Marine biologist Stephen Palumbi gave a talk at TED about the massive problem with pollutants in our oceans, and the disease and death this causes everywhere in the world, throughout the food chain, including us.
Keep in mind what he says, then read this article, where the problem of toxins found in whales is shown in grim detail. Quoting from the article:
“The researchers found mercury as high as 16 parts per million in the whales. Fish high in mercury such as shark and swordfish — the types health experts warn children and pregnant women to avoid — typically have levels of about 1 part per million.”
“Ultimately, he said, the contaminants could jeopardize seafood, a primary source of animal protein for 1 billion people. ‘You could make a fairly tight argument to say that it is the single greatest health threat that has ever faced the human species. I suspect this will shorten lives, if it turns out that this is what’s going on,’ he said.”
“‘The biggest surprise was chromium,’ Payne said. ‘That’s an absolute shocker. Nobody was even looking for it.'”
“He said another surprise was the high concentrations of aluminum, which is used in packaging, cooking pots and water treatment. Its effects are unknown. The consequences of the metals could be horrific for both whale and man, he said.”
“‘I don’t see any future for whale species except extinction,’ Payne said. ‘This is not on anybody’s radar, no government’s radar anywhere, and I think it should be.'”
Guess who is the largest manufacturer of PCBs in the world? Monsanto.
Is the US government doing anything about this? No. They’re too busy blocking the press from seeing and reporting on the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.
Back in September 2009, I wrote about the ioSafe Solo, a fireproof and waterproof drive. In January 2010, at CES in Las Vegas, ioSafe, the company behind these disaster-proof drives, launched a new product, the ioSafe Solo SSD.
It’s the same size as the ioSafe Solo, it looks the same outside, except for the branding, which now adds “SSD”, but inside, it’s a whole new ballgame. Instead of using a regular 3.5″ SATA drive, they’re using a 2.5″ Solid State Drive. This means they have even more spare space to play with when it comes to disaster-proofing the device — which they certainly did!
The ioSafe SSD isn’t only fireproof (same serious specs as ioSafe Solo), and waterproof (better specs than ioSafe Solo, now with full immersion up to 30 ft for 30 days with no data loss), but it’s also crushproof (5000 lbs, any axis with no data loss) and shockproof (20 ft drop into rubble, 1000g shock for 1ms with no data loss).
Here’s a video from CES where Rob Moore, the company’s CEO, burns the drive, then floods it with a firehose, then has it dropped from about 20 feet, then has it run over with a bulldozer. In the end, even though the enclosure gets destroyed, the data stored onto it remains perfectly safe.
Quoting from the press release:
“Combining ioSafe’s new proprietary ArmorPlate, a military grade steel outer casing with SSD technology, the new ioSafe Solo SSD adds unprecedented shock, drop and crush protection to the existing fire and water protection.
The ioSafe Solo SSD combined with ArmorPlate helps to protect data in a two story building collapse, 5000 lb. crush forces, 20’ drop into rubble and up to a 1000g shock. In addition the original HydroSafe™, FloSafe™ and DataCast™ work to keep the drive cool during normal operation and protect the data from fires up to 1550°F for 1/2 hour and complete water submersion of 30’ for 30 days in fresh or salt water. Like all ioSafe products, the ioSafe Solo SSD comes with ioSafe’s Data Recovery Service, a “no questions asked” policy to help customers recover from any data disaster including accidental deletion, virus or physical disaster.”
The specs say the ArmorPlate military-grade steel is 1/4″ thick. That’s mighty thick. It also makes the ioSafe SSD about 5 lbs heavier than the ioSafe Solo. It now weighs in at 20 lbs.
I wonder if the whole device could withstand bullets, because then it would make a perfect military storage device for use in conflict zones. For example, it could be placed in tanks, humvees and helicopters to store video, audio and coordinate information during patrols. And at 256GB for the largest size drive, it could store plenty of HD video, if the military should want to go in that direction.
