The Master Happy Birthday thread

woody said:
However, how many emails between soldiers and their loved ones will be saved in 100 years versus how many Civil War letters are saved? The physical world has value in permanence. The digital world has value in expedience.
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I call "survivorship bias". Think of all the Civil War letters lost to the ages because of the physical impermanence of paper and ink.

GMail has practically every e-mail I've ever sent or received (that wasn't spam) for the last five years saved on its servers. Meanwhile birthday cards, letters, and other written ephemera have been lost in apartment moves, misfiled, and otherwise misplaced. I'd wager that in 100 years, the ratio of saved to unsaved electronic correspondence will be far higher than the same ratio of physical writing. With water damage, hurricanes, expensive warehousing real estate and other factors, not to mention the challenge of cataloguing and access -- can you guess that my girlfriend is studying library science? -- the permanence of the physical is far overrated.
 
If Google keeps every email ever sent through their servers for the next 100 years, then any particular individual email you send is practically worthless and unrecoverable without someone knowing it's there. Are you going to hand down to your children and grandchildren the 100,000 emails that you wrote or received, burned on a DVD, a medium which may not even be around that long? Or will you tell them to check gMail? You can leave your legacy in the hands of a currently successful corporation, but I will prefer to print things I want to keep.

Furthermore, a handwritten letter from my grandfather to me has a much more personal value (whether or not his handwriting is legible). A postcard from Paris is more valuable than an email. The words are only part of the value. Words, like photos, have become commoditized and cheaply tossed around. (I don't believe this is entirely new, just more prevalent and obvious in the digital age.)
 
Happy Birthday!!!
 
Happy Birthday Kevin

Happy Birthday Kevin
:dance::birthday::band::smt113

---------- Post added at 12:05 AM ---------- Previous post was at 12:04 AM ----------

I guess as a birthday gift we should make him our fav broker :D
 

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