.ujon
.lqon
.pm 5
.cp 10
    It occurred to me today just how precarious our channels for 
one-to-many or many-to-many communications are: they all depend 
on one thing, the gov't postal service.

    Personally, I think the postal system in the US is pretty 
good. I have a mail order software business, and use the Postal 
Storage system every day, and I see very few fuckups, ie. actual 
lost or damaged mail. Their baroque beaurocracy is another story, 
but hey, they take a letter from East Bumfuck AK to Zonoid FL for 
only 25 cents!

    The talk of privitization of the postal system scares the 
shit out of me, as much as I might not like things as they are. 
Like the bullshit before the telco "breakup", everyone I talk to 
tells me all about the supposed benefits of competition, and an 
effecient business attitude towards delivery, etc etc.

    Bullshit! Sure, any bunch of idiots can make a fortune 
shipping mail from (say) LA to NY, but who's gonna do the Bumfuck 
AK to Zonoid FL mail? And for that nice cheap 25 cents? Wrong! 
The argument by analogy to the telcos, ie. "Sprint, MCI et al are 
cheaper, same would happen to mail" is bullshit also: the long 
haul carriers wouldn't and couldn't exist if the local telcos 
hadn't strung all that wire down all those small streets in all 
those low traffic areas; the capital investment to do that is 
incomprehensible, no private organization on this planet would 
attempt such a thing today. (The rural electrification projects 
(when? 30's?) that strung all the power wiring, was gov't 
subsidized or funded, no one could afford to do that, never mind 
provide the profit that would drive any corporation to do it.)

    What would happen is that private industry would get to 
essentially own and control the massive infrastructure, built 
from public money over the previous century (!), and use it to 
suck even more money from us with even less accountability that 
we have with the current system. As little control as we have 
over the civil portions of this gov't, we have *none*, by design, 
law and implementation, over private corporations.

    The punch line: the only one-to-many or many-to-many 
communications channel available to people like us, who don't 
have huge resource$, are printed publications; what if the two 
ounce rate was 75 cents or $1.00 instead of 39 cents? Many zines 
and even magazines would be dead, except for those that had good 
advertising income. Does this sound so far fetched? 

.cp 10
    There's an AP story by Deborah Mesce in the SF Exon-icle 
today, "FCC probe of cable TV urged", because "... a handful of 
big companies decide what a majority of subscribers will see, a 
gov't report said Wednesday. ... "Cable service is increasingly 
relied upon by more than half of all the nations households as 
the primary source of video programming ...". The writer stated 
that cable TV is available to 80% of U. S. homes, and that about 
1/2 that, or 42.7 million, subscribe to cable. Telecommunications 
Inc alone controls 23.4% of all cable program distribution. TV 
content is another subject entirely.

    This is the kind of environment that's "good for business", 
ie. profit only, all other considerations ignored. Would you want 
these guys to deliver your mail?

    The only other one-to-many or many-to-many communication 
method I can think of is computer bulletin boards (I would ...) 
but those (these?) are still somewhat elitist, in that you have 
to have access to the necessary equipment, plus a phone line, 
plus expertise, just to see anything at all. Privacy, censorship 
and such are different things on computer bulletin boards, but 
not completely awful as many think. The cost-to-access 
information is all different too. In any case this is all another 
subject.

    I don't think it's too early to think about the privitization 
of the postal system; the greedy bastards are always there 
digging away at things, we should stay aware of it.