NewYorkers bashing (was: USPO still trying to SPAM everyone)
As I said, UPS has been courteous, swift, and I know my UPS delivery guy (when he delivered my FAL rifle I opened the box and we talked It was the fed agent #675381. Did you notice the letters on NYPD cars: Courtesy Professionalism Respect
Re: USPO still trying to SPAM everyone
At 07:26 PM 8/1/00 -0500, Jim Choate wrote: On Tue, 1 Aug 2000, sunder wrote: Jim Choate wrote: On Mon, 31 Jul 2000, Eric Murray wrote: Well, they could make all other email services illegal. Yea, not bloody likely. But governments have done stupider things. See the 1st. That would be nice, except for two things. .gov has deemed that the post office should be a monopoly*, and thus it and only it is allowed to carry mails. No, the Constitution REQUIRES the post office to be a monopoly. Maybe the Republic of Texas consitution requires that, but the US Constitution on says, in Section 8, that the Congress shall have the power "To establish Post Offices and post Roads". No mention of monopoly there. General post, as a general principle of democratic society, since it represents a 'press' and is critical in the 'speech' of the people and they are required by oath to protect both is justification to have it managed by the central or federal government versus a bunch of individual businesses. One can argue, though IMHO not successfully, that it's useful for the Government to fund a post office that sends mail to everybody, but that's still no justification for monopoly. Far from it! A government postal monopoly, by deciding what content of speech it would carry and forbidding competition, could censor that speech in ways that the First Amendment clearly opposes and supersedes. (What? The Post Office ban mailing obscene content? Never happen...) Second while the 1st does protect speech, it doesn't prevent .gov from fucking with the method of transporation. See the FCC for another example. Um, as a matter of fact the Constitution REQUIRES the federal government to regulate inter-state commerce. Again, no, it only gives Congress power to do so, and does it particularly to take that power away from the states. Somehow they've bullied the courts into letting them extend that power to things like growing your own grain on your own farm to feed your own animals, and growing your own dope on your own farm to feed your own head, but then the Supremes in the early 1900s were no particular friends of the First Amendment, viz Schenck. [* An interesting exception is that things like FedEx, UPS, DHL, etc. do exist and do compete with the USPS's parcel post, but that's for packages.] In COMMERCIAL environments. If we were to reduce it to the majority of traffic that is carried by the USPS then they'd go broke in about a week. The reason there's a postal monopoly is in large part because of an anarchist lawyer, Lysander Spooner, who believed that private business could do a much better job of anything that a government business, and demonstrated it by running a better postal service in Rochester New York than the US Snail could, in about the 1840s. They couldn't beat him at their own game, so they banned him from competing. P.S. Jim Choate's broken mail software put another of those CDR things in, but I fixed that. Thanks! Bill Bill Stewart, [EMAIL PROTECTED] PGP Fingerprint D454 E202 CBC8 40BF 3C85 B884 0ABE 4639
Re: USPO still trying to SPAM everyone
At 8:30 AM -0700 8/2/00, Ray Dillinger wrote: Bill Stewart, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: The reason there's a postal monopoly is in large part because of an anarchist lawyer, Lysander Spooner, who believed that private business could do a much better job of anything that a government business, and demonstrated it by running a better postal service in Rochester New York than the US Snail could, in about the 1840s. They couldn't beat him at their own game, so they banned him from competing. That's oversimplifying things a bit. Part of the Postal Service's traditional mandate is to provide mail delivery *at the same price* for everybody. It's completely unsurprising that they can be undercut in Urban markets where the deliveries are mainly short and the carriers are very efficient because they can pick up or drop off hundreds of items per hour. Fine, let them provide "universal service"--but this has nothing to do with using force to bar other delivery services! It does in the sense that the other services can cherry pick the higher-paying clients, can concentrate on high-volume, higher-profit markets. However, the USPS does the same kind of "cross-subsidizing" by charging 33 cents to mail a letter of trivial weight while enticing corporate customers to sign up for subsidized bulk rates. The solution to all of these cross subsidies is to let free and unfettered competition happen. Package delivery services are under no compulsion to deliver to the most remote of locations. They do, usually. Some rural areas have a surcharge to cover the remoteness, and delivery may take an extra day or two. (My area, for example, may