The post office is not supposed to be a business
Stop treating it like a business
It’s a government provided service (gasp, a social service!) so citizens can communicate.
No wonder they want to take it away from us.
this post was submitted on 30 May 2026
671 points (99.0% liked)
Lemmy Shitpost
40071 readers
3152 users here now
Welcome to Lemmy Shitpost. Here you can shitpost to your hearts content.
Anything and everything goes. Memes, Jokes, Vents and Banter. Though we still have to comply with lemmy.world instance rules. So behave!
Rules:
1. Be Respectful
Refrain from using harmful language pertaining to a protected characteristic: e.g. race, gender, sexuality, disability or religion.
Refrain from being argumentative when responding or commenting to posts/replies. Personal attacks are not welcome here.
...
2. No Illegal Content
Content that violates the law. Any post/comment found to be in breach of common law will be removed and given to the authorities if required.
That means:
-No promoting violence/threats against any individuals
-No CSA content or Revenge Porn
-No sharing private/personal information (Doxxing)
...
3. No Spam
Posting the same post, no matter the intent is against the rules.
-If you have posted content, please refrain from re-posting said content within this community.
-Do not spam posts with intent to harass, annoy, bully, advertise, scam or harm this community.
-No posting Scams/Advertisements/Phishing Links/IP Grabbers
-No Bots, Bots will be banned from the community.
...
4. No Porn/Explicit
Content
-Do not post explicit content. Lemmy.World is not the instance for NSFW content.
-Do not post Gore or Shock Content.
...
5. No Enciting Harassment,
Brigading, Doxxing or Witch Hunts
-Do not Brigade other Communities
-No calls to action against other communities/users within Lemmy or outside of Lemmy.
-No Witch Hunts against users/communities.
-No content that harasses members within or outside of the community.
...
6. NSFW should be behind NSFW tags.
-Content that is NSFW should be behind NSFW tags.
-Content that might be distressing should be kept behind NSFW tags.
...
If you see content that is a breach of the rules, please flag and report the comment and a moderator will take action where they can.
Also check out:
Partnered Communities:
1.Memes
10.LinuxMemes (Linux themed memes)
Reach out to
All communities included on the sidebar are to be made in compliance with the instance rules. Striker
founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
It's the same with public transit. Some people think the government shouldn't invest in it because it won't be profitable, but... it's not supposed to be. It's a public service, just like libraries, firefighters, parks, public schools, road maintenance, etc. That's literally what taxes are supposed to be for.
It's crazy. I mean even if you are against taxes and everything it is a shared pool of resources. What are we supposed to with it if not pay for these things? Pay for the salaries of politicians that do not utilise these resources?
All the time you hear from these people what the government should not be spending tax payer money on but you rarely hear anything about what the money should be spent on.
you rarely hear anything about what the money *should* be spent on.
You must not be listening cuz plenty of people talk about spending it on bombing more foreign children for the good of the military industrial complex.
And cage fight matches in front of the white house
load more comments
(3 replies)
The USPS needs to take a long, hard look at their Money Order, and pivot toward basic consumer banking. They were the first widespread service for money transfers. They need to return to that core competency. They should issue checking accounts and bank cards (rivaling Visa and Mastercard) for anyone who wants one. They should provide fee-free basic consumer banking services to the general public.
At this time, their operational model is "advertising platform" that happens to occasionally provide delivery services. Their reason for continued existence is bulk mailing. They aren't a government service. They are a de facto business. They fund themselves, and they produce a revenue stream for their sole shareholder, the US Government. If they were actually a government service, they would be publicly funded, and junk mail would be broadly prohibited.
The USPS is currently a garbage delivery service. Neither snow, nor rain, nor uBlock Origin stays these ad peddlers from littering "Or Current Resident" with their stamped trash. They should shift their focus to parcel delivery, and consumer banking.
The whole 'run government like a business' idea usually entails running it into the ground. It's just a more diplomatic way to express wanting to remove social services from people.
Exactly. The USPS should have pivoted from daily physical mail delivery to telecommunications services by the 1920s. The breakup of AT&T's monopoly in the 1980s made the Internet possible; we could have had the internet 30-40 years earlier if we had pushed the USPS into telephone.
Nobody’s really willing to have this conversation. Much like the TSA, the USPS is a jobs program. The bulk mail justifies the ongoing maintenance expenditures on the mail sorting equipment that will be unnecessary if we stop pushing so many Valpaks and predatory “I want to pay cash for your house” mailers. And a lot of people who process the mail will be out of a job, and a good chunk of people who deliver the mail will be out of a job, and the remaining carriers will have a radically different job as the load is lightened and they would have to travel much further distances on their routes to justify a full day’s wage, but the economics of traveling that far start to raise questions about whether 6 day a week delivery to every address is a reasonable burden for the USPS to shoulder... presumably management would be unaffected.
This will all be in limbo til the nation is ready to talk about what work and life look like in a world where we’re all pretending to need to work 40 hours a week to live. And with the state of mass media as it is, the citizens don’t really get a say when it comes to what we’re talking about this week. Ironically, the USPS is well positioned to reach its customers and get the ball rolling… but taking a stance on the right to life would be deemed political.
