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Someone punch him in the face, please
I think a much smaller object with much much greater velocity it’s referable.
Vital US services shouldn’t be privatized! You remember when firefighting companies extorted people to put out fires? If you didn’t have their symbol out front or weren’t current on your payments, they would just watch your home burn down…
try it. no one will use it then.
Right. And people will die because of it. That’s the problem, my friend.
If you live in a small town, your meds might come by mail. Your pension check too. That kind of mission critical thing. And that absentee ballot? Yeah, no, that’s not gonna arrive on time.
Of course one could build alternative services. But in the meantime, at least, it will ruin a lot of things that are working properly right now. That is the point. That is the objective.
You know who wants to replace the postal service? Amazon. They have delivery vehicles, lockers, and so on. They have been building towards it for years. I’m sure an attack on the postal service would leave Amazon on top, and I bet it’s a plan in the works.
As for Amtrak, maybe musk wants to swallow it up with his boring company.
Actually they don’t, they want to replace fedex and UPS.
No one wants the business of daily letter service.
What people who want to gut the postal service don’t understand is that it’s a fucking service.
The USPS does last mile delivery for all courier agencies. FedEx and UPS won’t pay a driver to deliver your dildo out to your cabin in bumfuck Nebraska, but the USPS will, along with your tax documents, bank statements, and anything else you need.
If you get rid of USPS, you’re cutting anyone who isn’t in a major city off from not only packages, but critical documents.
It is insane to me when people complain about the failure of a public service to turn a profit as if that’s some kind of bad or unexpected outcome.
Services cost money to operate for the benefit of those using them. That is literally the point.
Yes, the Republican con has been to compare government to a household budget and/or corporations, and it’s just so very stupid.
I had to ups a document recently certified delivery but the company i was doing business with refuses to receive usps mail. It cost me $50 to send a fucking letter. I was so pissed.
nah, they’d then require someone else who takes on the private company to do it, give them 10 billion dollars to ensure the infrastructure remains and the service is provided, and then they would still refuse to do it but somehow use all the money anyway.
In my country since the government privatized a part of postal service, the quality of service heavily declined to the point that now is almost guaranteed that they will “lose” your letter if you send it in a place that will cost too much to deliver
this is almost what has been happening in my country.
Same.
Step 1: Privatize and sell it for peanuts to fellow billionaires Step 2: Watch it crumble Step 3: Buy it back for a fortune from the very same people you sold it
E:English
I’m not sure they’ve thought past step 1 honestly.
They probably really think they can run it better.
I don’t think a national railroad company can really become profitable, that’s why I suspect this is done in bad faith
The usps is a government SERVICE. These parasites look at that and say “but nobody profits from that” and somehow they just can’t let that happen.
Except the taxpayers benefit from it, who are the ones paying for it anyway!
What Chancellor Musk means is that no oligarch is getting rich from it, so he is unable to understand its purpose.
The thing is they did generate a profit until they were fucked with by Republicans to make them look unprofitable.
There isn’t a functioning part of our government that the regressives wont destroy for private profit.
I still can’t get over the idea of for profit prisons. incentivized incarceration is beyond stupid.
my personal conspiracy theory is that Amtrak exists solely to make train travel look bad, driving up private car sales.
I had a long career in ecommerce and the amtrak website has been annoying to book train rides on for the entirety of its existence. It would be trivial to improve it in any number of ways but it’s got (and maintains) the design patterns of a captive audience portal like ssa.gov instead of doing anything that removes barriers to purchase.
While it’s possible they have just had the same not very good at their job person for the entirety of the sites history (decades now) i very much doubt it. The company’s site today gives the same feel as when it started; they really don’t care if you buy a ticket or not and they aren’t really going to do much to help you do it.
I can get on board with this theory. They’re also insanely slow and nearly as expensive as air travel. I understand some of this is due to the rail network and who owns it, but it still seems like Amtrak hasn’t improved one bit since the 1950s.
I used them once to get from Tampa to Miami. It was fine. We got there over an hour late. I wouldn’t really want to take a longer trip.
The conspiracy theory isn’t that the automotive industry makes them look bad, it’s the rail owners.
Real: Amtrak doesn’t own any rails, they lease them and legally are supposed to have right of way on tracks unless the owner/operators of the rail currently have their own train that’s too big for the bypasses.
Conspiracy: Rail owners make Amtrak experience so painful that it drives down usage so Amtrak runs fewer and fewer trains, so they can be less of a nuisance to them or outright get rid of the service line and they get to completely ignore Amtrak
You aren’t wrong, BUT Amtrak does a decent job maintaining their trains and service despite the odds.
Amtrak recently received a huge infusion of funding under biden so of course trump wants to kill it.
i do like the trains! The Coast Starlight is amazing and the view from the observation car is just heaven.
