Yeah, shitty politics has done more damage to the USPS.

Though there is some truth to OP, the new generation mail trucks are designed with less enveloped letters and more parcel post in mind than the Grumman LLV was.

This is why swim would allegedly order goods on the dark web, and always shipped USPS as private carriers can search ur shit at their discretion.

And the post office has an incentive to keep costs low, whereas private companies could just add easily price-fix

The US government had a legal monopoly to "carrying letters and parcels arround." Then it decided to remove that law, and then capitalism created delivery services.

series of tubes

Without those tech-illiterate morons, we wouldn't have works of art like this though so it's not all bad.

You know, he was making a coherent point about bandwidth limitations, it was just phrased in a silly way because that's how you have to talk to laymen.

"The internet is not a big chariot. It's a series of aqueducts..." -- The Roman Senator from Ultima Thule

I thought it was a big truck.

Email was never a threat to mailed letters or magazines

Excuse me? You didn't put a /s in there, so I'm genuinely puzzled by your comment. If it was sarcastic, then well played.

Granted magazines have died out because of websites, but letters?

As a Dane unless you have an exemption, because you're very old or intellectually challenged, then you're required to have a special digital inbox for government and banking. When that was in introduced, letters died in less than a decade. To such a degree that the postal service stopped delivering letters last year.

A private company took over the letter carrying responsibility, so you can still send a letter. But there are no mail boxes left, you have to go to a store that does packages as well and standing in line to send a letter. The private company btw did a splendid job of making the postal service seem competent in comparison. Something no Dane would have found possible in years prior.

Certainly. It's probably less than 1 in 50,000.

Back when my brother was in jail, I was personally boosting that percentage by writing to him every week. Sometimes, he'd even write back. (some/most jails are wicked restrictive on correspondence and Internet access, and a letter is much cheaper than a jail phone conversation.)

That's insane, I never knew that!

I always assumed my ali-epxress packages where launched via cannon, and landed on my doorstep 10,000 miles or so away.

for which the same thing is also true

It's the same when you ask an American where they are from when you meet abroad and they reply with a state name like Texas instead of a country.

They're abroad so they must know that other countries exist yet still reply with their state name.

I don't think knowledge is the problem anymore, it's ignorance.

Ok Charlie

Google Wave tried to replace email with a come-and-go / bulletin board / long-form chat kind of thing. I'd still like that for occasional things, like organizing holiday get-togethers with the family, but that has been the only time I think about using something like that.

For most personal communication that isn't biz-to-biz, it's chat nowadays. And the rooms/teams/channels concept (like IRC) is the main medium for what I used to want Waves to be. At least on Teams, it still supports more than just a "tweet", and people can come and go on those threads, and depending on the service, you can pin messages, associate a wiki for persistent content, etc.

But all those still require people to be on that particular chat service.

Perhaps that's the end result for personal and group communication. The format feels pretty right for the job, to me. I just hope it eventually morphs into a federated system like email and Lemmy, as I just don't imagine everyone agreeing to sign up for yet another chat service every time someone else wants to start a group chat. Then instead of "did you add so-and-so to the group chat", we'd just pivot the problem to "oh, we were discussing this on the Slack group, but on the Teams group someone else said blah blah...". Same problem--fragmentation.