from simply being big. Small enterprises suffer from the lack of economy of scale. As a private individual or sole trader it is more expensive for me to send a parcel than it is for a large company, this gives the incumbent an advantage.

[kortilla]

> I think there should be an even more general effort made to remove the competitive advantage that comes from simply being big.

That’s ridiculous because you completely disincentivize automation and efficiency with those types of rules.

There is no reason to ensure that two guys spending 5 years to hand build one car need to be subsidized to continue that way.

[kwhitefoot]

> There is no reason to ensure that two guys spending 5 years to hand build one car need to be subsidized to continue that way.

Of course not. But it might be wise to subsidize them so that they can get started and disrupt the existing players that have become lazy and inefficient.

[kortilla]

That’s exactly what venture capital is for.

[Kalium]

The USPS is also an example of a postal system that formerly provided banking services.

[newhotelowner]

Amazon uses USPS for small and rural cities. Only USPS delivers my Amazon packages at my business. Amazon vans delivers at my home. My business & my home is 20 miles apart.

[structural]

Amazon uses USPS for large cities as well (where package theft is a very big issue) - most homes have a secondary lock with access to the foyer, and postal carriers have the key. This functions just like blocks of lockable mailboxes that are found in condo/apartment complexes, but for packages.

Needless to say, the overnight/next day delivery options that you'll see for suburban neighborhoods are nonexistent in many other places.

[Kalium]

> P.S. Let the post office do banking too so we can take some wall street's pie as well.

They did that for a while. Wall Street ate the Post Office's pie, rather than the other way around. Which is why the US postal system's banking service shut down.

Which is not to say postal banking is a bad idea, but that perhaps we should be careful with our expectations.

[throwaway894345]

I'd much rather we disincentivized intercontinental transport to incentivize domestic production and reduce carbon emissions due to transit. I don't necessarily mind that Amazon is successful so long as they aren't simply the best at deriving profits from Chinese slave labor, IP theft, and pollution. I don't think the solution is to make the Post Office better at those things.

[kwhitefoot]

> reduce carbon emissions due to transit.

Bulk and container ships are extremely efficient. Most of the carbon emissions are from the last few miles.

[derefr]

That's like saying that spaceships are extremely efficient, because "all they have to do is accelerate at the beginning and decelerate at the end." It's not the trip that gets you; it's the delta-V (or in this case, delta-p).

Also, cargo shipping voluntarily uses fuel ("bunker fuel" — the dregs of the petroleum distillation process) that's absolutely awful for the environment per watt generated compared to any other fuel (including any other petroleum distillate.) They do this because it's the cheapest [liquid] fuel to buy per watt generated, and because they "can" — cargo-ship engines are designed to deal with the low quality of bunker fuel, and ships at sea under most of the common charters [e.g. Bermuda] aren't subject to any ecological regulations restricting them from burning it.

Bunker fuel shouldn't be marketable for sale as a fuel at all. We (= OPEC, in this case) could still sell it to chemical companies, but the rest, we should just be sticking back in the ground. This would reduce global greenhouse gas emissions by such an extent it's not even funny.

This would naturally make shipping more expensive, since their next-cheapest fuel would be slightly more expensive. (Probably not for long, though; some capital investment into ship engine design, using modern engine technologies like Cylinder Deactivation, could probably claw most of this cheapness back.)

[snovv_crash]

Yes, bunker fuel is terrible. But this doesn't change the fact that most of the carbon emissions would still be there for domestic production, because ships are extraordinarily efficient per tonne-mile of goods hauled.

[derefr]

The carbon emissions would still be there, but they might not be nearly as toxic/hazardous. (See my reply to a sibling comment.)

On the other hand, they'd be happening over land, where people live; instead of over water, "merely" killing marine life, so that might be a wash in policy-makers' minds.

To be clear, though, I'm not arguing against using cargo ships for domestic logistic as a concept; just the current implementation. Cargo ships that didn't use bunker fuel would be an unalloyed ecological win compared to both domestic ground logistics, and the current implementation of domestic marine logistics.

