is the post office necessary?

this is another one of those old news stories that i take too long to address. but, really, is the post office necessary? or, alternatively, is the size of the service necessary. i think every zip code has its own brick-n-mortar building. so even your tiny towns have structures. and despite raising rates all the damn time, they are still losing something like $3B a year! it strikes me as a general waste of government resources and natural resources for that matter. how many postal trucks drive how many miles a day? and it's stop and go from mailbox to mailbox to mailbox. what a waste of gas!

now, i dunno about any of you, but is the postal service necessary? for myself, we don't get any mail of substance save magazine subscriptions. all of our bills are emailed, i pay all our bills online and most contact with family and friends that live far away is now done via social media. so what does the p.o do for us? deliver a whole of junk! that's it! most of it ends up in our recycling, catalogs i don't give a shit about (and can see online), credit card offers that i shred, etc. that's just a general waste of paper.

so, what to do about it? can we consolidate offices? especially in parts of the city and the less suburban places, i'd think two zip codes (at least) could be handled by one office. i certainly don't care if a piece of mail takes a few days longer to reach me. again, all my important stuff is emailed and i don't write checks. this could help reduce wasted money for services most of us neither use nor need AND it held save the government money on providing the services and sell the land where p.o's sit for revenue. we raise some money and save some money!

in the meantime, sign up for online banking and paperless billing. and google 'stop junk mail' and help out, huh?

thought this was pretty damn funny....

h/t devin townsend. if you don't know who he is, ya should.

tiger slays melbourne

so i listen to a lot of NPR because it rules. they cover a lot of things that the tradmed doesn't (i'm not that big a fan of the tradmed). more of a global look.

now, i'm a bit late on this one since the tournament is over and all. didja notice tiger woods played the australian masters in melbourne? no? well, shit, he won the damn thing by two strokes. didja know he accepted an appearance fee to play? here's the rub: the appearance fee for him was $3 MILLION. by winning the tournament, he won $300,000. look at those numbers again for me...what if he didn't win? what if he missed the cut?

oh hell, i nearly forgot to tell you WHO paid the appearance fee. that would be the local government.

seriously, i'm a lonely little blogger here and who gives a shit about my opinion on the subject but this bugs the hell outta me. woods makes approximately $75M (prolly more) in endorsements each year, add winnings and whatever else on top and i'll bet my house he's knocking on 9 figures a year.

lots of players/celebrities accept/demand appearance fees and i, on its face, have no issue with that. and i get the point of leverage (money) to appear halfway across the world. but when the appearance fee is 10x the winner take, don't you think there is something tragically out of step? ever more so, during this wonderful economy, that a government paid that fee? NPR said that because of woods' appearance, tickets were sold out for the tournament and officials/organizers/government would make a good chunk of money above and beyond what they paid him. so we're left with a golfer taking $3M in australian taxpayer money. i'd have no issue if this was privately funded, to be clear.

the other part of it is that he accepted the money, or even demanded it! the least woods could do is donate some back into the community. build a park or something for the, ya know, taxpayers. the story didn't seem to get a lot of play here but should brand tiger take a hit for it? i think so, terrible planning there. i think the demand or acceptance (whether it was offered by the australian government or demanded by brand woods was unclear) really stinks. what did the taxpayers get out of this? how do they directly benefit from spending their money to bring woods over? maybe brand tiger should re-examine their guidelines to play in tournaments.

anybody from melbourne reading? fly me out and i'll write and say whatever you want. it's getting cold in chicago...

brock lesnar, really?

so, big news of the day is brock lesnar may never fight again because of some intestinal problem. dana white apparently gave the 'scoop' to TMZ (incidentally, shouldn't they be following kate gosselin? they are a celebrity gossip organization or have a i missed something?). i'm a bit confused on this one. i'll start by saying i don't watch ufc or any mma at all. there's something disturbing about watching these guys TRY to hurt each other...breaking arms, legs, noses, whatever they can for a not-very-large payday. there are lots of stories about how these guys don't get paid very much to fight. contrast with boxing and the fighter's paydays.

back to the point: this is big news? i saw it on cnnsi.com and espn.com and a posts on lots of other blogs i read (now i'm posting on it. hell.). two questions: has mma/ufc hit critical mass where it is considered news for tradmed to cover, beyond the sizable group that follows it? it takes precedence over a lot of other sports stories out there? shit, michelle wie won a damn tournament! in terms of lesser sport stories, i thought that would be the big one. she's actually fulfilling some of that potential. five years + late but she won a tournament! c'mon, wheeeeeeeee wie!!!!!!

redundancy

i don't know why, redundancy really annoys the hell out of me. you don't need to repeat things like that! take, for example, your atm pin. it's not a 'pin number.' the damn thing is already called a personal identification number. you do not need to add the other 'number' to it. then, you'd have a personal identification number number. think about it the next time you say 'pin number' out loud.

or, 'writing a blog.' look, sport, you're blogging! that, as part of its definition, says you're writing. that word, blog, has become quite versatile. it can be a verb, noun, adjective, etc. reminds me of another word.

anyway, stupid people...