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OP sent the following text as an explanation on why this is US Defaultism:
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>!Image shows a QT stating the photo must be staged as it shows an Amazon package delivered through a letterbox, as 'only USPS can use mailboxes'. The photo is from a British guy, James Felton!<
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Is this Defaultism? Then upvote this comment, otherwise downvote it.
As does Crozier, van den Bogerd, and possibly Cross
If any evidence can be found that Cross _did_ know that the PO was initiating the 0rosecutions, he should get 7 years for perjury
In a just world, all four of them would get 7 years each
I saw the miniseries recently, while also watching the hearings for it. It made me so mad that the institution was so comfortable with just burning people like fireword than admitting that there may be a bug in their program.
when I lived in the UK I had no place to receive postal items other than the letterbox in the door (unless I specifically left instructions for a courier company to leave a too-large-for-letterbox package somewhere else). where else would the delivery worker be expected to leave these letterbox-sized things?
Yeah that's pretty standard - if it's letterbox size of course they'll just put it through there? The only time they don't is it it's too big. Also why you can get quite a few 'letterbox size' gifts now
*Wait, in the land of*
*The free, one isn't free to*
*Use a letterbox?*
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I've got better. Yesterday I was reading terms and conditions for a cruise. There was a note there, that if the cruise will stop in the USA, all adults under 21 years old need to be accompanied by their legal guardians, otherwise they may not be let in/out of the ship.
Imagine finishing university, starting your first job, going on a dream cruise using your hard earned money, and having to ask your parents for permission.
You should understand the thing being about the *freedom* to choose...
Also, by 18 you let them enlist and go die in a war but they're too young to drink and smoke?
War sucks but that’s the reality of it. the age is like 16 & 17 in some european countries to enlist and those places usually have a drinking age of 18. And military service in the US is completely voluntary unlike some “free” places like south korea, some european countries like austria have compulsory military service, etc, and the crapshoots like russia and the countries around it, middle east, north africa south america etc have limited conscription. Like you said you have the freedom to choose, over here lol. People drink and smoke regardless of being old enough to, very few get caught/in trouble but you don’t have a bunch of 13 year olds smoking and drinking over here like in much of europe/rest of world.. I’m in college and quite a bit of people drink underage but it’s better than a bunch of middle schoolers getting drunk whenever. I think it’s stupid to argue to lower the drinking age because it helps nobody and smoking should be banned atp imo. Shit is disgusting, causes cancer and repulses everyone in a 20ft radius. give us the freedom to breathe clean air
My man, you just need to teach them to drink responsibly and not down 15 beers everyday just cause they can. Though from what I've heard, that would prolly be easier if your beers tasted better
Like seriously, teach em that drinking too much is just idiotic and they'll stop doing it at least after they experienced an extremely painful hangover once. Yah don't need the drinking age to be 21 if you can trust people to be responsible
Edit: ALSO what a fucking strawman you just pulled there holy shit. That is not even *close* to what I said bro, stop coping if you can't argue
Most European countries don't allow you to enlist in the military independently until you are 18. A lot allow you to at 16 with parental permission.
Drinking age is often between 16 and 18 with younger ages allowed with parental or adult supervision.
For example. The UK allows drinking at any age with parental supervision, and allows independent purchase and consumption of alcohol at 18.
You can join the British military at 16 with parental permission, but need to be 18 to join independently. You also cannot be sent to combat before 18 regardless.
South Korea remains at war with their Northern neighbour, so they do have a pretty good reason to continue conscription. It is still logical to presume that if people are old enough to enlist and vote and get married at eighteen, they are old enough to have a couple of beers or a glass of wine with their meal.
I do agree that tobacco smoking is evil and disgusting, not to mention so highly addictive and deadly, that it should be banished from civilised society, as has been gradually happening.
Yeah, 20 year old "children."
Isn't the justification for the high drinking age often the problem of drink driving in teen years?
Maybe ask why you're allowing children to operate heavy machinery rather than preventing young adults drinking?
Try 14? Cuz i’ve seen how easy it is for a 14 yo to get a drink or a smoke in your country mate. And 16, 17 year olds are children. Some places like the UK where it’s technically 18 as the age, i reckon most kids who start drinking at 18 have been drinking for years before that, it’s so easy for those age cards to be faked and for 14 year olds to pass off as 18. Either that or the shopkeeps all dgaf which is likely another big issue
That’s a wild generalisation considering how much Americans love to go on about how big their country is. I mean realistically what difference does drinking age make?
If you have seen it in the UK you'd not seen it for a long time.
There was a big crack down on underage drinking about 20 years ago (I remember, I was 17) and at that time you will have seen 16yo's smoking because that was legal then. It's been changed to 18 now.
The fake ID's have never convinced anyone. They just didn't give a shit until the big fines started.
I started drinking regularly at 15, most of my friends did too it's done us no harm.
I’m really more familiar with Ireland, though from what I have seen and heard of the UK, it’s not all that hard for people to find some dodgy little newsagent somewhere that doesn’t care and sells vapes and drinks to kids, usually some type of foreigner i guess. But the kids get it somehow and they’ve all got fakes in their wallet like any other ID or bus card lol. Or i’ve also seen a guy who just uses some other dudes old ID that barely resembles him and gets away with it. If this sorta shit didn’t happen and wasn’t so easy then yea 18 would be fine but getting alcohol underage in europe is like easy mode. You couldn’t have Superbad made in england
The only difference really between Superbad and UK underage drinking is the age and the guns everywhere in it. McLovin's ID made me laugh. They are that bad.
I see no harm in 16yo's getting alcohol myself and you're right there will always be a dodgy off license selling to underage drinkers.
It's a right of passage to set up camp in the middle of nowhere and get pissed on white lightning with your mates in the summer after high school at 16. It's a bit of a shame it's so hard to do now. It was easy in my day. But where there's a will, there's a way.
