[PLUG-TALK] OT: [PLUG] Spam law update

Brent Rieck bsr at spek.org
Tue Oct 22 03:36:31 UTC 2002


On Mon, 2002-10-21 at 15:30, Dylan Reinhardt wrote:
> It seems pretty clear to me that first class mail requires no 
> advertising... it is their *other* services which require 
> advertising.  Fundamentally, I think it's a mistake for the USPS to be 
> pursuing this hybrid public/private business model.  It's a government 
> agency, not a business.  It may well pay for itself and provide an 
> important, necessary, service.  But it is not a business and can only do 
> itself and its customers harm by attempting to create expectations it can't 
> fulfill.

It seems to me that the USPS is a business, but one with an extremely
restrictive set of regulations about what it can and cannot do.  To that
point, I'm not sure what expectations it's not fulfilling, and besides
why is it so bad that the USPS might create an expectation it can't
fulfill?  Qwest does that every day, day in, day out - their entire
business is based upon creating expectation they can't fulfill!  I don't
see the Cato Institute writing many essays about how crappy Qwest is, I
guess it's okay for Qwest because they're "competing" with somebody
else.  Similarly, I think it's strange that when government doesn't act
like business they get slammed, and then when they do act like a
business they get slammed again..

> Qwest, Verizon and Ameritech may not be improvements over Bell, but that 
> obscures a larger point: you no longer have to use one company for your 
> telco business.  You can get the full range of telco services from smaller, 
> local competitors.  You can get VoIP, cell/digital wireless, and other 
> feeds that bypass the phone company entirely.  They may have been in a 
> position to thwart the large-scale deployment of DSL, but the RBOCS are 
> getting their lunch eaten in a big way, longer term.

I find that having a working system the does what I need at a cost I'm
willing to pay is far better than the illusion of choice combined with
amazingly poor service that breaking up Ma Bell gave us.  And just who
is eating the RBOCS' lunch? AT&T?  From the frying pan in to the fire
for the consumer.

> The problem here is not that the USPS is inefficient or dumb, it's that 
> they are required to deliver on too broad a set of requirements.  That is 
> the advantage private companies enjoy is that they only have to listen to 
> what we say we want insofar as we're actually willing to pay for it.  The 
> USPS is stuck with requirements we don't want to pay for.  It's an 
> impossible task and they deserve tremendous credit for delivering it at 
> all.  But it's not as though the situation couldn't be made better.

I'm personally willing to pay $0.37 for postal delivery at the current
level of service - I don't care that I don't have a choice as to who
delivers it.  I don't care because what I get now is good enough, in
fact better than I need, for the bargain price of $0.37.  Personal
anecdotes don't prove a hypothesis, but I don't know anybody who has any
objection to paying $0.37 per first class letter for the level of
service gotten.  The only people that seem to have serious objections to
the costs of supporting the USPS's level of service are the direct mail
people, most of whom also depend and count on the USPS's current level
of service when executing a DM campaign - and which I thought were the
people we were complaining about in the first place that got this thread
started.

--Brent




More information about the PLUG-talk mailing list