I was not familiar with this fascinating item from the list:
This bunker 200 feet beneath Iron Mountain houses 1.7 square feet of vaults which contain the charred remains of Flight 93, Edison’s patent for the light bulb, and Princess Diana’s Last Will and Testament. The US government is the biggest tenant, and the identities of 95% of vault owners are confidential. Sony Music, the Smithsonian Institution, and Corbis all have vaults there. Thousands of historic master recordings, photo negatives, and original film reels live here. Iron Mountain is also home to Room 48, a data center backing up some of America’s biggest companies.
Most of the above paragraph is accurate (obviously the 1.7 sq ft is a typo), but I researched this a bit and found that Iron Mountain is not an actual mountain, but the name of a storage company. One of their many storage facilities is a former limestone mine in Boyers, Pennsylvania, and that’s what is pictured in the original link. The company also has many above-ground storage facilities.
The underground facility houses such cultural treasures as the entire Getty photographic collection (25 million historical images), the Universal Music collection, cans full of film, old books, old costumes, etc.
Elon Musk recently spread misinformation about this place.
And then the speed—the limiting factor is the speed—at which the mine-shaft elevator can move determines how many people can retire from the federal government and the elevator breaks down sometimes, and then nobody can retire — doesn’t that sound crazy?
It sounds crazy because it is – so crazy that nobody can figure out where he got this idea. The inefficient processing of government retirements has nothing to do with elevators. The facility does not have an elevator!
The video below is a tour of the facility, as conducted by the company that runs it. It’s a fascinating place!
I’ve got one. It’s gone now, but back around the turn of the century, a company called Exodus was, effectively, the web. They backed up everything important on the internet. Banks, government, all of it. In those days, a lot was still done on tape backups.
They were in a bunker near LAX. They were considered a national security location.
If they had a security breach, the cops didn’t show up, troops and helicopters from the Los Angeles Air Force Base responded. It could withstand a direct hit from a nuclear warhead.
Talked to a security guy who worked there once. He said there was one place in the entire facility where there was a gap. He’d go stand there to eat a snack so he didn’t have to walk all the way out of the data vaults to take a break.
A tiny bit more color: I had clients in Exodus DCs’ and they were in consideration as the DC “home”for a startup I was involved with, and … the security was both no joke *and* a complete joke. *Massive* physical boundary protections, diverse power / data, , generators on fault protected pads, etc.
However, there was *no* followup, reporting, or controls after an employee was hired. I’ll leave the rest to your imagination, but … there’s a reason they went out of business just a few years later, and it wasn’t all related to the dot bomb. All very hush hush, of course.
Misinformation is a bit strong. While that place reportedly doesn’t have an elevator, many govt records are still paper-based. The federal govt a few years back put out M-19-21 which was aimed at getting govt agencies to move away from paper and convert their records to digital so they can get quicker access. Iron Mountain has their own pdf online about this memorandum detailing how they will try to comply with these requirements.
Most of my career has been about helping companies and govt agencies go paperless and it is something that many places have been very slow to do because it is such a big task. You can imagine how much faster everything runs once they get everything online and easily retrievable. That’s the important part of the problem, an elevator story may bring humor but means nothing. Just replace it with how long it takes someone to walk down a long corridor and go thru file cabinets.
And by “a bit strong,” you mean “100% accurate and absolutely the perfect, spinless way to describe it.”
I could have said “a totally nutty lie that no sensible person would have believed, and certainly no responsible person would have repeated without fact-checking,” but I know Elon was whacked out on drugs, so I just cut him some slack and described it factually. It was misinformation. There’s no other way to describe it. There is no elevator, there is no limit on how many people can retire, and there is no other mechanism which, like the imaginary elevator, could cause all retirements to cease until fixed. (Long corridors do not halt the process.) One can only guess how he could have come up with such a hare-brained idea. Did his drugs include hallucinogens?
If Elon actually knew how to improve things, he would have come up with a solution – he could have pointed out that Congress needs to appropriate the money to digitize the process. (The cost estimates have been massive. Obviously, his mission was to save money whether it made sense or not, and he wasn’t going to recommend that large expenditure, even though he may have known that it was the right thing to do.)