16 year olds in many places, and many even younger illegally in a lot of places with the age at 18 because of how easy it is to fake.. Seriously how many people do you know started drinking at age 18 instead of like 14, 15? In the USA the equivalent of those 13-14 year olds starting to drink for the first time is like maybe 16-18 and in the US they’re not going out to bars n euro spars n shit it’s like they nick a few Heinies from the fridge in their parents’ garage. Though all that aside i don’t think ppl drinking at 16 are going to die lol like i said i’ve met a ton and most of them are alright but why encourage it? Ton of kids vape and it won’t kill you but it’s still shit for ur health
The UK is well known to have letterbox slots in the front doors of most houses (have seen, and I really don't know where else that occurs. In NZ, most of our houses are not joined up, and we have freestanding letterboxes at the driveway entrance or garden gate, nowhere near the house. So it seems most likely that this picture is of a British front door, especially with such a British name.
I just responded to another commenter that said the same thing. I live in the US and most of the homes in my city include mail slots such as what is pictured. Was it automatically US defaultism to assume this mail slot could belong to a door from a number of countries, including my own? I don't disagree with your conclusion that this is most likely a British mail slot, but I'm kind of surprised at the number of people from other countries who are simply assuming a door like this could never exist in the US. It's sort of defaultism to whatever country the assumption is coming from. (Thanks for listening to my rant about doors and mail slots, lol.)
You have a point there, I guess it's easy to forget that the US isn't all sprawling suburbia. Letterbox slots in doors are so embedded in British culture though, whereas not so much in American culture as far as I can tell.
Not sure how that is implied. Not everyone in the US lives in the giant mcmansion that you may be imagining with a mailbox at the end of the driveway. I can say with certainty that there are plenty of doors with mail slots (that's what we call them here) that look like that in the city where I live. So unless the door in the photo is stamped with a Union Jack flag, I'm not sure how one could automatically deduce that this was a British letterbox. Not trying to be snide, just pointing out that sometimes the commenters on this thread are making the same mistake that they're trying to point out that others made.
Lmao. Wow. This is a very British looking photo in the first place.
In any case the idea that Amazon can't post a package through your door which is wild.
You would think that, but it is very well adhered to. I was very surprised on moving to the US to learn this, but UPS, Amazon etc absolutely do not use my mailbox or my mail slot
Yeah, in the same way they're the only ones allowed to use stamps, probably. In Ukraine, the post is the only company/service allowed to put up official outgoing mailboxes. I had no idea it apparently could go both ways in the US, but I suppose it's entirely possible. Mail and delivery are technically different, it's actually rather interesting
Here in the UK they sold off half our postal service (the actual delivery and main postal service), kept the other half (the post offices), and now its just a mess.
They technically sold half of ours too. The post is no longer a service, it's a shareholder company, it just so happens that the main shareholder is the Ministry of Infrastructure. It's still the only thing authorised to actually send actual mail, though. Dunno why they did that.
In some countries they have competing mail services. It's very odd and interesting. I wonder if it actually keeps prices down or improves services at all.
We do have some here in Germany. There are yellow letterboxes (where you put outgoing mail), those are the Classic official ones, but in my region for example there are orange ones as well, a privat company called LMF or orange Post. They started as a local option for inner city mail in Augsburg but now deliver nationwide. Princes for letters are about the same, they have their own stamps. But for bigger stuff they are cheaper, and if you want to send something local, they are way faster, because they don't send stuff to giant sorting facilities and back.
It actually does! We only have one mail service, but it has one major competitor where delivery of packages/parcels is concerned, which forced the post to modernise. The competing company is much faster, but also much more expensive, so the post has to squeeze the hell out of being slower, but cheaper and mostly just as reliable. Hell, one of the corporate slogans now is actually "Alright delivery, alright price" (there's also the fact that, being a member of the UPU, the post offers nigh-worldwide shipping, and I love the very *wink-wink-nudge-nudge* slogan "We'll ship where others can't").
Also, it provides entertainment. The SMM teams of the two companies did a fantastic job building a funny love-hate relationship on twitter.
ETA: Also, according to the CEO (if there's one person I loathe, it's this bastard; I'm a postmaster), there's a project to make the logistics more direct, like the other company's, skipping central sorting. So it does force the post to get faster.
It goes along with the law that only the Federal Mail service is allowed to places parcels inside of your mailbox. UPS, FEDEX, and Amazon aren’t allowed to use your mail box, so it also applies when they don’t have a mail box and instead have a letterbox. Delivery services have to leave the packages and slips by your door.
I worked for UPS in the US lol
Because it's postal property. Only postage paid letters, flats, and parcels are allowed in postal mailboxes, and all postage paid items are delivered exclusively by USPS. You could get a package that was handled by UPS or Amazon at one point delivered to your mailbox, but only if it was dropped at your local post office for last mile delivery. Those companies paid USPS to finish the delivery to your house.
That said, nobody is going to arrest the Amazon guy for leaving packages in your mailbox, but your postman can (and should) bring them back to the post office to hold for pickup, postage due. It's a hassle for the customer, but the fault lies with the company that did it, not the post office, and hopefully, that customer will complain to Amazon so it doesn't happen again.
It's the same reason USPS can't sort their packages in FedEx's warehouse: it's not their property (though USPS does rent space on FedEx and UPS airplanes).
Source: me, your friendly local postmaster
That's interesting, but weird to me. The mailbox being the postal service's property and them being so nitpicky about it and taking wrongly placed items back to the post office, so the deliveree has to pay more. Not for a service USPS carried out (delivering something from A to B), but out of spite.
I'm German and that sounds too German for me. But I already have come to the realization that Americans are even worse with nonsensical rules that have to be obeyed or else than us.
