08:06 – I’m surprised it took this long. Yesterday, a Montana man, citing the recent SCOTUS decision on same-sex marriage, applied for a marriage license to allow him to marry a second woman. If Montana officials have any sense, they’ll grant it.
The real problem is that everyone has been arguing around the real issue, which has nothing to do with same-sex marriage, plural marriage, group marriage, and so on. The question that should have been before SCOTUS was whether the government has any right to be involved in marriage in any way. My position, of course, is that it’s none of the government’s business. Marriage should be a purely personal arrangement between private persons. The government should be forbidden to be involved in marriage or to consider marital status in any way, particularly with regard to taxation.
By making marriage a purely personal matter, as it should be, we eliminate the problem. Churches cannot be forced to marry a gay couple, nor can gay-owned bakeries be penalized for refusing to bake wedding cakes for heterosexual couples. The IRS could no longer discriminate against married people because everyone would be taxed as an individual. Get government completely out of marriage, and the problems go away.
Barbara has tomorrow off work for the holiday, and we plan to spend most of the long weekend doing science kit stuff. Inventory of finished kits is low, and we need to start building it up for the rush that starts later this month.
16:02 – I just shipped a science kit to Canada, which was apparently the first one I’d shipped there since sometime in May. On 31 May, USPS changed prices for Priority Mail International, but only for Canada. All other countries remain the same: the only factors that determine price are the weight of the package and which country it’s being shipped to.
But USPS now has zoned rates to Canada, taking distance into account. Not zones in Canada, mind you. For a given weight, the price is the same to anywhere in Canada. Instead, the shipping price varies according to where the shipper is located in the US. There are now eight US zones,from 1.1 to 1.8. If you’re in a low zone, 1.1 or 1.2, the shipping price may actually be less than it was before the price change. If you’re in a high zone, it goes up dramatically. For example, a shipper in zone 1.8 (e.g., Honolulu) will pay something like $30 additional to ship a 5-pound package. For what we ship–6+ to 8+ pound packages–our break-even probably would have been Zone 1.2. Unfortunately, Winston-Salem is in Zone 1.4, which means our shipping costs to Canada for a typical package have increased by almost 30%.
The shipping surcharge covers more than just the additional shipping cost. Our actual costs also include higher credit-card charges on international shipments, additional packing materials, and the extra half hour or so it takes to re-package and ship to an international customer. We’ve been charging a $44 shipping surcharge on Canadian shipments for three or four years now, which means we absorbed two or three increases in postage costs by leaving the surcharge the same. Until recently, we were paying $36.43 in actual postage, which left only $7.57 to cover those other costs. The kit I shipped today went at the 6+ pound rate (< 7 pounds) and cost $44.11 in actual postage, leaving us -$0.11 to cover the additional costs.
So I just increased the shipping surcharge for Canadian shipments to $60, which is actually a couple bucks more than our actual cost. But I figure it’ll probably be another three years before I get around to updating it, so this way we won’t end up taking a loss when postage prices go up again next year.