USPS now offers official ZIP Code boundary polygons (postalpro.usps.com)

Which is to say "fund their pension plans."

Health benefits, not pensions. And in 2022 this requirement was eliminated by a reform bill.

If you fully fund the pensions before privatization, you can simultaneously claim that privatization is necessary (look! they're running out of money!) and radically reduce costs once you do privatize (all the pensions are pre-paid, so you can stop contributing to the fund and extract profits for a few decades before you have problems).

This zip code subscription is part of the same plan: Get people used to paying for data from the USPS so it has an additional income stream after privatization.

"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

Anyway it was just a silly joke about how your postal system is state owned but (sometimes) expected to make a lot of money, rather than run at a loss like a normal public service.

>Each Party acknowledges and agrees that a breach or threatened breach by LICENSEE of any of its obligations under this Agreement would cause the LICENSOR irreparable harm for which monetary damages would not be an adequate remedy and agrees that, in the event of such breach or threatened breach, the LICENSOR will be entitled to equitable relief, including a restraining order, an injunction, specific performance, and any other relief that may be available from any court, without any requirement to post a bond or other security, or to prove actual damages or that monetary damages are not an adequate remedy. Such remedies are not exclusive and are in addition to all other remedies that may be available at law, in equity, or otherwise

  > "Does that make the dataset less useful?"

Changing the value of the least-significant decimal place for a couple of points in a polygon is unlikely to significantly change the shape or reduce the accuracy so significantly that it reduces the value of the data.

You can request any already-existing dataset (which this now is). And they're required to charge only reasonable duplication costs and respond in a timely manner... And such FOIA response would not come with the same restrictive license.

Most of this address data is made available in order to enable pre-sorting of mail, which makes the job of the USPS easier. Presorted mail can also have a lower mailing cost, but I wouldn't be surprised if the USPS doesn't pass on all of the savings.

So then GPS and the Internet can go away then.

One of the development methods for new technologies in the United States for a long time has been the federal government creating projects that fund long term research, often that create multi-use technologies.

We can help the USPS by using a very cheap API to ensure that data we are entering into bank core systems is accurate.

Yes, the entity is for-profit. The bank is for-profit. Everyone is for-profit. Who gives a shit. This isn't a zero sum game. Everyone can win, including the USPS and the taxpayer.

>LICENSEE shall use the Database and Data for the Permitted Use only and shall not disclose, release, distribute, or deliver the Database or Data, any portion of the Data or Database, or any other information derived from the Data or Database to any third party without LICENSOR's prior written consent.

Comparing today to 40 years ago: as far as I can tell, letter mail is virtually always used for the purpose of transacting business these days. Forty years ago, it was used for business and personal purposes. If I wanted to communicate with family on the other side of the country, it was more likely than not done by mail. Even 25 years ago, a long distance call took some thought because it was charged by the minute. These days, at least in Canada, all but the cheapest of mobile plans comes with nation wide long distance and we have the Internet. Both services are available for less than basic phone service back then.

Parcels are a different story. I can't guess how people's personal habits have changed, but the business front is very different as far as I can tell. Mail order was the exception in urban areas back then. It would have been different in rural areas, but in my explorations of the country I discovered that some towns were places where people lived while other towns were regional hubs for businesses. There would have been some mail order and a lot of doing without, but I suspect it has seen a shift where proportionally more parcels are commercial in nature. On top of that, the standards for delivery have changed. When I was a kid, it could take weeks to receive something via the postal service (from across the country). Now shipping times are more aligned with couriers.

I realize there are economic benefits to subsidized mail, but I'm not sure that subsidizing businesses should be a priority.

Maybe some amount of messaging connectivity, for a narrow set of cases like court summons and other official messages, could be run as a public service at the taxpayers' expense. But likely the bulk of it should be run as a paid service, either regular businesses, or/and non-profits that still are expected to break even.

This isn't really accurate. USPS had a break even (not profitability) legal mandate since 1970-2006. They would adjust prices each year to hit break even. And that's what happened - they roughly broke even each year.

After a 2006 with broad bipartisan support, the UPS was able to make a profit (not just break even) but a price cap was added (to be reviewed every 10 years). They couldn't raise costs beyond inflation. A stamp to send to anywhere in the USA - anywhere (Alaska, Guam, etc.) - currently costs 82 cent. The postal union is against this, usps management is against this, and business mailers are for it. Dont you love all the ads USPS delivers you?

They have not been break even since 2007. They currently lose about $9B/year with $2.7BM being controllable and the rest largely being pensions, retiree health plans, and workers comp charges. Their core business (mail) has been declining for 20 years and no end is in sight. In 2020 they loosened the cap a bit (allowing USPS to raise prices). Business mailers tried to sue them but lost.

