Author Archives: Michael Froomkin

Apparently this is not a Washington Monument ploy: the USPS plans to discontinue Saturday delivery.

The Post Office’s money troubles stem from totally unreasonable congressional requirements, not imposed on any private business, that they fund not just current retiree’s pensions or 401(k) contributions for current employees (the private sector standard), nor just current employees’ future pensions, nor just projected future pensions for the next 20-25 years (the standard for most federal agencies), but all future pensions for all future projected retirees in the next 75 years. The idea, I have to presume, is to put the Post Office out of business and privatize its functions — a really bad idea when you consider that we rely on Post Offices to issue passports and to do other critical jobs like distribute medicine in the event of an epidemic.

I predict more credit cards will make bills due on weekends, forcing people to pre-pay, adding to their float.

Speaking selfishly, this makes me happier that I decided finally to stop renewing the Economist on the grounds that its politics were too predictable and its analysis increasingly threadbare. It came Saturday (on good weeks), which made it seem less dated and I had more time to look at it. Getting it on Monday at best will make it even less attractive.

Former NYC Mayor Ed Koch — who just a few days ago was still going, if a bit weakly — has died. The NYT has a very readable obituary, which notes,

Besides his sister, a former dean at New York University whom he saw regularly in later years, Mr. Koch is survived by New York itself, as an old friend put it a few years ago.

Koch’s generally successful tenure was buoyed by his outsized and quotable personality but stained by what could most charitably be called insensitivity to New York’s racial problems; to a distant observer that insensitivity sometimes looked more calculated. It’s odd to read again about the many scandals involving Koch’s associates that brought him down; that isn’t what sticks in memory nearly as much as Koch dooming his run for Governor by knocking upstate as too rural and Albany as devoid of a decent Chinese restaurant.