Is what you do on borrowed time?

Quality Required: Be prepared to die!

I was listening to a podcast this morning featuring Simon Black, Founder, SovereignMan.com and he was talking about things that we do that are past their use by date but are often continuing because they are protected by a Government enforced monopoly. He was ranting about paper copies of things that should be OK as digital things... like agreements that need to be printed, then signed and then usually digitized and stored digitally. Such a waste of time and effort.

he said that the Pony Express was killed off very quickly when telegraph wires followed railway lines across America. I suppose the same can be said of teletext machines when we got fax machines or Faxes when people went to email.

I was wondering therefore if we should really worry that the Post Office is dead... except that we support it with our taxes so it can keep doing stuff the most inefficient and expensive way.

It costs less to buy a book from www.bookdepository.com in the UK, have it shipped nearly next day to Australia than it does to by a express Post bag to send a similar weight of papers to the next suburb in your capital city... and then your guarantee is that if it is not delivered in the said time, they will refund your fee so they can stuff up the delivery on another time sensitive item.

I long for the day when the Post Office is a distance memory just like the Pony Express.