Losing Sunday Delivery Was Religious/Losing Saturday Delivery is Religious

http://news.blogs.cnn.com/2011/04/18/seventh-day-adventist-community-loses-sunday-mail-delivery/

I'd heard on the radio that some SDA communities had Sunday delivery rather than Saturday. At least one of those lost Sunday delivery a couple years ago. There may be a couple holdouts.

The computer-doesn't-recognize-Sunday-as-a-workday thing seems like BS. The USPS will delivery packages on Sunday if you pay them enough.

The SDA/Saturday delivery relationship has some other ramifications. It's hard to work for USPS if you observe the Sabbath on Saturday. Eliminating Saturday delivery might make USPS an easier employer for SDA members to work for.

http://advindicate.com/?p=2743

"Seventh-day Adventist Church Associate Counsel Todd McFarland ... [said] "For decades the USPS has been the single most troublesome employer for those seeking Sabbath workplace accommodation. Halting Saturday delivery will not only prevent many future Sabbath observance conflicts for Adventists employed by the post office, but will help resolve current situations in which mail carrier-church members are experiencing discrimination”".

A Jewish take on mail on Saturday:

http://judaism.stackexchange.com/questions/640/mail-delivery-on-shabbos

A bit more about Sunday delivery from a Sunday-Sabbath site:

http://religiousliberty.tv/church-state-and-the-postal-service-the-contentious-history-of-sunday-mail-delivery-2.html

Looks like the remaining Sunday deliveries are done by private post offices (contracting to USPS).

The USPS' official history of delivery

I had an old, broken URL for this and just now found the current one:

about.usps.com/who-we-are/postal-history/delivery-monday-through-saturday.pdf

It is out of date, written when Loma Linda still had Sunday delivery (date on it is June 2009).

According to this, the 1957 suspension of Saturday service lasted for exactly one Saturday, which explains why people mention a particular date (April 13) for this suspension, but no _end_ date -- that's because the suspension only applied that one day.

The LBJ suspension was partial but lasted a lot longer, and I would characterize it as yet another example of the 1960s screwing cities and favoring suburbs, since the only deliveries suspended were the ones done on foot.

"In May 1964 the Post Office Department ended Saturday delivery of Parcel Post in 6,091 cities where carriers made deliveries on foot – again, to save money. Delivery resumed in January 1966 after President Lyndon B. Johnson promised to seek increased funding from Congress. Johnson considered “a good, stable, dependable postal system . . . vital to the well-being of the nation’s economy.”7"

Footnote 5 addresses, indirectly, the Poor Rural People Really Must Have Saturday Delivery:

"Tri-weekly rural routes were established where mail volume was not sufficient for six-day delivery. The 1906 Annual Report of the Postmaster General (page 330) indicates that .6% of rural routes were tri-weekly. A postal survey in 1999 found that approximately .06% of rural customers received tri-weekly delivery."

Macmillan and DOJ reach agreement

http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-57568377-93/macmillan-reaches-e-book-pricing-settlement-with-doj/

While Macmillan admits no wrongdoing as part of the settlement, this would appear to be an important component of the deal:

"The proposed settlement agreement will impose a strong antitrust compliance program on Macmillan, including requirements that it provide advance notification to the Justice Department of any e-book ventures it plans to undertake jointly with other publishers and regularly report to the department on any communications it has with other publishers."

I'm reasonably certain that was some of what they were hoping to avoid. The usual no Most Favored for 5 years is in the deal as well.

Sargent's commentary, as usual, is a little breathtaking:

"Macmillan CEO John Sargent said in a letter posted online that the company ultimately settled "because the potential penalties became too high to risk even the possibility of an unfavorable outcome.""

I would like to refer Sargent to Seth Godin's thin, but in retrospect increasingly important _The Dip_. And also to say, gee, that finally occurred to you? Altho I suppose Macmillan may, like a lot of other people (corporate and otherwise), have been hoping for a different electoral outcome in November and, as a result, a shakeup at DOJ that might have resulted in more agreeable people (from the publishers perspective).

Governor Patrick bans traffic on roads after 4 p.m.

All I can say is, we'd _better_ get a ton of snow, or it's gonna be hard to convince people to take future forecasts seriously.

Turns out you _can_ convert a weekday to a weekend-day, if you try, and you have enough notice. This may have the effect of making this storm, after it is all over and done and shoveled away, as forgettable as previous substantial snowstorms that occurred on weekend days.

It wasn't just the shit that made horse-based transport horrible

They had influenza epidemics, too.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equine_influenza

Specifically, the Boston Fire of 1872 was as bad as it was because they had to have _people_ pull the steam powered pump wagons, as the horses were so sick they couldn't stand up in their stalls, much less work. Also, caused a Panic in 1873. Affected warfare. Etc.

File under things that would have made history so much more entertaining to a morbid tweener, if only because it completely horrified a bunch of the rest of the classroom.

Albany Law School

I just discovered that a (deceased) 4th cousin twice removed attended Albany Law School. Kinda funny, since I have a sister-in-law who works there.

I knew that this branch of my family was hyper-local to those in-laws, but every specific instance cracks me up.