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UK plan to digitise wills and destroy paper originals "insane" say experts

165 points by ilamont 3y ago

dfgfek 3y ago
If these historians feel so strongly about this maybe they should pay the yearly £4.5m out of pocket?
- febeling 3y ago
  The numbers to support political decisions are usually made up
- adaml_623 3y ago
  Running a society costs money. The court system costs money. The alternative is very undesirable. That £4.5 million per year is a small price for social stability. In addition the digital option has a likelihood of costing a lot more
  - jdsully 3y ago
    Paper records of wills are not going to have any impact on "social stability". The connection is so tenuous that using this line of argument there is almost no expense that the government shouldn't pay for.
- arcticbull 3y ago
  4.5m GBP rounds to zero in this context. The UK budget is 1.045T of which this represents 0.00043%.
- asdajksah2123 3y ago
  Over a 100 years the 4.5mm is 450mm pounds. Less than half a billion. What do you expect the liability to the state would be for all the wills getting wiped out, or modified, etc. Another way to think about it is, what would a private company charge the UK government to insure all liability costs of digitizing the wills? Especially since there are likely many individuals who are highly motivated to modify the wills database (many would benefit simply from destroying it). I don't know the answer to that question, and even though I suspect it will be far greater than 4.5mm, the point is that's the correct way to look at this cost, set against all the liabilities and risks digitization opens you up to. And most never seem to consider the costs and risks of moving to a new system when pointing out the cost of the existing system as a reason to move.
  - IanCal 3y ago
    Virtually nothing? I can't think of anything you'd likely get out of destroying a 25+ year old will. There are time limits for most claims against the executors. They are also planning to keep some number of wills, if you kept say everything over a certain value you'd probably cover the cases you're imagining.
- tivert 3y ago
  > If these historians feel so strongly about this maybe they should pay the yearly £4.5m out of pocket? Abolish the police, which will result in far greater savings. Then if you feel strongly that your house shouldn't be broken into, maybe you should pay for costs for private security out of pocket?
  - waihtis 3y ago
    Privatizing security? Now you're talking.
earthboundkid 3y ago
A nice thing about paper is it is very hard for hackers to ransom all of the wills.
- crazygringo 3y ago
  It's hard for hackers to ransom tape backup or cloud backups or versioned cloud storage as well, so that's not really an issue here.
  - jl6 3y ago
    Maybe in theory. But a lot of orgs like to automate their backups, meaning their backup infrastructure is online and available and thus exploitable.
    - pavel_lishin 3y ago
      A lot of orgs like to not bother testing their backups as well, meaning that their backup infrastructure functionally doesn't exist.
  - gustavus 3y ago
    > It's hard for hackers to ransom ... cloud backups or versioned cloud storage as well, so that's not really an issue here. Until you set the password to Password123! because that's the only password that everyone can remember, and the attackers go in delete the originals and previous versions and then keep all the data only for themselves.
  - btown 3y ago
    Under a "right to be forgotten" [0] society there's no such thing as an append-only backup or storage, or even offline snapshots in time. As soon as a mechanism to overwrite all existing records (or, equivalently, to destroy the keys necessary to decrypt those records) exists, a sufficiently determined hacker/ransomeer will be able to compromise that mechanism. Paper, at least in theory, requires noticeable human action to achieve destruction at similar scale. One hopes, of course, that the environmental controls of the archival facilities aren't cloud connected... [0] https://ico.org.uk/for-organisations/uk-gdpr-guidance-and-resources/individual-rights/individual-rights/right-to-erasure/ https://ico.org.uk/for-organisations/uk-gdpr-guidance-and-re...
1-6 3y ago
Not only will they save money on record keeping, it’s a way to create sunken treasure chests. When people die, digital files can easily be removed without trace. I expect this move will allow the government to purge lost records of dead people who never alerted their next-of-kin.
- blibble 3y ago
  how do dead people alert their next of kin? being serious: most wills are not sourced from the probate registry and are only sent there to obtain probate
  - oniony 3y ago
    With automation. I have my Google account transfer to my wife after _n_ months of inactivity, for example.
    - Uehreka 3y ago
      That’s not a thing most people have set up (even if they should).
  - toomuchtodo 3y ago
    In the US, this could be done by monitoring the social security death master file published on a cadence. Currently advocating for a citizen friendly system to notify chosen parties at death event. Financial institutions consume this SSA data to freeze accounts, for example. https://www.ssa.gov/dataexchange/request_dmf.html https://www.ssa.gov/dataexchange/request_dmf.html
- Xenoamorphous 3y ago
  > digital files can easily be removed without trace As opposed to paper.
  - Terr_ 3y ago
    Paper is much harder to secretly vanish (A) at scale and/or (B) remotely. I always thought it was cool how some Ghost in The Shell movie/anime stuff involved storing very sensitive secrets as barcodes on paper, to be kept physically-secure before being read by cybernetic eyes. There's also some line from one of the The Expanse books (Abbadon's Gate) which I can't easily call up here. The protagonist is inside an alien space-station following an AI's instructions to try to save the day, and he's curious why the AI doesn't just do it. The AI tells him that for the builders of that place, having physical existence was a kind of authority all on its own.
gustavus 3y ago
> The proposal comes amid growing concern at the fragility of digital archives, after a cyber-attack on the British Library left the online catalogue and digitised documents unavailable to users since late October. > The apparent vulnerability was also revealed this month when the prime minister, Rishi Sunak, and the former prime minister Boris Johnson both claimed they could no longer access WhatsApp messages sought by the UK Covid-19 public inquiry. But I'm sure the UK government will do a great job of protecting these super important and valuable documents.
- meepmorp 3y ago
  I'm inclined to believe that the problem with Rishi and Boris handing over those messages is more about their lack of motivation, rather than ability, to do so.
- pbhjpbhj 3y ago
  I'm sure these Tory politicians accused of enabling stealing from the tax-payer (and in Johnson's case of needlessly choosing to allow COVID to spread in a way he knew would cause thousands of excess deaths), will be eager to mandate cross-platform open messaging systems so all their messages can be well preserved in the future!
btbuildem 3y ago
[flagged]
pcdoodle 3y ago
What's to stop someone from hashing the original document and committing it to the bitcoin blockchain? The 1st instance of this image will obviously have the keys of the trust and 3rd party witness from when it was signed.
- teraflop 3y ago
  A hash doesn't do you much good if the document that corresponds to it is lost. And storing the document itself in the blockchain is hilariously cost-prohibitive, on the order of $100,000 per MB.
trebligdivad 3y ago