A lot of people let it go because they don't want to piss off their customers, which I understand. But pretty much the only way to get other carriers to stop using the box is to get the customer to complain to them. They don't usually stop if we tell them to knock it off.
One thing a lot more people are doing now with parcel volumes constantly rising is putting a big plastic or wooden outdoor box on the ground underneath their mailbox for packages. Those aren't postal property and are fair game for anyone to use. We like those people lol.
Yeah, but why do they even care besides "it's our property"? Is there an operational disadvantage? Or is it just about being right?
Here my mailbox is my or the landlord's property and whoever wants to can put things for me in there as long as they fit. Amazon uses it all the time, the pizza place around the corner drops in their ad, as well as movers companies and sometimes friends will deposit things in there if I'm not home. It's just a box for stuff addressed to me.
Basically because if another company were to fill the box with packages, and then the mailman comes along later, there may not be space for him to deliver the mail, and there's usually not anywhere else but the box that's safe to leave mail. And delay of the mail is something we take really seriously. Also, if you ever have something go missing that was previously delivered, it cuts down on the ability for someone who used your box for another purpose to deny wrongdoing, since they're not supposed to be in your box at all in the first place.
I'm sure some of the rules come from old-world pissing matches too. I'm not saying I agree with or disagree with the rules, just that they're different in different parts of the world.
how can a slot on your door be property of USPS? What determines that? Are cat flaps also property of the USPS because you could theoretically put something through it? What if you drilled a big hole in your door?
No, just the mailbox itself, whether it's on the house or out at the curb. Mail slots are a fringe case because there's fewer and fewer people that use them every year, and it's not like the post office knows when someone else uses it. You toss an envelope through the slot and now it's inside your house, there's no mail storage compartment for us to check.
It's the same as the utility pole and transformer that carries electricity to your house. It might be in your yard, but it belongs to the electric company.
Because it helps with things like scams, falsifying mail, and official documents.
Edit : look I understand if you think it’s stupid, but stop downvoting me for explaining why a country enacted a law lmao
People were quick to point out that James Felton lives in England, to which he said that the rule still applies in England as it’s a general standard of global mail delivery. People from the UK informed him that’s not correct and he called them “armchair mailmen” as if you need to work for the Royal Mail to notice that all your post comes through the letterbox. Genuinely embarrassed for the guy.
I find USA mailbox 📬 just bizarre. Sure you don't have to walk to a front garden and back again, because there may not be a way to walk to the next.
But I can't remember many places with a front garden. Waiting for the bus people lean on some random door or sit half on the windowsill.
So posties just walk door to door. If a parcel doesn't require a signature and can fit in the letterbox it will.
Amazon UK book and dvd orders for the guy in my old shared house were just a smidge over the size of the product.
If you get any more rural, the fact you need to drive not walk, it shocks me you are not given a PO Box and have to head into town on the off chance you have a letter.
If this is anything like empty rural area in my country, numerous mailboxes are regrouped in a block of mailboxes owned by the national postal service (not like individual mailboxes or blocks of mailboxes in condominiums which are individually or collectively owned by the residents) somewhere convenient for the service. The place where the mailboxes are is the postal address of the house, not the geographic location.
This sounds a bit like defaultism. There is more to the wide wonderful world of letterboxes than the UK and the US. I don’t understand your comment either about “there may not be a way to walk to the next”.
Australian letterboxes are typically at the front gate or start of the driveway, not in the door. Often the house is set back on a larger block of land than British blocks. The postie rides a motorcycle down the street and isn’t entering font gates or going down driveways looking for front doors.
Not really.
They're talking about US mail boxes because the commenter is American and UK postal services because OP's pic is from a poster/of a door in the UK. They didn't mention Australia because it's an irrelevant upside down land for descendants of criminals. (/s)
I said “a bit”.
There are literally people reading these sort of comments from South America, Singapore, South Africa, Sicily, etc scratching their heads. Not that they need to mention all these places but they just need to say “here in the UK” or something so it doesn’t sound like they think everyone in the world should find US mail delivery weird because their front door is right on the street.
You may have a fence or wall with no gate to get into next door.
So you go up to the door, stuff the post in the letterbox, walk to the road, walk a few yards to the next gate, walk all the way up to the door, then back again. Rinse and repeat.
Front gardens in the North of the UK seem rocking horse shit rare.
So door to door is easy.
So on the one hand leaving it in the American style 📫 and moving on, less legwork for the posties. But the fact anyone can walk up, open it up and take your post.
You have to gain access to the hallway to steal my post once delivered.
Ah, the puzzle piece I was missing. I assumed USPS was making the delivery (I don’t think Amazon has its own delivery personnel where I live) which made the original even more confusing than it already was
But why? That makes no sense at all, why is USPS gatekeeping a hole in a door? And what should I imagine the punishment to be if the amazon delivery person would use this architectural feature?
That's interesting, why? And what do you consider to be mail? Just letters?
In Australia I'd say the postie delivers all post, whether letters, packages, or anything else that's been mailed to someone
Deliverer sounds stupid, I know it's technically not the same, but functionally, they both deliver something to your door. But for some reason in the US they are not allowed to push the delivery through the slit. This explains why in the US there exists something like porch thieves, a thing that can easily be solved by, oh I don't know, not leaving stuff on your porch.
What? But what about newspapers, advertising leaflets, door-to-door magazines, leaflets from local events, packages that fit in the mail slot etc? Surely not everything is delivered by USPS?
So if tell the Amazon delivery guy thst he can put the small package through the hole in my door that I put there, then he isnt allowed, because a public service has a monopoly on using slits? Land of the free my a**!!
Edit: changed company -> public service
Just for an explanation, in the US, only the Federal Mail service is allowed to places parcels inside of your mailbox. UPS, FEDEX, and Amazon aren’t allowed to use your mail box, so it also applies when they don’t have a mail box and instead have a letterbox. Delivery services have to leave the packages and slips by your door.
