People tweeting stuff. We allow tweets from anyone.
RULES:
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.
Canada as well. There's been pushes to privatize the postal service so they can race to the bottom for profit.
It's very saddening that people fall for this and delude themselves into thinking companies will compete to provide a better service.
Yep, look at phone companies, healthcare, prisons and ISP's in the US to see how privatizing these things shakes out. It's not pretty.
It's one of the only things in the constitution they are required to have. I don't understand how privatizing it was ever constitutional.
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.
Yeah they have to respect it by law, same in Norway
Everything important is by digital mail now though, not to be confused with email ..
Now you're just rubbing it in:
Most people might think that any e-mail provider is good enough, but a digital mailbox is a bit different from an e-mail. The Norwegian digital mailbox is tied to your identity, and much more secure than an e-mail inbox is.
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
Man I've been giving the ASPCA $20 a month for years and not a single address label...
Try Heifer International
In France you just put a sticker or something on your box saying "no ads" and that's it, no more ads posted. It really is quite a bunch of paper every week, too!
Obviously the Internet should remain as public and free as it is/as possible but you just made me want to sell it to France
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
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.
It's literally illegal for a post worker to not give you junk mail in the US.
That's because you're a cucked society who keeps voting for the businessman to sodomize your life.
Ich hab das nicht dran weil ich die freien Zeitungen benutze, um den Biomüll einzupacken 💀
A tip if you're in the USA, look at the top right of envelope. If it says "presorted standard" it's garbage.
In Germany it's "Dialogpost" or "Postwurf Spezial"
Der junkenmailer
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
Economies of scale...s
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.
You can completely opt out of the credit card spam ones with a simple sign up on a federal website, but I forget the exact one and am too lazy to hunt it down. Only lasts 5 years though
Or you can do a full mail in thing for the lifetime one, might do that since I just hit my 5 year and started getting spam again
The site is OptOutPrescreen, by the way!
It's not a federal website, it's a "joint venture among Equifax Information Services, LLC, Experian Information Solutions, Inc., Innovis Data Solutions, Inc., and TransUnion, LLC (collectively the "Consumer Credit Reporting Companies")."
So it's not technically government-enforced in any way, but the credit bureaus just kind of decide to honor it to be... nice?
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.
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.
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
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 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.
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
@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.
Since we're talking about mail:
What do I do with my old bills/insurance statements/etc? I have executive dysfunction and I just can't find a simple method that works for me. It all ends up in a pile and every few months I pitch the whole thing and promise myself to do better next time. Perhaps there's an app, website, or program I should just digitize them into?
You're super likely to not need them yourself, the companies you've dealt with will likely have their records digitized for the 7 required years (or more)
Keep them for 1-6 months to make sure no funny business happens (I've caught my ISP pulling bullshit and proved it with my last 6 bills kept) and then shred them and you'll be fine
Oh, and try to get anything you can sent to an email with privacy, then they come digitized and can be kept forever with no real effort
For me it's 99 spam things and one Manila folder. It's always the VA noticing I exist again and deciding I haven't been fucked with enough recently.