But let’s not go into hypothetical situations. The ioSafe SSD can work for disaster recovery right now. Should your place of business burn down or fall down or be flooded, any data stored on the ioSafe SSD will be available to you immediately, as soon as you dig it out of the rubble. That’s a tangible advantage. You can simply add this drive to your server room, or put it in the CEO’s or CFO’s office, and let him or her back up important documents to it, knowing they’ll be there in case of a disaster.
The thought just occurred to me — do you know how they could make it better? If it’s meant to survive disasters and be buried in rubble, it needs a geo chip of some sort, so you can locate it with a proximity device. It could be something simple that beeps faster the closer you are to the drive, so you don’t have to dig through all the rubble to find it, should it come to that.
And there’s another goodie packed into the drive: an eSATA interface. This, coupled with an SSD, means you’ll get blazing fast write and read speeds. You can see the eSATA connector on the back, next to the USB and power connectors.
Pricing for the three different Solo SSD models starts at $499 for 64GB, $749 for 128GB, and $1250 for 256GB. It’s a bit steep, but then, SSDs are still expensive, and no other drive on the market (that I know of) offers this level of physical protection for your data.
Images used courtesy of ioSafe. You can see photos, videos, specs and more information about the Solo SSD on their website.
The folks from ioSafe gave me a 500 GB ioSafe Solo drive and asked if I could write about it. The short summary is this: it’s quite different from a regular external drive, and yes, it does exactly what it says it’s supposed to do — it is fireproof and waterproof.
How is it different? For one thing, it’s big — much bigger than a regular external drive, much bigger than even a Drobo. Keep in mind this is a single-drive enclosure, while the Drobo is a four-drive enclosure. It’s also much heavier than a regular external hard drive. The discrepancy is explained solely by its unique purpose, which is to withstand fires and floods. I’ll explain below.
The ioSafe drive is made with technologies like the FloSafe air cooled vent, HydroSafe water barrier and DataCast fire safe — patented technologies which the folks at ioSafe invented.
One of my concerns with the drive, given its watertight and fireproof seals, was how it cools itself. Could it withstand regular use? Wouldn’t the drive overheat during extended use? The answer is no, thanks to the FloSafe vents, which stay open and allow air to circulate through the enclosure as long as the room temperature stays under 200° F. Once the ambient heat passes over that threshold, the vents close and seal automatically, protecting the drive inside. The closing mechanism doesn’t rely on electricity — it’s mechanically triggered, which means it’ll work whether or not the drive is plugged in.
The drive and circuits are packed inside a foam enclosure called the DataCast fire insulation. The DataCast formulation forms a chemical bond with water molecules that, at temperatures above 160° F, releases water vapor to limit the internal temperature of the hard drive. This enables the ioSafe data storage product to protect your data from heat damage while the unit is engulfed in fire. Typical fires last about 30 minutes and have temperatures of approximately 800° F to 1000° F. The ioSafe fire resistant data storage product has been tested up to UL 72 one-hour standards at 1700° F and the ASTM E119 fire curve standard. While the strength and duration of a fire cannot be predicted, the ioSafe drive has been over-engineered to withstand even the toughest fires, and that’s good news for your data.
When it comes to flood protection, the HydroSafe barrier blocks fresh or saltwater damage, including full immersion, while still allowing for the heat dissipation necessary for normal functioning. All ioSafe products are inherently flood resistant, whether or not the vents are open or closed, which is as it should be, since a flood isn’t normally associated with a temperature rise above 200° F.
The official specs of the ioSafe Solo drive which I reviewed say that it’s fireproof to 1550° F up to ½ hour and waterproof to 10 feet of fresh or saltwater up to 3 full days. They also say the drive comes with a 3-year warranty and a $1,000 Data Recovery Service, which works as follows (quoting from ioSafe website):
The Company or its contracted partner will provide phone or email based support to assist in recovering the data, or
The Company will pay for the disaster exposed product to be shipped back to the Company’s headquarters for data recovery. If data recovery is successful, a replacement product will be loaded with the original data and shipped back to the original user, or
At the discretion of the Company, if the data recovery by the Company is not successful, the Company will pay up to the amount shown in the table below for the specific product to a third-party disk recovery service of the Company’s choice to extract the data. Any data extracted will be loaded on a replacement product and shipped back to the original user. The Company has the right to use a factory refurbished product as the replacement product.