The Empire Builder is another good train although the scenery on that route can’t compare with the west coast.
fuck no, nationalize spacex and starlink
This but unironically.
Can you imagine a presidential candidate running on the platform of seizing the assets of the billionaire class? They would transcend political parties, they would unify the nation and people would finally gain something from our politics.
And they would probably be found with thirty bullets to the back of the head and it would be ruled a suicide.
The billionaires would also drop every dollar they could into opponents, misinformation, and smear campaigns
Waluigis
Makes a whole lot more sense, honestly.
Not sure if I want Musk to have the amount of liquid cash that would be required to buy him out.
Don’t buy, just seize.
he can be paid in a new crypto we made on the spot for this purpose
oh yeah, he loves crypto, I’m sure that would be a great form of payment.
At this point. How could anyone care or take seriously anything Musk or Trump spits. It’s all lies and bullshit.
I mean you have to take their words seriously because they tell you what they’re going to do. Or at the very least what they want to do.
Lies and bullshit, but with a 50% chance of happening
Privatising literally everything has been their end-goal with ALL of this the entire time. They plaster it with conservative talking points but this entire administration is an effort by corporate forces to dismantle public services, rights and benefits, so that if you so much want to drive to the store you will have to pay a subscription to use the privately maintained roads, so you have a credit-card reader by your faucet and toilet, so that they can tax you on rainwater you’re required to have to collect rain from your gutters. (This is real in other countries.)
The efforts towards killing public services goes way, way back and if you look at every conservative/republican legislation, it all hinges around how “bad” public services are. Public schools teaching evolution, public television for simply existing, and they’ve been massively successful and killing the regulations and oversight on things like media fairness, public health proposals, safety nets and social services, and yes they really, really want to kill our medicare and medicaid, so they can replace them with more bullshit commercial services. They won’t be happy until we stop getting paychecks we can choose how to use and we all just hand our pay right over to a number of subscription services for things they can take away if you miss a payment.
They want us poor, they want us stupid, they want an army of slaves and if they can’t get it via racism and dehumanizing some identifiable group or population, they will just settle for full on serfdom and monarchy. Now get out there and work your lord’s fields!
AmTrak is a hill I am willing to die for on.
He’ll find those already government run in Russia. Perhaps he should consider relocating to that shithole and leave the United States the fuck alone.
No.
Not everything should be privatized so some asshole oligarch can have another toy.
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Exactly, we have UPS, FedEx, DHL and bunch of others.
Leave USPS the fuck alone.
that’s their goal, crush the public service competition
This. Alternatives mean that they can hold monopoly and jackup prices on a whim.
They’re all shit too. Fat lot of good privatization would do. USPS was Cool and Good until DeJoy was dropped in to throw wrenches into the cogs.
UPS is actually fairly reliable. FedEx is hit and miss depending on the driver coverage area you’re in, DHL and others just don’t even exist.
USPS has always been great, but primarily for handling “last mile” where a lot of customers need reliable delivery of low monetary value packages like letters that UPS isn’t set to handle, but carry some of the most important lifelines of information to rural and poor Americans.
UPS has always been hit or miss at best in my experience, but of the three, I’ll concede that it’s the least garbage. The other two have delivered packages to the wrong house—not as in like, “next door” wrong house, but as in “some house miles away” wrong house—or they sometimes just flat out don’t deliver a package and return it to the sender. If they do deliver a package, it’s rarely on time.
As for USPS, nowadays, my wife has tracked packages to see that they are brought to our local mail sorting facility, but then for some bizarre, inexplicable reason, they’re sent off elsewhere, even to another state, before being delivered here days later than the estimated delivery date. I have no idea what the hell is happening, but it’s insane and insanely stupid. And I know who is to blame, at least with this service anyway.
DeJoy got rid of around 1/3 of the mail sorting machines, so now they have to fake it or something. They cannot keep up with the volume of mail, is my guess.
I dare say everything should be nationalized as a civil service.
Everything that has been privatized, has ended up costing us more for shittier service. This will not be different.
I’d bet he wants to take over Amtrak so he can replace it with that stupid Las Vegas car tunnel.
Or replace it with nothing, because “railways and mass transit are obsolete” (translation: “they’re hurting my car sales”).
I remember seeing an interview with Margaret Thatcher where she said that rail could never be successfully privatized. Just as a reminder of how extreme Musk’s ideas are.
Thatcher’s successor, John Major, oversaw the privatisation of British railways between 1994 and 1997.
It only took 30 years for them all to completely collapse in 2024.
British Rail Service is so bloody expensive as well. Seems like you guys have these, essentially, per-track monopolies.
They more or less did that here in the Netherlands. Once the government let go, things slowly started getting worse and we’re now at the point where I’d say things are expensive, occasionally sporty and suboptimal…
Japan seems to have done it, no idea what the people over there think about its service and affordability though.
How bout we increase funding to those things instead. No one should be competing with either of those services.
