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Little research:

"Davis Square in Somerville at lunch time and very few drivers are stopping for people in the crosswalks. It was right there on June 12th that a 90-year-old woman was struck and killed in a crosswalk by a FedEx delivery truck. Partly for that reason, as a video posted on Facebook shows, Somerville police began cracking down at seven locations across the city. Over two weeks in June they wrote almost $40,000 in tickets"

But yeah, they're ONLY doing this because they obviously just want to hand out tickets, right?

Taken from here:
http://boston.cbslocal.com/2014/07/08/somerville-police-crosswalk-crackdown-nets-40000/

Your video, Lousy FedEx Delivery Guys - Conan O'Brien, has made it into the Top 15 New Videos listing. Congratulations on your achievement. For your contribution you have been awarded 1 Power Point.

>> ^blankfist:

You confused me a bit here. You're repeating my sentiment on this.
Certainly it's a smart business move to use the post office in less accessible/less populated areas, because it's cheaper than paying a driver and buying a truck to do it. Again, this has something to do with the USPS having a monopoly on first class mail, because they're the only show in town for first class mail they have to offer their service nearly everywhere in the US - even to rural areas where they're probably losing money to operate there.

And again, I think that's probably true for some set of examples that don't involve deliveries to the NetRunner household. I don't live in a rural area. I live in an urban area, and even more specifically I'm quite near a FedEx delivery hub.

Still, they think it's cheaper to pay the USPS to deliver the package than use one of their own delivery trucks. I think they're right. It's far more efficient to use the USPS because they already have the infrastructure in place to deliver mail to my doorstep, and will be delivering mail to my neighborhood every day already. No point in inefficiently duplicating effort.
>> ^blankfist:
I think that's what @chilaxe meant by subsidizing. He didn't mean tax dollars,

I read the phrase "your and my paycheck" as an allusion to taxation. I also said as part of my rejoinder that it won't be affected, "unless you buy postage".

>> ^blankfist:
[T]he cost of postage on first class mail is subsidizing those drivers and stations in less profitable areas (though tax dollars did subsidize the post office for years). So, because the USPS already has trucks going out to those areas, companies like FedEx use that to their benefit where it would normally be unprofitable for them. Would you disagree with this assertion?

No, I agree with that assertion. Do you think there's something wrong with that kind of subsidization?

>> ^blankfist:
By the way, I think highly of Marxist philosophy. Marxists and little 'l' libertarians (think anarchist leaning) have more in common than Marxists and Social Democrats & Progressives. But that's a whole other conversation.


And one I'd like to have sometime. I personally think it's pretty strange for you to claim to respect Marxist philosophy, while decrying everything liberals do.