[throwaway894345]

But that doesn’t change the fact that no amount of efficiency can make domestic shipping + oceanic shipping cheaper than domestic shipping alone.

[tomarr]

>Bunker fuel shouldn't be marketable for sale as a fuel at all. We (= OPEC, in this case) could still sell it to chemical companies, but the rest, we should just be sticking back in the ground. This would reduce global greenhouse gas emissions by such an extent it's not even funny.

Bunker fuel is responsible for ~3% of CO2e emissions? OK it may have a greater impact on air quality, but in terms of carbon it is not exactly a stand-out item.

[derefr]

Carbon is a heuristic, not a target. The air isn't bad because of carbon; carbon oxides are just the most common of the GHGs we put in the air.

Bunker fuel contains a lot more light-molecular-weight things that aren't hydrocarbons (e.g. nitrogenous molecules), and so when they burn, you end up with toxic GHGs being produced, rather than just bad for climate change GHGs. (And, as you mention, the fact that we're burning it mostly at the beginning and end of the trip, means we're burning it near ports, and therefore making the air at port cities — and nearby estuaries — toxic.)

But even then, the concern with bunker fuel in particular isn't really the GHGs (i.e. the low-molecular-weight products of combustion that stay airborne), but all the high-molecular-weight stuff that's mixed in there, that doesn't stay airborne, but is temporarily put into the air during combustion.

Bunker fuel is "dirty fuel", using a similar sense of "dirty" to a "dirty bomb" — not that it's radioactive, but that it "salts the earth" where it goes off. Except that a bunker-fuel "bomb" goes off over water, and all the resulting heavy-molecular-weight vapors that come off the combustion then fall into said water, contaminating the oceans+estuaries with these chemicals. Bunker fuel salts the sea.

[Schiendelman]

As a single line item, that’s vast.

[throwaway894345]

I'm sure they're "extremely efficient" compared to the last few miles, but those are still a whole lot of emissions that don't exist at all when production is domestic. That said, the more realistic possibility is that the threat of bringing production domestic will drive China (and the shipping industry, perhaps via nuclear marine propulsion) to make concessions.

[kortilla]

Because the post office doesn’t care about doing it efficiently or with a profit.

Government employees don’t (and can’t legally) get bonuses for doing well or beating expectations.

The entire post office org gets no bonus (or punishment for that matter) by impacting the cost to revenue ratio.

Both of these are the reasons it never works to throw a pile of money at a government org and expect something sustainable monetarily and good to come out of it.

[kwertyoowiyop]

The post office should be run efficiently. But I don’t require it to make a profit. It is a service, for our collective benefit. Just like the Army. I don’t expect the Army to make a profit.

[kortilla]

As long as it’s not operating at a loss or using taxpayer money, then that’s fine. Otherwise it’s using taxpayer money to destroy competing businesses.

We don’t really care about businesses operating private militaries so the army isn’t a good comparison.

[morpheos137]

These comments threads are fascinating for their display of confidently proclaimed ignorance.

Postal supervisors, including local supervisors at your local office can and do get performance bonuses.

Mailmen and clerks can not due to their union contracts.

[kortilla]

Getting performance bonuses while not having the ability to change anything is the same thing. If you can’t see why tying the incentives to the ability to affect outcomes is important, I don’t know what to tell you.

[1123581321]

What goes wrong at those branches, then? Are the supervisors prevented from making drastic changes?

[morpheos137]

Yeah basically by the union and dysfunction at higher levels like sorting plants.

If supervisors could hire and fire mail carriers for performance and pay them market rate wages then the service would be drastically different.

How it is now supervisors have very little control over local branches. They can not control who to hire, in my district interviews for hourly workers were not even a thing, they can not control what to pay staff or what staffing level they need. They can not control the volume of mail they receive. While FedEx or UPS can refuse work if they lack capacity USPS has to accept the over flow.

Almost all new hire mailmen are hired "part time" with no set schedule for a low nationally uniform annual wage. The entry level wage for a mailman is the same in both small towns and big cities.