Having had to deal with a death in the last year or so, this makes a lot of sense to me; this actual part (the gov record of the will) is VERY rarely used. Now if we can digitise the ones held with lawyers as well that would be great; IMHO the biggest problem for that is most of the lawyers handling this stuff are digitally inept. Heck a lot of these systems need digitising more, it's crazy how many doucments have to be sent around to tell one dept about something another dept has declared.
- tivert 3y ago
  You're only considering one use case. There are others: > It is feared that wills of ordinary people, some of whom may become historically significant in the future, risk being lost. > Wills are considered essential documents, particularly for social historians and genealogists, as they capture what people considered important at the time and reveal unknown family links. Digitization is not a problem, but the destruction of the originals is.
  - mytailorisrich 3y ago
    I would think that for historical or genealogical research it actually makes no difference if the paper original is destroyed because what matters is the text: the assets the person had and how they wanted them dispersed, and the names of the people mentioned, maybe the wording.
    - toyg 3y ago
      Only if you trust digitalisation to be a perfectly faithful process, and digital artefacts fundamentally unmodifiable or falsifiable. Which we all know is totally the case... oh wait
    - simonw 3y ago
      From the article: > “You can see the indent of the pen and if the writer is excited or tense. There are minute details on the page which digitisation [can’t capture]. There is a thrilling sensation that you are looking at a document that a real human being wrote on. You get a connection to the past that digitised versions won’t give you.” More importantly: the digitization process is prone to errors and mistakes. Anyone who's spent any time browsing digital collections will have encountered pages that were scanned out of focus, or where a part of the page was illegibly crumpled, or a page was missed or miscategorized.
simonw 3y ago
This strikes me as an example of a pattern I've become increasingly aware of over the years. You have an institution - in this case the Ministry of Justice - who presumably at one point had senior employees who were acutely aware of the historical importance of preserving original documents like this. These were likely key values of that organization, but crucially they were recorded only in people's heads. Time moves on, employees come and go, and now there's a push for savings around the UK government and someone pipes up and says "well, we could digitize those musty old documents, throw away the originals and save on archival costs" - and there just so happens to be nobody currently in a senior position who understands why that's a bad idea. I have the same suspicion every time a tech company makes a howlingly obvious error - like that time GitLab said they were going to delete every free repo that hadn't been updated in a year (and later recanted after the entirely predictable outcry): https://www.theregister.com/2022/08/05/gitlab_reverses_deletion_policy/ https://www.theregister.com/2022/08/05/gitlab_reverses_delet...
- 1970-01-01 3y ago
  So why is it a bad idea? There's a difference between destroying information and destroying the original copy of it.
  - adastra22 3y ago
    Destroying the original copy would be destroying information. A picture of an artifact is not the same as the artifact itself.
    - 1970-01-01 3y ago
      True, however these are legal documents and not art for a museum.
      - notthemessiah 3y ago
        Even ignoring the historical value, it's easier to hack into a server and edit a file than it is to forge a legal document and break into an archive. Suddenly, you're the legitimate heir to a castle.
j-bos 3y ago
Lessons never learned: - https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2018/apr/09/special-needs-teacher-uk-50-years-loses-job-immigration-status https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2018/apr/09/special-need... - https://www.amazon.com/Windrush-Betrayal-Exposing-Hostile-Environment/dp/1783351853/ref=sr_1_1?crid=37JNCIIFVN6YF&keywords=amelia+gentleman+the+windrush+betrayal&qid=1699455463&sprefix=amelia+gentleman+the+windrush+betraya%2Caps%2C164&sr=8-1&tag=timharford-20 https://www.amazon.com/Windrush-Betrayal-Exposing-Hostile-En... I love digital records, but historically people have been wrecked by the destruction of physical records.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- arp242 3y ago
  The whole Windrush affair was mostly caused by just ridiculous and cruel policy, not digitisation. There was nothing requiring the home office to start investigating these people in the first place, or to have these extremely stringent requirements for proof they had been living in Britain before 1973. Who has these kind of papers? Most of us don't – other than my passport, I don't really have any documentary proof from before I was in my 20s or so.
  - ponector 3y ago
    Don't you have a birth certificate? A school diploma? Old passports?
    - arp242 3y ago
      Other than the school diploma that wouldn't really prove anything for the Windrush people because it was about residency rather than nationality. The immigration laws changed in the early 1970s so you had to prove you were in Britain before the change (and, IIRC, in some cases provide evidence for every single year you were in Britain for it to be considered valid). I could perhaps get some records from the school I attended, maybe? No idea if they still have records from decades ago. I certainly don't have anything from that lying around. Who still has records from their elementary school or high school? Some probably do, but I don't think it's uncommon for people to have nothing at all from that when they're in their 60s.
oceanplexian 3y ago
Watching UK policy from a distance has been like watching a dumpster fire. You can get arrested for writing a Tweet, you need to show an ID to watch porn on the Internet, a kitchen knife is considered a deadly weapon. They shot their economy in the foot with Brexit. It's like they took the fucking worst policy ideas from both sides of the political aisle in the USA, and thought, hey, let's combine them, this will turn out great.
- chatmasta 3y ago
  Keep in mind most of what you read is UK policy proposals. They're always proposing a bunch of whacky stuff. Hardly any of it gets implemented.
  - orwin 3y ago
    Does that makes bureaucracies weirdly whacky-resiliant in exchange for more bullshit and red tape on the edges? I'm genuinely asking, your comment triggered the thought.
  - PrimeMcFly 3y ago
    Getting arrested for writing a Tweet is certainly implemented.
    - foldr 3y ago
      This framing doesn't make sense. The issue isn't the medium but what was said. You can be arrested for a tweet in the US too if you say something that's not protected by the First Amendment (e.g. a death threat). The UK, like almost all other countries in the world, has less stringent free speech protections than the US. For this reason you can be arrested for saying some things (whether on Twitter or not) that would be protected under the First Amendment in the US. The same is true of a vast number of other countries (including many other European countries, e.g. https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2021/09/09/pimmelgate-german-politician-police-raid/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2021/09/09/pimmelgate-g...), but HN likes to get particularly excited about a few examples of this happening in the UK.
flenserboy 3y ago
This is a great way to ensure that the past can be modified as contemporary needs demand.
- echelon_musk 3y ago
  Exactly my thoughts.
toyg 3y ago
The UK government has great form when it comes to handling historical documents affecting the lives of thousands, as proven by the Windrush saga. I also have particular confidence that this executive should take irrevocable steps, since they have a clear electoral mandate and are very likely to remain in power for the next decade. /s
