> Let's keep in mind that most people don't have access to basic hygiene and food safety.
Hyperbole for the sake of making an argument does not mean the writer is unable to construe of or consider situations where what they wish for is impractical or far down peoples priority list.
> I never understood why this kind of injonctions for us to do things keep on coming up to the front page of HN. I understand that they make good titles, though.
Because they set out ideas about society that may or may not be something we agree with, but that makes for interesting discussion.
> But a notebook in the attic definitely will.
Most of my dads notes have survived, but certainly not all. One of my grandparents diaries have survived. To my knowledge no writing by the other tree has survived; if it has it has already diffused among siblings two out of three which are dead, with no clear knowledge where any documents might have ended up.
None of my great grandparents or great great grandparents writing survives other than a couple of words written on the handful of photographs and two drawings which have survived, even though I know for a fact that some of them wrote regular letters to family after emigrating the the US.
The written records we have even from a time when people used to write a lot on paper are only a tiny fraction of the records made.
Some families will be lucky and have a lot, some will have nearly nothing, and often when you have a lot it quickly difuses out among descendants to the point that soon many will not have more than small fractions of even what is available about their ancestors, if any. E.g. I only got hold of one of the handful of surviving pictures of one of my great grandfathers because I stumbled on my grandmothers half brothers daughter doing genealogy and found her daughters on Facebook, and she happened to have one picture.
I do agree there's no guarantee about archive.org, and so I'm certainly ambivalent about people putting all their eggs in that basket, but this admonition for all of us to have a website will never reach anyone to start with, and nothing prevents both and/or at least keeping local copies of the site as well.