shinelikethunder:

aprillikesthings:

The USPS is the fastest, cheapest, and most accurate mail service on the planet last I heard, and is the biggest employer of veterans in the entire country. 

On top of that, mail carriers: 
-have wages that top out at over $30 an hour (and their wages go up in predictable steps based on how long they’ve been with the USPS)
-have excellent benefits, including a shit-ton of vacation time, plus a pension, and they can retire after thirty years

But they also have one of the oldest, biggest, strongest unions in the country. That must piss off Republicans so much. 

Also, side note: they take zero taxpayer dollars. They’re entirely funded by postage. 

(”But I heard they were doing terribly!” They’re not. Congress saddled them with pre-funding their retirement 75 years out to intentionally put them in the red and make them look bad. I’m not joking or exaggerating. There’s tons of info, but here’s the USPS’s own info: https://about.usps.com/who-we-are/financials/annual-reports/fy2010/ar2010_4_002.htm )

I think I am morally obligated to link to Zeynep Tufekci’s NYT column about how the US Postal Service blew her mind when she first arrived here: https://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/03/opinion/why-the-post-office-makes-america-great.html

Yes, I was told, in the United States, mail gets picked up from your house, six days a week, free of charge.

I told my friends in Turkey about all this. They shook their heads in disbelief, wondering how easily I had been recruited as a C.I.A. agent, saying implausibly flattering things about my new country. The United States in the world’s imagination is a place of risk taking and ruthless competition, not one of reliable public services.

I bit my tongue and did not tell my already suspicious friends that the country was also dotted with libraries that provided books to all patrons free of charge. They wouldn’t believe me anyway since I hadn’t believed it myself. My first time in a library in the United States was very brief: I walked in, looked around, and ran right back out in a panic, certain that I had accidentally used the wrong entrance. Surely, these open stacks full of books were reserved for staff only. I was used to libraries being rare, and their few books inaccessible. To this day, my heart races a bit in a library.