>USPS® ZIP Code Boundaries - Publication

>Four quarterly updates with limited publication.

Sharing it with everyone is probably going to get you banned from getting quarterly updates, as there's strings attached. Though I do wonder just how they keep track. Are they fingerprinting the data somehow? Does that make the dataset less useful?

The data does change though, and I wouldn't be surprised if at this boutique subscription pricing it's individually fingerprinted

I vote you pay for it and share it with us for free.

(Or start a gofundme for it.)

You wouldn't steal from the post office would you?

ZIP codes aren’t even guaranteed to be polygons. Most data sets use the census bureau’s ZIP code tabulation area.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZIP_Code_Tabulation_Area

That’s not an accident. Congress made it a requirement that the USPS pre fund their pension plans, decades in advance. The only government institute required to do such a thing.

It is great for governments to run responsible budgets, but this was such a unique constraint, it seems designed to strangle the USPS.

Due to Baumol's Cost Disease and email, it doesn't make sense to be paying labor to drop off junk mail every single weekday. Cutting this by 2/days a week in urban areas and by 3 days/week in rural would save incredible amounts.

Yeah, we're in weird times where things that should be non-partisan have become very partisan. The postal service has become a lightning rod for the most extreme elements; privatization and anti-democracy activists want to kill it, including the guy who's supposed to be running it. Since they can't easily kill it, they just make it suck in every way they can.

USPS is run as a financially self-sustaining business wholly owned by the federal government. (So, not for profit, but also not funded by the government.)

For a long time it was in this weird double bind because the federal government mandated generous health insurance for USPS employees, but did not allocate funds for it, because USPS was supposed to provide its own funds to cover all expenses. It looks like new legislation (PSRA) was finally passed in 2022 to move that burden from USPS and onto the OPM.

It wasn't intended to be profitable. It was intended to provide a public service in the national interest. Any funds raised through postage were to hopefully offset the considerable costs, but the considerable costs were in and of themselves seen as a necessary expenditure for a critical responsibility of the federal government, no more or less so than the considerable costs associated with the raising of armies and navies for the defense of the nation.

there might be an argument for it since DeJoy has been trying to run it like amazon ruining rural service

No??? It's an independent bit of the exec branch designed to operate as a public service. You should have learned this in high school civics class

No?

It always kind of weirds me out just how much of the inside of The Pentagon is dedicated shopping space. I mean, I get the full food court and maybe the barbershop. But the full-sized CVS? The candy store? The local chain specialty bundt-cake store with the punny name? The souvenir shop in the central area, away from the souvenir shop where the public tours go. It feels like it's trying to say "America's defense rests on exporting commerce" without knowing it's actually trying to say that.