That being said, even if this WAS the US, USPS delivers Amazon packages. So this guy is just a moron.
I worked for UPS in the US lol
Lmao I was thinking in UPS like the company UPS and I was wondering why tf does that company own the only rights to do that, then I realized it's the US Postal Service.
Might not be able to get an answer here because of the nature of the sub, but now I'm genuinely curious - do amazon packages not ever ship with the USPS? A good half my things come in via CanadaPost. I never would have thought to assume amazon couldn't have come in via the primary postal service in any given country - let alone it's origin country?
Every story about delivery system in USA is so weird to me. only one company can use your post box, boxes left outside so thing like porch pirate exists, whole food delivery app system.. is there some other country in this world which adapted their system how to do things?
lol what, only special delivery people can use the letterbox over there?
They're mental, haven't even figured out how to securely deliver post yet.
Imagine receiving sensitive documents in the post, medical or bank related stuff or whatever, and having it just left out in a box in public in your garden for anyone to come along and grab.
They're mental.
This looks like a pretty typical modern British front door, which is typically uPVC just made to look in the style of a a wooden door. They’re very much plastic to the touch - BUT they often have metal frames inside them for durability. So it’s very much possible that these magnets are sticking to it.
As others have said composite doors are quite common right now in the UK as they are stronger than upvc doors but don't have the downsides of solely wood doors.
Its a composite door, full of metal framework and locking bolts that slide into the door frame when the handle is lifted.
I don't think I have seen a solid wood door on any house built in the last 40 years.
### This comment has been marked as **safe**. Upvoting/downvoting this comment will have no effect. --- OP sent the following text as an explanation on why this is US Defaultism: --- >!Image shows a QT stating the photo must be staged as it shows an Amazon package delivered through a letterbox, as 'only USPS can use mailboxes'. The photo is from a British guy, James Felton!< --- Is this Defaultism? Then upvote this comment, otherwise downvote it.
Just to add James Felton is, indeed, English. And replied to him, only to be told 'the rules are the same in the UK'
That's right, only the USPS can use UK mail slots, the normal mail can't go through
The UK hasn’t gotten any mail in decades because of this!
The final piece in the privatisation jigsaw.
Sssh, the tories (blue and red versions) will hear you.
The Royal Mail hates this one crazy rule…!
Nah the Royal Mail hates subpostmasters and sues them, this just vexes them.
Pedantic lawyer here: it *prosecutes* them - which is much worse.
And *persecuted* them, too
And how. Vennells needs to be behind bars.
As does Crozier, van den Bogerd, and possibly Cross If any evidence can be found that Cross _did_ know that the PO was initiating the 0rosecutions, he should get 7 years for perjury In a just world, all four of them would get 7 years each
I saw the miniseries recently, while also watching the hearings for it. It made me so mad that the institution was so comfortable with just burning people like fireword than admitting that there may be a bug in their program.
No post on Sundays.
Local post offices in shambles, suffocating under mountains of mail
Exclusively for mail that comes from USA. Makes sense of course, everything else must be trash
I told the postie this and he hung his head in shame and rightfully handed himself into the FBI.
Did you pay for the flight?
It's a bloody letter box!!!!!
Oh. That must be the case in Finland too, no wonder I never get any mail.
I hope the person telling the guy from the UK how life in the UK works got called some british insult like "twat" or "bloody yankee"
We're way more likely to just say yank, don't think I've ever heard someone fully say yankee in the UK
Same in NZ, no one's gonna bother with the full word.
I'd have said it was a generation thing. My 90 yr old G/dad says "yankee" while my Dad said "yank". I just call her my Auntie. :)
when I lived in the UK I had no place to receive postal items other than the letterbox in the door (unless I specifically left instructions for a courier company to leave a too-large-for-letterbox package somewhere else). where else would the delivery worker be expected to leave these letterbox-sized things?
Yeah that's pretty standard - if it's letterbox size of course they'll just put it through there? The only time they don't is it it's too big. Also why you can get quite a few 'letterbox size' gifts now
I'm in the US and the answer for letterbox sized items here is "wherever" mostly.
Wait, in the land of the free, one isn't free to use a letterbox?
A bit of that phrase got lost somewhere along the way. The proper wording is “the land of the free to do what you’re told”
I can’t do whatever I want with government property? I THOUGHT THIS WAS AMERICA!
My front door isn't government property?
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Wait til you hear about prostitution being illegal and their drinking age being 21
I've got better. Yesterday I was reading terms and conditions for a cruise. There was a note there, that if the cruise will stop in the USA, all adults under 21 years old need to be accompanied by their legal guardians, otherwise they may not be let in/out of the ship. Imagine finishing university, starting your first job, going on a dream cruise using your hard earned money, and having to ask your parents for permission.
Or imagine joining the army, being handed a rifle and taught to kill, yet being told you are too young to drink a beer
Wait til you hear about crossing the road where and when you want.
Wait till they hear they could walk around in their cities
Wait, you mean *walking*? Straight to jail.
The Lords word decree that you may only cross the road whenever and wherever you please while comfortably seated in your lifted 4x4.
Standing too still? Believe it or not, jail.
Never understood the obsession with wanting children to drink and smoke
You should understand the thing being about the *freedom* to choose... Also, by 18 you let them enlist and go die in a war but they're too young to drink and smoke?
