- cross-posted to:
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- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
UK plan to digitise wills and destroy paper originals “insane” say experts::Department hopes to save £4.5m a year by digitising – then binning – about 100m wills that date back 150 years
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.
So you’re saying that governments should waste tax payer money on something that has no real benefit just because it can?
I guess you also want to keep them longer than 150 years?;I mean it would be crack head behaviour to throw them out right? Why not convert the whole country to warehouses and store every document ever made?
They’re just old legal documents, interesting to have a copy for future generations but in no way worth the huge waste of money storing them would be.
Stopped reading there.
No. I’m saying what was in my comment. The right interpretation for what I say is the one I already gave you.
Are you talking about the cost of digitising? Or the cost of keeping paper records?
Because there’s more to this than simply how expensive is the format that we keep them in. There’s also how quick and easy it is to produce, to search, to share, to update. These are all positives when information is digitised that can’t be done if your will is a piece of paper forgotton underneath your bed.
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.
I’m sorry but this wildly over simplifying the issue to the point that the copper pipe analogy and hyperbolic language isn’t useful. I respectfully hard disagree with this characterisation for the reasons I’ve explained in my other reply.
Putting a will (or anything other legal documents) on paper must have seemed totally natural hundreds of years ago but at some point we need to accept that we have different needs for these documents and different ways of capturing them.
I totally agree with you about security. That should be a principle in all of this. But that shouldn’t constrain us to recording on paper. If security is paramount then design a system whereby you can verify the veracity and authenticity of the digital document and create secured controls around their handling - hint these systems already exist today. Tampering and theft is certainly an issue but realistically so is it if you still had paper. It’s not uncommon for paper to burn, I have been told 😉.
Any system is fallible, but that shouldn’t mean we remove it from consideration.
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.
I’m not trying to argue with you 😔. I’m trying to have a conversation with you. There’s no need to be like that.