News
Welcome to the News community!
Rules:
1. Be civil
Attack the argument, not the person. No racism/sexism/bigotry. Good faith argumentation only. This includes accusing another user of being a bot or paid actor. Trolling is uncivil and is grounds for removal and/or a community ban. Do not respond to rule-breaking content; report it and move on.
2. All posts should contain a source (url) that is as reliable and unbiased as possible and must only contain one link.
Obvious right or left wing sources will be removed at the mods discretion. We have an actively updated blocklist, which you can see here: https://lemmy.world/post/2246130 if you feel like any website is missing, contact the mods. Supporting links can be added in comments or posted seperately but not to the post body.
3. No bots, spam or self-promotion.
Only approved bots, which follow the guidelines for bots set by the instance, are allowed.
4. Post titles should be the same as the article used as source.
Posts which titles don’t match the source won’t be removed, but the autoMod will notify you, and if your title misrepresents the original article, the post will be deleted. If the site changed their headline, the bot might still contact you, just ignore it, we won’t delete your post.
5. Only recent news is allowed.
Posts must be news from the most recent 30 days.
6. All posts must be news articles.
No opinion pieces, Listicles, editorials or celebrity gossip is allowed. All posts will be judged on a case-by-case basis.
7. No duplicate posts.
If a source you used was already posted by someone else, the autoMod will leave a message. Please remove your post if the autoMod is correct. If the post that matches your post is very old, we refer you to rule 5.
8. Misinformation is prohibited.
Misinformation / propaganda is strictly prohibited. Any comment or post containing or linking to misinformation will be removed. If you feel that your post has been removed in error, credible sources must be provided.
9. No link shorteners.
The auto mod will contact you if a link shortener is detected, please delete your post if they are right.
10. Don't copy entire article in your post body
For copyright reasons, you are not allowed to copy an entire article into your post body. This is an instance wide rule, that is strictly enforced in this community.
view the rest of the comments
It's more opportunity to declare fraud. Biden postal service (crippled by Trump) not delivering votes in conservative counties, etc.
If you mean the USPS scaling down, that's kinda had to happen. People send way less mail than they used to. Electronic communication has displaced a bunch of postal mail.
I just bought a sheet of forever stamps this week, and the roll they were replacing was IIRC 34 cent stamps. That's how long it was taking me to get through a roll.
goes looking for when I would have bought them
https://about.usps.com/who/profile/history/domestic-letter-rates-since-1863.htm
Yeah, those haven't been current in 22 years.
goes looking for mail volume numbers
https://about.usps.com/who/profile/history/first-class-mail-since-1926.htm
The USPS peaked in volume back in 2001. In that year, they transported 103,656 million pieces of mail.
Last year, they did 45,979 million pieces.
Your post shows how little you understand the USPS.
A) It wasn't the scaling down of the USPS that is what Trump did. He appointed the head of the org, Louis DeJoy, who did a lot of specific acts that slowed down how mail was delivered. He got rid of over 700 high-speed auto-sort machines that were perfectly fine but out of date and then didn't order new ones. He cut overtime and lowered the opening hours of offices.
B) The only reason the USPS is having financial issues is because the Republicans passed a law (which many Dems also voted for because they are morons and the plan sounded good at first read) that said all pensions had to be pre-funded through death. That means for every person who works there and has a pension, let's say being paid $500/mo for the rest of their life, will require the USPS to have a fully funded account in the amount of $500/mo x 12 mo x life expectancy. They can't do like every other company on Earth with a pension and fund it over time either through profits or by an interest bearing account. That crippled the USPS because they had to divert all their profits. Before that they were profitable, but this stifled all growth.
C) Even with that, they finally came back and made $56 billion in PROFIT in 2022. Yes, in 2023 they had a loss of $6 billion, but the profit from 2022 helped them to not scale back.
D) USPS doesn't make most of their money on first class mail. The majority of their income is from package delivery ($32.4 billion) and from mailing advertisements ($15.9 billion) vs first class mail revenue of $24.5 billion.
https://about.usps.com/newsroom/national-releases/2023/1114-usps-reports-fiscal-year-2023-results.htm
The reason that they needed to be pre-funded is because the USPS was shrinking and is expected to continue to do so.
What happens with a private company that's shrinking or going under is that people who have a pension plan risk winding up without their pension.
