I really don't understand the justification for withholding operational data like this. We are trying to make the job of the USPS easier with these tools. It's a lot cheaper and faster for everyone involved if I can query the database while the customer is still standing in front of me.
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.
I was confused by this until I realized you are missing some logical steps in your (accurate) argument.
The 2006 law took away the safety net (ie the ability to charge whatever is needed to break even).
The “you can now make a profit” rule actually made it HARDER since it came with a price cap.
It told the USPS: You can keep any profits you make, but you cannot raise prices above the rate of inflation to get them.
This forced the USPS to absorb rising costs through internal efficiency rather than passing the bill to mailers
By no means was I implying that the ability to profit means they did profit. Im just stating what the law was.
No because they are still deep in the red, about $9B a year.
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.
https://www.militarytimes.com/news/pentagon-congress/2025/12...
Electrifying the USPS light vehicle fleet is expected to generate up to $4.3B in lifetime savings over the fleet lifecycle, similarly.
https://huffman.house.gov/media-center/in-the-news/electrify...
https://atlaspolicy.com/federal-fleet-electrification-assess...
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.
The unsung role of logistics in the US military - https://news.mit.edu/2025/unsung-role-logistics-us-military-... - November 25, 2025
True, but isn't this because everyone knows that USPS is a dying business already?
It’s weird how people bring this up. It was very unusual for the usps not to have to set aside money now to pay for pensions in the future.
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
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.
The finances of your police and fire departments, your libraries and public schools, and the military, are all “dogshit” by this absurd reasoning.
(I have all my mail sent to a CMRA and basically never see any of this stuff, though.)
Not when combined with the idea that spam mail senders should be legislated out of legality.
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.
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.
When things cost as close as possible to their MARGINAL cost. The marginal cost of mailing a letter is very low, almost certainly closer to $0 than $0.83, especially if you accept letter carriers have to run their route every day regardless.
The problem of course is the USPS has enormous fixed costs, including I would argue the pensions (honestly not sure how they would be accounted for in a GAAP sense, I'm absolutely not an accountant)
Federal funding has long distinguished between the two for other things like transit. You're only allowed to use federal funds for capital expenses, not operational expenses. USPS getting a taxpayer subsidy for their fixed costs doesn't seem that nuts.
I think I've received two letters in the last year. I haven't received any individual junk mail letters.
The letter volume last year was 90M for 6M people, so about 15 each. I assume elderly people and others who have opted out of receiving government and business mail digitally drive that number up.
(Someone still delivers a bundle of leaflets from local businesses all together every month or so, and a local newspaper, but I don't think it's the postal service. Every home gets the same bundle.)
I personally get a massive benefit from USPS being cheap, despite the fact that I send no mail. It provides a massive low-cost physical delivery network across the country, with service to every address. This is a benefit to me because it makes business and personal communication simple and reliable. If I need it personally, it's there. If I don't, I still rely on thousands of parties who do.
Your position is like claiming the interstate system is useless because you don't have a car, ignoring how all those goods your life relies on actually get to you.
Maybe you're an autodidact like many other engineers, and maybe you would have done better without schooling. Such people are a minority.
Like many, I think you're confusing "the school system is flawed" (it is) with "school bad."
Poor community? Sorry Timmy, your schools SUCK.
Rural community? Get to farming Timmy. You dont deserve a GOOD education either.
Living in a rich suburb of a big city? Congrats, your schools are well funded and low student:teacher count. Your education will actually be pretty damned good.
If the schools in a given country were pumping out geniuses year after year then maybe you would have a point.
The unintended consequence of this is all the junk mail that makes regular mail a horrible experience to interact with.
Raise the prices , remove the spam.
And this same version of the API (the latest incarnation) is also very picky about addresses, to the point where many more addresses must be "verified" before it will let a label be generated. Sure, you can just set 'ignoreBadAddess' to TRUE, but then you're just kicking the can down the road. They knew exactly what they were doing when they released this new service with free address validation, and then did the rug pull. Fucking drug dealing dark patterns there.
It seems like corruption to me.
They want it to suck, and, in turn, fail. They are trying to dismantle public services in favor of private enterprise, preferably those of their buddies.
Would take way more than one letter to make USPS profitable.
Their core business has been declining for the past 20 years and business mailer lobbyists work very hard to keep the current price caps. This idea that we should let the finances spin out of control and raise taxes is a recent idea.
Standard communication (including addressing) is such a basic, critical function of government that it only makes sense to do it at scale and just fund it with taxes.
Your approach leads to exploding federal budgets, which are already the bane of the US, Canada, and the EU. When will you learn? Everything is not the exception, everything is the problem.
When will you learn? Taxes are not “the bane” of the EU, taxes are why It’s a nice place to live and America isn’t.
