The Federal Government really doesn't deal with addresses, roads, etc. That's the job of the states, counties, towns, etc. The USPS, though, needs to know all of that so mail can be delivered.
Via multiple different processes (depending on the entity in charge) the USPS and the entity (state/county/city/town/village/developer/whatever) that comes up with road names/parcels/lots determine the addresses. These addresses get sent to the USPS.
It sounds like the process depends on your specific locality and which government overlays are in charge.
Note that a plat map (the survey that slices land up into chunks) does not necessarily have to include the address.
I lived in a place that was renumbered twice while I lived there, and it wasn't at all obvious - to anyone - as to where the new addresses came from. I asked the county, city, and USPS, and none really could explain how it worked really.
In the US, your mailing address is essentially a routing label. The zip code is designed specifically to help route messages.
The "city" field in the mailing address is less city and more post office name. USPS is a lot more flexible now, but used to be, if your city didn't have its own post office, your mail would need to be addressed to the city where your post office resided; and even if your city did have a post office, it doesn't mean that's the one that services your delivery point.
Many people don't even live in an incorporated city, so at a municipal level they're just in a state and a county, but not a city. Those people still have to put something in the address field, but that leads to a lot of confusion. Unincorporated towns often have no official basis, and aren't always unique either. Of course, neither are incorporated cities in some states. :P
Changing ZIP codes to be geographical would significantly reduce the usefulness of ZIP codes for their primary use, sorting and delivering mail, so that's a non-starter. Use something else!
Well, Postal Code is a geographical region but it's not one aligned with legal boundaries.
These are all real scenarios I've lived/have family who has lived:
- Town A contains a region called "Village B" with no distinct government structure. However, Village B has its own post office, so a subsection of Town A has a separate ZIP Code and is delivered mail by this second post office.
- Town C contains two disjoint sub-regions (unincorporated villages) called "Village D" and "Village E." Both have post offices and both have their own ZIP Codes. Some addresses in Village D are delivered mail by the post office in Village E—not the one in Village D.
- Town F has its own post office, but a street in town F receives mail delivered by the post office in Town G.
The practical impact of these is twofold:
- Mail is written to addresses not matching the municipal governmental structure of your town/city.
- Mapping apps that rely on USPS data to provided addresses (which is generally good, because it means mail will go to the right place) will show the wrong legal town names for the structure.
Historically, only larger cities had things you might recognize as a postal code. For example: Boston 8, Mass. The current abbreviation for Massachusetts is MA. And some changed - such as NB being Nebraska (and is now New Brunswick) and Nebraska is now NE.
On older letters, you'll see the red abbreviations instead of the more modern ones:
routing. how do we route a physical package to someone, what route does the mail carrier take?. is where the networking term stems from.
you don't really need to know exactly who or where the target house (or IP) is, you just sorta need to know what post office or trucks serve that area (or which networks connect to your target IP / next hop).
thats up to your local post office (or switch) -- send it to them and let them figure it out, which routes and truck to take to get there, like which routes will eventually pass through this locality?
sometimes that's simple and geographical, like a big city and the local post office serves the people around you, 10 miles in any direction, and sometimes it's because there is a mail truck that drives up and down a valley serving people on multiple sides of a state line and in multiple towns.
back in the day, before cars, those routes could be multi-day treks.
also consider that USPS is federal and plays by federal jurisdiction rules, meaning that they don't really care about neat and tidy state or municipal lines -- they're valid everywhere.
tl;dr: USPS cares about delivery routes and that's what ZIP codes help with. These happen to make up, more or less, areas. This is close enough an abstraction for many use cases (which is why they are ubiquitous), but pretty horrible once you get into the details.
Postal codes are designed to help with delivering mail so it is less linked to geographic in terms of other things we care about and mostly linked to things that are relevant to mail delivery.
Watch the Scott Manley video where he does a very deep dive on the physics of cooling a data centre in orbit. He takes into account reflected heat off the earth and a LOT more.
TLDW summary: it’s entirely doable. Anyone that says it isn't simply hasn’t looked at the physics and math.
Will it be financially beneficial is a totally different question. Of course there were endless experts saying reusable rockets and electric cars never would be.
> I've never heard someone explain what bottleneck exists on earth
1. Power.
2. Political will (current massive pushback over data centre builds).
Feasable for sure, humans can solve this. But Elon Musk doesn't seem to really throw himself on solving power.
I find that very weird.
He 'makes' (panasonic) batteries on mass and had Tesla Solar roofs. So why instead of talking about a dyson sphere or DC in space, he wouldn't just build a solar city in the dessert, put some fiber around and start putting solar panels and his batteries around? AI is not that latency dependend than a lot of other things
Against my better judgment, I let someone on the internet tell me to do my own research by watching a 30 minute Youtube video. Parts of it, at least. I regret it.
Scott Manley literally waves his hands at thermals, claiming that because there exist 28kW SpaceX satellites in space (that operate only intermittently, because they need to cool down), it is feasible to efficiently run modern datacenters that are ~three orders of magnitude more power-hungry 24/7.