Product Line
U.S. Dollars per Disk
S2, R4
$5,000
3.5 Pilot, 3.5 Squadron
$2,500
Solo External HDD
$1,000
I know of no other company that offers a free data recovery service, particularly after a damaging incident such as a fire or a flood. ioSafe does it, proving their commitment to the safety of your data.
Now let’s talk about the other aspects of the drive, such as its looks, performance and noise levels.
The enclosure of the ioSafe Solo is made of solid sheet metal, particularly the front, top and bottom, which is made of a single piece of 1 mm thick steel. It’s built like a tank — as hard drives go, anyway — and is made to withstand hits and dents. The simplicity of the design — two leaves of sheet metal bent into simple curves that fit together like a dovetail joint — makes it appealing to someone who likes good, solid design.
Other than its size, the enclosure’s exterior isn’t fancy or flashy. The real beauty lies inside, in the fireproof and waterproof padding and seals. Other than a bit of branding and the blue LEDs on the front, the sides, top and bottom feature no adornments at all.
The back side features a lip with a punch hole that can be used to secure the drive physically to a flat surface, or with a security cable. The back of the drive has a power switch, the USB connector, the air grille through which the drive cools itself, the DC power port, and a metal plate with the drive’s serial number etched onto it.
Hardware noise is something I’m always concerned with. I prefer my hardware to be as quiet as possible. I compared the ioSafe drive with other external devices that I own, like the 1st generation Drobo, the 2nd generation Drobo, the WD My Book Studio Edition II, and the LaCie Mini. On an approximate loudness scale, it ranks below a 1st gen Drobo but above all the other devices, like the 2nd gen Drobo, the My Book Studio and the LaCie Mini. It’s the fan that’s the cause of the noise, not the hard drive itself. Given how much padding and sealing there is inside the enclosure, the fan has to work extra in order to cool it, so you’ll always hear its hum. The good thing is that it’s constant, so you tend to get used to it after a while.
The drive has a USB 2.0 interface, so you can expect typical USB 2.0 transfer speeds from it (it tops out at 480 Mbps). For example, I was able to copy 122.25 GB to the ioSafe Solo in 1 hour and 50 minutes, which is par, or perhaps even a little faster, than my prior experiences with USB 2.0 transfers.
Beside the size of the drive, which is considerable but appropriate given its specifications and purpose (5.0″W x 7.1″H x 11.0″L), there’s also its weight to consider (15 lbs). This is a heavy drive. It’s not something you can lug around in a backpack. It’s something that’s meant to be stationary and to withstand fires and floods. It is serious business. I wouldn’t even call the ioSafe Solo a drive you can keep on your desktop. Yes, you can do that, but it’s probably better to keep it bolted to the floor or to your wall, or even better, plug it into a USB to Ethernet device and keep it away from your desk, somewhere in the basement, in the attic, or in a closet. Turn it on every once in a while, copy your vital data to it, then turn it off and forget about it, until you have a disaster. Then dig it out, retrieve your data, and pat yourself on the back for having bought it.
The ioSafe Solo isn’t the only device made by ioSafe. They have a whole range of drives that cater to consumers and businesses alike. They have internal drives, made to fit inside existing computers, that use the same fire and water-resistant technology. They’re 2.5″ drives fitted inside custom 3.5″ enclosures with SATA interfaces. They also have rack-mountable RAID systems configured as RAID 1 (mirrors) and NAS devices that can be configured as RAID 0/1/5.
