If you had 10 minutes alone....

With a presidential candidate to discuss the environment, what would you say?

I have junk mail on my brain right now (reading the junk mail wiki did it), so I think that would be the issue I would talk to them about.

I realise that there are far more important things, but dealing with junk mail seems like one of those 'low hanging fruit' problems to me, and I am sure they have a million people advising them on bigger issues. It's a nice small issue that can easily be dealt with in 10 minutes.

I've noticed that junk mail here is personally addressed to me. So from that I assume that USPS deliver it?

In New Zealand 99% of junk mail is delivered by kids on bikes. If you don't want it, you just put a sticker on your mailbox that says "No junk mail". Every month or so the people who print the mail ask the delivery kids how many house they deliver to. So you tell them how many you have left after each run and they stop giving you those ones.

Very few people like to get junk mail and it wastes a huge amount of paper each year. I suspect that many people don't know or can't be bothered to unsubscribe from it, so just grumble and (hopefully) put it into their recycling. We have some junk mail that we have tried to unsubscribe to, but they never respond, or they dont list a contact phone number.

So why don't they give us the personal FREEDOM (so the GWB's out there can get behind it) to chose if we want to receive mail and ban the practice of sending personally addressed junk mail?

I'm sure that USPS make a decent amount of money off of it, but I am sure they also spend a lot of money sorting and transporting it around (that's another thing... when are we going to see the postie riding a bike??? I had never seen a postal truck for delivering the mail until I came here!). I'm sure that some of the people who make and distribute the junk mail would lose their job, but hundreds of thousands of kids would get a job and exercise instead.