With the USPS, it's a quasi-governmental agency. Strictly-speaking, the government isn't on the hook for the pensions...but it's a pretty good bet that if the USPS can't cover pensions, then USPS workers are going to be asking the government to cover it down the road. This ensures that it's the USPS that pays for it, rather than it running up a huge debt, filing for bankruptcy, and then dumping it on the taxpayer.
The bill required all pensions to be prefunded for 50 years. Even pensions for people who were at retirement age and couldn't possibly last 50 years, and people who have just started and might not stay long enough to qualify for a pension also needed to have a prefunded 50 year pension. That's ridiculous. No other government organization has this requirement, and no other non-government organization has this requirement. So why would the quasi-governmental need one?
Also, USPS was profitable in 2006. While maybe not growing, they weren't going under. This was purely a political move to turn a profitable USPS and make it crash so that private companies like FedEx and UPS could take over the role to make money. Bush Jr used scare tactics to get liberals to vote for this, like the arguments you are using. Thankfully, Biden repealed this law in 2022.
It can be characterized that way, but the person who did the gutting was a Trump appointee and he seems to have done it in a deliberately ham-fisted way. Should the postal service struggle with ballots anywhere in the country that will be taken as a sign of fraud, but the reality is they did a poor job of making changes whether they were necessary or not.
Edit: downvotes aren't from me. Yours is a perspective I can't refute, but what I have read says the post office would be perfectly fine if their budget stopped being raided.
I figured it was an attempt to get votes in before he's declared ineligible. So when he's ousted, he'll say "I got all these votes, count em! I should win but they're cheating and saying I can't run! FRAUD!"
Lmao don't you understand by now, there is no scenario where the GOP and its Almighty Head Cancerous Tumor do not scream fraud
Trump isn't going to be declared ineligible. He meets the constitutional requirements for being President. Unfortunately. We are just going to have to win the election by giving Biden more votes. And they're going to declare fraud whether he loses by 1 vote or 10 million, so let's try to just absolutely destroy them at the ballot. We can't just beat him, we have to send a message that Trump and his sycophants will never have a path to election again.
He would be the first felon as president. I do not want that.
We can only express that with a vote. I mean besides shouting it from the rooftops, but the only concrete way is with a vote.
His candidacy is clouded, he engaged in insurrection on January 6 and Congress can't requalify him for office. They and only they have the authority but they don't have the votes. Even if he loses he's going to try to seize power. He only has to seize it if he loses. They are past caring about the election and you can tell because they have already told us that win or lose they intend to spill American blood.
The problem is that 'everyone knows' but Congress did not hold designate him as doing so. While Colorado declared he did, the Supreme Court unanimously ruled that section 5 of the 14th amendment says it's up to congress, not courts (neither state or federal) to make the determination.
I don't disagree with the rest, but this part I just have no idea what part of the constitution you are referencing. He's 35+, a natural born citizen, and a 10+ year resident. That's it. He's qualified because beyond that the founding fathers foolishly had faith that the citizenry would hold politicians to account. I guess to their credit that worked for a couple hundred years.
Section 3 14th Amendment to the US Constitution.
The Supreme court's reply: Section 5 14th Amendment
They said only the national legislature can make this determination, based on section 5.
Unfortunately, it is left to Congress to declare an insurrection, and that section is of little use to us. That was adjudicated with several states trying to remove him from the ballot. So he doesn't need to be requalified.
I question that decision, particularly given the current extremely partisan court. But unfortunately our constitution gives us no recourse save impeachment or passing explicit laws that are within the framework of the constitution, but bar Trump.
The votes aren't there for either so the law holds that the supreme court's interpretation that Congress must vote to declare an act to be insurrection is currently the law of the land.
We have a tremendous fight ahead of us to undo all the harm Trump caused in his first term. I'm talking perhaps decades.
The Section 3 clause absolutely has not been adjudicated. Nice try.
Supreme Court said he can't be removed from the ballot based on that. Not sure what you call that, but the clause does us no good in preventing him from being elected.
Note that on this particular matter, they ruled unanimously that Trump couldn't be removed from ballots.
Very true. The partisanship calls into question everything the court does, but the unanimity is a strong statement. There are reasons for it, but it's frustrating to watch a crowd of people violently attack the Capital for the express purpose of preventing the lawful transfer of power and then have the courts say damn our eyes, Congress gets to decide.
It very clearly was the thing we all saw with our own eyes as it happened, but the right side of Congress won't say so because it's to their political advantage.
Agreed, though to be fair, since we all saw it with our own eyes, you would hope we would move to prevent it by voting against him.