The union contract sets a certain percentage quota for "part time" workforce so under-staffing is the norm.

The senior mailman gets a solid middle class wage, while the entry level barely makes enough to live on in some cases or in others gets absurd mandatory overtime.

[1123581321]

Thanks. That is all unfortunate. I really hope the USPS can get an administrator with enough political clout to let employees at all levels make good changes.

[rubyist5eva]

Because if there’s one thing that makes the government run well is more spending!

[rootusrootus]

That is quite possibly true. The primary goal of government is not efficiency. We need to quit making that some kind of top priority. The first thing government should be is effective. This is fundamentally why mixing for-profit businesses into government functions always ends up a clusterfck.

[kortilla]

> We need to quit making that some kind of top priority.

Then how do we pay for it? You’re either making the customers pay the true cost or you’re just stealing it from the entire tax base.

If you do the latter then it’s unfair to any business competing in the same category and they will all eventually go out of business because they have to be sustainable.

So we end up with less efficiency and absolutely no other options.

[rubyist5eva]

Spending more creates more bureaucracy and makes government less effective, which was the point of my sarcastic quip.

[mgaunard]

Vertical integration is what makes the service that Amazon provides so good.

Splitting things into different siloed entities just leads to inefficiencies.

[bsder]

These are really good ideas except ...

Republicans specifically blocked the Post Office from doing these things with legislation.

[dkjaudyeqooe]

> What would be awesome is if instead of this we gave a fuck ton of money to the post office and tried to solve this problem for everyone and also eroded amazon's competitive advantage.

Why hasn't this happened already? What makes you think it would actually happen?

[kyletns]

Takes political courage and public pressure. There is a little bit of that being exhibited by the current administration, but it's also pretty clear that another potential administration would have had a lot more potential to fix these problems.

[kortilla]

What? The current admin spearheaded some 3-6T in spending bills presumably for “infrastructure”. It seems like all of the support is there.

The problem is that nobody gets political credit for improving existing systems. That money will instead be pissed away on other political gifts and novelties.

[KittenInABox]

What do you mean "infrastructure" in quotes? The infrastructure bill is almost entirely infrastructure like roads, bridges, waterways, electricity, and broadband internet. (It's also only 1T. Not 3-6.)

[kyletns]

Thanks KittenInABox.

Politicians absolutely do get credit when they improve actual systems and improve people's lives. People like it, and will vote those politicians back into office. But it has to be actual, felt, day-by-day changes in their lives (such as fixed roads, the USPS offering free check cashing, or even a friggin relief check in the mail with the president's signature on it). The current infrastructure bill(s) promise that real support, but they didn't fund it enough imo and it's far from clear that they'll be able to use the money they did get to make meaningful changes in people's daily lives.

[kwhitefoot]

To some extent it seems to have happened in China.

[whiddershins]

Why do you favor paying via taxes over paying via purchases for the same service?

[maxerickson]

The replies to this that slag the post office would make more sense if Amazon didn't rely on the post office for last mile in so many places.

[kyletns]

Great write up on the USPS banking pilot: https://prospect.org/economy/postal-banking-test-in-the-bron...

Not a fun outcome but the fight isn't over, yet.

[justinator]

The USPS is getting into banking:

https://www.govexec.com/management/2021/10/postal-service-la...

[bloqs]

One of the few certainties in life, along with death and taxes, is that a Government body/or institution (any government) will be less efficient, the more money it has.

[mdgrech23]

The government would find a way to fuck it up - most likely through forced diversity hiring. Look at truly innovative companies - every year they can can 10% or so of the lower performers - if you're not doing your job your fired - doing that in a gov ran business? good luck. everyone would claim wrongful termination so it becomes cheaper to keep the lower performers which leads to our current situation w/ the post office.

[jfk13]

> Look at truly innovative companies - every year they can can 10% or so of the lower performers

So you're a fan of stack ranking, huh? I thought that was pretty widely discredited, and "truly innovative companies" know better by now.

