Regarding the post office thing:
When I'm not listening to KATG I listen to my local NPR station here in rural upstate New York, and they talk quite a bit about the USPS situation. There are some post offices that are slated to be closed in some communities here due to lack of volume. There are some that are literally the size of travel campers that will go DAYS without a single customer coming in, yet are staffed by at least one person. You would think it would make sense that these post offices be cut, because the couple hundred or thousand rural route delivery stops could easily be transferred to a bigger branch.
So why not just cut them? These small communities (and when I say small, I mean less than a thousand people for a post office) argue that having a post office in their town "builds a sense of community" and "acts as a meeting place for the town". I've never seen people, young or old, get together to hang at the post office. It really makes no sense to me.
EDIT: And just today, another article
http://www.watertowndailytimes.com/a...WS05/709119904