cinntaile 3y ago
You can't keep everything from the past, even if it might have historical value in the future. Perhaps they can set up a foundation that keeps these records or force people to pay a yearly/10 yearly fee to keep the physical records, but I don't see why the government should keep wasting 4.5 million pounds each year. The argument that you read here is that it's a rounding error but if you apply that same logic to all costs of similar size you suddenly end up with a number that is not a rounding error.
ilamont 3y ago
I interviewed Ray Kurzweil not long after "The Singularity Is Near" came out. I asked him about a concept that he brought up in the book but didn't get much attention in light of the other more startling predictions he made. Excerpt follows: Q: In the Singularity is Near, you also discussed an intriguing invention, which you called the "Document Image and Storage Invention", or DAISI for short. But you concluded that it really wouldn't work out. Could you talk a little bit about that? RK: ... The big challenge, which I think is actually important almost philosophical challenge -- it might sound like a dull issue, like how do you format a database, so you can retrieve information, that sounds pretty technical. The real key issue is that software formats are constantly changing. People say, "well, gee, if we could backup our brains and I talk about how that will be feasible some decades from now. Then the digital version of you could be immortal, but software doesn't live forever, in fact it doesn't live very long at all if you don't care about it if you don't continually update it to new formats. Try going back 20 years to some old formats, some old programming language. Try resuscitating some information on some PDP1 magnetic tapes. I mean even if you could get the hardware to work, the software formats are completely alien and [using] a different operating system and nobody is there to support these formats anymore. And that continues. There is this continual change in how that information is formatted. ... Q: You said there's no technological solution. What about creating standards that would be maintained by the community, or would be widespread enough that future … RK: We do use standard formats, and the standard formats are continually changed, and the formats are not always backwards compatible. It's a nice goal, but it actually doesn't work. I have in fact electronic information that in fact goes back through many different computer systems. Some of it now I cannot access. In theory I could, or with enough effort, find people to decipher it, but it's not readily accessible. The more backwards you go, the more of a challenge it becomes. And despite the goal of maintaining standards, or maintaining forward compatibility, or backwards compatibility, it doesn’t really work out that way. Maybe we will improve that. Hard documents are actually the easiest to access. Fairly crude technologies like microfilm or microfiche which basically has documents are very easy to access. So ironically, the most primitive formats are the ones that are easiest. [reposted from the discussion on "I found my Grandpa’s notes 20 years after he died (2020)" (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27034087 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27034087)]
- deleted 3y ago
B1FF_PSUVM 3y ago
Most people do not understand that nowadays we're ruled by databases. You may have all the paper documents you want, but if they do not match what's in the government's databases, you're going to have a bad time.
rthkljlkrj 3y ago
I was just commenting a couple of days ago how ridiculous that the British library melts down when their computers fail. Turns out these people don't learn.
happytiger 3y ago
Digital technology means that 1) the intern can burn down the entire library of Alexandria with the wrong SQL statement (“what’s ‘where?’”), and 2) we still have no real long-term archival solution for data storage that isn’t prohibitively expensive or subject to non-retrieval due to technology advancement Consider this: please pull the tape backups? What do you mean we don’t have a tape reader anymore and the tape has all gone bad? What about the archival DVD? They only last 25 years? Surely the Zip drive has it on it? The plastic wore out on the read heads? Is that even a thing? Amazon glacier? No SLA? No, ColeSLA isn’t a funny joke Steve. This is serious. Wait. So, where are the land records from 1870 to establish ownership of the property then? Digital record preservation is hard and gets a lot harder the longer term you try to do it. Governments do NOT have the proper time horizons or actual costs of preservation in realistic order or top of mind when they talk about these projects being “cost saving.”
- EvanAnderson 3y ago
  The parties involved don't understand that they're trading the problem of maintaining paper records for the problem of maintaining digital media. Humanity has a lot of experience maintaining paper records with reasonable success. Digital media, not so much.
  - mytailorisrich 3y ago
    The issue they have is that the number of wills they have to keep is large and increasing, and will increase forever or at least until they change the rule that they must be kept in some form forever. On a related topic, and perhaps more importantly/scary, the Land Registry has already gone digital so that deeds to properties are only kept in digital form...
- LunaSea 3y ago
  Cries in flooded, moist or burnt down physical archives.
  - happytiger 3y ago
    Government could ruin civilization with unexpected moisture. That’s a strange sounding verbiage.
karaterobot 3y ago
Not only is this bad for historians in the future, I very, very much doubt it will save even the paltry £4.5 million GBP they claim it will. Even after the initial, massive digitization is amortized, they'll still have to pay people to digitize wills and maintain a public database to search them, and my word does £4.5m go really fast when the government is involved. I'd bet money that they'll figure out a way for it to cost more and destroy history.
bitwize 3y ago
You'd think the UK of all places would learn what with that Domesday Book kerfuffle.
- pbhjpbhj 3y ago
  Are you referring to the original Domesday Book, or the issue with difficulty reading the Domesday Book laserdiscs, produced in the 1980s, as the hardware became obsolete? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BBC_Domesday_Project https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BBC_Domesday_Project
  - bitwize 3y ago
    The digital one. The paper Domesday Book has lasted nearly a thousand years; the digital version could scarcely make it to twenty. I don't think we've seen a more stark illustration of the difficulties of digital archiving.
1970-01-01 3y ago
1,000 year BDs are very cheap: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Verbatim-M-Disc-BD-R-Branded-Surface/dp/B011PZALWA https://www.amazon.co.uk/Verbatim-M-Disc-BD-R-Branded-Surfac... I'm siding with the UK until someone can tell me how these are NOT safer than paper archives.
- the_snooze 3y ago
  Paper doesn't require specialized hardware or software to read. Sure, the discs are cheap and durable. But will the authorities keep a store of BD-readers? Maintain legacy computers compatible with those readers? Software to read archived files from those discs, with no online dependencies (e.g., license activation)? This is something people are already thinking about, and it's a hard problem. https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2015/02/13/386000092/internet-pioneer-warns-our-era-could-become-the-digital-dark-ages https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2015/02/13/386000092...
  - 1970-01-01 3y ago
