Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2020/04/27/help-save-the-usps-with-this-d.html
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I have a lot of packages to mail, as soon as the quarantine eases in San Diego. I hope they can hang on.
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Time to get back to snailmail correspondance. Postcards can be fun.
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On the Planet Caffinator, we had already saved the planet by using coffee pods. But we had a problem with our postal servic;e that they were too under-appreciated because we had diverted them to moving coffee pods into the arctic. So we followed Boing Boings adorable advice and dressed every postal worker in a cute doggy costume. This alleviated all our problems: funded the postal service, improved moral, and, for some reason, further lowered our CO2 levels.
Zume of Caffinator
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They should just stop giving discounts to the people sending me completely undesirable junk, which is the vast majority of what’s in my mailbox. I feel like on the one hand complaining about junk mail is tired and hackneyed, and yet it really does still account for most of what I get.
Do highly recommend postcard correspondence though. I’ve got a chess game going with my brother since December, and it remains highly entertaining.
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Interestingly, it’s not funded by taxpayers, but entirely through the sale of postage, gifts, and services.
I’m fairly certain that Congress has to approve any increases in postage rates, though.
Isn’t the government Constitutionally-required to keep the postal service running? It’s the only actual government service specifically called for in the document (Article I, Section 8, Clause 7). Yes, the USPS is a quasi-independent service now, but I don’t think the Constitution was amended to eliminate the requirement.
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Apparently about a third of the USPS revenue stream from postage comes from bulk mail. I had understood the USPS was surviving to this point primarily because of consistent bulk mail revenues. I am surprised and disappointed the USPS is not funded at least in part through taxes. For the cost of 1-2 aircraft carriers per year they could reduce or eliminate their reliance on bulk mail.
How does that work? I imagine that each postcard would include the player’s current move, and then some kind of diagram (?) that shows what the board currently looks like. If not for the latter, I imagine that the two virtual boards could get out of sync.
BTW, I just hand wrote, addressed and mailed (via the USPS) a letter to each of my Senators requesting that they vote to fully fund the Postal Service. Then I went and bought a hundred bucks with of postage stamps from the USPS website (my history shows I do that about once a year, and it was time). As a mentioned to my Senators, I am a former/closet philatelist ever since my dad turned me on to it when I was a kid. I don’t do much of anything with it now, other than buy (and use) all the unusual (and many times cool looking) stamps the Postal Service produces.
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I have a part of my savins in Italian postal bonds. I think that the better option is to buy USPS postal bonds. Besides post pffices clerks are nice guys,
There is an alpha-numerical code system involved. You simply send your move trough that code. eg D2 to D3 . Your move.
I still send quite a bit of mail, via Stamps.com. I print out sheets of stamps and labels for packages. We send out quite a few packages of gifts to family members and they all go USPS.
My dad was a stamp collector, and he really enjoyed visiting post offices. But if you were on line behind him, you’d have been annoyed, because he would spend forever talking to the clerk and looking through whatever stamps they had.
I would think (naively?) that small rural communities would value their post offices and want to keep them around. But what do I know.
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I keep a board out with the moves so we just send the updates. This works because I have an extremely polite cat. My brother’s cat cannot be described as polite, but she exclusively targets soft flesh.
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