[mananaysiempre]

Fascinating in more than one way: I don’t think I’ve ever seen mail delivered on the same day within the same city even when my place of residence had a well-functioning postal service by modern standards. (What I have seen in a particularly egregious case, though, is letters reliably taking a month to traverse a distance that takes me half an hour on foot.)

[lloydatkinson]

I've been told that it was once common in the UK to be able to send an early morning letter and have a reply in your letter box by afternoon. Now, I have Post Office workers graffitiing envelopes and changing the type of postage I just paid for once I've left the Post Office, letters going missing regularly, a couple of stamps costs £10, and first class can take a week. It's now got so bad that we hand delivered cards over Christmas.

Absolutely pitiful.

[selfhoster1312]

There's nothing surprising about that. Human experience transferred through the ages has been lost to automation and profit-seeking via workforce-reduction. The machine/algorithm may have 80% of the human expertise of railway/post operators, but it's lost the last 20% that made operations seamless.

And it's certainly made work more tedious and painful, which does not exactly lead to better outcomes in the long run. I would certainly recommend reading « La mécanique des lettres » on this topic, but unfortunately i can't find an english translation.

[IncreasePosts]

Huh? You can send an email and receive a response within a minute. You can call someone and literally have a live conversation with them.

Yes, we've lost the ability to quickly send pieces of paper to arbitrary homes, but there really isn't a need for it when you have better alternatives.