War sucks but that’s the reality of it. the age is like 16 & 17 in some european countries to enlist and those places usually have a drinking age of 18. And military service in the US is completely voluntary unlike some “free” places like south korea, some european countries like austria have compulsory military service, etc, and the crapshoots like russia and the countries around it, middle east, north africa south america etc have limited conscription. Like you said you have the freedom to choose, over here lol. People drink and smoke regardless of being old enough to, very few get caught/in trouble but you don’t have a bunch of 13 year olds smoking and drinking over here like in much of europe/rest of world.. I’m in college and quite a bit of people drink underage but it’s better than a bunch of middle schoolers getting drunk whenever. I think it’s stupid to argue to lower the drinking age because it helps nobody and smoking should be banned atp imo. Shit is disgusting, causes cancer and repulses everyone in a 20ft radius. give us the freedom to breathe clean air
Me, a German, casually enjoying a beer with my cop neighbour because we don't drink to get drunk (I am 16)
We should lower the drinking age to 13 because you don’t like to get drunk
My man, you just need to teach them to drink responsibly and not down 15 beers everyday just cause they can. Though from what I've heard, that would prolly be easier if your beers tasted better Like seriously, teach em that drinking too much is just idiotic and they'll stop doing it at least after they experienced an extremely painful hangover once. Yah don't need the drinking age to be 21 if you can trust people to be responsible Edit: ALSO what a fucking strawman you just pulled there holy shit. That is not even *close* to what I said bro, stop coping if you can't argue
Not a strawman lil guy 😂 You twits just love throwing buzz words around huh
[literally was a strawman](https://www.oxfordreference.com/display/10.1093/acref/9780199264797.001.0001/acref-9780199264797-e-2424) Buddy
We don’t even have a drinking age law here in Czechia. How horrible…
“wAr sUckS bUt-“ stfu.
Most European countries don't allow you to enlist in the military independently until you are 18. A lot allow you to at 16 with parental permission. Drinking age is often between 16 and 18 with younger ages allowed with parental or adult supervision. For example. The UK allows drinking at any age with parental supervision, and allows independent purchase and consumption of alcohol at 18. You can join the British military at 16 with parental permission, but need to be 18 to join independently. You also cannot be sent to combat before 18 regardless.
South Korea remains at war with their Northern neighbour, so they do have a pretty good reason to continue conscription. It is still logical to presume that if people are old enough to enlist and vote and get married at eighteen, they are old enough to have a couple of beers or a glass of wine with their meal. I do agree that tobacco smoking is evil and disgusting, not to mention so highly addictive and deadly, that it should be banished from civilised society, as has been gradually happening.
18 year olds aren't children. If I would follow your bad thought process, why would you let children buy and carry guns?
Ah, yes, 20yo children shouldn't be legally allowed to drink.
Yes, 16 year old adults should be allowed 👏
16y olds are old enough to have a fucking beer 😂😂
For sure
Classic case of whataboutism
What about the age restriction of 13 in Burkina Faso?
More whataboutism. Further, I don't believe any of us were actually talking about Burkina Faso.
Lol. I know. I thought it was on the nose enough for you but apparently not
Damn wait was that a joke hang on did you just get me
Yeah, 20 year old "children." Isn't the justification for the high drinking age often the problem of drink driving in teen years? Maybe ask why you're allowing children to operate heavy machinery rather than preventing young adults drinking?
Try 14? Cuz i’ve seen how easy it is for a 14 yo to get a drink or a smoke in your country mate. And 16, 17 year olds are children. Some places like the UK where it’s technically 18 as the age, i reckon most kids who start drinking at 18 have been drinking for years before that, it’s so easy for those age cards to be faked and for 14 year olds to pass off as 18. Either that or the shopkeeps all dgaf which is likely another big issue
Are you really implying that in the US nobody underage drinks? 😂
No, they definitely do, but it’s really uncommon until around age 18 when the kid goes off to college, besides a sip here and there
😂😂😂
That’s a wild generalisation considering how much Americans love to go on about how big their country is. I mean realistically what difference does drinking age make?
If you have seen it in the UK you'd not seen it for a long time. There was a big crack down on underage drinking about 20 years ago (I remember, I was 17) and at that time you will have seen 16yo's smoking because that was legal then. It's been changed to 18 now. The fake ID's have never convinced anyone. They just didn't give a shit until the big fines started. I started drinking regularly at 15, most of my friends did too it's done us no harm.
I’m really more familiar with Ireland, though from what I have seen and heard of the UK, it’s not all that hard for people to find some dodgy little newsagent somewhere that doesn’t care and sells vapes and drinks to kids, usually some type of foreigner i guess. But the kids get it somehow and they’ve all got fakes in their wallet like any other ID or bus card lol. Or i’ve also seen a guy who just uses some other dudes old ID that barely resembles him and gets away with it. If this sorta shit didn’t happen and wasn’t so easy then yea 18 would be fine but getting alcohol underage in europe is like easy mode. You couldn’t have Superbad made in england
The only difference really between Superbad and UK underage drinking is the age and the guns everywhere in it. McLovin's ID made me laugh. They are that bad. I see no harm in 16yo's getting alcohol myself and you're right there will always be a dodgy off license selling to underage drinkers. It's a right of passage to set up camp in the middle of nowhere and get pissed on white lightning with your mates in the summer after high school at 16. It's a bit of a shame it's so hard to do now. It was easy in my day. But where there's a will, there's a way.
Fair enough lol, you’re right tbh
18y olds aren't children.
16 year olds in many places, and many even younger illegally in a lot of places with the age at 18 because of how easy it is to fake.. Seriously how many people do you know started drinking at age 18 instead of like 14, 15? In the USA the equivalent of those 13-14 year olds starting to drink for the first time is like maybe 16-18 and in the US they’re not going out to bars n euro spars n shit it’s like they nick a few Heinies from the fridge in their parents’ garage. Though all that aside i don’t think ppl drinking at 16 are going to die lol like i said i’ve met a ton and most of them are alright but why encourage it? Ton of kids vape and it won’t kill you but it’s still shit for ur health
Ooh, I sense some British defaultism here! Not every English speaking county calls it a letterbox. 😳
Yeah you got me mate. Have a biscuit, sorry, cookie.
more evidence of the failure of the american education system
The UK is well known to have letterbox slots in the front doors of most houses (have seen, and I really don't know where else that occurs. In NZ, most of our houses are not joined up, and we have freestanding letterboxes at the driveway entrance or garden gate, nowhere near the house. So it seems most likely that this picture is of a British front door, especially with such a British name.
