fishbane

Just amusement at the irony of a man who pays his bills by serving unwanted ads complaining about the USPS delivering unwanted ads.

Lol. Yes privatize it like Intermat then 65% of the USPS website can be taken up by ads too!

From the pension perspective if I were an employee and needed to pay any more or received any less I'd just assume invest the 4.4% or whatever it is. The retirement prefunding that was hamstringing the USPS prior to the 2022 repeal was related to medical benefits more than pensions. I don't really see many pensions at all in the private sector. Maybe at the c level they have sweet retirement benefits. I more often see out of control pensions from local/city/municipal/state police. The top three years thing is similar although some places it could be top year or top 5, but the % is way more (70-80%) and the calculation often includes overtime. A USPS employee couldn't work enough years to get 70-80% and these guys get it after 20-30 years. More over places with the top 3 or 1 year calculation that include overtime. This can be exploited as often overtime is assigned with priority to seniority - if two officers want to work the same OT shift the more senior officer gets it. Officers near retirement can rack up tons of OT resulting in lifetime pensions in excess of the base salary.

The FERS pension calculation is very reasonable. The calculation is 1.1% of the average of the top three earning years(not including overtime) times the number of years of service. Employees hired after 2014 contribute 4.4% of their pay to the plan. Unless someone received a significant salary bump late in their career their own contributions should cover most of the benefits.

The big downward spike starting near 2007 is in part due to a law that required the USPS to prefund retirement benefits for a period of 10 years. This was not required before that and retirement benefits were just paid out of the operating budget previously. It was the only agency required to do this. I think they made the payments in full for the first 3 or so years and then had to start defaulting on the prefunding. Eventually this requirement was repealed in 2022. If not for this requirement they would have had a surplus for several more years. Today Amazon delivery 90% of the stuff I order themselves and largely don't use Fedex, UPS, or the USPS. They've sent me a handful of items through USPS and UPS in the past year, but none via Fedex. Ten or so years ago before they started ramping up their own delivery fleet I used to get a lot of stuff delivered from Amazon through Lasership. I believe that company goes by Ontrac today. In any case I think Amazon has stopped using them at least in my area.

I don't think Khalil was among the students that entered Hamilton Hall though he did take part in negotiations. What would his actions amount to from what you've listed? Not leaving a quad? That's what? Criminal trespass? When has anyone had their green card been revoked for that? They also cannot revoke the green card without a hearing. Yet they picked him up and shipped him to Louisiana. The law under which the Trump administration is attempting to use to deport Hamas supporters forbids providing "material support or resources." That sounds like more than a protest in a quad to me.

Because it's a public service and allows for businesses to do business and connects people. If USPS had to make money they wouldn't deliver to everybody and wouldn't visit every house every day like Fedex, UPS, ect. Postal treaties for international mail wouldn't work. USPS delivers international mail essentially for free. For years and years Americans have found value in the postal service and I don't see that changing anytime soon. USPS being subsidized with congressional appropriations is nothing new.

What is the point of this graphic?

Mail delivery once a week is an awful idea. Today you can mail a letter and it gets delivered within two days to a large part of the country. This would significantly slow that down. It would also cripple the USPS package service. UPS and FedEx delivery 5 days a week. Why would anyone use the USPS when it could take a week or more? No such thing as next day or expedited service.

I think you are mistaken here. The USPS had 525,000 career employees in 2023. There is no way they hired 192,000 new career employees in Dec. That didn't happen. I have seen the number 190,000 pre-career employees transitioned to career positions, but that was over the entirety of Postmaster DeJoy's term, not last year like the tweet you initially quoted seemed to imply and definitely not the month of Dec. The fact that career employees only increased by less than 30k from the start of DeJoy's term in 2020 until 2023 probably means that the 190,000 pre-career employees that transitioned were largely offset by retirements and other forms of attrition. https://federalnewsnetwork.com/workforce/2025/01/usps-offers-up-to-15k-in-early-retirement-buyouts-to-cut-mail-handler-staffing/#:~:text=During DeJoy's tenure%2C USPS has,net loss in fiscal 2024. That is the relevant portion of the article. Simply pulling out the fact that 190k pre-career employees transitioned to career positions even over the correct time frame misses the fact that overall staff and work hours decreased during the same period. The tweet and AI summaries you are relying on are misleading and/or incorrect. I've already pointed out what was wrong with the job numbers. The mail volume has not decreased by 80% as indicated in the tweet even using the number in your post - 116.5 is not 20% of 213. Though mail volume has decreased during DeJoy's service package volume is up which is bulkier per item and requires more employees per item. I get why American's may doubt the value in foreign aid and agencies like USAID, but the USPS provides a very tangible service 6 days/week. Sure it has some problems, but we get quite a lot even for $9.5 billion.