Speaking for a patchwork of samples that have fascinated me in the U.S.—New developments tend to incur impact fees to offset their immediate effects on the roads, sewers, and sidewalks. Police charge a fee to connect your alarm system to their dispatchers, an hourly wage for an off-duty cop to stand guard at your commercial premise, and a fine if you waste their time with false alarms… in some cases they attempt, at least notionally, to recoup the cost of the investigation from criminals upon conviction (I hear the collections rates are unimpressive…). Heck, some places bill inmates for each night in jail! [0]
Fire services tend to send you a bill for a false alarm, a fee for an inspection and, if you did it on purpose, a criminal charge plus the full cost of the response. And lord forbid you accept EMS services…
All are tax-funded, but all gesture at apportioning costs in relation to use. If they send this much junk mail while it’s quarters-a-pop, how much would they send if it were free…
[0] seriously! https://www.flsheriffs.org/uploads/Subsistence%20Fee%20Final...
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.
However municipalities should be allowed to, not forced to [or not].
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.
I don't know why the taxpayer should subsidize fintechs.
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.
There is a ideology of some people that think that taxes are a magical way of funding anything they feel is a common good. Most of the time these are well intended thoughts of public good. However they NEVER take into the account the unintended consequences of their ideas. It stops with tax more = more public good.
>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.
How the heck are you supposed to do anything with it if you're not allowed to produce results that are derived from it somehow??
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.
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.
>Four quarterly updates with limited publication.
Sharing it with everyone is probably going to get you banned from getting quarterly updates, as there's strings attached. Though I do wonder just how they keep track. Are they fingerprinting the data somehow? Does that make the dataset less useful?
>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.
Sadly, you cannot, from what I can tell.
The S-10 itself is a really good farm truck though, so I'd keep your eyes on the market for one. Or maybe the equivalent Ford one.
I'd like to have a Hilux, because the Tacoma isn't as good but that's just not an option here.
I have heard it claimed that they are not DOT compliant which prevents them from being sold to the public, so USPS crushes them all at the end of their life.
That said, once in a great while a non-USPS LLV shows up on GovDeals. Last one I saw was local to me a few years ago and it sold for over 10 grand.
For the very small bit of time (as you mentioned) - the Commercial Long Life Vehicle, or CLLV: https://www.flickr.com/photos/hugo90/33789231153
I assume you're talking about the LLV?
I had thought the post office bought a small number of 4x4 LLVs, but I don't see anything about it on wikipedia, so probably not. That said, maybe you could bodge something together from S-10 4x4 parts? (wikipedia says the rear axle is from the 4x4 s-10 blazer and the front axle is from the 2x4 blazer ... it might not be easy, but it's probably not impossible to grab a 4x4 front axle and stuff it in... )
I've read that the post office doesn't sell their old ones, but they weren't the only buyer and some of the other buyers do sell them.
Wikipedia does say the NGDV comes in all wheel drive. Although yeah, probably hard to buy a new one.
For example in Seattle people can request body cam footage arbitrarily. But the faces and identifying info of witnesses and victims need to be redacted which takes time and money. Someone started bulk requesting almost all body cam footage, and that placed a big cost on the police department. Now they charge $17 per body cam request.
Instead, what they are, are collections of mail delivery points. The "full" 5+4 zip code represents one mail delivery route that a postman follows to deliver mail. And the "fuller" 5+4+2 zip code has the last two digits of the street number.
So couple issues with trying to make polygons from zip codes:
1. There is no guarantee that a given zip code has a finite area. There are several zip codes that exist at a single street address. So... is that a point? Is it the footprint of the building where the mail is delivered? Maybe a hexagon with some minimal side length? Examples: Several IRS return addresses, and some large hospitals.
2. There is no guarantee that a given zip code has a contiguous polygon representation. It depends on the algorithm you use to generate polygons from address points.
3. There is no guarantee that a given zip code has a fixed geospatial representation. Example: the armed forces zip codes for delivering mail to overseas personnel on deployment. The AFPO zips represent "wherever the troops happen to be today". How do you represent that as a polygon?
This is why the USPO has long resisted publishing polygons. It doesn't make sense at the conceptual level, so there are a bunch of weird edge cases you wouldn't expect if you naively treat them as polygons.
ALSO: The census does publish zip polygons. Some of those have zero people living in them (like the hospitals and IRS locations), so you can get weird div-by-0 effects if you aren't careful.
APO/FPO is a good counterexample, though even these presumably have domestic delivery points where the postal service hands off mail to the military (not that their locations should matter to postal customers).
Same goes for DPO addresses, I assume USPS doesn't actually deliver to embassies overseas (or at least does so under contract with the State Department if it does, and again consolidates deliveries at one or more domestic locations).
1. A given land parcel may not have mail delivery (think: rural land, even with people living on it), so... what is its zip code? Does it even have a zip code? Remember, a zip code is defined as a set of mail delivery points.
2. A given land parcel may have multiple mail delivery points, each of which may have a different zip code (think: a large mall or commercial building with multiple tenants, where it may be more convenient for the USPS to deliver from two or more mail routes). Does that land parcel have more than one zip code or do you arbitrarily pick one? If it has more than one, does the whole parcel have both codes (so, overlapping polygons), or do you try to subdivide it somehow?
[Users of zip code polygons often want to preserve the capability to look up the zip code from a given lat/lng point. So they will yell at you if you choose to have overlapping polygons or two zip codes for one polygon.]
