Back in the 80s I wrote an assembler and a simulator for a custom DSP before the board was manufactured (it was the 80s so several chips were required), and our team wrote and tested code for it before the board was ready. When the board was ready, we wound up having to modify the assembler and simulator because some control signals were wired backwards and it was easier to just change the instruction coding than to redo the layout. The tools ran on a Vax. Worse, it was Eunice, a Unix-on-top-of-VMS atrocity that we were stuck with because of code that needed VMS and other code that wanted a Unix-like system.
Yes, but for their young earth creationist beliefs to be valid, the errors from carbon dating would need to be far larger than the errors caused by effects described in this article, and other means of dating would need to be ignored.
I'm glad that the article writer got his domain back, but I wish we had a better term than "grandfathered". The origin of this term goes back to Jim Crow, when to stop Black people and newcomers from voting, many places in the American South imposed a near-impossible test you had to pass to register to vote, but also added a loophole: if your grandfather voted in your county (or sometimes your state), you could vote without taking the test. This was called the grandfather clause.
People persist in "buying" digital movies e-books, and games despite the fact that they can disappear at any point, without warning, because the seller's license expired or they just feel like discontinuing the service.
In 2006 a law was passed requiring the USPS to fund pensions far in advance, a requirement no other business had, which instantly put them deep in the red. This wasn't fixed until 2022. But it was just this phony accounting that messed them up, more than the other factors you mention.
>In 2006 a law was passed requiring the USPS to fund pensions far in advance, a requirement no other business had, which instantly put them deep in the red. This wasn't fixed until 2022.
No because they are still deep in the red, about $9B a year.
That’s $2B less than the first six days of the Iran war ($11B). We could just cut a check each year from the general fund. It’s a paperwork issue. The fact that we can spend $100B+ on an illegitimate conflict on a whim while costs like this are bikeshedded over boggles my mind.
US Military costs ~$1T/year and the Pentagon hasn’t passed an audit in the last eight years, comparatively, but not a lot of similar complaints of that waste versus pensions for workers operating and serving a national public service agency.
USPS and the US military are both, at their heart, logistics engines and systems, and both should be valued as such. "The whole is more than the sum of its parts." If you do not maintain and treat said systems with respect, the capability will not be ready when you need it, or will not contribute to the ongoing success of the jurisdiction in which it operates. The only difference between the two is that the US military happens to fight wars with what its logistics operation it provides itself.
It's not a business; it's an independent agency of the executive branch. The persistent attempts to view it as a business are a category error and the difference between public and private sectors.
"Contrary to statements made by some employee groups and other stakeholders, PAEA did not require USPS to prefund 75 years of retiree health benefits" https://www.gao.gov/assets/gao-13-112.pdf
Also the 2022 Postal Service Reform Act eliminated the prefunding and ~$57 billion of overdue payments, but USPS finances were still dogshit afterwards: USPS revenue was $80 billion and expenses were $89 billion in FY2024
I don’t think of their finances as being dogshit because there aren’t revenue positive. It’s a fraction of a sliver of the federal budget to run a constitutionally mandated service.
The (non-navy) military has no constitutional mandate at all, it’s an industrial scale cash incineration device which the postal service can’t hold a candle to, and we don’t blink at it wasting 10x or more of the postal service’s opex.
Would you allow other companies to deliver letters and to deliver stuff inside mailboxes? I find it disgusting that a company with a monopoly on those two services still can't make a profit.
They also have to deliver to every valid residential address.
You wouldn’t see UPS or fedex running a mule train to make sure an area still gets mail[1]
If we let other companies take over and kill the USPS we’ll just see a ton of areas of the country not get delivered too because the profit margin isn’t there.
Someone just bringing whatever shit they want to my house? Junkmail needs to be deregulated? Everytime I hear the "notions" of the libertarian/hypercapitalist ilk it just sounds like "What if your life could be even shittier than it is now?!?"
>Yes. Organizations must fund pensions up front and not rely on future revenue to make up for shortfalls.
What? Maybe my reading comprehension is a little off this morning but are you saying a company offering a pension plan must set aside hundreds of thousands of dollars day 1 every time they hire a new employee?.... That math doesn't math.
I've been using Emacs since the early 80s, first Gosling's Emacs and shortly after switch to GNU Emacs when it was first released in 1985. In college we had a DEC-10 system and I used Teco on that one.
Mergers are also a huge factor, and the recent Warner/Paramount merger is going to cost a lot of jobs (even more so because the merged company will be so deeply in debt that it will have to aggressively cut expenses).
reply