And USPS still got shanked by the government anyway.
I don’t think I’ve ever seen a proper post office in at least a decade because even the main shipping/processing offices look like a hurricane blew threw and they didn’t even bother to replace the postal workers that died.
Mailman here. I still deliver thousands of letters a day
Man, I remember when people used to write letters. The internet just wasn’t a thing on anyone’s radar at the time, except maybe science folk, and personal computers were very uncommon and costly.
There was something special about writing a letter, sometimes bit by bit over days or even weeks. And getting one in the post was exciting. Especially when it was from a relative who might slip a £1 note in there.
I think somewhere I still have a folder of letters from old girlfriends - and they would be old now, one is dead. But you’d keep letters, because they were somehow more personal.
Interestingly, this form of communication had its own viruses - things called chain letters. I got one once, and participated in spreading it. Some just wanted maximum dispersal, others were fraudulent or malicious.
Then home computers and email came along and it was just so much easier. Letters pretty much died out. I only really get them from companies now trying to sell shit. And bills and traffic fines often send them. Fuck knows why traffic fines can’t use email. And my doctors, again - why?
And now email is sinking under the weight of procedurally generated crap and scams. A lot of work related stuff I get is pages of shit generated by AI. I take the view that if they couldn’t be arsed to write it, I can’t be arsed to read it. At best, I’ll get AI to summarise - which is a ridiculous use of all this compute power and its attendant environmental harm. And so, so many ‘click this link’ scams. Makes me wonder if email will soon be superseded by something else.
Google Wave tried to replace email with a come-and-go / bulletin board / long-form chat kind of thing. I’d still like that for occasional things, like organizing holiday get-togethers with the family, but that has been the only time I think about using something like that.
For most personal communication that isn’t biz-to-biz, it’s chat nowadays. And the rooms/teams/channels concept (like IRC) is the main medium for what I used to want Waves to be. At least on Teams, it still supports more than just a “tweet”, and people can come and go on those threads, and depending on the service, you can pin messages, associate a wiki for persistent content, etc.
But all those still require people to be on that particular chat service.
Perhaps that’s the end result for personal and group communication. The format feels pretty right for the job, to me. I just hope it eventually morphs into a federated system like email and Lemmy, as I just don’t imagine everyone agreeing to sign up for yet another chat service every time someone else wants to start a group chat. Then instead of “did you add so-and-so to the group chat”, we’d just pivot the problem to “oh, we were discussing this on the Slack group, but on the Teams group someone else said blah blah…”. Same problem–fragmentation.
Mail/packages sent via the United States Postal Service have more constitutional protections than those sent via commercial carrier or email.
And the post office has an incentive to keep costs low, whereas private companies could just add easily price-fix
This is why swim would allegedly order goods on the dark web, and always shipped USPS as private carriers can search ur shit at their discretion.
There are postal organizations outside of the US.
That’s insane, I never knew that!
I always assumed my ali-epxress packages where launched via cannon, and landed on my doorstep 10,000 miles or so away.
for which the same thing is also true
It’s the same when you ask an American where they are from when you meet abroad and they reply with a state name like Texas instead of a country.
They’re abroad so they must know that other countries exist yet still reply with their state name.
I don’t think knowledge is the problem anymore, it’s ignorance.
If someone is from the UK and you ask where they’re from and they answer Scotland, do you roll your eyes?
If someone is from Paris, do you get mad that they didn’t say France?
People expect others to know a little geography, so if you’re from one of the bigger states, you can assume most people have heard of it. After all, there’s a pretty big difference between the average person from California, and the average person from Arkansas.
I’m in the USA and I have talked to multiple people who are also from USA who have never heard of RI lol. Asking if it’s part of New York. I’m sure there’s European countries I would have no clue about and I can’t tell u every country in africa or Asia either. Most people don’t memorize 180 counties and their locations, one hemisphere is enough lol.
I’m in the USA and I have talked to multiple people who are also from USA who have never heard of RI
jesusfuckingchrist
I have a buddy who works for the USPS. The package delivery portion of his job sounds nuts.
fun fact: street vehicles are still being used to transport data around. for large amounts of data, it’s faster and cheaper to write it on a disk, then ship the disk, instead of transporting it over the internet.
Never underestimate the bandwidth of a Ford Taurus full of tapes screaming down the Jersey Turnpike.
