No, it’s not a private business, rather it’s an independent agency of the US Federal Government.
The thing is that the USPS has still got to work thru the US Congress in order to make any structural changes, such as altering the days of delivery or employee related items. Not like UPS or FedEx which have a much more free hand in what they do to run their businesses.
Mark Gosdin
Which makes sense, since the Constitution puts the Post Office entirely under the thumb of Congress and since the USPS has Ent-like slowness when it comes to adapting and the only way to have that Treebeard-like slowness is to be part of the federal government 
Amazon’s hand-off to the USPS is causing my shipments to rack up a delay of at least a day. I also don’t like the hand-off as USPS has a bit of a history with putting mail into the wrong boxes in my neighborhood.
I don’t know how it is there, but here it’s harder to not get a license as the test is astonishingly perfunctory: there’s no “real world” road course in the test, just a drive through a course (containing no other cars) that is designed to test a prospective driver’s ability to perform a 3 point turn, go in reverse in a straight line and parallel park. That’s the kind of o_0 stuff that makes you start to think that states shouldn’t honor the licenses of other states so readily.
I only had see FedEx to USPS, and my luck so far is that FedEx will always estimate one more day, meaning, if they say it will be delivered on Saturday, it ends up at my house on Friday. It’s even more funny when on their page, they say to except delivery in one or two days after they hand it off to USPS.
So I’m checking out the dub of Initial D Fourth Stage and the video is really weird: it’s 16:9 widescreen but Funimation surrounded the video on all sides with large black bars, making the video a really small rectangle in the middle of the screen.
Because it is widescreen, I can stretch the video to the screen with no deforming. However, in their infinite wisdom, Funimation put the subtitles partially into the completely-unnecessary black bars, making them unviewable when the video is at its proper size.
How’d Funi have such a video fail?
Well I’m, shall we say irritated, with the UPS -> USPS combo right now.
I ordered a camera last week, it shipped out of New Jersey just fine made it to UPS in Orlando ( OIA Airport I believe ) and was supposed to go to our Kissimmee PO this morning. From OIA that is a less than 20 minute drive.
Noooo, UPS takes it to the main PO in ORLANDO, which then in their typical USPS confusion puts it on a truck for delivery there. That’s about 25 miles from where I’m located.
Right now tracking still shows it “Out for Delivery”, but who knows how long it will take for USPS to fix UPS’s mistake.
I’d growl but I just don’t have the heart for it.
Mark Gosdin
Actually, I need to correct my FedEx->USPS status, the one time an order didn’t get to me quickly it bounced out the New * states for whatever reason, and FedEx gave up, and gave it to a USPS office on the east coast somewhere. USPS handled the rest correctly from there. Took a week… While an order that came from Texas with the FedEx->USPS came in three days. And that was sent the day after the one that took a week.
Update on the wandering package, USPS tracking now shows it as “Status Not Updated” since midnight last night. I suppose they have a default that if a package misses a tracking scan after it goes on the Delivery Truck it posts a sort of warning message.
Over the years I have had a lot of packages shipped via USPS Priority, FedEx 2nd Day and UPS 2nd Day, they all made it to me on time. It’s when these combo shipping methods showed up that the wheels seem to have come off.
I think that the carriers really don’t have their hearts in this, so their customers don’t get the service that they’ve been promised.
Mark Gosdin
I really don’t understand the point in the combo deal . Had four packages delivered last month using both setups . FedEx to USPS ones both got misplaced for a day . UPS to USPS ones UPS ended up delivering both instead of doing the transfer .
Update #2 - the wandering package’s magical mystery tour continues. Overnight the USPS rewrote their tracking history removing the attempt to deliver in Orlando entries and replacing them with a “Forwarded” and “Sorting Completed” entries.
It still has the “Status Not Updated” entry from Saturday night.
This gives me some hope that my camera wasn’t left sitting on someones doorstep in south Orlando.
UPS offers an “option” to convert the joint shipments to regular UPS Ground. Believe me I will be taking advantage of that in the future.
Mark Gosdin
How doee one engage that option? I don’t plan on ordering much from Amazon but if I should order something from them then I’d like it to be shipped here directly via ups, instead of being in limbo for days due to the USPS handoff.
(Amazon has only opened a tiny center here so stuff still ships normally. Their big distro center won’t open here for a few months)
You sign up for UPS’s MyUPS, as far as I know that is free at least it was when I signed up a couple of years ago. Then you have options regarding notification text messages and delivery that you can use, like having the combo shipment delivered by UPS instead or having them hold it at their dock for you to pick up. There may be more, I haven’t looked at it in a while.
Final Update on the wandering package, it was delivered today even though the tracking never updated after it was shipped to Orlando. Package was in good condition and the camera was undamaged.
The Pentax Q7 itself is a nicely made camera with a BIG viewscreen on the back. No rangefinder, but you don’t really need one with that screen. The box shows where all the major components come from, body - Philippines, lens - Vietnam, cables + charger - China, software - Hong Kong. Sadly Japan’s industries have been hollowed out, in some cases, much like the US has.
Mark Gosdin
Is it really preferable to ship labor out to the third world instead of having robots doing it in the first world? The bonus of that would be that robots are cool.
I do find it interesting that the Japanese car companies have outsourced some labor to the US and that they’ve discovered how to keep the 3rd party unions over here out (which have been the bane of the Big 3 for eons).