    >Paper doesn't require specialized hardware or software to read. But it does. To preserve the paper, you need a warehouse with HVAC, power, and constant maintenance. You could bury them in the dirt for 1000 years, but then you lose accessibility.
    - foxhill 3y ago
      only if you want to store them in the open air. vacuum sealing them would obviate the need for an expensive hvac bill. and deep ground is not ridiculous. we’re expecting the storage to be in the “mostly write only” regime, after all.
- deleted 3y ago
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- lorax 3y ago
  Your "very cheap" 1,000 year BD only has always 10 year warranty. I wouldn't want historical records stored on that.
jdietrich 3y ago
If these plans are "insane", then we have a much more serious problem on our hands - the overwhelming majority of important documents being created today are digital-only, so if we can't trust digital archival, we're doomed to create a black hole in our history. Fortunately, The National Archives are very competent at digital archival. They have created a comprehensive set of guidelines and tools for preserving digital records. https://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/information-management/manage-information/ https://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/information-management/m...
derefr 3y ago
It doesn't seem to me that "preserve the physical records" or "destroy the physical records" are the only two options. How about "stop having the taxpayers pay directly for the preservation of the physical records; and instead donate them to a museum / archive / historical society, who will preserve them for their own reasons"?
bigbacaloa 3y ago
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nuc1e0n 3y ago
The UK government has a track record of embarking on huge IT procurement projects that are dismal failures which prove to be more expensive than doing nothing at all. See the Covid app for example. They even lost Covid case data by storing it in an excel spreadsheet for pity's sake. How can anyone seriously see this as being anything other another massively costly mistake? Maybe someone like Infosys will make consultancy money off the back of it I guess.
kelnos 3y ago
While £4.5M is perhaps small potatoes when it comes to a government budget, it's not nothing. (And presumably this archive will only grow over time, increasing the cost.) Why not digitize them, and then offer to give them to some sort of private/non-profit entity that's dedicated to historical document preservation, or something like that? Only snag I can think of is that maybe these documents are not supposed to be public? (Especially for the wills of the more recently-deceased people.) It seems a bit much to ask taxpayers to spend that money because some of those wills (ultimately probably a very tiny, sub-1% fraction of them) might become historically significant someday.
nitwit005 3y ago
It's easy to take the stance that nothing should ever be thrown out. It's always possible, if unlikely, it will be important. Museums, archived, and similar institutions have warehouses of junk that essentially never get looked at. Baring an infinite budget, you have to start throwing stuff out eventually.
skrbjc 3y ago
The obvious right answer is digitize them and then keep the originals, perhaps in a less easily accessible and potentially cheaper storage location.
Animats 3y ago
After the Land Registry debacle [1] this seems like a terrible idea. It is now possible in the UK to steal a house, resell it, and for the new "owner" to have good title. [1] https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-beds-bucks-herts-63392025 https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-beds-bucks-herts-6339202...
Log_out_ 3y ago
Germany scanned its national archives in with xerox stations. We will never know what numbers might have been scrambled. https://youtu.be/7FeqF1-Z1g0?si=FvBoSQ90yi4MQKsd https://youtu.be/7FeqF1-Z1g0?si=FvBoSQ90yi4MQKsd So similar projects existed and were so disastrous that they were quietly buried. To this day if a document was xerox scanned before the Bugfix it might be nil and void in court.
eviks 3y ago
Read half the article and not a single cogent argument presented besides some highly emotional statements: - Wills are considered essential documents, particularly for social historians and genealogists, as they capture what people considered important at the time and reveal unknown family links. Digital copies preserve this, so this is a non-issue - amid growing concern at the fragility of digital archives, after a cyber-attack on the British Library left the online catalogue and digitised documents unavailable to users since late October. Were these documents lost? Are wills going to be stored in the same centralized-only way? Are non-digitized documents more available because the cost of accessing them is much higher than a few clicks in a browser even if the browser is down for a month in X year? Paper isn't immortal either, how do you square it with those concerns? The WhatsApp example is just not at all relevant in this context > Hardware goes out of date and so it might not be available in the future to recall the scanned documents, Is there not a trivial solution to address this concern that a huge number of people employed in their daily lives? Than the other half isn't much better with repeating nonsense about data loss and people being forgotten while the opposite is true given that much easier access increases the chances of discovering the part of some future Mary Seacole > The human connection of handling the original wills and “the feel of the old rag-based pulp paper” would be lost too, he said. Just preserve a bunch of stacks of that old paper you can hug while reading the wills to keep the connection alive > wills are “absolutely vital” social-historical documents > highlighted the emotional impact of seeing an original signature on a historic will for a family member. You can see the signature in the image and have the same reaction, you know, people cry watching movies
- deleted 3y ago
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salawat 3y ago
There was a Stargate SG-1 episode in which people were entirely reliant on a network info store to act as an arbiter of truth, and to maintain a handful of other things that superseded the objective of returning a truthful representation of reality to the end user. A government can be thought of as an abatraction that fulfills a similar purpose. The problem is that sometimes the non-mutability of dead tree publishing is a critical feature, not a bug.
southernplaces7 3y ago
The more I read about just about anything coming from the UK Government, the more I suspect that its bureaucrats and government leaders have all collectively flushed their brains down a vast stinking toilet. Examples in many contexts (some darker than others) abound, and quite aside from some of them being intentionally self-serving, others are simply bizarre. This is one of them. For documents as fundamental as these, the basic premise should be that sure, you create digital copies, but for the sake of having such as backups in case some extreme situation causes the destruction of the hard copies, not as a bloody substitute and excuse to destroy them.
MagicMoonlight 3y ago
It’s not insane at all. You’re all whining but you’ve never requested a physical copy of these wills. If you’re willing to store hundreds of millions of individual physical documents for eternity, free of charge then feel free to pipe up. I’m sure they’d be willing if you have the means to do so. But you don’t. So you want us to spend billions pointlessly keeping a warehouse full of documents nobody ever reads. When it’s trivial to just scan them in enough quality that you would never need them.
benjaminryan 3y ago
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markfinn 3y ago
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165 points by ilamont 3y ago