I’d argue that is what it became, not what it started as or should be.
Absolutely. It was an excellent system a hundred years ago.
They failed to expand the postal service into telecommunications between 1890 and 1940, leading to AT&T's monopoly on the phone system until 1982. They failed to expand their money transfer system into consumer-oriented electronic banking services in the 1990s, leaving Visa and Mastercard with a stranglehold on payment processing. We'll have to break them apart soon.
My dad (a conservative) works in usps and thinks that there's no way they'll go after them.
He gets fed up saying how DMV workers are so slow and disrespectful and them glazes up his work in the usps saying that their agency is the one that gets overworked the most.
load more comments
(3 replies)
Fuck. They're up to $1.70 already? I think I still have some left from when I paid like fifty cents.
a buck seventy to take some paper to Oshino Hakkai? What about a small child weighing under fifty pounds?
If they never expire, they would have been an amazing investment opportunity to stock. Imagine paying fifty cent today and still beeing able to send them to all the remaining 4 countries left worldwide when prices go up to 253.72 Trumpjuniordollars in 2056. Or you can trade them for bread.
I’m a big fan of their new duck trucks. Saw one the other day and it made me smile.
The new trucks that are designed far better than the old ones? Half As Interesting on YouTube has a great video on those.
Those remind me so much of The Busy World of Richard Scarry! I love them, with their little mustache blinkers.
They look like Beavis and Butt-Head characters to me, also we apparently had to recall several due to the wheels on specifically the right side of the truck falling off. Needless to say you'll still see the on life support LLVs for a while
load more comments
(7 replies)
"Hey, can you place my vote, please? My taxes have already paid for the postage."
Current administration:
"Nah. The wanna-be dictator says no, and our top guy is corrupt as fuck..."
My wifes vote was held up in “customs” when she voted from abroad. It never arrived and it was also to late to send a new vote. Why a letter would even go to customs is beyond me.
i'm from the bay area in california. i went to college in utah (please don't start i know i was an idiot. i still am an idiot (thanks mitch) that's how i know) and my absentee ballot would reliably arrive the day after the election. i tried having it sent to my parents and having them mail it to me in a nondescript envelope and it arrived on time. HUH I WONDER WHAT WAS GOING ON AT THE POST OFFICE IN UTAH, since that didn't happen to me when i had my california absentee ballots sent anywhere else.
Ok, but unrelated to the post office, is this the actress from Game of Thrones? The lady who first marries King Joffrey?
The cool thing about the postal service is that they will deliver anything no questions asked.
Top bun from a McDonald's hamburger? no problem!
Asbestos condoms? You got it!
Several slices of 9 year old moldy balogna? Hell yeah buddy!
The cool thing about the postal service is that they will deliver anything no questions asked.
Having shipped packages via USPS before, I cannot confirm they don't ask questions, they specifically asked to make sure I wasn't shipping chemicals or explosives.
I know it means hazardous chemicals, but I find the idea of "does your package contain molecules" chuckle-worthy. Probably something a surreal world post office would say.
👁️ 👄 👁️
D o e s y o u r p a c k a g e c o n t a i n c o n c e p t s ?
mayhaps
Well, you could send a lump of pure gold. That would have atoms but no molecules. You could try it with silver or iron, too, but the surface would probably start to oxidize before you got it into the box.
Just send some Helium.
load more comments
(2 replies)
USPS used to ship children. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/brief-history-children-sent-through-mail-180959372/
load more comments
(2 replies)
State: Hey, can you mail out this ballot postmarked by the state to a resident in the same state that isn't on a special federal government list?
USPS: No.
Postal Service moving forward with Trump’s attack on mail voting
Well this made me frown like grumpy cat..thanks
Don't kill the messenger.
We live under a fascist regime that is dismantling itself to ensure it's power over us.
"Don't kill the messenger" is a great slogan for supporting the USPS
Easy, it’s the difference between a service and a business. War is a business, run by profiteers who charge $1000 to produce and deliver a hammer or a toilet seat, whereas historically the postal service was a pure need met by the government and subsidized by the people, but seen previously as such a critical means of transferring critical information, news, it was necessary to prop up the entire economic system by transferring contracts, documents for business, government, personal dealings, so it had to function and the cost was not a consideration, gouging wasn’t dreams of, and it piggybacked on all the major and newest modes of transportation. Today greed and political malfeasance has intentionally spread the idea that the postal service should be profitable, for some to kill it off or raise prices to enrich their own investments in competition, for some to damage voting by mail, for some to further sow distrust in reliable government services to convince the masses that the government is entirely incompetence and untrustworthy to run such programs to further privatize various industries.
It was cheap because capitalists relied on it to enrich themselves. Now they can do their business in other ways cheaper, so they can do what they always do - raise prices, enshittify it, strip the parts and sell them off once people lose faith in it, then use their corporate monopolies that provide the same services to gouge the populace that previously paid pennies for the same services.
USPS is one of the many things that still makes me feel a large rush of civic pride in these dark times, among museums and libraries, firefighters, and good community spaces(parks, bike trails, hiking areas, etc).
view more: next ›