this post was submitted on 05 Feb 2025
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[–] [email protected] 223 points 2 months ago (2 children)

republicans are so fucking stupid

[–] [email protected] 64 points 2 months ago (3 children)

USPS also lost a major revenue source

[–] [email protected] 82 points 2 months ago (2 children)

Which the stupid Republicans will use to continue to try to privatize something that should never have been privatized and should never be privatized The Republicans are the Nazis now and they need to be stopped

[–] [email protected] 14 points 2 months ago

Unless someone puts a stop to them, we're the nazis now.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

Education? Medical care? The electrical grid? Oh, no you’re talking about privatizing the post office. It gets so confusing since Republicans want to privatize well, everything.

[–] [email protected] 29 points 2 months ago (2 children)

That's probably part of the plan. They want the post office gone to make room for private companies. Fuck all the people that live in remote areas where it isn't profitable to have mail I guess.

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[–] [email protected] 14 points 2 months ago (4 children)

Chinese packages are a net negative for the post office, you can probably find articles about that from Trump's first term.

[–] [email protected] 51 points 2 months ago (3 children)

The Postal Service is a service.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 months ago

Just because it's a service doesn't make the comment you are replying to any less correct. Cancelling inbound chinese shipments is negatively affecting quality of service, NOT revenue

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 months ago

We should not be allowing cheap crap that serves no purpose to be a drain on tax dollars lmfao

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 months ago (2 children)

Just because it's a service doesn't mean it has to operate at a loss. Water is a service too, but you can't bankrupt the water company by using 300x as much water.

[–] [email protected] 32 points 2 months ago (4 children)

Here’s a crazy take, maybe water shouldn’t be privately owned.

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[–] [email protected] 15 points 2 months ago

Services can still cost money. Utilities, such as water, cost money but if the government is running them they do not need to produce profit.

Republicans framing the postal service as a failed business venture is purposeful.

[–] [email protected] 20 points 2 months ago (1 children)

The USPS was never intended to turn a profit. It’s not a business. Its entire purpose is to deliver mail to every American, regardless of where they’re located. Making that profitable was never realistic nor necessary for a government service.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 2 months ago (2 children)

It doesn't have to profit, but it also doesn't have to subsidize incoming packages from China.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 2 months ago (1 children)

How are they subsidizing them?

[–] [email protected] 9 points 2 months ago (7 children)

The UN Postal Union sets guidelines for international mail that dictates developing countries shouldn't have to pay full price to send mail to developed countries. Basically if it costs $30 to ship something from a developing country, they would charge $20 and the destination country would pay for the shortfall (dollar values not real). China was a much smaller economy when this agreement was drafted.

The US renegotiated this agreement with the United postal union in 2019/2020 but there were still come compromises made - while the amount of subsidization is minimal compared to 10 years ago, USPS still allegedly eats some losses on every package from China.

Basically Trump is mad because the deal he personally negotiated 5 years ago wasn't good enough. Same thing that happened with his trade agreement with Canada

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[–] [email protected] 11 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (3 children)

I don't know why you got down voted because it's 100% true. NPR did a fairly good episode on it: https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2018/08/01/634737852/episode-857-the-postal-illuminati

Edit: To summarize, there's an international org (UPU) that controls the amount postal services can charge each other to deliver mail/parcels. The current due is below what it costs to actually deliver a parcel, so a package from China actually costs the USPS money. That cost gets passed on as higher domestic fees, leading to a situation where a shipper is charged ~5x more to ship something domestically compared to what a company in China is charged to ship to the US.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 months ago (1 children)

People don't like when something Trump does could have good reasons. It does seem accidental in this case, but it doesn't make it not true.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 2 months ago

How about you wake up and stop painting shit in gold?

Trump doing some good (which I don't even think is the case here) is purely incidental to serving his own self interests.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 months ago

Good thing the USPS is a public service and not a business, and the fact that it's not expected to turn a profit is actually a feature and not a bug.

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[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Everything they do is a "net negative"! My company's IT and HR departments don't generate any revenue at all...

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[–] [email protected] 7 points 2 months ago

How did Bezos let this happen? Didn’t he buy his way into the administration for reasons?

[–] [email protected] 82 points 2 months ago (4 children)

Some brilliant entrepreneurs have surely already started repackaging businesses in Canada and Mexico.

[–] [email protected] 46 points 2 months ago (1 children)

No so, from the article:

Daniel, the owner of a trucking company based in Alberta, Canada, who asked to only use his first name for privacy reasons, tells WIRED that two of his company’s trucks were turned away at the US border in New York and Montana today because they contained packages originally from China. After speaking with a US Customs and Border Protection agent in Montana, the company was able to get a third truck into Washington state by removing all packages from China, Daniel says.

[–] [email protected] 42 points 2 months ago (2 children)

Yeeees, and the idea is to repackage the items so that the packages are not originally from China. Now it's a Canadian export!

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[–] [email protected] 19 points 2 months ago (1 children)

The way I read it, the entrepreneur is Bezos - he has his own planes etc. and does not need USPS. You have to buy Chinese stuff from him now. (I have not researched the subject in depth - this is just my take on the headline)

[–] [email protected] 8 points 2 months ago

Bezos would still be subject tot he same import tariffs, the same Customs issues.

The way I read it is they just created a huge new workload for Customs without funding the resources to do it. Unless we make huge changes to how sites like Amazon works, now Customs needs to have an input in every one of the millions of packages directly sent from over seas every day.

USPS is smart to say there’s no way to make it work all of the sudden, but it ought to affect everyone.

….. I see a more recent post that some form of sanity prevailed. If we’re going to instigate trade wars out of spite, let’s at least have a transition where we can try to figure out how to make it work

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[–] [email protected] 59 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

The headline is updated on the article itself; USPS has resumed accepting such packages.

[–] [email protected] 44 points 2 months ago (3 children)
[–] [email protected] 26 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Folks like you are why I love lemmy. Thanks!

[–] [email protected] 12 points 2 months ago
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[–] [email protected] 40 points 2 months ago
[–] [email protected] 39 points 2 months ago (13 children)

DeJoy is still there, yes? Isn't it weird how an unelected asshat like fElon can fire employees of the government who were basically nonpartisan, not to mention dismantle agencies, as part of a fake "agency".

But somehow, in 4 years of the Biden administration a partisan hack like DeJoy kept his job....

[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 months ago

The situation regarding Dejoy is not so simple.

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[–] [email protected] 26 points 2 months ago

The Congress shall have Power...To establish Post Offices and post Roads

The Post Office has the constitutional authority to designate mail routes. The Post Office is also empowered to construct or designate post offices with the implied authority to carry, deliver, and regulate the mail of the United States as a whole. The Postal Power also includes the power to designate certain materials as non-mailable, and to pass statutes criminalizing abuses of the postal system (such as mail fraud and armed robbery of post offices).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postal_Clause

[–] [email protected] 16 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (1 children)

Want your package from chaina? Pay the tariffs!

~...then very humbly ask the Chinese government to refund you those tariff costs....~

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