I initially planned to put the review unit through fire and water in order to test it, but I honestly don’t know what new things I could add to what people have already done to it in order to prove its capabilities. Take this video from the Wall Street Journal for example, where ioSafe’s CEO dunked the drive in a pool, then baked it in an oven to show the data stays safe.
Another reviewer barbecued the ioSafe Solo, only to find out the data stayed safe, as expected. On a local TV station in California, where ioSafe is headquartered, Robb Moore, ioSafe’s CEO, went on camera to torch yet another product — their 3.5″ internal drive that uses the same technology. The result, once more, was the expected one. The data stayed safe even though the drive was put through 30 minutes of 1200° F fire.
Finally, Gear Diary ran the ultimate fire test on the ioSafe Solo. They put it inside a burning car, left it in there for 10-15 minutes, hosed it down with professional fire equipment, then disassembled it to see if the data stayed safe. It did.
Like I said, I don’t know what I could add by torching and dunking my review unit, when it’s already been done much better by others. Gear Diary’s test in a burning car was the ultimate proof for me. That was a real test under real life conditions, and the drive proved that it could withstand it.
If you’d like to buy the Solo, you can do so directly from ioSafe or from Amazon.
If you’d like to win your very own ioSafe Solo drive, then join ioSafe’s Facebook page. As soon as they have 5,000 fans, they’ll hold a drawing and award one of them the drive.
A video compilation of various Peter Schiff TV appearances (2002-2009) is available on YouTube. The quality isn’t that great, but the message is pure gold. He’s been saying since 2002 that the US economy would collapse, and he gave solid reasons why it would collapse every time. His messages got more pointed with each appearance, they made sense, and yet he was ridiculed over and over for his opinions by so-called pundits on various TV networks. Ben Stein once said to him: “Sub-prime is a tiny, tiny blip.” I bet he’d like to eat his words now…
In 2004, I wrote an article where I said some of the same things Peter Schiff was saying — namely, that an economy financed by debt would not go on forever, and that we might be headed for another Great Depression. Back in 2004, the real estate market hadn’t even hit its peak, so I based my observations on common sense. I have no education in finance, but I can spot a turd no matter what it’s called.
I wrote then that the slowing US economy was being falsely propped up by the war spending in Iraq, but that wouldn’t last. You see, the government operated under a false assumption. The thought that what pulled us out of the Great Depression — the ramped up spending for WWII — would do it again in modern times. They were wrong. As I also wrote then, the WWII spending paid off: the world wanted American products after the war — they were hungry for them, and the manufacturing economy, which had been making weapons, shifted into making lots of things for export, like cars and clothes and other badly needed things in war-torn countries. Back then, we had a manufacturing economy, and there was real demand for our products.
History unfortunately does not repeat itself. In 2004, things were different. The US had no American products to export (unless you count weapons of war). It had moved most of its manufacturing overseas, leaving little to make at home. It was going into massive debt to finance a war that would (among other doubtful goals) stimulate a slowing economy, yet, from the get-go, they were not building American goodwill overseas in order to stimulate demand for American products. Even if they had done that, there were no American products to export, since we did not have a manufacturing economy any more.
A quick aside: some were saying a while back that the US is in the information services business — you know, IT, expertise, analysis, consulting, research, etc. — white collar stuff. I don’t buy it. For one thing, not everyone in the US can hold a white collar job. There are a finite number of people out of the US population (percentage-wise) that can do those jobs, and there are a finite number of such jobs available. To make things worse, information products lose their market value fast in times of economic hardship: when you need money to buy bread, you aren’t going to worry about knowledge; your stomach comes first. Also in the “things get worse” department, India and China are only two of the countries that can steal a large number of our information jobs as more of their people are educated. Don’t forget how many Indians work for Microsoft and other tech companies, and how many Chinese are involved in research. Unfortunately real products that fulfill real, tangible needs are still the king, because they are always in demand if they’re quality goods.
