You’ve hit the crux of the situation here:

you either support some things being nationalized for the greater benefit of society, or you take the neoliberal approach and say “there is no society, may the best corporation win”.

I have no doubt that privatizing all mail can generate better margins and return some nice profits to a handful of individuals at the expense of less citizens having access to the service.

It's only efficient as a way to funnel taxpayer money into stockholders' pockets. "Privatizing" a service but continuing to pick winners and subsidize them isn't really privatizing and isn't compatible with a real free market. It's literally a kind of command economy, albeit one designed to benefit only a few.

> continuing to pick winners and subsidize them

Another approach could be to just give rural Americans more cash, and let them pick the winners, as consumers.

What mail? Spam? People don't mail things anymore. It's why they're going out of business.

And it's not like mail would be unavailable. If it cost $2 for rural customers to mail a letter instead of $.50, would it really matter for the two letters that still get mailed a year?

You seem to be disconnected from rural life completely.

Many people rely on physical mail for things like social security checks, taxes, bills, communication with family and friends.

Remember, broadband never actually got rolled out everywhere like phones did(hint: one was considered a vital utility)

"Many people rely on physical mail for things like social security checks, taxes, bills, communication with family and friends."

A somewhat higher postage rate would not affect this that much, and no, there are not that many people always sending letters, and broadband isn't required to pay bills.

The vast, vast majority of mail (even bills sent etc.) is completely wasted, it would be incredibly more efficient to dump it in lieu of sending 'only the mail that is needed'.

If starlink gets off the ground as promised broadband will be a solved problem.

I feel like the most likely scenario right now is it will take on a limited form of its current self, maybe delivery once per week? Much higher postage?

Lots of things could happen, but likely not by Q3 when they are projected to run out of money.

> Many people rely on physical mail for things like social security checks, taxes, bills, communication with family and friends.

All of those things can be done on the internet and don't require broadband.

Also, how many times a year do you have to file your taxes, if you really want to do it that way?

My brother bought a rural place that doesn’t have any internet whatsoever, and it’s not that far out in the sticks. If internet access is needed to interact with the government/banks/etc, we have to do better to provide it to rural folks.

You can get a phone line basically anywhere for the same reason you can get mail there, and if you can get a phone line then you can get dial-up, which doesn't get you YouTube but it does get you email and online banking and all of those sorts of things.

Yes, dial up is technically still internet... But do you really get internet that way? Websites these days are made for broadband, some of them coming in at a few MB just to get to the login screen. Plus you gotta turn off all non-essential internet communication in Windows (telemetry, updates, ...) or that 4 kB/s you get are lost to that. If you're paying by the minute it's going to get expensive real fast.

Its purpose isn't to be real internet, its purpose is just to do what the postal service does. It doesn't matter if cnn.com has 500MB of javascript because you're not going there, you're just doing email and banking.

And nobody pays by the minute anymore.

You assume that all these people have AC current. I know for a fact that at least half a dozen american in West Virginia (lincoln county) get there only electricity with solar panels. Yes, they can access their emails thanks to the public library, but how much longer this public service will stay open?

But even those banking and webmail sites are in the order of megabytes.

What are they using to connect to these services?

An up to date windows 10 laptop? A MacBook? You are making a lot of assumptions about a lot of people.

Even on a completely updated, modern machine try throttling your bandwidth to 56k and paying your bills via your banks website.

"Up to date"? The latest version of Windows 10 can technically run on hardware older than anybody would have any interest in using. Like late 1990s or so. Anybody can get a much newer PC than that, like an early Core i5, for around $50-$100, which someone might actually want to use.

Dial up is slow. But if that's the problem you want to solve then how do you do it by subsidizing the postal service?

I just paid my credit card bill at 50k down/20k up. It's fine. Took about half an hour, but I'm browsing HN (also throttled) in this tab so it's not too inconvenient. You could also read a book or cook or something.

So, “let them eat cake”.

How is that not a completely viable solution?

Have you actually used dial up? It's terrible slow compared to broadband but a whole lot faster than mailing a letter.

Would it be possible to take half the 70B that we’re paying USPS and quickly build out fixed wireless service to at least the lower 48?

I don’t know myself, but it seems within reason to me.

Yeah, sorry man, but you're dead wrong. As he said, you're really disconnected from reality here. "All those things can be done electronically" -- lol. You must not have interacted with many government agencies.

You can do your taxes electronically, I've done it. You can have your social security check direct deposited. "Bills and communication" is your bank website and email, not a government agency. All those things can be done electronically.

I think you're being willfully obtuse, so there isn't much point to trying to help you understand. You're too stuck on the singular point of whether it's physically possible for something to be done electronically, and ignoring every other factor.

I'm more concerned that it may be drastically expensive-- or completely unavailable-- for rural people to receive packages. Right now UPS/FedEx/etc don't go everywhere and rely upon USPS for last mile in many areas.

Either that wouldn't happen or it would be solved by the UPS equivalent of a PO box, which eliminates the last mile problem by moving the mailbox.

You assume these people all have cars.

You know what? The best solution is lifting taxes (most of them don't pay much anyway) and usual phone bills (that are freaking expensive for the service it provides). it will probably cost less than to pay for the last mile.