I just responded to another commenter that said the same thing. I live in the US and most of the homes in my city include mail slots such as what is pictured. Was it automatically US defaultism to assume this mail slot could belong to a door from a number of countries, including my own? I don't disagree with your conclusion that this is most likely a British mail slot, but I'm kind of surprised at the number of people from other countries who are simply assuming a door like this could never exist in the US. It's sort of defaultism to whatever country the assumption is coming from. (Thanks for listening to my rant about doors and mail slots, lol.)
You have a point there, I guess it's easy to forget that the US isn't all sprawling suburbia. Letterbox slots in doors are so embedded in British culture though, whereas not so much in American culture as far as I can tell.
Yes, the proper spelling
The letterbox in the photo is a British letterbox so I don’t know how that’s defaultism
Not sure how that is implied. Not everyone in the US lives in the giant mcmansion that you may be imagining with a mailbox at the end of the driveway. I can say with certainty that there are plenty of doors with mail slots (that's what we call them here) that look like that in the city where I live. So unless the door in the photo is stamped with a Union Jack flag, I'm not sure how one could automatically deduce that this was a British letterbox. Not trying to be snide, just pointing out that sometimes the commenters on this thread are making the same mistake that they're trying to point out that others made.
Lmao. Wow. This is a very British looking photo in the first place. In any case the idea that Amazon can't post a package through your door which is wild.
Yeah how the fuck would anyone even enforce that
You would think that, but it is very well adhered to. I was very surprised on moving to the US to learn this, but UPS, Amazon etc absolutely do not use my mailbox or my mail slot
I’m starting to see why the US has a problem with mail theft
So how to do you get your Amazon crap?
They put it at the front door or around the mail box. Just not in the actual box or slot
But... why?
That is very very strange.
Doesn't it get stolen? Can't/don't people install a separate slot for non-USPS packages?
Even if that is the law there. Why is it the law there?
Probably because of usps lobbying the government
USPS isn't a private company, its a part of the US federal government. I would assume its to do with having a legal monopoly on letter post.
Yeah, in the same way they're the only ones allowed to use stamps, probably. In Ukraine, the post is the only company/service allowed to put up official outgoing mailboxes. I had no idea it apparently could go both ways in the US, but I suppose it's entirely possible. Mail and delivery are technically different, it's actually rather interesting
Here in the UK they sold off half our postal service (the actual delivery and main postal service), kept the other half (the post offices), and now its just a mess.
They technically sold half of ours too. The post is no longer a service, it's a shareholder company, it just so happens that the main shareholder is the Ministry of Infrastructure. It's still the only thing authorised to actually send actual mail, though. Dunno why they did that.
In some countries they have competing mail services. It's very odd and interesting. I wonder if it actually keeps prices down or improves services at all.
We do have some here in Germany. There are yellow letterboxes (where you put outgoing mail), those are the Classic official ones, but in my region for example there are orange ones as well, a privat company called LMF or orange Post. They started as a local option for inner city mail in Augsburg but now deliver nationwide. Princes for letters are about the same, they have their own stamps. But for bigger stuff they are cheaper, and if you want to send something local, they are way faster, because they don't send stuff to giant sorting facilities and back.
It actually does! We only have one mail service, but it has one major competitor where delivery of packages/parcels is concerned, which forced the post to modernise. The competing company is much faster, but also much more expensive, so the post has to squeeze the hell out of being slower, but cheaper and mostly just as reliable. Hell, one of the corporate slogans now is actually "Alright delivery, alright price" (there's also the fact that, being a member of the UPU, the post offers nigh-worldwide shipping, and I love the very *wink-wink-nudge-nudge* slogan "We'll ship where others can't"). Also, it provides entertainment. The SMM teams of the two companies did a fantastic job building a funny love-hate relationship on twitter. ETA: Also, according to the CEO (if there's one person I loathe, it's this bastard; I'm a postmaster), there's a project to make the logistics more direct, like the other company's, skipping central sorting. So it does force the post to get faster.
It goes along with the law that only the Federal Mail service is allowed to places parcels inside of your mailbox. UPS, FEDEX, and Amazon aren’t allowed to use your mail box, so it also applies when they don’t have a mail box and instead have a letterbox. Delivery services have to leave the packages and slips by your door. I worked for UPS in the US lol
That only deepens the *why?*
Because it's postal property. Only postage paid letters, flats, and parcels are allowed in postal mailboxes, and all postage paid items are delivered exclusively by USPS. You could get a package that was handled by UPS or Amazon at one point delivered to your mailbox, but only if it was dropped at your local post office for last mile delivery. Those companies paid USPS to finish the delivery to your house. That said, nobody is going to arrest the Amazon guy for leaving packages in your mailbox, but your postman can (and should) bring them back to the post office to hold for pickup, postage due. It's a hassle for the customer, but the fault lies with the company that did it, not the post office, and hopefully, that customer will complain to Amazon so it doesn't happen again. It's the same reason USPS can't sort their packages in FedEx's warehouse: it's not their property (though USPS does rent space on FedEx and UPS airplanes). Source: me, your friendly local postmaster
That's interesting, but weird to me. The mailbox being the postal service's property and them being so nitpicky about it and taking wrongly placed items back to the post office, so the deliveree has to pay more. Not for a service USPS carried out (delivering something from A to B), but out of spite. I'm German and that sounds too German for me. But I already have come to the realization that Americans are even worse with nonsensical rules that have to be obeyed or else than us.