The whole DOGE thing has been a shame because their mission was a worthwhile one. If they had hired a company like McKinsey to study the agencies systematically, one by one, and recommend severe cuts, they would have achieved the same cost cuts by firing only deadwood instead of firing (and often re-hiring) essential employees like air traffic controllers, weather analysts, disease specialists, and others. But instead of doing that, they gave the task to a guy who just cut people at random – often by saying people were terminated for cause when those same people had A+ performance reviews. It was a typically bungled, tantrum-based Trump operation.
Mushrooms…per the NYT
And not just mushrooms. Musk apparently has spent the past year being addled on a whole cocktail of drugs.
Well, if anonymous sources say it must be true!
1.7 square feet isn’t very big.
I also think 1.7 square feet is very small and I’m damned impressed they fit all that stuff into such a small space.
I rather enjoy the Mission: Impossible movies, but sometimes I think about the “this secure facility has all these safeguards…” and wonder if it reaches a point where said security makes it useless for the person who actually needs to access it. The one in MI:5, if you hurt your knee you wouldn’t be able to get your own stuff.
I have I think an entertaining story on this. One of the (still!) regular guests on Coast to Coast AM with George Noory (at least as of a year or two ago) is a self described ‘remote viewer’ (and teacher) named Major Ed Dames. He’s a long time guest who goes back to the Art Bell days. Even the producer of Coast to Coast knows Ed Dames is a loon/fraud because the first bumper music played to introduce Ed Dames is Foreigner’s ‘Head Games.’
Anyway, Ed Dames appeared on Coast to Coast with Art Bell because he remote viewed what he called a ‘kill shot’ of earth from some asteroid. Ed Dames was still going on about it years later and because he married an Eastern European woman, in the mid to late 2000s he remote viewed the ‘safest place on earth’ to move to…Ukraine.
There is a marginally related story from these rings of paranormal nuttiness. Another guest, a seemingly credible and sane lawyer from Vancouver, Washington, Andrew Basiago, claimed that President Obama while still called Barry Soetoro was involved in something called Project Pegasus that sent people back in time (can’t remember if forwards as well) and to other planets using technology the government has but obviously doesn’t disclose. I believe Obama/Soetoro was only involved in going to other planets but that his teacher in this was Ed Dames.
During this broadcast a clearly annoyed Major Ed Dames called up saying “I was never a teacher in this Project Pegasus. This whole thing is loony.” When even Ed Dames says something is loony…
Just to make clearer a couple things here, not that they’re all that important.
1.Ed Dames did move to Ukraine I believe shortly before the Russian invasion of Crimea.
2.Basiago had given details of this supposed time when Dames was teaching Obama/Soetoro including the timeline and Dames said that he had records of what he was doing at the time and that he’d sue Basiago if Basiago mentioned him in relation to this again. Basiago in telling about Project Pegasus since to the best of my knowledge has never since mentioned Ed Dames.
My guess on their motivations:
1.When a person is a phony like Dames, I think it makes sense to disclaim any involvement in totally loony sounding things, as it shows Dames being concerned with maintaining his credibility, as any person who can demonstrate actual remote viewing powers would want to do.
2.Basiago was making his first appearance on Coast to Coast and my guess is he was hoping that in mentioning Dames it would give him a connection to the listeners. He likely never thought that Dames would have a problem with it.
I have an interest in the paranormal, 99.9% have poor discernment of interpretation of what they see, are grifters, or are just plain nuts. Dames I think definitely was (is?) a grifter. During the remote viewing project the government funded, amongst the ones considered the big names like McMoneagle, even they knew Dames was a loon who basically had a low level position with the group that he presented as being a big time guy for his grifting operations.
If there’s a solar flare the size of the Carrington Event, it’s going to destroy electronics and there’s not really a safe space unless you’ve learned to live as a survivalist – besides consideration of being outside of areas that could be wildfire territory if some high voltage transformer explodes. If it’s that strong though, there’s a hell of a lot more to worry about.
Joe McMoneagle, Hal Putoff and Russell Targ were definitely not grifters, unlike Dames. I know at least one of those three disliked if not hated Dames.
I haven’t seen the movie but I know their names were changed and I think they were slightly mocked, but they were the real people portrayed in the film The Men Who Stare at Goats.
I’ve been inside that mine. There are government workers in there doing paperwork. It might be feasible that if they couldn’t do their jobs for some reason, that it would slow government personnel processes.
Yeah, laying some of them off would certainly do it, for example, just as it has done for SS and the VA.
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