dfgfek 3y ago

If these historians feel so strongly about this maybe they should pay the yearly £4.5m out of pocket?

febeling 3y ago
The numbers to support political decisions are usually made up
adaml_623 3y ago
Running a society costs money. The court system costs money. The alternative is very undesirable. That £4.5 million per year is a small price for social stability. In addition the digital option has a likelihood of costing a lot more
- jdsully 3y ago
  Paper records of wills are not going to have any impact on "social stability". The connection is so tenuous that using this line of argument there is almost no expense that the government shouldn't pay for.
arcticbull 3y ago
4.5m GBP rounds to zero in this context. The UK budget is 1.045T of which this represents 0.00043%.
asdajksah2123 3y ago
Over a 100 years the 4.5mm is 450mm pounds. Less than half a billion. What do you expect the liability to the state would be for all the wills getting wiped out, or modified, etc. Another way to think about it is, what would a private company charge the UK government to insure all liability costs of digitizing the wills? Especially since there are likely many individuals who are highly motivated to modify the wills database (many would benefit simply from destroying it). I don't know the answer to that question, and even though I suspect it will be far greater than 4.5mm, the point is that's the correct way to look at this cost, set against all the liabilities and risks digitization opens you up to. And most never seem to consider the costs and risks of moving to a new system when pointing out the cost of the existing system as a reason to move.
- IanCal 3y ago
  Virtually nothing? I can't think of anything you'd likely get out of destroying a 25+ year old will. There are time limits for most claims against the executors. They are also planning to keep some number of wills, if you kept say everything over a certain value you'd probably cover the cases you're imagining.
tivert 3y ago
> If these historians feel so strongly about this maybe they should pay the yearly £4.5m out of pocket? Abolish the police, which will result in far greater savings. Then if you feel strongly that your house shouldn't be broken into, maybe you should pay for costs for private security out of pocket?
- waihtis 3y ago
  Privatizing security? Now you're talking.

earthboundkid 3y ago

A nice thing about paper is it is very hard for hackers to ransom all of the wills.

crazygringo 3y ago
It's hard for hackers to ransom tape backup or cloud backups or versioned cloud storage as well, so that's not really an issue here.
- jl6 3y ago
  Maybe in theory. But a lot of orgs like to automate their backups, meaning their backup infrastructure is online and available and thus exploitable.
  - pavel_lishin 3y ago
    A lot of orgs like to not bother testing their backups as well, meaning that their backup infrastructure functionally doesn't exist.
- gustavus 3y ago
  > It's hard for hackers to ransom ... cloud backups or versioned cloud storage as well, so that's not really an issue here. Until you set the password to Password123! because that's the only password that everyone can remember, and the attackers go in delete the originals and previous versions and then keep all the data only for themselves.
- btown 3y ago
  Under a "right to be forgotten" [0] society there's no such thing as an append-only backup or storage, or even offline snapshots in time. As soon as a mechanism to overwrite all existing records (or, equivalently, to destroy the keys necessary to decrypt those records) exists, a sufficiently determined hacker/ransomeer will be able to compromise that mechanism. Paper, at least in theory, requires noticeable human action to achieve destruction at similar scale. One hopes, of course, that the environmental controls of the archival facilities aren't cloud connected... [0] https://ico.org.uk/for-organisations/uk-gdpr-guidance-and-resources/individual-rights/individual-rights/right-to-erasure/ https://ico.org.uk/for-organisations/uk-gdpr-guidance-and-re...

1-6 3y ago

Not only will they save money on record keeping, it’s a way to create sunken treasure chests. When people die, digital files can easily be removed without trace. I expect this move will allow the government to purge lost records of dead people who never alerted their next-of-kin.

blibble 3y ago
how do dead people alert their next of kin? being serious: most wills are not sourced from the probate registry and are only sent there to obtain probate
- oniony 3y ago
  With automation. I have my Google account transfer to my wife after _n_ months of inactivity, for example.
  - Uehreka 3y ago
    That’s not a thing most people have set up (even if they should).
- toomuchtodo 3y ago
  In the US, this could be done by monitoring the social security death master file published on a cadence. Currently advocating for a citizen friendly system to notify chosen parties at death event. Financial institutions consume this SSA data to freeze accounts, for example. https://www.ssa.gov/dataexchange/request_dmf.html https://www.ssa.gov/dataexchange/request_dmf.html
Xenoamorphous 3y ago
> digital files can easily be removed without trace As opposed to paper.
- Terr_ 3y ago
  Paper is much harder to secretly vanish (A) at scale and/or (B) remotely. I always thought it was cool how some Ghost in The Shell movie/anime stuff involved storing very sensitive secrets as barcodes on paper, to be kept physically-secure before being read by cybernetic eyes. There's also some line from one of the The Expanse books (Abbadon's Gate) which I can't easily call up here. The protagonist is inside an alien space-station following an AI's instructions to try to save the day, and he's curious why the AI doesn't just do it. The AI tells him that for the builders of that place, having physical existence was a kind of authority all on its own.

gustavus 3y ago

> The proposal comes amid growing concern at the fragility of digital archives, after a cyber-attack on the British Library left the online catalogue and digitised documents unavailable to users since late October. > The apparent vulnerability was also revealed this month when the prime minister, Rishi Sunak, and the former prime minister Boris Johnson both claimed they could no longer access WhatsApp messages sought by the UK Covid-19 public inquiry. But I'm sure the UK government will do a great job of protecting these super important and valuable documents.

meepmorp 3y ago
I'm inclined to believe that the problem with Rishi and Boris handing over those messages is more about their lack of motivation, rather than ability, to do so.
pbhjpbhj 3y ago
I'm sure these Tory politicians accused of enabling stealing from the tax-payer (and in Johnson's case of needlessly choosing to allow COVID to spread in a way he knew would cause thousands of excess deaths), will be eager to mandate cross-platform open messaging systems so all their messages can be well preserved in the future!

btbuildem 3y ago

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pcdoodle 3y ago

What's to stop someone from hashing the original document and committing it to the bitcoin blockchain? The 1st instance of this image will obviously have the keys of the trust and 3rd party witness from when it was signed.

