Don't "Go Paperless", Go Paperful [sic] (for What Really Matters)
"Paperless" is only perceived to be good for the environment if we conveniently, gullibly, falsely and wrongly assume the digital devices we leverage to "go digital" cause no environmental damage to produce and to use (extraction, combustion and so on). That's not even counting the server side, routers, manpower etc. Dr. Andy Farnell wrote about it years ago. "The Nine Circles of E-Waste" has aged well.
Why should we favour paper use sometimes? Well, many reasons.
Consider what we wrote earlier today about postal services; with modern letters that get printed not by hand but by some machines it's safe to assume there is some storage device or file/s somewhere, driving the printer or movable types or whatever, then doing the printing. They nowadays say to people, get your "skinnerbox" to access the file/s instead of receiving the physical output. To say so is to basically deny people the full service/s they once had. Is this really progress? Papers last vastly longer than the average digital device, which in this age (the "Made in China" era) are made to fail within a few years. "Just get used to it!" (Data will be lost without redundancy, format shifting, device shifting etc.)
"Written communication is no longer a service," someone pointed out, "but a profit center and in conflict with Metcalfe's law, they are shaving the edges off of the network. In other words, in effect the decision to end letter service was made when DPS ended and PostNord started, only the timing was left open. Now the wheels set in motion back then have ground this far."
A reader said that "Google and Microsoft aim to do the same to plain text over IMAPS/SMTP."
"And of course Palantir is drooling at the idea of all written communication going through Goolag [Google] or Microsoft in machine readable form." It is already digesting British people's medical data in partnership with Microsoft (US) in the UK - it's like a form of espionage by pseudo-American spying firms which work closely with foreign spooks.
"Societies that say the aim is to "go digital" and eliminate paper trail aren't advanced; they're moving backwards," I said, and the reader replied, "see earlier comment about Palantir drooling" (they try to 'monetise' sensitive data by sending it down hostile 'pipes').
Choosing paper is common sense in many real-world scenarios, it's not being a "Luddite" or "retarded" or a "pain" (supposed 'burden' to those who cut their services and staff). █