I’m still very much a pen & paper kind of person; if there’s something worth communicating, I prefer to break out the fountain pen and the writing paper. I’ve got a drawer full of envelopes and stamps and I keep resupplying. I’m also one of the few people who still sends (sent) postcards when travelling (travelled) —all duly adjusted for the current state of affairs, of course— mainly because sending a tangible item with a postmark and perhaps the GPS coordinates of where you’re sending from is now a novelty.
Anyway, I have to say, my experience with flawed or incomplete addresses has been very disappointing. Many people probably just pick up the unsolicited commercial mail that drops into their inboxes in industrial quantities and just discard it en masse, probably with that tiny proportion of actual ‘valuable’ material inside.
The postal system really is quite amazing. We tend to think of it as archaic but in reality it’s an enormously powerful, flexible, and efficient logistics system that spans the planet. What never ceases to boggle my mind is how it comes down to people: when envelops go through the sorting facility, those that are hard to parse with OCR are read by people (and it depends on the legibility of your handwriting!), that last mile depends on a person, and again, in this case, an anomaly was (successfully) managed by a person. It’s all very touching.
A lot of the angst against the post office is fueled by various political motivations. It’s one of the few remaining federal-ish organizations governed by merit based civil service, which is the root of a lot of objections in certain quarters. Exams don’t really care who you are or what you look like.
You also have other entities with their eyes on potentially lucrative contracts for first class mail and other mandated carve outs like delivery to Alaska. Similarly to how certain Senators from Pennsylvania are always concerned about the National Weather Service giving away data that Accuweather would like to sell, shippers would love to 10x the cost of delivering mail.
I wonder how much less wasted paper I would get if the cost went up 10x... I would hazard a guess that 95-98% of my mail is spam, and usually not for local businesses.
The issue is that spammers will just have someone who is not a post officer deliver their spam.
There was a similar method for email spam, hashcash where you needed to include some string derived from the message and recipient and some random characters you choose such that it will gag to some number with some amount of 0s at the start. Like bitcoin, the idea was that the cost of computing all the hashes would be prohibitive for mass spamming. It never caught on and I guess webmail would have been more expensive to set up if it had.
A system I would like would be one where there is a mechanism to return post if you don’t want it (rather than if it was sent to the wrong address) and the sender must cover the cost of recycling the material and some extra fee to make them not want their post to be unwanted. This would have to apply regardless of how the post was delivered.
If you live in a major city, you probably already get gobs of that friggin spam rubber-banded to your front door knob anyway. I find it in my mailbox, on my doorknob, on my door step, sometimes on the windshield wiper of my jeep.
Every now and then you'll find a super ambitious realtor or whatever that fedex overnights you something too.
It’s a bit of an environmental nightmare when you think of how much material is used in creating dumb junk mail, how much carbon is dumped into atmo from the movement, all for it to go _directly_ into the bin when it arrives. Even if you say it’s recycled (is it??) it was unnecessary. Even if you say there was a plane/truck headed there anyway (was there?) it was unnecessary. Physical junk mail is a wasteful, _wasteful_ exercise that I would not be sorry to see curbed.
I had never thought of it in those terms but come to think of it... (dons economist hat) yes... this is likely one of the few scenarios in which a higher price might actually drive up utility (and not the other way around, where market conditions of low competition combined with high utility get exploited by monopolists to drive up price). Very interesting, thank you for that insight. The higher price would make it more exclusive and thus drain the cesspool.
It really is amazing. Both how fast items can travel across a country or around the world to a specific person, but also just the sheer volume of material moved.
I just wish it wasn't primarily used to deliver what is literally trash into my mailbox. I say literally because I take most everything that shows up in my mailbox and throw it straight in the trash.
In some ways I completely agree, but if you ever have to start sending larger volumes of stuff (especially parcels, especially international parcels, and especially international parcels to areas outside north America and the EU) then getting things to consistently arrive where they should in a reasonable time frame takes a lot of effort.
Anyway, I have to say, my experience with flawed or incomplete addresses has been very disappointing. Many people probably just pick up the unsolicited commercial mail that drops into their inboxes in industrial quantities and just discard it en masse, probably with that tiny proportion of actual ‘valuable’ material inside.
The postal system really is quite amazing. We tend to think of it as archaic but in reality it’s an enormously powerful, flexible, and efficient logistics system that spans the planet. What never ceases to boggle my mind is how it comes down to people: when envelops go through the sorting facility, those that are hard to parse with OCR are read by people (and it depends on the legibility of your handwriting!), that last mile depends on a person, and again, in this case, an anomaly was (successfully) managed by a person. It’s all very touching.