[jbm]

Your 10% example was used by Jack Welsh GE and Enron right? Do you consider them innovative / forward looking?

[spiderice]

So because Enron is bad, everything they did is bad? I’m not arguing in favor of firing the bottom 10% each year, but your logic here is ridiculous.

[jbm]

It is commonly speculated that the Darwinian "10% off the bottom" layoffs were one of the reasons why Enron had so many failings as a company (fear of getting laid off led to dishonest dealing and creative accounting) and that is supposedly one reason why it fell apart.

By arguing that effective, innovative companies get rid of dead weight, anyone making the argument needs to confront that there are obvious cases where this isn't true, and that it creates perverse incentives.

As for the topic in general, I'm of a mixed opinion about similar government services. The mail service in Canada is overpriced and feels poorly run (like most everything that is Federally run in Canada), but Japan Post was excellent the whole time I lived in Tokyo. Finding what works and reproducing them makes a lot of sense to me.

[dillondoyle]

how does diversity hiring fuck up companies and government?

it shouldn't be consider a 'quota' to give equitable access and try to catch up the the actual balance of diversity in this country.

Tech I get is harder because of the century of lack of education and lower opportunities.

But you can't write off entire races as less performant.

[mattrighetti]

Because it moves the hiring focus from skills and "meritocracy" to something that should be irrelevant: age, tattoos, hair color etc.

Skills give value to an organization making it more competitive and productive, your appearance does not. If you make decisions on who to hire based on the former you're basically saying "Guy X is better than guy Y but I'm gonna hire Y because some people are offended by the fact that we're not 50/50", which is obvious in every single part of life.

Also, I know a lot of friends that are saddened by their hiring process and they feel like they've been hired just because the HR had to and not because they were the top choices.

But yeah, this is controversial nowadays so I don't really try to put it out there at all and let it be.

[KittenInABox]

> Look at truly innovative companies - every year they can can 10% or so of the lower performers

Name the truly innovative companies that have this as a policy right now.

[rdtwo]

You don’t think big companies have diversity quotas in 2021? Where have you been for a decade

[ldjkfkdsjnv]

Dude the post office would squander that money. I have no idea why people think these public entities can execute like Amazon does. Its the same with SpaceX and NASA, very clear at this point that NASA was a huge waste of money and completely incompetent.

[ceejayoz]

Why doesn’t NASA get any credit for creating and funding the Commercial Cargo and Commercial Crew programs?

SpaceX looks like a very savvy, competent investment made by NASA to me.

[ldjkfkdsjnv]

Because if a private company had worked on that same thing, the results would have been 10x.

[ceejayoz]

Yeah, sure. Go look up what those programs involve.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceX#2005%E2%80%932009:_Falc...

> The first two Falcon 1 launches were purchased by the United States Department of Defense under a program that evaluates new US launch vehicles suitable for use by DARPA. The first three launches of the rocket, between 2006 and 2008, all resulted in failures. These failures almost ended the company as Musk had planned and financing to cover the costs of three launches; Tesla, SolarCity, and Musk personally were all nearly bankrupt at the same time as well; Musk was reportedly "waking from nightmares, screaming and in physical pain" because of the stress.

> However, things started to turn around when the first successful launch was achieved shortly after with the fourth attempt on 28 September 2008. Musk split his remaining $30 million between SpaceX and Tesla, and NASA awarded the first Commercial Resupply Services (CRS) contract to SpaceX in December, thus financially saving the company. Based on these factors and the further business operations they enabled, the Falcon 1 was soon after retired following its second successful, and fifth total, launch in July 2009; this allowed SpaceX to focus company resources on the development of a larger orbital rocket, the Falcon 9. Gwynne Shotwell was also promoted to company president at this time, for her role in successfully negotiating the CRS contract with NASA.

[rootusrootus]

> can execute like Amazon does

We'd have to be willing to let the USPS operate at a significant loss for a decade, kinda like Amazon.