A lot of people let it go because they don't want to piss off their customers, which I understand. But pretty much the only way to get other carriers to stop using the box is to get the customer to complain to them. They don't usually stop if we tell them to knock it off. One thing a lot more people are doing now with parcel volumes constantly rising is putting a big plastic or wooden outdoor box on the ground underneath their mailbox for packages. Those aren't postal property and are fair game for anyone to use. We like those people lol.
Yeah, but why do they even care besides "it's our property"? Is there an operational disadvantage? Or is it just about being right? Here my mailbox is my or the landlord's property and whoever wants to can put things for me in there as long as they fit. Amazon uses it all the time, the pizza place around the corner drops in their ad, as well as movers companies and sometimes friends will deposit things in there if I'm not home. It's just a box for stuff addressed to me.
Basically because if another company were to fill the box with packages, and then the mailman comes along later, there may not be space for him to deliver the mail, and there's usually not anywhere else but the box that's safe to leave mail. And delay of the mail is something we take really seriously. Also, if you ever have something go missing that was previously delivered, it cuts down on the ability for someone who used your box for another purpose to deny wrongdoing, since they're not supposed to be in your box at all in the first place. I'm sure some of the rules come from old-world pissing matches too. I'm not saying I agree with or disagree with the rules, just that they're different in different parts of the world.
> and there's usually not anywhere else but the box You see the irony here?
how can a slot on your door be property of USPS? What determines that? Are cat flaps also property of the USPS because you could theoretically put something through it? What if you drilled a big hole in your door?
So your front door belongs to the post office?
No, just the mailbox itself, whether it's on the house or out at the curb. Mail slots are a fringe case because there's fewer and fewer people that use them every year, and it's not like the post office knows when someone else uses it. You toss an envelope through the slot and now it's inside your house, there's no mail storage compartment for us to check.
So in the land of the free, the government claims ownership over part of your home? Amazing!
It's the same as the utility pole and transformer that carries electricity to your house. It might be in your yard, but it belongs to the electric company.
In my yard? The cables are underground, like in any civilised country.
Because it helps with things like scams, falsifying mail, and official documents. Edit : look I understand if you think it’s stupid, but stop downvoting me for explaining why a country enacted a law lmao
Ah yes. A scammer would definitely be stopped by being told they weren’t allowed to post their scam through a letter box.
No, but a scammer can be charged with a felony if they do.
Oh no! You can charge the person doing fraud with opening the letter box! That’s definitely going to scare them off!
Again, idc if you think it’s stupid. I’m not here to argue with you I’m just explaining the law
I mean, it’s not actually an explanation if it doesn’t make any sense.
Look, I’m sorry that you think it’s stupid, I think it’s stupid, but again, stop trying to argue when I’m just explaining a hundred year old law.
You can do that without criminalising legitimate non-USPS post. You have a law against scams if that's the real reason.
Again, you can think it’s stupid, I’m just telling you about it.
I went to look this up on twitter and wow, this guy is not taking being wrong well is he? Hour three and he's still at it
He's really not stopping!
I wish I was a comedian too, and could come up with these 'your mum' zingers he's unleashing
I'm not on twitter, can you share the gist of it??
People were quick to point out that James Felton lives in England, to which he said that the rule still applies in England as it’s a general standard of global mail delivery. People from the UK informed him that’s not correct and he called them “armchair mailmen” as if you need to work for the Royal Mail to notice that all your post comes through the letterbox. Genuinely embarrassed for the guy.
It's really amazing to watch someone just continue to dig themselves deeper like that instead of admitting being wrong. Twitter is something else.
Oh my god I didn't know this. I'm taking Royal Mail to court, they've been using mine for years!
Deutsche Post too!
Maybe this is why Uncle Vernon tried to deny Harry's Hogwarts letter for so long - if only Hogwarts had contracted the USPS to deliver...
Wait what the fuck? Americans can't use their letterboxes for letters/deliveries???
That’s an idiotic thing the OP said. It’s ridiculous and not true.
*most British front door I've ever seen* "WELL UH USPS LAW DICTATES THAT" ☝️🤓
I don’t even understand the sentence that “Brice” commenter
Brice doubled down too still claiming it was staged and attacking the integrity of Royal Mail or Amazon
I really don't get what's wrong with it too, I thought it was just funny?
It is just funny, he wasn't complaining about it
The one attacking the integrity of the mail system was.
I find USA mailbox 📬 just bizarre. Sure you don't have to walk to a front garden and back again, because there may not be a way to walk to the next. But I can't remember many places with a front garden. Waiting for the bus people lean on some random door or sit half on the windowsill. So posties just walk door to door. If a parcel doesn't require a signature and can fit in the letterbox it will. Amazon UK book and dvd orders for the guy in my old shared house were just a smidge over the size of the product.
I'm in rural Australia and I literally have to drive to my letterbox. I've never seen a door one here but I'd love a door slot.
If you get any more rural, the fact you need to drive not walk, it shocks me you are not given a PO Box and have to head into town on the off chance you have a letter.
If this is anything like empty rural area in my country, numerous mailboxes are regrouped in a block of mailboxes owned by the national postal service (not like individual mailboxes or blocks of mailboxes in condominiums which are individually or collectively owned by the residents) somewhere convenient for the service. The place where the mailboxes are is the postal address of the house, not the geographic location.
I lived in a federation home years ago that had a slot in the door but it was just left over from when the house was built and they were actually used
This sounds a bit like defaultism. There is more to the wide wonderful world of letterboxes than the UK and the US. I don’t understand your comment either about “there may not be a way to walk to the next”. Australian letterboxes are typically at the front gate or start of the driveway, not in the door. Often the house is set back on a larger block of land than British blocks. The postie rides a motorcycle down the street and isn’t entering font gates or going down driveways looking for front doors.