He does not do any math. He acknowledges that cooling systems are heavy, take up huge amounts of space, and that small, existing satellites need to schedule downtime to cool off. I'm no physicist, but I'm pretty sure radiant cooling systems scale with surface area, which is bad news for anyone trying to scale existing cooling systems up 1000x.
I'm excited at the prospect of Starship landing on the moon. 100T payloads are maybe not required to make it happen, but probably are. For those of us who care about Artemis IV happening on schedule, being disappointed in a 52t payload capacity is very straightforward.
Starlink payloads are the literally the path to making Starship human spaceflight ready. Starship has to launch dozens to hundreds of times to identify and fix low probability failures. Without frequent Starlink flights testing and debugging the vehicle, it would take far longer to build a safe and reliable Starship.
They're also highly profitable, and fund/subsidize future missions. Recall, Starship development was funded by Starlink.
I would argue that we need a breakthrough in space technology before we can do proper and reasonable spaceflight.
We were able to land on the moon 60 years ago (why is Artemis IV not planned for 2029?) and nothing happend after.
Why would we have enough resources to start building stuff on moon OR even on Mars if we don't have enough resources (apparently) to make earth better?
So who will pay for any of it? And how much margin will be left after the other companies caught up to Space-X?
What do you think? Required for what? I don't think we should be landing on the moon unless we can build a sustainable presence there. I think the only way the other moon lander is better if it turns out to be a better path to getting more equipment on the moon over time, and my feeling is that's unlikely. I would actually be somewhat surprised if Blue Origin landed their small lander on the moon before SpaceX lands Starship HLS.
I could see China being "first" but their first isn't anything resembling a sustainable presence.
Launching at only half payload capacity is disappointing. Starlink is severely capacity constrained, SpaceX needs to get as many v3 sats as they can into orbit, instead of flying partial loads.
Falcon 9 capacity over time went from 9,0000 kg expandable to LEO for v1, to 13,150kg for v1.1, to 22,800 kg for block 5 (17,500 kg reusable). Substantial gain.
So nothing to be disappointing about Starship. Raptor v4 is already on the roadmap, and more down the road. You can speculate all you want. I just don't understand why you have to be disappointed. That SpaceX doesn't just "move fast and break things"?
I’m not saying Starship won’t improve. My point is Starship block 3 is designed for ~60 v3 sats, and this flight will only do 26. This is the fourth flight in a row with a half payload. Every flight they make below full load delays the Starlink network.
The analogy you used (Falcon 9's payload growth) spans over 8 years. How long will it take Starship to start flying full payloads?
I'm completely aware. But this is the third flight in a row with a half payload. If this trend continues, it's not a good sign for Starship block 3's performance capabilities.
“If this trend continues” about Falcon 1. About Falcon 9 landings, about Falcon 9 reuse, about starlink capacity, about starship launching at all, about the heat shield, about the catch, about the towers, about drone ship landings…….
That has been the narrative about every single step spacex has ever taken.
And you know what the trend is?
They are kicking fucking ass. Annihilating old space and the writing the game one incremental win at a time.
Well, I have some bad news. Starship isn't following the Falcon 9 development philosophy.
Starship is literally a boondoggle project by a space company that was the new kid on the block and now has the same hubris as the old kids on the block.
Nothing about the Starship development process is remotely close or has any similarity to Falcon 9.
Starship SpaceX is "old space".
The Falcon 9 philosophy was as follows: Make it work, then push the envelope and learn from the failures.
The Starship philosophy: Let's set ourselves ambitious goals that push the envelope from the start. Partial success is a failure. The cathedral must be finished before we can launch the first customer payload.
Hint: SpaceX doesn't want to cannibalize their cash cow Falcon 9. Typical old company thinking.
I'm fully aware. But Starlink is blocked by today's Starship launch cadence and payload capacity. Pointing out Starship could handle this payload 5 years in the future isn't helpful.
All of Starlink's future ambitions are blocked by today's Starship.
As a snowboarder I was reluctant, but got into it a few years ago. We pull our young daughter in a chariot with skis about 10km into a little cabin by a river with a wood stove.
Cheese, salami and hot chocolate and we make the return loop. Three evenings a week all winter long is a great way to spend time outside.
> *”will competitors be able to replicate Tesla’s success?”
Tech first companies like Waymo: yes, clearly.
OEM US automakers? Not a chance, not ever. They can’t do a simple infotainment system to save themselves.
If they want to “auto” driving, they’re going to license it from some other company.
> This is a total failure/incompetence of multiple utility institutions that we all pay for and depend on. Even a day without electricity should be unacceptable in a modern, functional society.
Like the storm surge walls at Fukushima, all infrastructure is designed with a certain size of storm or event in mind based on historical averages and outliers.
Climate change is throwing all that to shit.
Your comment says plain and clear you’ve never lived through a “once in 100 years” level event more than once in a decade, and you don’t realize how much it would cost to upgrade what we’ve spent ~100 years building.
It’s trillions, just to get started.
I also wonder if you’d be fine with increasing taxes to pay for all that, or if you already complain about “high taxes”
Do you know of anywhere I can learn more about why this is?
Have they ever thought about changing it so a “postal code” IS a geographical region?
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