teraflop 3y ago
A hash doesn't do you much good if the document that corresponds to it is lost. And storing the document itself in the blockchain is hilariously cost-prohibitive, on the order of $100,000 per MB.

trebligdivad 3y ago

Having had to deal with a death in the last year or so, this makes a lot of sense to me; this actual part (the gov record of the will) is VERY rarely used. Now if we can digitise the ones held with lawyers as well that would be great; IMHO the biggest problem for that is most of the lawyers handling this stuff are digitally inept. Heck a lot of these systems need digitising more, it's crazy how many doucments have to be sent around to tell one dept about something another dept has declared.

tivert 3y ago
You're only considering one use case. There are others: > It is feared that wills of ordinary people, some of whom may become historically significant in the future, risk being lost. > Wills are considered essential documents, particularly for social historians and genealogists, as they capture what people considered important at the time and reveal unknown family links. Digitization is not a problem, but the destruction of the originals is.
- mytailorisrich 3y ago
  I would think that for historical or genealogical research it actually makes no difference if the paper original is destroyed because what matters is the text: the assets the person had and how they wanted them dispersed, and the names of the people mentioned, maybe the wording.
  - toyg 3y ago
    Only if you trust digitalisation to be a perfectly faithful process, and digital artefacts fundamentally unmodifiable or falsifiable. Which we all know is totally the case... oh wait
  - simonw 3y ago
    From the article: > “You can see the indent of the pen and if the writer is excited or tense. There are minute details on the page which digitisation [can’t capture]. There is a thrilling sensation that you are looking at a document that a real human being wrote on. You get a connection to the past that digitised versions won’t give you.” More importantly: the digitization process is prone to errors and mistakes. Anyone who's spent any time browsing digital collections will have encountered pages that were scanned out of focus, or where a part of the page was illegibly crumpled, or a page was missed or miscategorized.

simonw 3y ago

This strikes me as an example of a pattern I've become increasingly aware of over the years. You have an institution - in this case the Ministry of Justice - who presumably at one point had senior employees who were acutely aware of the historical importance of preserving original documents like this. These were likely key values of that organization, but crucially they were recorded only in people's heads. Time moves on, employees come and go, and now there's a push for savings around the UK government and someone pipes up and says "well, we could digitize those musty old documents, throw away the originals and save on archival costs" - and there just so happens to be nobody currently in a senior position who understands why that's a bad idea. I have the same suspicion every time a tech company makes a howlingly obvious error - like that time GitLab said they were going to delete every free repo that hadn't been updated in a year (and later recanted after the entirely predictable outcry): https://www.theregister.com/2022/08/05/gitlab_reverses_deletion_policy/ https://www.theregister.com/2022/08/05/gitlab_reverses_delet...

1970-01-01 3y ago
So why is it a bad idea? There's a difference between destroying information and destroying the original copy of it.
- adastra22 3y ago
  Destroying the original copy would be destroying information. A picture of an artifact is not the same as the artifact itself.
  - 1970-01-01 3y ago
    True, however these are legal documents and not art for a museum.
    - notthemessiah 3y ago
      Even ignoring the historical value, it's easier to hack into a server and edit a file than it is to forge a legal document and break into an archive. Suddenly, you're the legitimate heir to a castle.

j-bos 3y ago

Lessons never learned: - https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2018/apr/09/special-needs-teacher-uk-50-years-loses-job-immigration-status https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2018/apr/09/special-need... - https://www.amazon.com/Windrush-Betrayal-Exposing-Hostile-Environment/dp/1783351853/ref=sr_1_1?crid=37JNCIIFVN6YF&keywords=amelia+gentleman+the+windrush+betrayal&qid=1699455463&sprefix=amelia+gentleman+the+windrush+betraya%2Caps%2C164&sr=8-1&tag=timharford-20 https://www.amazon.com/Windrush-Betrayal-Exposing-Hostile-En... I love digital records, but historically people have been wrecked by the destruction of physical records.

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arp242 3y ago
The whole Windrush affair was mostly caused by just ridiculous and cruel policy, not digitisation. There was nothing requiring the home office to start investigating these people in the first place, or to have these extremely stringent requirements for proof they had been living in Britain before 1973. Who has these kind of papers? Most of us don't – other than my passport, I don't really have any documentary proof from before I was in my 20s or so.
- ponector 3y ago
  Don't you have a birth certificate? A school diploma? Old passports?
  - arp242 3y ago
    Other than the school diploma that wouldn't really prove anything for the Windrush people because it was about residency rather than nationality. The immigration laws changed in the early 1970s so you had to prove you were in Britain before the change (and, IIRC, in some cases provide evidence for every single year you were in Britain for it to be considered valid). I could perhaps get some records from the school I attended, maybe? No idea if they still have records from decades ago. I certainly don't have anything from that lying around. Who still has records from their elementary school or high school? Some probably do, but I don't think it's uncommon for people to have nothing at all from that when they're in their 60s.

oceanplexian 3y ago

Watching UK policy from a distance has been like watching a dumpster fire. You can get arrested for writing a Tweet, you need to show an ID to watch porn on the Internet, a kitchen knife is considered a deadly weapon. They shot their economy in the foot with Brexit. It's like they took the fucking worst policy ideas from both sides of the political aisle in the USA, and thought, hey, let's combine them, this will turn out great.

chatmasta 3y ago
Keep in mind most of what you read is UK policy proposals. They're always proposing a bunch of whacky stuff. Hardly any of it gets implemented.
- orwin 3y ago
  Does that makes bureaucracies weirdly whacky-resiliant in exchange for more bullshit and red tape on the edges? I'm genuinely asking, your comment triggered the thought.
- PrimeMcFly 3y ago
  Getting arrested for writing a Tweet is certainly implemented.
  - foldr 3y ago
    This framing doesn't make sense. The issue isn't the medium but what was said. You can be arrested for a tweet in the US too if you say something that's not protected by the First Amendment (e.g. a death threat). The UK, like almost all other countries in the world, has less stringent free speech protections than the US. For this reason you can be arrested for saying some things (whether on Twitter or not) that would be protected under the First Amendment in the US. The same is true of a vast number of other countries (including many other European countries, e.g. https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2021/09/09/pimmelgate-german-politician-police-raid/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2021/09/09/pimmelgate-g...), but HN likes to get particularly excited about a few examples of this happening in the UK.