Is it not settled law that the bill of rights extends to non citizens? I thought the rights apply to persons more generally and not citizens.

But what does it say about fraud and abuse when the person leading it owns companies with billions of dollars in government contracts some of which are years behind schedule and are carrying out these moves outside of normal channels? Not and example to be followed in my mind. Space X is years behind schedule on HLS and just blew up another starship yesterday. Musk is heading up the department that is leading cuts at NASA the agency paying for HLS and the FAA the agency that has yet to conclude ita investigation of the last starship explosion.

They both say "less than a month." It appears the title was edited at some point presumably within 20 minutes of posting. I don't know what it read before that. The point is that it was widely optimistic and now this topic is a month old and DOGE is nowhere near that mark even by their own generous accounting.

Not the post topic. That said $1 trillion in 1 month. If we are going to go by Elon Musk stated goals instead wasn't that "at least $2 trillion"?

Isn't it? It's been a month since you started this thread and the DOGE website is only reporting $105 billion in savings. So if that is to be believed you were only off by a factor of about 10.

If they are discussing something so important that it is risking WWIIi then it's incredibly dumb to demand thank you from one side as Vance did.

Zalensky did not invite the media. Is the deal is important and there are significant disagreements then why invite the media to the meeting? Who set up the meeting and invited the media? Vance accused Zalensky of litigating things in front of the public for pointing out that Russia has broke previous agreements with Ukraine. Vance seemed to acknowledge it was a dispute. Why invite the media to ask questions when there is a dispute and then get upset with Zalensky for making his case by stating facts?

I think they are these are workers that have been told not to come to work for disciplinary reasons or because there is an ongoing investigation into them. The old paid administrative leave. At least it seemed pretty clear that's what they were talking about about the DHS and VA employees referenced in the article. Not sure how those numbers add to $3.1 billion.

I am sure that a deal could have been signed without a trip to Washington. What I doubt is if the deal had been hammered out to what either side thought was it's final form before the trip. The drafts that have been reported on were vague both in terms of what money the US would get from the mineral fund and what the US would provide in terms of security. Those seem like the most important parts to both parties.

I asked a question. I did not make any claims. With little doubt Trump and his administration were responsible for the media being at this meeting. I have to guess but I think Zalensky was willing to sign the mineral rights deal and is open to a cease fire, but without security guarantees of some form there is not much point in doing either. There likely was some disagreement in private before this meeting which had not been made public. I would be surprised if the problem of Zalensky wanting security guarantees and Trump only offering the guarantee that "Putin has not broken a deal with me" failed to come up. Why go through with the press Q and A on a deal with such an apparent problem? Doesn't seem like a solid idear to me. Wait until you have an agreement ready to sign. Vance added absolutely nothing to the affair. Why demand a thank you? Letting a lack of a thank you kibosh a deal to end a war doesn't jump out to me as master negotiation. I wonder if Vance will make similar demands of Putin...

Zalensky was responsible for the press being at this meeting?

If this isn't by far the best value for money for the taxpayer I am sure DOGE will cancel it and apply the savings to the national debt.

This is laughable dumb. Musk has been lying and pushing vaporware for well over a decade all whilst his support swung from one political party to the other. When the SEC went after Musk in 2018 after he falsely tweeted that he had secured funding to take Tesla private at a premium was that because he supported and voted for Hillary Clinton in 2016? Did the SEC go after him more recently for failing to disclose his purchase of twitter shares in a timely manner because he supported Trump? If the enforcement actions follow him regardless of who he supports it might just be because he is breaking the law and openly posting about it on the internet.

I don't think Ono would have expected Gilman to be there when he made the trip. Flo put out a video of him wrestling with Jordan Conaway up the other day. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rKoGJw8LGSQ

That's up at 165. Who knows what his training situation was like between OSU and now. Parco's leaving too. He could be a NQ at 149 or 157. Is he transferring? Probably a better option. Still have to replace Parco.