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Family in pharma had a good counter-question to rationally scope this:

"What are we going to do with this, if we store it?"

A surprising amount of the time, no one has a plausible answer to that.

Sure, sometimes you throw away something that would have been useful, but that posture also saves you from storing 10x things that should never have been stored, because they never would have been used.

And for the things you wish you'd stored... you can re-enable that after you start looking closely at a specific subsystem.



I agree that this is the way, but the problem with this math is that you can't, like, prove that that one thing in ten that you could have saved but didn't wouldn't have been 100x as valuable as the 9 that you didn't end up needing. So what if you saved $1000/yr in storage if you also had to throw out a million dollar feature that you didn't have the data for? There is no way to go about calculating this stuff, so ultimately you have to go by feel, and if the people writing the checks have a different feel, they will get their way.




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