flenserboy 3y ago

This is a great way to ensure that the past can be modified as contemporary needs demand.

echelon_musk 3y ago
Exactly my thoughts.

toyg 3y ago

The UK government has great form when it comes to handling historical documents affecting the lives of thousands, as proven by the Windrush saga. I also have particular confidence that this executive should take irrevocable steps, since they have a clear electoral mandate and are very likely to remain in power for the next decade. /s

cinntaile 3y ago

You can't keep everything from the past, even if it might have historical value in the future. Perhaps they can set up a foundation that keeps these records or force people to pay a yearly/10 yearly fee to keep the physical records, but I don't see why the government should keep wasting 4.5 million pounds each year. The argument that you read here is that it's a rounding error but if you apply that same logic to all costs of similar size you suddenly end up with a number that is not a rounding error.

ilamont 3y ago

I interviewed Ray Kurzweil not long after "The Singularity Is Near" came out. I asked him about a concept that he brought up in the book but didn't get much attention in light of the other more startling predictions he made. Excerpt follows: Q: In the Singularity is Near, you also discussed an intriguing invention, which you called the "Document Image and Storage Invention", or DAISI for short. But you concluded that it really wouldn't work out. Could you talk a little bit about that? RK: ... The big challenge, which I think is actually important almost philosophical challenge -- it might sound like a dull issue, like how do you format a database, so you can retrieve information, that sounds pretty technical. The real key issue is that software formats are constantly changing. People say, "well, gee, if we could backup our brains and I talk about how that will be feasible some decades from now. Then the digital version of you could be immortal, but software doesn't live forever, in fact it doesn't live very long at all if you don't care about it if you don't continually update it to new formats. Try going back 20 years to some old formats, some old programming language. Try resuscitating some information on some PDP1 magnetic tapes. I mean even if you could get the hardware to work, the software formats are completely alien and [using] a different operating system and nobody is there to support these formats anymore. And that continues. There is this continual change in how that information is formatted. ... Q: You said there's no technological solution. What about creating standards that would be maintained by the community, or would be widespread enough that future … RK: We do use standard formats, and the standard formats are continually changed, and the formats are not always backwards compatible. It's a nice goal, but it actually doesn't work. I have in fact electronic information that in fact goes back through many different computer systems. Some of it now I cannot access. In theory I could, or with enough effort, find people to decipher it, but it's not readily accessible. The more backwards you go, the more of a challenge it becomes. And despite the goal of maintaining standards, or maintaining forward compatibility, or backwards compatibility, it doesn’t really work out that way. Maybe we will improve that. Hard documents are actually the easiest to access. Fairly crude technologies like microfilm or microfiche which basically has documents are very easy to access. So ironically, the most primitive formats are the ones that are easiest. [reposted from the discussion on "I found my Grandpa’s notes 20 years after he died (2020)" (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27034087 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27034087)]

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B1FF_PSUVM 3y ago

Most people do not understand that nowadays we're ruled by databases. You may have all the paper documents you want, but if they do not match what's in the government's databases, you're going to have a bad time.

rthkljlkrj 3y ago

I was just commenting a couple of days ago how ridiculous that the British library melts down when their computers fail. Turns out these people don't learn.

happytiger 3y ago

Digital technology means that 1) the intern can burn down the entire library of Alexandria with the wrong SQL statement (“what’s ‘where?’”), and 2) we still have no real long-term archival solution for data storage that isn’t prohibitively expensive or subject to non-retrieval due to technology advancement Consider this: please pull the tape backups? What do you mean we don’t have a tape reader anymore and the tape has all gone bad? What about the archival DVD? They only last 25 years? Surely the Zip drive has it on it? The plastic wore out on the read heads? Is that even a thing? Amazon glacier? No SLA? No, ColeSLA isn’t a funny joke Steve. This is serious. Wait. So, where are the land records from 1870 to establish ownership of the property then? Digital record preservation is hard and gets a lot harder the longer term you try to do it. Governments do NOT have the proper time horizons or actual costs of preservation in realistic order or top of mind when they talk about these projects being “cost saving.”

EvanAnderson 3y ago
The parties involved don't understand that they're trading the problem of maintaining paper records for the problem of maintaining digital media. Humanity has a lot of experience maintaining paper records with reasonable success. Digital media, not so much.
- mytailorisrich 3y ago
  The issue they have is that the number of wills they have to keep is large and increasing, and will increase forever or at least until they change the rule that they must be kept in some form forever. On a related topic, and perhaps more importantly/scary, the Land Registry has already gone digital so that deeds to properties are only kept in digital form...
LunaSea 3y ago
Cries in flooded, moist or burnt down physical archives.
- happytiger 3y ago
  Government could ruin civilization with unexpected moisture. That’s a strange sounding verbiage.

karaterobot 3y ago

Not only is this bad for historians in the future, I very, very much doubt it will save even the paltry £4.5 million GBP they claim it will. Even after the initial, massive digitization is amortized, they'll still have to pay people to digitize wills and maintain a public database to search them, and my word does £4.5m go really fast when the government is involved. I'd bet money that they'll figure out a way for it to cost more and destroy history.

bitwize 3y ago

You'd think the UK of all places would learn what with that Domesday Book kerfuffle.

pbhjpbhj 3y ago
Are you referring to the original Domesday Book, or the issue with difficulty reading the Domesday Book laserdiscs, produced in the 1980s, as the hardware became obsolete? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BBC_Domesday_Project https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BBC_Domesday_Project
- bitwize 3y ago
  The digital one. The paper Domesday Book has lasted nearly a thousand years; the digital version could scarcely make it to twenty. I don't think we've seen a more stark illustration of the difficulties of digital archiving.