soon be on the UPS "every other day" program, where the UPS driver makes the circuit every other day instead of every day. Sounds fair to me, even though I don't like it.) I have no doubt but that some service would pick up the slack and deliver to remote locations. Granted, if someone lives up at the top of a dirt road in the middle of the Kayoot National Forest, delivery may be tough. But, importantly for this example, the US Postal Service probably won't deliver to such an address, either. This is why many rural residents get their mail in town, at mailboxes, or other means of Rural Delivery. --Tim May But Spooner's service (and so far every mail service ever proposed by a private-enterprise) refused to serve rural customers, because out there it takes more resources to get from A to B, and the carrier may spend hours just going to get or deliver one letter. The legal justification for shutting Spooner's mail service down was that by refusing to serve rural customers, he'd be taking the profitable markets away from the post office and therefore driving costs out of reach for rural customers. The alternative to shutting down his service would have been tripling or quintupling postage costs for rural delivery, and the feds weren't ready to do that. Of course, there's a valid argument that if someone wants to live ten miles from the end of the nearest road (like my bud Dimu, an american Indian living on federal land), then paying some postal- packing person to spend the necessary six hours walking along game trails to deliver his weekly bag of junk mail should be a fact of life for junk mailers. But the feds identified a national interest in having everybody pay the same rate, and that is why Spooner's service was shut down. Worthy of note: having mail everywhere be the same rate means that your cross-town deliveries are paying, in part, for the letters I send to Dimu and for contracting companies in alaska mailing pallets of cinder-blocks to construction sites up in the back of beyond -- it's the cheapest method for freight delivery. Also worthy of note: If you're willing to serve *EVERYBODY* at the same postage rate, the federal argument against having private competition against the USPS won't hold up in court against you. Bear -- -:-:-:-:-:-:-: Timothy C. May | Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money, ComSec 3DES: 831-728-0152 | anonymous networks, digital pseudonyms, zero W.A.S.T.E.: Corralitos, CA | knowledge, reputations, information markets, "Cyphernomicon" | black markets, collapse of governments.
Re: USPO still trying to SPAM everyone
Fuck, no traffic on cpunks except this ... Actually, it is the U.S. Postal Service. Officials there are planning to offer people living at all 120 million of the nation's residential street addresses free e-mail addresses. It would link the e-mail and The stupidity of the author, ny.politics readers and George is flabbergasting. Maybe George can be saved: - there is no technology known to man that can force user to check the POP mailbox that he is not interested in. - Spamming those who believe in "free" accounts is good, because there is some chance that it will eliminate them from the gene pool. - This may even ease the spamming load on those with paid accounts. Therefore, I suggest that we support this by all means.
Re: USPO still trying to SPAM everyone
On Mon, 31 Jul 2000, Anonymous wrote: Fuck, no traffic on cpunks except this ... Actually, it is the U.S. Postal Service. Officials there are planning to offer people living at all 120 million of the nation's residential street addresses free e-mail addresses. It would link the e-mail and - there is no technology known to man that can force user to check the POP mailbox that he is not interested in. Try completely ignoring your paper mail sometime and see how long it is before you're in trouble with the law for missing a jury duty summons or a bill or some legal action or other. There is lots of precedent that sending something by US Postal service constitutes legal notification. Someone will come up with the bright idea of according the same status to US postal emails, and then you won't be able to ignore your USPS email account without getting into trouble with the law. And the one who came up with the idea will get promoted for saving millions of dollars a year! - Spamming those who believe in "free" accounts is good, because there is some chance that it will eliminate them from the gene pool. No one has yet died of spam, one case of an irate recipient murdering a spammer notwithstanding. That case was evidence that *sending* spam may eliminate some from the gene pool, but *recieving* spam has not yet been demonstrated to have any such effect. - This may even ease the spamming load on those with paid accounts. The only thing that really reduces the spam load on any email account that you actually use for public fora or publish on the web is a good procmail script or equivalent. Therefore, I suggest that we support this by all means. With all due respect, you are wrong. Bear
