pimento64

Brings back fond memories of moving into a house that still had a fuse box and discovering the one for the dryer was a screw.

It's costing 4.5M a year to keep those documents

I cannot stress this enough, that is nothing. You're hand-wringing over an amount of money that falls under the scope of a rounding error in any first-world country's budget. If you want to talk about proper use of resources, a properly-functioning legislative body shouldn't even be able to afford to think about it, let alone discuss it, they should be dealing with a full session's-worth of projects that cost 100—100,000 times as much. If you want to talk about proper use of the taxpayers' money, it doesn't involve elected officials derelicting their actual duties to hem and haw over something that costs under $50 million on the national scale. For a government to have taken any action on this at all is a greater wastage than any potential savings. Seriously, imagine being paid by the public to ensure things are run properly, and then spending your time on the clock discussing whether or not the government should save $4.5M per year by switching brands of floor wax in all of the public schools. People have been tarred and feathered for less.

These movies aren't just any wish fulfillment, they're meant to be a panacea that assures the viewer that she made the right choice in being a stay-at-home mom, and that she would have regretted pursuing her career.

I want a Hallmark movie where a high-powered executive comes back to his hometown, helps save the Christmas tree lighting ceremony, and decides to leave his career to be with his shortstack tomboy wife and be her himbo kept husband on her ranch.

But that shouldn't constrain us to recording on paper.

If you're going to argue with me, spend less time on smug pontification and more time making sure you actually know what my point is.

Okay now do everyone else too

Why? Better in what sense? Better for whom? I think spending the money on ensuring that paper records are preserved is worth it solely because it monkeywrenches tampering and fraud, so diverting that money would always be worse no matter what it goes to. Money spent on maintaining public parks would be better spent on curing cancer, does that mean we defund parks? Money spent on a necessity is not a waste just because there are other necessities.

Also, even assuming you're right, who cares? I just spent $1.50 on a cup of coffee. That money could have been put to better use, but it wasn't, and it doesn't matter, because it's $1.50. This was my original point, functional states don't have to even think about this cost, they can literally afford to forget it.

The cost of keeping paper records. Doing anything but keeping them is crackhead behavior, it's like ripping copper pipes out of your walls and selling them to keep your electricity turned on. A society has failed if it reaches that point. I agree there's more to it than expense, such as having a secured original that's much more difficult to forge.

Sky found to be blue

What can it even cost, at a ceiling? A few hundred thousand a year? I million? Even a hundred million? I expect it's way less, but even if it's half a billion, that is pocket change in the first world. If your government can't afford to write off an expense that miniscule, you live in a failed state.

YTMND was where the web peaked, and everything since has been the decline.