
Internal USPS Documents Outline Plans to Hobble Mail Sorting - laurex
https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/pkyv4k/internal-usps-documents-outline-plans-to-hobble-mail-sorting
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cycomanic
Even if this is not about the elections it is straight out of the "how to
privatise public services" playbook. Gut and underfund public services, once
people start getting annoyed, point to the service and say "the government
can't run services well, private companies are much more efficient." open the
market for private corporations, that often don't have to fulfil the same
requirements (e.g. deliveries in rural areas...). The private corporations
will quickly increase prices while reducing services.

~~~
bhupy
I mean, "government can't run services well" is probably overly simplistic and
incorrect.

But what if we replaced it with the following: "an extremely politicized
government can't run services well".

Is that a controversial statement? And if it isn't, doesn't that suggest that
you don't want an extremely polarized/politicized government running extremely
critical infrastructure?

> The private corporations will quickly increase prices while reducing
> services.

This is fairly simplistic, as we know that not to be the case for the vast
majority of private services we use today. Yes, there exists conditions where
this is true (monopolies), but it's true less often than the above statement
that "politicized government can't run services well".

~~~
cromwellian
The postal service predates the US government and has been running since 1775
(Benjamin Franklin first postmaster general). It was cash-flow positive until
it was sabotaged by Republicans, who banned it from raising prices above
inflation
([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postal_Accountability_and_Enha...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postal_Accountability_and_Enhancement_Act))
while simultaneously requiring it to spend $54 billion to prefund pension
benefits for the next 50 years.

So if you want to know why they're having monetary problems, look no further.

>"an extremely politicized government can't run services well"

The Republicans normally make this a truism by sabotaging government programs.
With the exception of the military, everything else gets squeezed and forced
to justify their budget requests, but hardly anyone ever says "you want to
raise the DoD budget by $100 billion? HOW ARE WE GONNA PAY FOR THAT?" Notice
how if you propose $75 billion for tuition free college, GOP spokespeople are
all over the media raising questions about funding mechanisms.

The USPS has been a reliable actor for 245 years. Its infrastructure, like
electricity, or roads, and should not be subject to "we should run this like a
for profit business" concerns.

~~~
bhupy
> The Republicans normally make this a truism by sabotaging government
> programs

Yes, but you have to contend with the reality that you are participating in
the same government as they are. It's like constantly insisting on sharing a
pool with a kid that constantly insists on peeing in it, with no real way to
kick that kid out. It's a byproduct of the polity in which we are
participating, and as long as a democratically elected government consists of
people who don't agree with you (read: polarized / corrupt), the services they
run will have problems, as we are seeing.

> The USPS has been a reliable actor for 245 years. Its infrastructure, like
> electricity, or roads, and should not be subject to "we should run this like
> a for profit business" concerns.

Just because the USPS has been reliable in the past, doesn't mean that it's
structurally set up to be reliable forever. It could also just mean that we
weren't as polarized about how the USPS should function in the past, and we
are now. As long as that continues to be the case, the USPS will be a sub-
optimal agency. In contrast, how many goods & services provided by the private
sector have this problem? If a corporation is self-sabotaging, it will die,
and be replaced by another corporation. That doesn't appear to be the case
with a polarized government.

Also, the allergic reaction to privatization / profits strikes me as just as
(if not more) reactionary than the right-wing allergic reaction to public
services. The private sector is involved in reliably providing us with
critical goods & services like food, clothing, furniture, housing (in markets
without onerous zoning), transportation, information technology, e-mail, cloud
computing, electronics, etc etc etc. All of those things gotten cheaper over
time (even relative to inflation), have seen an increase in investment over
time, and an increase in quality over time. The profit motive is just the
incentive for people to provide goods & services for others, as efficiently as
possible. It's not a silver bullet, as monopolies can lead to rent seeking,
but to suggest that the private sector is always and unquestionably "bad" is
not a serious opinion worth engaging with. Importantly, the public sector is
also not a silver bullet, as we are seeing.

Also, privatized postal services aren't novel either. Singapore's postal
service, SingPost, is a publicly traded company. The UK's postal service,
Royal Mail, is a publicly traded limited company. Germany's postal service,
Deutsche Post AG, is a publicly traded company. Japan's postal service, Japan
Post, is a publicly traded company.

Your issue is that you participate in a government where your fellow citizens
are voting to sabotage the public services. From where I sit, the private
sector strikes me as _strictly_ better than a self-sabotaging public sector
that's governed by Republican politicians every 4-8 years. Either we continue
to swim in a pee-filled pool, or we figure out another swimming arrangement.

~~~
CogitoCogito
What specific problems will privatization solve? Profitability? Efficiency?
Something else? Which of your problems cannot be fixed by changes to the
current system?