I remember someone put a Micro SD card on a pigeon and sent it. Was faster.
i remember there is an XKCD about it, i just can’t find it rn
I just noticed the MTU for the interface in the article. If nobody has suggested this already I’ll be disappointed, but I propose that instead of jumbo frames we call them dumbo frames, when it relates to IPoAC using printed paper as the medium.
One time I looked at a 1tb microSD card and decided there was no fucking way that much data could fit into something so small. Ever since that day, no microSD card has worked for me. They get I/O errors, each one. Suspecting this isn’t a coincidence might be my most schizophrenic thought.
You should not have doubted that card, now they’re all taking their revenge
This morning my external SSD won’t mount. This is getting fuckin spooky
Could you doubt global warming or Trump? I mean you have a power, and with great power comes great responsibility. Stop only destroying electronics 😉
Alright, I’ll take a flying fuck at it. I guess check headlines in an hour.
wait until you learn about the information density of DNA
I’d better go find out and balk at that too, free vasectomy if it works
Ah, classic sneakernet!
Email affected the USPS far less than people think it did.
EDIT: I should say the ADVENT of email.
Yeah, shitty politics has done more damage to the USPS.
Though there is some truth to OP, the new generation mail trucks are designed with less enveloped letters and more parcel post in mind than the Grumman LLV was.
Then Capitalism gave us delivery services, and the US government made the USPS bankrupt and obsolete.
The US government had a legal monopoly to “carrying letters and parcels arround.” Then it decided to remove that law, and then capitalism created delivery services.
In exchange for the monopoly there was flat rate service to every address in the country. Now they’re expected to do the flat rate service without the monopoly, while other companies targrt the most lucrative business.
And then Congress required them to take out loans to come up with 75 years worth of employee health benefits in just 10 years. That put them in massive debt, when other companies have such requirements.
Now, the same politicians that imposed those rules on them, are complaining that they’re no longer “profitable”, since every single penny they make is going towards paying off that debt.
Similar play as private equity
Until the internet can move matter we will always need matter transport options of which the USPS is one of.
Email was never a threat to mailed letters or magazines. It was some nonsense thunked up by the same caliber of technophobe that called it the webbernet and thought it really was just a series of tubes.
“The internet is not a big chariot. It’s a series of aqueducts…” – The Roman Senator from Ultima Thule
Email was never a threat to mailed letters or magazines
Excuse me? You didn’t put a /s in there, so I’m genuinely puzzled by your comment. If it was sarcastic, then well played.
Granted magazines have died out because of websites, but letters?
As a Dane unless you have an exemption, because you’re very old or intellectually challenged, then you’re required to have a special digital inbox for government and banking. When that was in introduced, letters died in less than a decade. To such a degree that the postal service stopped delivering letters last year.
A private company took over the letter carrying responsibility, so you can still send a letter. But there are no mail boxes left, you have to go to a store that does packages as well and standing in line to send a letter. The private company btw did a splendid job of making the postal service seem competent in comparison. Something no Dane would have found possible in years prior.
The post specifies USPS which means the time would be around 30 years ago in the US.
I’m sorry to heat about your postal service. It’s a sad accomplishment to out-suck the US.
series of tubes
Without those tech-illiterate morons, we wouldn’t have works of art like this though so it’s not all bad.
You know, he was making a coherent point about bandwidth limitations, it was just phrased in a silly way because that’s how you have to talk to laymen.
I thought it was a big truck.
I bet actual personal letters are less than 1% of what USPS delivers these days
Back when my brother was in jail, I was personally boosting that percentage by writing to him every week. Sometimes, he’d even write back. (some/most jails are wicked restrictive on correspondence and Internet access, and a letter is much cheaper than a jail phone conversation.)
That’s awesome and wholesome
It sucked being the kid at summer camp that never got mail. I figured jail was similar, so I made sure he had mail. I didn’t always have much to say, so often I’d send a greeting card filled with writing or sometimes just a post card. The act of sending/getting mail was the important bit.
I’m pretty sure it was so much worse, and that you made it so much better for him.
Certainly. It’s probably less than 1 in 50,000.
So the man said “that’s a good thing” and the zen master said “we’ll see”
Ok Charlie
A mail straight from my living room to your living room, delivered instantly??? That’ll never work! Some kind of electronic mail??? The post office won’t stand for it!