[ldjkfkdsjnv]

Or differently stated, reinvest all profits back into the business, report a loss. Amazon is brutal to its employees, a government run entity will never match the level of execution. Its really a fantasy to think otherwise, and has never been shown to be true

[jimjimjim]

spacex stands on the shoulders of giants. don't forget that!

[systemvoltage]

I completely disagree. Funding a government mandated monopoly is a terrible idea.

I would vote so hard against Post Office handling banking. It is incalculable that this kind of stuff gets upvoted by the intellectual diaspora of HN.

[hairofadog]

I'm equally agog at your take, for whatever it's worth. The Post Office is wonderful, and it boils my blood to see legislation that aims to destroy it. I would love to see the Post Office handle banking.

I'm also fascinated when can this sentiment expressed when there are so many posts along the lines of {Apple,Amazon,Facebook} deleted my account with no warning or explanation, and I can't help wondering if the folks saying this is why you're an idiot if you don't run your own email server are the same as the ones saying you're an idiot if you don't trust Amazon to be your sole postal provider.

[kortilla]

Amazon isn’t a postal provider and they aren’t a monopoly. WTF are you talking about?

[morpheos137]

Funny enough almost every single person who has actually worked at the post office thinks postal banking is a ludicrous idea.

[kwhitefoot]

This is obviously not universally true. Do you really want to have privately owned roads? Privately owned courts?

[systemvoltage]

Let's ban all bakeries, should bread be federalized?

[kwertyoowiyop]

No because then everyone would just…loaf.

[keyb0ardninja]

Agreed. I thought that was meant as sarcasm at first, but apparently not. I'm shocked that is the top comment.

[CrazyCatDog]

two words: visit Switzerland

Also, absolutely agree with anyone suggesting that we eliminate “bulk rate”—unsolicited mail should cost as much as first class—both to avoid real world spam, and to save trees.

I pay extra for my carrier to block spam calls—I world gladly pay the post office to do the same—like PaperKarma.com but last mile…

[systemvoltage]

If you expect USPS to turn into Swiss-like government agency, sure. But it is not. And it can never be. The culture inside government agencies in USA is rotten.

[adolph]

> instead of this we gave a fuck ton of money to the post office

Or the post office could find a sustainable and growth economic model . . . at which point it might be indistinguishable from Amazon/Walmart/Safeway/etc.

[golemotron]

Please read the history of post office budgets and spending.

[rootusrootus]

They've actually done pretty well, given the amount of politics that gets played with their funding.

[oliv__]

I don't know about you but from my personal experiences in dealing with the USPS, they're not exactly what I'd describe as the most efficient (or friendly for that matter) organization.

Compare that to same-day or next day delivery from Amazon, it's night and day.

I'd rather not dump more tax money into that mess.

EDIT: I find it interesting that 90% of the responding comments in this thread are seemingly against the parent comment's ideas yet all are being heavily downvoted now with practically no answers to justify the downvotes

[rootusrootus]

> EDIT: I find it interesting that 90% of the responding comments in this thread are seemingly against the parent comment's ideas yet all are being heavily downvoted now with practically no answers to justify the downvotes

I think that's because many of the comments are posting regularly debunked misinformation.

Personally, I like the USPS more than Amazon. Because while Amazon frequently gives me great service, they can terminate that relationship at any time and then I'm completely stuck. Because the USPS is quasi-governmental, they can't just decide I'm no longer allowed to be a customer.

[kortilla]

> I think that's because many of the comments are posting regularly debunked misinformation.

Such as?

Most of these faded out comments are talking about how the USPS is a government org so it has no incentives to efficiently fix things regardless of money. How do you debunk that? It’s true of the incentives of every government agency.

[nicoburns]

Why does the CEO of a private company have incentive to fix things? Presumably because they’ll be fired if they don’t. How is that any different for the head of a governmental organisation?

[twblalock]

Stock compensation.

[nicoburns]

I mean sure, but do you really feel like that’s necessary for someone to be motivated to do a good job. IMO there’s plenty of incentive without that.