3. What about AFPO addresses that represent the current location of a group of people who move around all the time? An aircraft carrier out in the Pacific is not near any land parcels.
But polygons support it fine, they just overlap.
"Many postcodes for particular lat/lon" should be part of the polygon delivery schema, i.e. you get a list all the time.
Seems like a non-issue for most use cases.
> 2 means some polygons overlap which is fine too
For some use-cases, sure, but not all. One common use-case for zip code polygons is "I have a lat/lng, just give me the zip code, damnit!" Your users might expect that a lat/lng point can have no zip code, but most won't expect that it can have multiple (because no address has multiple zip codes).
At a minimum that leaves you scrambling to explain "well, but it only happens in a few edge cases where a land parcel has multiple mail delivery locations from different postal carriers, and it's super-rare, pinky swear".
> 3 means some zipcodes are excluded from scheme, as one might not be legally allowed to know where a particular unit is.
Another very common use-case for zip code polygons is "I have a zip code, just tell me where it is, damnit!" Maybe they want to estimate shipping distance without hitting the shipper's API.
Part of the problem here is that the AFPO zips do have a physical location for this purpose, which is the facility where mail and parcels are delivered from the USPS to the AFPO. And your users will probably expect you to know that's what they mean. So when you try to explain that "actually an aircraft carrier is constantly moving and we're not allowed to know where it is", they will think you are being pedantic and condescending, and look for someone else to sell them polygons.
But let's say the user actually wants to forecast sales of the new ThingyWidget 3000 by estimating the average weather by customer zip code (by getting the polygon for each zip and the doing a spatial join to weather data). When they do that for the AFPO drop-off point, they're going to get a completely wrong estimate of the weather because the people receiving mail at the AFPO zip are not physically present at that place. So when you explain that "actually that is the physical location of the AFPO facility" they will also think you are being pedantic and condescending, and look for someone else to sell them polygons.
Notice how you're damned if you do and damned if you don't?
Any choice you make for polygonalizing zip codes will be wrong for some use case, and it will be spectacularly wrong for certain edge cases in very intuitive ways that certain users deeply care about and will blame you for.
Which brings me back to the point: You can make a set of polygons for zips which is "good enough" for many use-cases, but ultimately you cannot represent zips as polygons in a way that is suitable for all use cases because, once again, zip codes are not polygons!
If I was developing something that required dealing with US GIS I'd very much prefer a service that does the above, and handle the edge cases, than have no such service at all.
I came across all this when building maps for sales territories defined by ZIP codes. I needed to have a simple, clean partitioning of the US for this use case, and ZIP codes are not that. So I took all ZIP codes as points and generated a Voronoi diagram to yield clean, non-overlapping polygons that covered every point in the country. That was plenty good for the purposes of doing visualizations of the US split into tens of territories.
It is great for governments to run responsible budgets, but this was such a unique constraint, it seems designed to strangle the USPS.
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
Health benefits, not pensions. And in 2022 this requirement was eliminated by a reform bill.
Which is to say "fund their pension plans."
https://www.congress.gov/109/plaws/publ435/PLAW-109publ435.p...
Page 55 discusses setting money aside for retiree healthcare benefits:
>Not later than June 30, 2007, and by June 30 of each succeeding year, the Office shall compute the net present value of the future payments required under section 8906(g)(2)(A) and attributable to the service of Postal Service employees during the most recently ended fiscal year.
"Net Present Value" is accrued, i.e. benefits owed to current and past employees.
It makes sense to require an organization to set aside money it promised to pay someone...otherwise organizations would just go around paying people today with future taxpayers' money (which is what governments literally do).
Page 53 discusses the same for defined benefit pensions. All of the present values are of accrued benefits, not projected benefits.
However, I do suspect this was a clever way to handicap the USPS specifically, since it did not apply to any other governments such as state/county/city.
https://ips-dc.org/how-congress-manufactured-a-postal-crisis...
> The Trump Task Force acknowledged that without the costs imposed by the Post-Retirement Health Care Mandate, USPS would today be profitable on an operating basis.
Like when you buy food you like instead of the cheapest calories, this can make financial sense, because you value the preferred food more than the additional cost.
At around $20 a household projected loss for 2027, you wouldn't have to try very hard to do better than dismissing discussion of the value it does or doesn't bring.
It doesn't make financial sense because Congress has capped how much the garbage manufacturers have to pay.
Half of their links are dead but they've updated their website to say:
> We help agencies leverage new and innovative capabilities, including super intelligence, machine learning, and robotics.
But the cost of preparation isn't, government humans are still involved
makes sense as its really enterprise level activity -- polling/marketing, government, banking, insurance, etc -- who live or die by zip code data
the rest of us should be good with US Department of Commerce's free (last time I looked anyway) geo services. Google em down
:lightbulb: :huggingface:
In reality, USPS is starved of resources, and like with all other open source things, some billionaire would make millions out of it without contributing anything back.
For a long time it was in this weird double bind because the federal government mandated generous health insurance for USPS employees, but did not allocate funds for it, because USPS was supposed to provide its own funds to cover all expenses. It looks like new legislation (PSRA) was finally passed in 2022 to move that burden from USPS and onto the OPM.
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.