Okay, back to the war. It took people’s minds off the economy until the real estate market ramped up, and when that bubble burst, the whole ugly truth came to life. We had no economy to speak of, it was all propped up by debt, and all that debt was crashing down on us, as some, including myself, predicted. In my article from 2004, I said the following:
… unless we get someone in the White House who is willing to address the problem of debt head-on, I think our country is headed for certain disaster.
Fast forward to 2008. At the end of September of that year, I laid down my thoughts about the impending economic crisis. I was saying pretty much the same things I said now, except I approached the problem from a different angle. You see, we hadn’t yet elected Obama. Later that year, my wife and I, along with many other people, voted for him, because he was better than the alternative, and we hoped he’d do some good.
While the jury is out on that last part, and part of me says I should just sit back and wait to see what he does with his presidency, part of me goes back to the problem of debt and wonders if he’s tackled it head-on, like it needs to be handled. Unfortunately, he’s headed in the very opposite direction. He’s going to put our country into yet more debt in order to keep stimulating the economy. All this stimulating makes me wonder what status quo the government hopes to achieve. Just what state of the economy do we want to return to? Where do we want to go after we’ve spent all of that money? These words from Jim Kunstler say it best:
“… to what state of affairs do we expect to recover? If the answer is a return to an economy based on building ever more suburban sprawl, on credit card over-spending, on routine securitized debt shenanigans in banking, and on consistently lying to ourselves about what reality demands of us, then we are a mortally deluded nation.”
So, we’ve been going into more and more debt, for years and years, propping up a sick economy that has no more manufacturing backbone to stand on its own, and we’ve never taken our medicine. The US economy is like a sick man who’s hyped up on speed and other crap to keep from crashing into a bed and going through a proper recovery from a serious bout of the flu. It can’t go on forever. It has to at some point end. It doesn’t make sense otherwise. Like I said in an article from February of this year, there will be an ugly third act, where the fat lady will sing and the curtains will come down, and believe you me, it’s going to be a doozy.
Will it have to do with the severe de-valuing of the dollar and cause it to be replaced as the world reserve currency? Possibly, since some countries out there, like China and Russia, are already calling for a new global currency. I think there will be more unrest beyond the dollar debacle. And who knows, perhaps behind the scenes, that was the plan all along: bring on a crisis where bargains are to be had for those with the money to get them, and the sort of economic unrest that would make it easier to move certain pieces of the big puzzle into their place.
I’ve just got to say what I’m about to say, because it’s gnawing at me from inside, and I need to have it out. I’m not going to pretend I’m some economic guru, and I’ll use plain words.
My thinking on economics is simple. I understand tangible products. If an economy makes stuff I can touch and see, if it manages to sell that stuff both inside and outside the country, and the unemployment rate is low, then things are well.
I think things started to go sour when our industries decided to shift manufacturing to third-world countries. The thinking was that cheaper labor would result in cheaper products and lower prices. The truth was that it took jobs away from our country and it really only resulted in higher profits for the investors, not lower prices for us. As more companies would announce they were moving factories abroad, I would wince, because I knew our economic power was decreasing with each and every move. When you’re making less stuff in your own country, it’s plain common sense to realize that your economy is weaker.
As our economy started to move away from manufacturing and toward the service sector, I winced again. If you’re not making tangible products, what are you really making? Services? Knowledge? That’s all nice and good, but you can’t base an economy on intangibles. You just can’t. You have to have a good, healthy mix. I suppose I shouldn’t complain about this so much, since I work in IT. Still, at least what I make is tangible. I make websites and web systems. You can see and touch those, or click on them anyway. But not everyone can be a knowledge worker. It takes a certain amount of dedication, interest, perseverance and education, and many people simply don’t have the inclination to do that, or to be knowledge workers. That’s where having a good mix of jobs to offer your people is important. The more manufacturing jobs you move away from the country, the less variety you can offer your people. Plus, what do you do with all the folks you’re laying off as you “restructure” your economy?