I'm asking this seriously. I'm just trying to understand what problems you
believe privatization will fix.

~~~
bhupy
Easy: privatization of a thing almost always decouples its administration and
operation from politics. Private corporations are almost never self-sabotaging
because they can’t afford to be, and when they are, they quickly die and get
replaced. OTOH having a representative democracy appoint and appropriate the
governance of our services is well and good when people actually _want_ that.
Unfortunately, whoever is in power has reliably flip flopped back and forth
every 4-8 years, and as you might have noticed, people don’t always vote for
the “best” people. Privatization allows the postal service to run and be
funded totally independent of partisan politics. Amazon provides its services
cheaply and reliably _because_ it doesn’t have to worry about who is in power
every 8 years.

And privatization isn’t some new scary boogeyman, it’s been implemented in a
handful of healthy and prosperous nations (Germany, Japan, Singapore, the UK).

> Which of your problems cannot be fixed by changes to the current system?

I’d ask you how you’d even go about “changing the system” when you’re
participating in that system with people that violently disagree with you.
This is the logical endpoint of “democratic planning”, where people that
disagree with you vote for a self-sabotaging system. Nobody wins, everyone is
equally unhappy.

~~~
CogitoCogito
I asked for specific problems and you provided none other than a vague
statement about politics. What _specific_ problems do you believe
privatization would solve? Would delivery costs go down? Would speed increase?
Why? Would a private corporation held to the same rules and standards (e.g.
the same pension obligations, contracts, etc.) function better? Why? If what
you're saying (as I believe) that the new corporation would run under
different rules and standards, then why could those same changes not be made
to the current system?

> I’d ask you how you’d even go about “changing the system” when you’re
> participating in that system with people that violently disagree with you.

What does this statement even mean? Literally every law passed, ever action
taken by the government, etc. changes the current system. You're acting like
"changing the system" is impossible when it's clearly not. Hell,
_privatization_ is even a "change of the system". Just like partial
privatization is. Just like changes the the postal system are.

Please help me understand your thinking.

~~~
bhupy
> What _specific_ problems do you believe privatization would solve?

For starters, unlike what we’re seeing today, mail-in ballots would be
processed without issue because there isn’t a political incentive to hobble
it. As long as there is a market need to reliably deliver ballots, privatized
carriers will process them.

> Would delivery costs go down? Why?

They certainly could. The private sector is often better at allocating
resources than the public sector, because of the superior efficiency of
competition and the pricing system as compared to central planning.

I can give you a couple concrete examples.

NASA's planned SLS moon mission is a bit of a disaster — way over budget and
way behind schedule. Because the boosters aren't reusable, each launch is
expected to cost $1B (with a B) dollars — EACH launch! Meanwhile SpaceX's
target cost-per-launch is $50M.

In Washington DC, the average government school spending per student is
$31,280. The average private school tuition in DC is $23,959.

Finally, privatization would allow for greater funding (through greater
investment). Today, the funding of USPS is limited by the political process.

> Literally every law passed, every action taken by the government, etc
> changes the current system

That’s not what I mean by “changing the system”. What I’m saying is that as
long as the postal service is tightly coupled to the political process by
being “government run”, and the government in question is polarized as to
whether it should even exist, then it will produce sub-par outcomes relative
to its private counterparts. There is literally no law you can pass to change
this save for changing who is allowed to vote/participate in the government,
or by decreasing a public agency’s democratic accountability. Those all
require Constitutional changes (“changes to the system”) which are almost
impossible in the current climate.

~~~
cromwellian
Delivery costs might go down at the expense of a large number of rural
Americans unable to get mail at all.

Universal service has a cost and like roads, those costs may not be economical
everywhere but none the less necessary (eg clean water, electricity,
education, etc for all Americans regardless of which town they live in)

~~~
bhupy
> Delivery costs might go down at the expense of a large number of rural
> Americans unable to get mail at all

This is conjecture, at best. If there’s a market need for something, it will
be met at the fair market value for that thing — provided there are no
exogenic barriers like regulation or endogenic barriers like
monopolies/cartels.

At best, you can probably make the case that rural areas will no longer
receive _subsidized_ mail service, but it’s worth asking ourselves if that’s
even a desirable goal. And even if it is, it’s worth considering if
nationalization is the best way to achieve subsidized rural delivery, or if
direct subsidy or a UBI is the better way to achieve that, or perhaps even
regulating the private carriers just like for eg food quality is regulated by
the FDA.

I’ll also add that the rural population is overwhelmingly the set of people
who are aggressively voting for privatization.

------
fillskills
How are there no protests about this? Why are people not scared of the threat
to democracy? Sure I am drawing a line from hobbling USPS to democracy, but it
seems like a very clear one.

Sorry for bringing something political in nature to HN. Before this I would
never think of it. But all tech progress relies on a sound democracy.

~~~
charwalker
Most are mis or uninformed on the impact this will have or simply support the
current administration regardless. Trump has held about 40% approval even
under impeachment.

