As a postal worker I have an awesome tip:
Take all your mail, then rifle through it looking at the postage. Make a pile for Standard, a pile for First Class, and put everything else in a third pile (non-profit etc). Look through the pile of Standard. It’s literally all garbage. Look through the pile of first class, them’s the bills. Look through the non-profit pile and if you’re lucky you got return address labels from the Humane Society. If you didn’t get return address labels and you need return address labels, make a small donation to the ASCPA and give it a month
What’s crazier is that I get 5lbs of junk mail regularly, but if I go to the post office and try to mail a 1 lb envelope it’s like $40
In Germany, you can just put a little sign on your letterbox that tells the post person to not give you any free newspapers or mail.
Only ads I’ve gotten in years where the ones directly addressed to me, and that’s like every few months from one of two slightly old fashioned firms, and tends to include a voucher, so that’s something.
I’d love that. My current routine is to just toss the ads and whatnot in the recycling bin on my way in. I look at it just long enough to determine whether it’s important, I don’t even look at what their deals are.
I don’t know know if you’re in the US, but the junk mail senders here have been making their ads look like official mail.
I had one the other day that said IMPORTANT stamped across an otherwise nondescript, but official looking enevelope. So opened it just in case. It was an ad for some douchbag company stating that it wanted to buy our house for cash.
I always worry that one day I’m gonna toss a piece of mail that I actually needed because of this bullshit.
Ich hab das nicht dran weil ich die freien Zeitungen benutze, um den Biomüll einzupacken 💀
Sadly too many asshats ignore the stickers. I could now sue the shitty “free”
newspaperad delivery device, but that’s somehow more work and money than I’m willing to invest.
A tip if you’re in the USA, look at the top right of envelope. If it says “presorted standard” it’s garbage.
I wish they would get rid of all mail except for person to person written letter, checks made out to me, and packages I’ve ordered. Everything else is garbage.
You’d be killing the USPS. They survive because of that garbage.
I’m not convinced they should survive, given all the waste. USPS jobs pay well tho. I’ve made some decent money as a contractor… hauling truckloads of these garbage commercial flyers and nondescript magazines. But in the distribution facilities, I’ve often seen literally shipments of birds, bees, plants, or just glancing down at a pile of mail, might see an obvious love letter. Hopefully not a creep. And all the shipping from Amazon, UPS, Fedex, etc, tends to find its way in a USPS truck.
edit: also, fuck DeJoy. that rat bastard can go back to XPO.
The cool thing about USPS is they are required to deliver to any and all addresses in America. Your Grandma lives in the middle of nowhere and needs her prescriptions? Usps is probably the only service that will deliver that to her.
In fact medication is a top reason why we NEED the USPS to survive
That’s a strange way of spelling “straight to fucking hell”.
Well, that might be how it’s currently primarily funded, but that doesn’t mean that that’s the way it has to be funded.
I would rather pay for more expensive stamps than a time and environmental cost.
Just finished my jury duty and it was a wild ride
Other jurors shocked me with how antaganostic they were to the plaintiff for asking for compensation and punishment for a nursing home’s negligence. We ended up awarding money for clear negligence- specifically for injuries (physical and financial) and pain, but it was a struggle to find agreement from them for clear facts that neither side disputed (and verbally acknowledged this nondispute). When it came time to answer if the doctor was negligent in not consulting a wound physician, they didnt agree because the nursing home policy said “do it if wound doesnt improve in 2-4 weeks”. Wound got worse over the 5-6 weeks they waited and by the time they did, she was so bad from not participating in therapy (due to being laid on the wound constantly and the ensuing pain) that she had had to be put on hospice and died from a lack of dialysis.
Because they didnt find the violation of her rights (violations were agreed to) to be reckless or willful (such as by understaffing or poor care), we could not award additional damages to punish the nursing home
I take solace in the fact that it gave the family closure for a 6 year lawsuit
That second part is surprising to me. “Facility policy” and/or signed paperwork don’t allow a provider to be negligent to someone under their care.
Hell, it wouldn’t even protect individual nurses’ licenses. Any licensed individual who provides care is responsible for following the law, even if “policy” contradicts it.
Thats what I was trying to argue but the other jurors were more concerned with not having to come back on Monday and a “that’s what it says” with no critical thinking. Esp when the plaintiff expert witnesses (an excellent nurse who has a practice investigating nursing homes for compliance with the federal regulations and an excellent doctor who worked for CMS writing the very regulations) outlined what care the law requires
I don’t know anything about this stuff, but if there’s bad judgement because people didn’t want to have to come back, then something is seriously rotten about the system and it doesn’t work. What the hell.
I was taught as a child to open plain envelopes first. Checks, credit cards, and other important stuff are put in boring envelopes.
I worked for a CC company and when we mailed checks to customers we told them “This check will come in a plain white envelope.” And the amount of people who thank me for letting them know because they might have thrown it away.
