Originally published at: Nothing on Earth can exceed the weight limit of a USPS flat rate box | Boing Boing
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Illyrion, that’s the ticket.
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I think we just pin pointed why the GOP is so eager to privatize it…
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Does this parcel contain anything liquid, fragile, perishable, or from the hypothetical island of stability beyond the primordial elements?
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How about the content of The Impeached One’s head? I’ve always thought that it was a pretty dense accumulation of matter.
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Long ago I was a USPS letter carrier, and one of the qualifications was to be able to lift 75 lbs, or maybe it was 90 lbs, can’t remember, and can’t lift either anymore without feeling it later. Limiting the amount workers have to be able to heft reduces the number of disability and workman’s comp claims.
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Back in the early oughties I was part of a bunch of machinists who started trading steels and other dense, heavy objects using flat rate boxes. Walking into the post office with one of these filled with S90V was always fun, as they would eye the fiberglass reinforcing, try to pick it up, glare at me, and ask what’s in it. “Steel,” and you could just see the frustration as they realized that yes, they’d have to accept and deliver it for the standard rate. I once traded some 200 year old Colonial-era plate wrought iron for some very nice pattern welded steel using the larger boxes, and they asked me to come pick the package up at the post office, as they didn’t want to deliver such a heavy package. Then they raised the rates (wonder why) and put stricter limits on the larger boxes – but obviously not on the smaller.
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Paul Sherman is clearly not trying hard enough, literally, he need to push harder. The core of the sun has an approximate density of 5.4 pounds per cubic inch, which makes it well above the weight limit for this box when completely filled. While it might be a bad idea to compress hydrogen in a postal box to that level as it might result in spontaneous fusion, you could probably compress the hydrogen to 2 pounds per cubic inch without any risk of it becoming a nuclear bomb.
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A dozen separate boxes to ship this chunk of the sun’s core is such a ripoff. Thanks, Obama.
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Sure, but where are you gonna find the cyborg studs to help you fetch it?
ETA:
I thought the skull was hyper-dense, in order to keep from collapsing from the vacuum it contains.
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There used to be a business that would sell dive weights using the flat rate shipping box, so as to not pay the per pound metered weight.
Their domain is now up for sale.
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This seems sensible. The limit is probably set by what can be picked up by the average person without trouble. However, you could probably pack a running gyroscope I there and still have some fun.
A long while ago, the UK parcel service used to restrict the largest dimension of a box, so if you wanted to return an umbrella, you could get the best rate by packing it diagonally in a tea chest. Your national post services are treasures, who should be running Amazon, and providing internet to all, and maybe even running Facebook and the like.
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I mean, if so it wouldn’t really be flat rate would it?
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Storing highly compressed hydrogen plasma in a postal service box is a bad idea for several reasons and probably violates federal law and postal regulations, but fusion isn’t a big concern. The energy generated from fusion in the core of the sun is about 1 watt/flat rate box.
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