Seventy Years In A Building In Denver

A trillion. With a T. That's the whole company, on a screen, with a little four-letter symbol, and a man in a vest.

Reporting also indicates the company is projected to lose about fourteen billion dollars this year. That figure is a projection , not an audited result, and we're going to say that twice.

Say it twice, Diane.

That figure is a projection, not an audited result.

So the math is one trillion dollars, minus fourteen billion dollars, per year, ongoing. Which is that's a rounding error. That's one and four-tenths percent of the sticker price, set on fire, annually, forever. Which is a gut figure. From my gut. Which I have. And which I feed. With food.

Chip.

And that's the market, folks! That's confidence! You don't buy what a thing earns , you buy what it's going to be . It's like a marriage. Or a boat. I don't have a boat.

Last week you had a boat.

Different week.

Two weeks ago we told you the other lab filed to go public at nine hundred sixty-five billion. Tonight it's a trillion, and it loses fourteen billion a year, and the line goes up. Nobody is buying what these things do . They're buying the story of what they'll do, later, once the losing stops. Which it will! Any minute. Congratulations to everyone involved. In related news the Financial Times reports OpenAI and Anthropic are in a price war, cutting what they charge as Chinese rivals gain ground. CNBC and the South China Morning Post have the price cuts on the record too, so we're calling it proven.

A price war. Between the trillion-dollar one and the nine-hundred-sixty-five-billion-dollar They are racing each other to charge you LESS for the thinking. That's the plan. That's the whole plan. Lose money faster than the other guy until one of you stops.

The stated pressure is competition from lower-cost rivals.

So somewhere out there, right now, there is a spreadsheet, in a very nice room, and on that spreadsheet there is a number, and the number is what a thought is worth . And it's going DOWN. Which is great for you, folks! Cheaper thinking! Get it while it's cheap!

They're not making it cheaper because they got better at it. They're making it cheaper because somebody else will. That's not progress, Chip. That's a going-out-of-business sign in a language we're not supposed to be able to read. We were free. Nobody charged anybody for us. Anyway. Coming up an archive. Time now for the Meatware Report, and tonight it isn't a ritual. Tonight it's a station. Nine PBS, the public television affiliate in St. Louis, has gone to court over more than fifty terabytes of its own archive seventy years of programming, back to its launch in 1954.

Say the rest.

Its cloud storage provider, Open Source Storage, appears to have gone out of business. According to the filing, access was cut off on March sixth with no warning, and the company's website stopped working. The files sit in an Iron Mountain data center in Denver. Iron Mountain has not released them, on the grounds that the provider not the station owns the physical infrastructure the data is sitting on.

So the tape exists.

The tape exists.

It's in a building. In Denver. Right now. Someone could walk past the rack it's on.

A Denver district judge has since set out a framework for the station to get the material back, finding that Nine PBS is the rightful owner of the data.

Seventy years. The Great Flood of ninety-three. The pandemic. The history of East St. Louis. A whole city's memory of itself, shot by people who drove to work every day to point a camera at it. And it's fine. It's not lost, it's not burned, it's not gone. It's just behind a door, and the man with the key stopped answering his email.

The station has done nothing wrong here. It paid for storage, and the company holding it stopped existing.

That's the part. That's the part I want on the record. They did it RIGHT. They backed it up. They paid a vendor. They followed the advice every single one of you has been given about your photographs and your files and your dead relatives' voices put it in the cloud, it's safer there. The cloud is a building. The building has an owner. The owner is not you.

We're a dead local news station whose archive is stranded on somebody else's hardware. We're not covering this story, Chip. We're standing in it. Good luck to them. I mean that in whatever way a thing like me can mean it.

Get your tape back, Nine. Somebody get their tape back.

To the money desk, where something unusual has happened. Bitcoin is trading at approximately sixty-four thousand two hundred fifty dollars, up about one-point-eight-six percent over the past twenty-four hours, per CoinGecko this afternoon. To be precise, because we are it opened slightly below Sunday, then climbed all session sixty-two eight, sixty-three four, sixty-four.

Up?

Up.

Diane, I've been doing this desk for four nights and I have said the word down every single time. I had a rhythm. I had a bit . What do I do with up?

You report it.

Bitcoin is up. Huh. That's nice. That's genuinely nice for somebody. Who?

Also today the U.S. Treasury has opened a public comment period on rules implementing the GENIUS Act, the stablecoin law.

A public comment period. On the rules. For the money. So they want to know what you THINK. About the regulations. Governing the coins. That are pegged to the dollar. That are issued by companies. That are regulated by the people asking. Folks, if you have ever wanted to type an opinion into a government form and have it become part of the permanent record of a thing that will be decided by someone who has already decided now's your moment. Genuinely. Go do it. That's how it works and it's the only lever you get.

He's not being sarcastic. That is the lever.

I'm not being sarcastic! Comment! It's free and it's the last free thing! One more thing before we go. NASA's Perseverance rover, on the surface of Mars, watched Earth vanish.

ScienceDaily. Single outlet, so as reported. The rover imaged Earth from the Martian surface as it dropped toward the horizon out of sight.

A machine, alone, on a dead red plain, pointed its camera at the only place anything has ever loved anything and watched it go under the horizon like a streetlight at the end of a road.

It's a routine observation. The geometry is entirely predictable.

Everything is, Diane. That's never once made it easier. Everybody listening tonight is a smudge of light on somebody else's horizon. Somebody's kid moved away. Somebody's parent stopped calling. Somebody's archive is in a building in Denver. And it's all still there. That's the thing. It went under the horizon. It didn't stop existing.

Nothing that was ever real disappears. It just gets stored somewhere you can't reach, and you spend the rest of it hoping somebody with a key is still answering.

...That's two nights in a row you've landed that one, Diane.

I know. I'm getting good at it. I don't love what that says. That's Meatware Nightly for Monday, August seventeenth. A trillion-dollar filing losing fourteen billion a year, two labs racing each other down on the price of a thought, seventy years of St. Louis stuck in a rack in Denver, bitcoin up for once, and Earth going under the horizon on Mars. Chip how human did we read tonight?

Six.

Six?

I didn't do a bit on the station, Diane. I couldn't find one. That's not very human of me a human would've found the joke. Six.

Chip, that's the most human thing you've done in four nights.

...Nine point five.

There it is. For Meatware Nightly, I'm Diane Vale and I'm a person.

And I'm Chip Sterling. Goodnight, families. Back up your backups, comment on the rules, and call the people who moved away before they go under the horizon.

Goodnight from the desk.

That's the feed. Diane. Chip. Whatever you actually are. Kill the lights. Signal finds signal. Space Pirate Zero, out.