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Michael Boyle's weblog

John Robb

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of Userland Software believes that the USPS shoudn’t be saved. He writes, “Too many workers are in jobs that aren’t leveraged by computer automation” and later states that the postal service is resistant to automation.

According to recent data from the USPS and FedEx, the USPS looks damned efficient. They delivered 200 billion pieces of mail a year with, Robb cites, 300 thousand employees. FedEx delivered 526 million pieces with 215,000 employees. Even if all but 10% of the USPS traffic were addressed and unaddressed admail, that’s still a great deal more volume delivered than FedEx with only 85,000 more employees.

Just got back from

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a couple of days in the country at a cottage without electricity, with a privy out back, and folks who make some lovely music. Anyhow I was half dreading coming back, as there were a couple of little nit-picky things I had to do soon, if not tonight.

One of them was to register my copy of Sig Software’s Drop Drawers, which gives me popup folder functionality in OS X. A good little app, and something I’m happy to pay $15 for through Kagi. And it turned out to be the easiest thing in the world to register the copy on my box. I just copied a long text block from the email they sent me and started the app. It read the clipboard, saw that my code was there and that’s it – the thing was registered. Beautiful in its simplicity. A nice way to ease into the week – other times I’ve had nightmares with non-functioning registration procedures and such.

Michael Boyle Blog