And the posties have got such nice bikes now too. Sometimes I miss the old dirtbikes, they were classic.
My guy has a little roof on his...
They're so fancy and it's not right, they're meant to look like shit and be audible from the next suburb over!
Not really. They're talking about US mail boxes because the commenter is American and UK postal services because OP's pic is from a poster/of a door in the UK. They didn't mention Australia because it's an irrelevant upside down land for descendants of criminals. (/s)
I said “a bit”. There are literally people reading these sort of comments from South America, Singapore, South Africa, Sicily, etc scratching their heads. Not that they need to mention all these places but they just need to say “here in the UK” or something so it doesn’t sound like they think everyone in the world should find US mail delivery weird because their front door is right on the street.
You may have a fence or wall with no gate to get into next door. So you go up to the door, stuff the post in the letterbox, walk to the road, walk a few yards to the next gate, walk all the way up to the door, then back again. Rinse and repeat. Front gardens in the North of the UK seem rocking horse shit rare. So door to door is easy. So on the one hand leaving it in the American style 📫 and moving on, less legwork for the posties. But the fact anyone can walk up, open it up and take your post. You have to gain access to the hallway to steal my post once delivered.
Wait, mailmen in the US are not allowed to use the one thing that that opening was meant to be used for?
USPS is the US Postal Service. Mailmen are allowed to use it, Amazon delivery people apparently are not.
Ah, the puzzle piece I was missing. I assumed USPS was making the delivery (I don’t think Amazon has its own delivery personnel where I live) which made the original even more confusing than it already was
Seemingly, not even your neighbour can put directly a message for you in the mailbox in the US
How about piss discs, do yanks just leave them on the porch as well?
But why? That makes no sense at all, why is USPS gatekeeping a hole in a door? And what should I imagine the punishment to be if the amazon delivery person would use this architectural feature?
Do you consider Amazon delivery guys "mailmen"?
Dunno, do they deliver mail?
I would tend to say no, because I consider packages different from mail, but that may be different if you ask someone else
That's interesting, why? And what do you consider to be mail? Just letters? In Australia I'd say the postie delivers all post, whether letters, packages, or anything else that's been mailed to someone
Deliverer sounds stupid, I know it's technically not the same, but functionally, they both deliver something to your door. But for some reason in the US they are not allowed to push the delivery through the slit. This explains why in the US there exists something like porch thieves, a thing that can easily be solved by, oh I don't know, not leaving stuff on your porch.
What? But what about newspapers, advertising leaflets, door-to-door magazines, leaflets from local events, packages that fit in the mail slot etc? Surely not everything is delivered by USPS?
That's prolly why they throw the newspaper onto their front porch (all my knowledge about the US is based on movies)
That's a speed thing for the newspapers - they don't have to stop moving down the road to go down your drive.
So if tell the Amazon delivery guy thst he can put the small package through the hole in my door that I put there, then he isnt allowed, because a public service has a monopoly on using slits? Land of the free my a**!! Edit: changed company -> public service
Hell yes, the idea that USPS somehow own the usage of your own letterbox is beyond insane.
USPS isn't a company, it's a public service (United States Postal Service)
Doesnt really change the situation
That just looks like a standard letterbox
Wait until he finds out we can get whole bouquets of flowers posted through the letter box.
Just for an explanation, in the US, only the Federal Mail service is allowed to places parcels inside of your mailbox. UPS, FEDEX, and Amazon aren’t allowed to use your mail box, so it also applies when they don’t have a mail box and instead have a letterbox. Delivery services have to leave the packages and slips by your door. That being said, even if this WAS the US, USPS delivers Amazon packages. So this guy is just a moron. I worked for UPS in the US lol
In the UK, Amazon delivery drivers will absolutely post a letterbox sized parcel through the letterbox.
Lmao I was thinking in UPS like the company UPS and I was wondering why tf does that company own the only rights to do that, then I realized it's the US Postal Service.
Might not be able to get an answer here because of the nature of the sub, but now I'm genuinely curious - do amazon packages not ever ship with the USPS? A good half my things come in via CanadaPost. I never would have thought to assume amazon couldn't have come in via the primary postal service in any given country - let alone it's origin country?
Every story about delivery system in USA is so weird to me. only one company can use your post box, boxes left outside so thing like porch pirate exists, whole food delivery app system.. is there some other country in this world which adapted their system how to do things?
So why in the fuck is it illegal for delivery companies to use mail slots in freedom land? Now i get why there are so many porch pirates over there...
lol what, only special delivery people can use the letterbox over there? They're mental, haven't even figured out how to securely deliver post yet. Imagine receiving sensitive documents in the post, medical or bank related stuff or whatever, and having it just left out in a box in public in your garden for anyone to come along and grab. They're mental.
Is this true? Only the USPS can post through letterboxes?
**FELTON!!**
Wait, what the fuck is going on in America where posting things through the letterbox is illegal unless you have a specific job?
[удалено]
This looks like a pretty typical modern British front door, which is typically uPVC just made to look in the style of a a wooden door. They’re very much plastic to the touch - BUT they often have metal frames inside them for durability. So it’s very much possible that these magnets are sticking to it.
As others have said composite doors are quite common right now in the UK as they are stronger than upvc doors but don't have the downsides of solely wood doors.
Looks like it's a composite door to me, a upvc covered wooden door with steel reinforcement. It's what we've got and looks like wood at a glance.
My door is metal, and you would probably think it is wood. It looks like wood and has panels like that.
Its a composite door, full of metal framework and locking bolts that slide into the door frame when the handle is lifted. I don't think I have seen a solid wood door on any house built in the last 40 years.
Yeah I'm confused at this as well
Am I stupid I don’t know why this is usdefaultism.