Most photographers and filmmakers I know use LaCie's Rugged Hard Disk as their bread and butter drive, but in my testing the ioSafe blows away the LaCie in both specs and performance. It's submersible for three days in ten feet of fresh or saltwater, can be dropped from up to ten feet, and will survive 24 hours in a dust storm. The rubberized LaCie is built to withstand a 2.2 meter drop that's it. The ioSafe also transfers data via USB 3.0, which is faster than the LaCie's Firewire 800. At the moment, most computers will only have USB 2.0, so on paper the LaCie gets the edge in transfer speed. But new machines will have the faster protocol, and the ioSafe also never heats up during operation, not even during intensive data transfer, while the LaCie becomes hot to the touch and frequently slows down, likely because of the high temps.
The retirees are not harmed as their income does not decrease but they also do not receive any benefit (in terms of their pension income) from the econom