Carpe Covid, USPS, Carpe Covid !

This Covid-19 related "stay home ..." slogan just arrived. Mailed April 1 in UK, arrived in USA on April 6 including a weekend. Not too bad! And a topical collectible.

John, that is a good one. Thank you for sharing it. Wonder if other nations are following suit? You are right, this could well be a very topical moment -- or more likely two years.

As to the issue of the USPS, it appears from news in the last two days that testimony before Congress is that mail volume is down. Anecdotally I have far fewer catalogs coming in recently, although I continue to receive smaller Amazon packages via USPS.
The cash flow problem was foreseen weeks ago, as we see the PS was authorized to borrow $10 billion (USD) from Treasury as part of the most recently passed emergency virus relief legislation (itself the 3rd package if I have my count right). So the USPS is entering a revenue trough ascribed to the current situation and is projected to run short of cash as summer approaches.

It would not surprise me if they are hit with a number of lawsuits too from employees and their survivors as a result of the virus situation. I have understood that they are self-insuring as to vehicles, but I do not know about other arenas.

It all could wind up lending impetus to the occasional call for privatization, but I sure hope not. It is far too much a social good and essential service to my way of thinking.

- Jonathan

Barron's:

"The government says money in the CARES Act can be used for operating expenses but not to repay debt. What's more, any loans received are intended to help speed the delivery of medical products while protecting the safety of postal workers."

From Business Insider:

"As part of a $10 billion relief package for the US Postal Service, congress authorized the agency to create temporary delivery points.
The goal is to reduce human contact and transmission of the coronavirus, and could look a lot like Amazon's locker delivery option."

Thanks, Rogdcam for the line from Business Insider.
Not quite sure how that reduces human contact compared with the classic suburban curbside mailbox where there is no contact, but maybe my imagination is failing me. Perhaps the aim is to reduce having urban carriers walking with their cart or satchel in the street from building to building.

One might speculate that such temporary delivery points might endure beyond the immediate crisis (which will last til a proven vaccine emerges I believe) and be part of a PS mechanism to reduce the amount of time taken by PS employees (and vehicular wear and tear) in last mile or last quarter mile delivery.

My parents' suburban, single family detached neighborhood in Florida has a centralized box system for some 50 households and within easy walking distance of the various houses. The carrier was in and out on his/her way fast, except for large parcel packages. Struck me as better than my own neighborhood in PA with the same number of households across say three cul-de-sacs, all of us with separate street boxes. Would be easy to walk to a central box system for residents and more economical for the PS running costs I suspect. Big packages again are a complication of course.

Stay safe.

I hate to raise the specter of politics here, but there is something of an elephant in the room: Vote-by-mail. Here in Oregon we have had vote-by-mail for 20 years and there has never been any accusations of fraud or cheating. It's nearly impossible to hack or manipulate due to the paper trail. This is the most logical approach we should be taking in all states with upcoming primaries and very possibly the presidential election. And yet there is significant resistance to the idea. Were the USPS to fail or become privatized it could have a significant impact on our electoral process. Be assured, this is something our politicians are thinking about.

Everyone should be voting by mail, but certain people are dead set against it (guess who).

Who?

Since the topic of mailing ballets is obviously political with a clear split along Republican/Democratic lines, lets move on without further comments.
Don

Except that Oregon has proven the Times wrong. Tens of millions of ballots with perhaps a dozen instances of fraud.

Except that Oregon has had single party control since 2012, so why would the controlling party undertake an investigation that could impact its control?

Don is right; no one can prevail in this debate, so why not lock the topic.

But Richardson, the state's highest-ranking Republican, did not mention any noncitizens voting, and he made a point of saying the number of suspicious cases amounted to only one out of every 38,000 ballots in the 2016 election.