1970-01-01 3y ago

1,000 year BDs are very cheap: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Verbatim-M-Disc-BD-R-Branded-Surface/dp/B011PZALWA https://www.amazon.co.uk/Verbatim-M-Disc-BD-R-Branded-Surfac... I'm siding with the UK until someone can tell me how these are NOT safer than paper archives.

the_snooze 3y ago
Paper doesn't require specialized hardware or software to read. Sure, the discs are cheap and durable. But will the authorities keep a store of BD-readers? Maintain legacy computers compatible with those readers? Software to read archived files from those discs, with no online dependencies (e.g., license activation)? This is something people are already thinking about, and it's a hard problem. https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2015/02/13/386000092/internet-pioneer-warns-our-era-could-become-the-digital-dark-ages https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2015/02/13/386000092...
- 1970-01-01 3y ago
  >Paper doesn't require specialized hardware or software to read. But it does. To preserve the paper, you need a warehouse with HVAC, power, and constant maintenance. You could bury them in the dirt for 1000 years, but then you lose accessibility.
  - foxhill 3y ago
    only if you want to store them in the open air. vacuum sealing them would obviate the need for an expensive hvac bill. and deep ground is not ridiculous. we’re expecting the storage to be in the “mostly write only” regime, after all.
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lorax 3y ago
Your "very cheap" 1,000 year BD only has always 10 year warranty. I wouldn't want historical records stored on that.

jdietrich 3y ago

If these plans are "insane", then we have a much more serious problem on our hands - the overwhelming majority of important documents being created today are digital-only, so if we can't trust digital archival, we're doomed to create a black hole in our history. Fortunately, The National Archives are very competent at digital archival. They have created a comprehensive set of guidelines and tools for preserving digital records. https://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/information-management/manage-information/ https://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/information-management/m...

derefr 3y ago

It doesn't seem to me that "preserve the physical records" or "destroy the physical records" are the only two options. How about "stop having the taxpayers pay directly for the preservation of the physical records; and instead donate them to a museum / archive / historical society, who will preserve them for their own reasons"?

bigbacaloa 3y ago

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nuc1e0n 3y ago

The UK government has a track record of embarking on huge IT procurement projects that are dismal failures which prove to be more expensive than doing nothing at all. See the Covid app for example. They even lost Covid case data by storing it in an excel spreadsheet for pity's sake. How can anyone seriously see this as being anything other another massively costly mistake? Maybe someone like Infosys will make consultancy money off the back of it I guess.

kelnos 3y ago

While £4.5M is perhaps small potatoes when it comes to a government budget, it's not nothing. (And presumably this archive will only grow over time, increasing the cost.) Why not digitize them, and then offer to give them to some sort of private/non-profit entity that's dedicated to historical document preservation, or something like that? Only snag I can think of is that maybe these documents are not supposed to be public? (Especially for the wills of the more recently-deceased people.) It seems a bit much to ask taxpayers to spend that money because some of those wills (ultimately probably a very tiny, sub-1% fraction of them) might become historically significant someday.

nitwit005 3y ago

It's easy to take the stance that nothing should ever be thrown out. It's always possible, if unlikely, it will be important. Museums, archived, and similar institutions have warehouses of junk that essentially never get looked at. Baring an infinite budget, you have to start throwing stuff out eventually.

skrbjc 3y ago

The obvious right answer is digitize them and then keep the originals, perhaps in a less easily accessible and potentially cheaper storage location.

Animats 3y ago

After the Land Registry debacle [1] this seems like a terrible idea. It is now possible in the UK to steal a house, resell it, and for the new "owner" to have good title. [1] https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-beds-bucks-herts-63392025 https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-beds-bucks-herts-6339202...

Log_out_ 3y ago

Germany scanned its national archives in with xerox stations. We will never know what numbers might have been scrambled. https://youtu.be/7FeqF1-Z1g0?si=FvBoSQ90yi4MQKsd https://youtu.be/7FeqF1-Z1g0?si=FvBoSQ90yi4MQKsd So similar projects existed and were so disastrous that they were quietly buried. To this day if a document was xerox scanned before the Bugfix it might be nil and void in court.

eviks 3y ago

Read half the article and not a single cogent argument presented besides some highly emotional statements: - Wills are considered essential documents, particularly for social historians and genealogists, as they capture what people considered important at the time and reveal unknown family links. Digital copies preserve this, so this is a non-issue - amid growing concern at the fragility of digital archives, after a cyber-attack on the British Library left the online catalogue and digitised documents unavailable to users since late October. Were these documents lost? Are wills going to be stored in the same centralized-only way? Are non-digitized documents more available because the cost of accessing them is much higher than a few clicks in a browser even if the browser is down for a month in X year? Paper isn't immortal either, how do you square it with those concerns? The WhatsApp example is just not at all relevant in this context > Hardware goes out of date and so it might not be available in the future to recall the scanned documents, Is there not a trivial solution to address this concern that a huge number of people employed in their daily lives? Than the other half isn't much better with repeating nonsense about data loss and people being forgotten while the opposite is true given that much easier access increases the chances of discovering the part of some future Mary Seacole > The human connection of handling the original wills and “the feel of the old rag-based pulp paper” would be lost too, he said. Just preserve a bunch of stacks of that old paper you can hug while reading the wills to keep the connection alive > wills are “absolutely vital” social-historical documents > highlighted the emotional impact of seeing an original signature on a historic will for a family member. You can see the signature in the image and have the same reaction, you know, people cry watching movies

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salawat 3y ago

There was a Stargate SG-1 episode in which people were entirely reliant on a network info store to act as an arbiter of truth, and to maintain a handful of other things that superseded the objective of returning a truthful representation of reality to the end user. A government can be thought of as an abatraction that fulfills a similar purpose. The problem is that sometimes the non-mutability of dead tree publishing is a critical feature, not a bug.

southernplaces7 3y ago

The more I read about just about anything coming from the UK Government, the more I suspect that its bureaucrats and government leaders have all collectively flushed their brains down a vast stinking toilet. Examples in many contexts (some darker than others) abound, and quite aside from some of them being intentionally self-serving, others are simply bizarre. This is one of them. For documents as fundamental as these, the basic premise should be that sure, you create digital copies, but for the sake of having such as backups in case some extreme situation causes the destruction of the hard copies, not as a bloody substitute and excuse to destroy them.

MagicMoonlight 3y ago

It’s not insane at all. You’re all whining but you’ve never requested a physical copy of these wills. If you’re willing to store hundreds of millions of individual physical documents for eternity, free of charge then feel free to pipe up. I’m sure they’d be willing if you have the means to do so. But you don’t. So you want us to spend billions pointlessly keeping a warehouse full of documents nobody ever reads. When it’s trivial to just scan them in enough quality that you would never need them.

benjaminryan 3y ago

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markfinn 3y ago

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