Really? I find myself wishing that digital cameras would focus on the viewfinders again as viewscreens mean that I have to hold the camera a few inches in front of my face and I find that to be a bit awkward. Though I can’t say that I’ve used too many modern digital cameras in the class of that Q7.
I hadn’t heard of that. Thanks
A viewfinder would cost more, of course, plus adds complexity to the camera, not much but enough to make a difference in terms of cost to manufacture and selling price. Most folks use their phone camera now so they are not conditioned to expect anything other than having to hold the screen a few inches out in front of their face. You and I are “old fogies” in that regard.
Big ticket items like cars make sense to manufacture closer to where you intend to sell them. So Japanese manufacturers have a good reason to make cars in the US / Canada / Mexico for the North American market. Japanese companies have a history of cooperation between their versions of Unions and Business Management. The US has a tradition of an adversarial relationship. It’s not too surprising that the plants built by the Japanese car makers have refused to negotiate with US style unions. Good ol’ culture clash.
Mark Gosdin
I can’t say that I like looking at the viewscreen and seeing the world portrayed in it as much as I like to look through the viewfinder and see the world as the camera sees it. When I have the camera at my eye, I can more easily track a shot with the camera, I find. It also feels more secure having the device against my face as that gives it 3 points of contact with the body; holding my phone out near the edge of a scenic overlook to snap a pic is always a dreadful experience.
Preferring “retro” technology puts one on either the “old fogie” side of the fence or the “hipster” side and I prefer being on the former than the latter 
On another note, I saw that the Japanese have forced Funi into using an Engrish title as the official North American title for one of their shows. It really chaps my hide that the Japanese keep doing this. Maybe we need to send Samuel L. Jackson over there because they haven’t realized that they don’t speak English
http://www.funimation.com/blog/2014/10/10/daitoshokan-no-hitsujikai-gets-new-english-name/
I understand preferring the traditional SLR or Rangefinder on a camera. I’ve got a collection of cameras from the 60’s, 70’s & 80’s that includes classic 35mm SLR’s. I love the feel of them, but to be honest I don’t carry them around much and like the kids in Hidamari Sketch I’m uncomfortable carrying around a $1000 DSLR because of it’s cost.
So the $250 Digital that can take the classic SLR’s lenses on an adapter is a compromise that I’m more comfortable with. At least until I can find one of those $1000 DSLR’s on Craigslist for $200.
I don’t know were you are from Celestial, the Japanese title for the Librarian series does not sound out as “bad” English to me. Of course I’m from Southeastern Oklahoma, which has a mix of Pennsylvania & Texas old South English with a dash of Choctaw & Chickasaw native speaker’s accents thrown in. Think a slightly less hick sounding Bill Clinton, in the literal sense my home town was at the beginning of the railroad line, Clinton’s was at the end.
Mark Gosdin
No matter how I look at it, “A librarian like a good shepherd” is missing something, either a verb or some punctuation to facilitate the addition of a verb. Since you got me thinking of Clinton, “is” would be a suitable verb 
“A good librarian is like a good shepherd” would work or “A good librarian, like a good shepherd, …” would be less off-putting as it leaves open the possibility for tacking on the missing necessities needed to go from Engrish to English, like “A good librarian, like a good shepherd, is hard to find”.
Though the long and short of it is, as far as I’m concerned, that Japan should leave the English duties for North American releases to the guys who make their living releasing anime in North America to English speaking audiences. Micromanagement 
D&D helps Children’s Miracle Network Hospitals, through Extra Life, but instead of focusing on the hospitals/charity, this year it is using its own website to promote its new version of D&D and giving bonuses to people for reaching stretch goals like a kickstarter which basically means they are using CMNH as free advertising rather than focus on giving to the charities.
In addition Keith Baker the creator of Eberron is asking for people to support Eberron so he can show WotC that people are intersted and using the charity donations as a polling service/webcounter and says everywhere he is doing this primarily to get support for Eberron to be printed for the new version of D&D, and not with the charity as his main goal for participating.
When a billion dollar business scams charities you have to know something is wrong, but hey, maybe HASBRO is not so well off since they lost control over their TV station so they are trying to abuse charities because they cannot afford to pay for advertising?
related links:
http://keith-baker.com/support-eberron/ “Support Eberron!”
http://dnd.wizards.com/articles/news/extra-life
http://www.enworld.org/forum/showthread.php?367593-Please-Support-Eberron! “Please Support Eberron”
http://www.enworld.org/forum/showthread.php?367594-Please-Support-Eberron! “Please Support Eberron”
note. the last two will require copy and pasting since this so called “forum” cannot handle URLs containing letters it feels do not belong in them and fails to handle a literal string containing an exclamation point. must be running on Windows server…
At this point the audacity and unethical behavior such as this makes me feel Pooh-Boy is a more upstanding role model for ANYONE than the company that stole a game from Quackers to make billions off of (HASBRO).
Purposefully publicized charitable work is all about the “optics”. Anything else is ancillary. This is just more honest than usual. The charity gets the money, this Eberron property gets advertisement and potentially gets support from Wizards and everyone involved benefits.
Maybe it is cynical but it doesn’t sound like a scam to me.
Yep, Cynical use of a charity. Tons of it. Scam? Maybe a little,
It’s all about getting a big company interested enough in something to spend money it.
Mark Gosdin
