- cross-posted to:
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- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
rip rural service
Definitely, I live in a very rural area of the country I think it might be one of the most rural places in the lower 48 states. And we heavily depend on the postal service to get things that we simply don’t have here. This will totally cripple my town and 99% of the people here will blame it on woke.
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…
This has been a fever dream of Republicans for my entire life. Looks like they just may get it this time.
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.
As long as they pay out the full pension to all the employee’s. After every postal employee’s pension is fully funded.
Lol, you know they wouldn’t
Of course not. Its been the dream of these scumbags for decades to get their hooks in to all that pension money and screw over the postal workers. They forget the term going postal exist for a reason.
He doesn’t understand the second ‘S’ in USPS. Stable genius.
AmTrak is a hill I am willing to die for on.
How bout we increase funding to those things instead. No one should be competing with either of those services.
The post office would take an act of congress.
Both would, actually. They are independent quasi governmental corpirations.
Nah, not anymore, just an XO and the little fascists will make it happen.
Whole lotta shit happening right now that should take an act of congress. Seems to make no difference.
And a constitutional amendment.
It wouldn’t need a constitutional amendment. The constitution says they can, not they must, run a postal service
Sounds like “somebody” is about to launch Xmail and AmtraX, coincidentally of course
They want to eliminate or control the Postal Service so that they can eliminate mail-in voting. Their added bonus is padding the pockets of fellow millionaires and billionaires.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
Lies and bullshit, but with a 50% chance of happening