When real estate prices started going up like crazy, I knew they’d come down, hard. They were bound to do so. When a pathetic little townhouse with a few tiny rooms, made out of plywood and fake brick cladding, cost over $400,000, that couldn’t be good. As prices kept going up, and people bought up multiple properties using ARMs, banking on the hope that the values of these properties would continue to grow, but no regular person could afford to actually own one of them, that was just plain wrong. When the home prices in most neighborhoods are so high that they’re out of reach for most, that’s asking for trouble.
Then I heard about the gaming that went on behind the scenes, as loans were approved by mortgage companies which seemed to sprout out everywhere. We knew someone who worked at one of these companies, and that person was just shocked at what went on. Executives would push employees to approve more and more loans only so they could get fat bonuses and afford McMansions and Mercedes cars. Meanwhile, the employees got nothing but low pay and long hours.
What’s more, I also heard about investment firms buying up groups of mortgages left and right, and re-selling them, and creating ridiculous layers of investments and speculations on top of these (mostly) insecure loans, in order to squeeze as much profit from them as possible. I’m sure that if you go back and check most loans, you’ll find 5-6 layers of additional financial speculation on top of the original mortgage. That’s insane and it makes me sick when I think about it. Instead of letting someone borrow money and charging them the set interest fee for the life of the loan, banks were selling these loans left and right as soon as the papers were signed, not caring where they ended up, letting others take the fall when and if the loan defaulted, etc ad nauseam. I knew that wasn’t going to end well.
Fast forward a couple of years to where we are today, and is it really any surprise that we’re here? Is it? And what’s being done about it? The government wants to bail out the banks and give them insane sums of money. You can’t do that! If they’ve mismanaged their own money so badly over these past several years, while their executives got filthy rich, let those same “smart” executives figure out how to fix their own problems! But no, what we’ve got now are scare tactics employed across the main stream media, where politicians and bankers are trying to scare us into giving in and allowing the bailout plan to go through. We’ve got bankers lobbying politicians to get the plan passed, and we’ve got them salivating at the thought of getting a piece of the bailout pie. This is ridiculous and irresponsible!
I keep thinking about Bush’s televised speech when he wanted to go into Iraq. And then I think about his speech just a few days ago, where he used the exact same scare tactics and language to try and get us to agree to the bailout plan. Jon Stewart did a great job of contrasting the two speeches on The Daily Show [reference]. Here’s a man that’s derailed our country, our economy, our international standing, and our military over the past 8 years, and we get to see his scare tactics in use once more. He’s clearly beholden to special interests, and they write his agenda. They wrote his agenda when he said we should go into Iraq, and they’re writing his agenda now that he wants to bail out the corrupt bankers. Given his track record, does he really deserve any credibility? I don’t think so.
So what should we do? Ride it out. Let the bankers suffer and cry. Let’s take our proverbial castor oil, let the crap pass through the system, and move on. They said it would be a disaster yesterday, when the stock market tumbled 778 points, and yet it jumped back up by 485 points today as investors gobbled up stocks while the prices were low. I think we all need a serious round of belt-tightening. Many Americans need to learn a hard lesson, namely that life doesn’t work on credit, that you need actual, real money to buy stuff. People and politicians and banks everywhere need to learn real fiscal responsibility. They need to learn that they can’t run up bills on credit cards and loans and credit derivatives and bond issues and not expect them to come due at some point. They need to learn that saving is more important than spending, and that a healthy economy means an economy that keeps its jobs inside the country, and makes most of what it needs inside the country as well.
It is truly unfortunate that none of the candidates running for president is saying this. I support Obama on my website, as you can tell by the Obama button in the sidebar, but that doesn’t mean I agree with him on everything. I think he’s the better choice out of the two, but he’s pretty short on substance when it comes to what needs to be done about our economic crisis. And he actually supports the bailout plan — probably out of fear, because he doesn’t want to be saddled with a big recession should he win office. I honestly wish Ron Paul was still running for president, because he’d get my vote, solely for his common sense approach to this whole mess.
Raoul Pop 