Who the hell just throws mail away without knowing what it is first? And if it’s not clear from the outside, then without opening it first?
Come to think of it, that’s pretty much email, too.
75% automated notifications or stuff that isn’t quite spam but you don’t care about
23% spam
2% stuff that you better not miss
@The_Picard_Maneuver Here in the UK, sure we get Spam mail but there’s red labels and stuff for really important mail from the government and things and most of the time it’s just telling you to pay for a TV licence that you wouldn’t use as you don’t pay for live TV and just watch YouTube.
If there was a way to highlight official government mail, spam mailers would use it to fool people into thinking it’s something important. I get tons of spam that looks like something official.
Sounds like it would be really easy to put those people in jail for federal offense, yeah? Also if we can print unique, hard-to-duplicate cash, we could do the same for envelope accents, right?
@Semi_Hemi_Demigod They have a few things such as a return address to a government building on the envelope along with the envelope actually being a certain type that I haven’t seen with any other mail.
Sorry, I meant that if such a policy were implemented in the USA it would be abused by spammers. There would be a Supreme Court case where the spammers win because they used a slightly different color and it would suck.
We’re a young democracy and not very good at it.
Similar in Germany. The “we are done playing, ignore this and go to jail” mail will be sent in a special yellow envelope most of the time.
In the US you just shoot the people that try to put ads in your mailbox. Not a lawyer tho so idk. shrug
LPT: probably shouldn’t do this
LPT: If you aren’t caught it isn’t a crime
Thanks for the warning, i almost shot the mailman.
How does this nonsense comment even have upvotes?
Yeah idk man, my brain just produces things and sometimes they just happen to turn into typed text.
Jokes are funny
US thing I’m guessing? Here in Sweden, we don’t get much spam mail in the first place but you simply put a “no ads” sign on your mailbox and then only get the stuff you need. The 8 years I’ve lived in my current apartment I’ve gotten like 3 things that weren’t bills and stuff I need.
In the US, conservative lawmakers have been waging a quiet war against our postal system for a while now.
Highlights: They forced it to be self-sustaining (cut federal funding), then when that didn’t kill it they forced it to, in a very short time frame, pre-fund retirement benefits ahead of time for all current and former employees.
The postal system is more or less dependent on the funds it gets from spam mailers.
Edit: To clarify, I’m not insinuating that the bulk/majority of its income is from junk mail, I’m just stating that its not nothing, so they don’t really have an incentive to kill that source if revenue.
I recently got denied for a public housing program in the US.
I did not find out about this until I was at the local public assistance office for another reason, where I just randomly happened to be told that I was denied by the person who was apparently my case manager.
She said she mailed it a few days ago and was surprised I didn’t get it.
2 weeks later and the actual denial letter never arrived.
…
Keep in mind, almost all government assistance programs in most of the US will correspond by you via mail only. If they email or phone call you, well you still need to show up in person or mail them for most important applications.
And… if they mail you something, they’ll often give you maybe 10 days (not business days, even though everything they do takes business days) to respond and have your response be received by, or they’ll permanently bar you from whatever you are applying for and file it as ‘refused to provide documentation.’
So if your shit gets lost in the mail, fuck you, nobody cares!
…
I have said this in various places on lemmy at other times and people seem to think I am joking, but I am not: If anyone from a functioning country wants to do a sham marriage for tax benefits and I can immigrate there, please let me know. Living off of disability payments alone fucking sucks here.
USPS says you can write “Refused” on your mail to refuse it. I’ve heard that can possibly stop them from sending you more.
If you wanted to actually opt-out from the largest mail advertising organization’s lists though, you have to pay them. Good 'ol capitalism.
As someone who rents so much of my mail is from past residents which I have told them do not live here, or local ads (literally several magazines per month) which I can’t opt out of cause it’s EDDM, that I straight up just stopped collecting it. Any small packages that would have gone in the box go on top of the cluster and any letters I received are stuffed into the box and I pick them out if I happen to notice I’m missing something.
Anyone that really needs my attention would call me or email me shrug
Watch out for jury duty summons.
My address on my license is still my parents house and I haven’t lived there permanently for 18 years. I move around a lot (hopefully I can finally stop that this year) so I wasn’t going to get a new driver’s license every year or two. Whenever I get a summons, I just reply with one of the exclusions (“I live more than 40 miles away”, “I don’t live in the state anymore”, etc…). I’ve never had to go 😂
In my state, you have to update your address on the license (but you dont need to be issued a new card, just update the file)
When I was renting I had a stamp “Return to sender. Addressee not known at this address”
I do similar. Cross the name out with a Sharpie and write “MOVED”.
After owning the place for two years now I just throw it out.
Just so you know, throwing mail away that isn’t yours is a federal crime.