So this attitude that they should just lose a bunch of money and be backstopped by the taxpayer, when mail is less critical than ever, is an recent idea and is aligned with business mailer lobbying interests. It seems obvious to me that they should just go back to the break even mandate.

but that "value of being cheap" is provided to the people using the mail (or other delivery services) for that transaction; it does not benefit people who are not involved in the transaction but have to pay the subsidy. The economy operates most efficiently when things cost what they should or as close as possible.

what Microeconomics is about is calculating what is cost efficient and what is not; free mail services are not; less free mail services are not; rationally priced mail services are.

The only steel-man argument is that USPS provides coverage for that last 1%, living in the boonies, unable or unwilling to use a computer. But that’s at huge cost to everyone else, so much so that we should just give those people a computer and a 1Mbps Starlink connection for free to enable us to get rid of USPS.

What was the reason for the 2026 change to make it non-free? Some "government should be run like a business" (and therefore charge for services) BS, or was there some kind of abuse or privacy issues they were trying to limit?

Through folding: ounces flat in a 9x12 is $1.98; folded in a #10 it's $1.11. Square envelopes pay $0.49 extra.

Print package labels online: a 12 oz package coast to coast is $13.65 at the counter, $8.95 through USPS's free Click-N-Ship.

Keep boxes at or under 12x12x12. Since July, anything bigger is billed at volume ÷ 139 pounds if that exceeds its weight.

I've been building an (unofficial) searchable reference to USPS's rules and prices. The presort page is here: https://postalref.com/guides/presort

Census tracts are, but those don't align to addresses in any meaningful way.

How are we to improve our Zones if the Zone Improvement Plan (ZIP) Code is not readily available?

this in itself is quite unusual/seem kinda not clever

because now you are exposing a "implementation detail" about how you deliver the mail now to people in a way which is hard to change (or at least high friction for the people living there). But you should be able to change your postal routs ad-hoc whenever needed.

At the same time you lose many of the "dual-use" benefits many other countries get from it.

Like often (outside of the US) "zip" codes:

- are used for mail disambiguation (in combination with city/region and street names)

- cover (very very very roughly) a similar amount of people

- hence can be used for polls, statistics etc. etc.

- and due to not being to narrow scoped disclosing your zip code doesn't feel like major privacy invasion, so you actually get data for polls where e.g. your customers are from by asking at the checkout if they are willing to tell you their zip code

- are often also used for all kinds of administrative area scoping (not all, e.g. not voting areas or zoning laws)

so the us using a collection of postal routs which kinda somewhat but not maps to boundary lines seem like a major lost opportunity

Quite something to see this in a browser on my phone, rendered that easily. I can clearly remember how hard this was back then.

Yup, lots of weird edge cases. For that one, you could also represent it with a multipoly.

But in general, having more points really doesn't help with processing geo data. As you said yourself, you had to decimate the polygons. It's always compute vs. precision.

(My standard example used to be the World Trade Center, which had two - not one for each tower, but one for the state government offices and one for everything else.)

I had mine changed from a new zip getting added as the area's population grew (after it had been removed decades earlier).

If postal employees are federal GS employees, they are not legally allowed to strike:

https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/5/7311

However, what I believe many are missing is that having a physical mail network that is accountable to the public good and our government is an advantage for many important situations that should not be dependent on the free market.

It means that you reduced the poverty of other people by 2. Somebody who could not afford a cake before, now can.

This is why making a profit is philanthropy, and for the same reason, losing money impoverishes the rest of society. If you lose money, you impoverished other people. If the state loses money, it impoverishes society, but is the poorest people who gets the worst of it.

(subsidize: not only do we incurring retirement obligations from the general fund, we charge the same amount to deliver a letter to rural Alaska as we do to a place across the street)

We could cut costs by reducing mail delivery frequency country-wide and more in costlier areas. In the age of satellite Internet, the need for delivering a physical thing quickly is not something we need to federally subsidize (argument for slowly: yes). In my suburban area I'd be completely unaffected by 2/week delivery. People in rural areas need to pay the cost of living rural now that we don't have anyone subsistence farming.

You can even get it from ... the government: https://www.census.gov/programs-surveys/geography/guidance/g...

Not sure under what basis you think they are "supposed" to be a certain way but postal codes originated as a signifiers of areas, even in the UK.

US postal codes absolutely have overlap in area, because they do not divide land, they direct delivery routing.

In fact, these were invented by Nielsen, and they determined them just by measuring which city's TV stations are predominantly watched in each county, and assigning each county to one DMA based on that.