CPAs can I write this comic off on taxes now, please let me know

I haven't seen anything as stupid as the WeWork IPO document in a very long time - that is, until Elon Musk filed to take SpaceX public. WeWork was a joke. SpaceX is a threat. And if Musk and his bankers have their way, you are going to be their bagholder.

Lots of the top-line details leaked long before the S-1 filing itself became public. There's the rumored valuation of more than $1 trillion. That's despite the nearly $5 billion in losses last year. The total addressable market (TAM) for SpaceX - the amount of revenue SpaceX thinks it could make if won over what it thinks is its entire customer base - was listed as $28.5 trillion. By way …

Read the full story at The Verge.

```Long-time Slashdot reader schwit1 brings word that Marcia Lucas, part of the editing team for both Star Wars and Return of the Jedi, has died at age 80 after a battle with metastatic cancer. Married to George Lucas from 1969 to 1983, Marcia is remembered by The Wrap as "a powerful asset in the early days of the Star Wars series, helping shape its voice and identity long before it became the massive global franchise..." She won an Academy Award for Best Film Editing for her work on the original "Star Wars" movie, an award that came four years after she was nominated for editing George's previous film, "American Graffiti." She additionally edited his debut feature, "THX 1138." Beyond these collaborations with her then-husband, Marcia worked as an editor with other acclaimed filmmakers like Martin Scorsese and Francis Ford Coppola. She was credited as sole editor for Scorsese's "Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore," and served as supervising editor for "Taxi Driver" and "New York, New York." Marcia served as part of a three-person crew editing both "Star Wars" and "Return of the Jedi." On the first film, she worked alongside Paul Hirsch and Richard Chew and was personally responsible for editing the Battle of Yavin — otherwise known as the iconic "trench run" sequence near the end of the film. For "Return of the Jedi," Marcia shared credit with Sean Barton and Duwayne Dunham. "If only Lucas had people like her on the prequels instead of sycophants who worshipped him as a God..." argues this 2015 blog post noting an article calling her "the secret weapon behind Star Wars — including this anecdote from The Secret History of Star Wars : The [Star Wars] Death Star trench run was originally scripted entirely different, with Luke having two runs at the exhaust port; Marcia had re-ordered the shots almost from the ground up, trying to build tension lacking in the original scripted sequence, which was why this one was the most complicated (Deleted Magic has a faithful reproduction of the original assembly, which is surprisingly unsatisfying). She warned George, "If the audience doesn't cheer when Han Solo comes in at the last second in the Millennium Falcon to help Luke when he's being chased by Darth Vader, the picture doesn't work." Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader schwit1 for sharing the news.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Yesterday was yet another dark day for a fair and free press, as the Bari Weiss-led CBS News hollowed 60 Minutes out further. It wasn’t just executive producer Tanya Simon and correspondent Sharyn Alfonsi—who found herself in the crosshairs over her CECOT segment—who were fired. Correspondent Cecilia Vega and another EP, Draggan Mihailovich, were both also axed from the news magazine. While Mihailovich doesn’t seem to have publicly commented on his firing, Vega has. 

In a statement obtained by Business Insider, Vega says that CBS broke her contract, which wasn’t set to expire until March 2027. She writes that she was fired after refusing to make her stories politically biased, and that she witnessed colleagues start to self-censor because they were afraid their reporting would put their jobs in jeopardy. (A fear, it seems, that was rooted in fact.) Vega’s entire statement reads: 

I was fired today. My contract as a correspondent for 60 Minutes was not set to expire until March 2027.

I have the utmost respect and admiration for my colleagues at 60 Minutes and the stories that air every Sunday. But I very much fear what comes next for and the future of the legendary broadcast.

In recent months, my producing teams and I have experienced efforts to insert political bias into our stories. Reporting teams have held back on submitting story pitches about important news topics out of fear of the internal repercussions.

Let’s call this what it is: censorship, both imposed and self-driven. It is dangerous for the show and dangerous for democracy.

I held the line and refused to incorporate suggestions that offend the conscience, a phrase I borrow from a colleague who has also fought to keep questionable editorial suggestions away from the facts. I know from many conversations with colleagues that many producing teams and correspondents working on the show today have had to fight to maintain editorial independence with regularity. I am far from the only 60 Minutes correspondent who has asked herself, “What is my personal red line? How much can I push back before I pay the price?”

I am proud of the work I did for 60 Minutes. This season alone I was part of teams that won two of the highest honors in our profession — a George Polk award and a duPont-Columbia award for our coverage of Venezuelan migrants sent by the Trump administration to El Salvador’s Cecot prison. And not for nothing, I climbed to Mount Everest.

I also walk away with an honor no one can take from me: I was the first Latina correspondent to ever be on 60 Minutes.

Today I lost an amazing job. But I still have my integrity.

To my former colleagues, continue to hold the line.

CBS News hasn’t shared who, if anyone, would specifically take on the roles vacated by Vega and Alfonsi. However, Paramount did confirm yesterday that Simon’s role will go to Nick Bilton, a filmmaker and former tech columnist for The New York Times. In a statement posted on X when the news was announced, Bilton offers some stock sentiments about the changing nature of the news business, writing, “Evolving or dying isn’t a threat. It’s simple math. My responsibility is not just technological transformation. It is also our trust with the public.” Rather a rough start on that front, eh? 

There’s been a strange little revolution brewing over the last few years in the world of modern pentathlon—the weirdest, most expensive, and least-watched event of the entire Summer Olympic Games catalogue. The sport (based around a very early 20th century understanding of the skills of a modern soldier, including sword fighting, swimming, running, and firing what were later turned into laser-based guns) ran into some PR problems back at the 2020 Games, when participants complained that the fifth event, equestrian show-jumping, introduced an unwelcome random element to the sport. (Your event’s reputation is not doing great, modern-popularity wise, when it generates headlines about a pissed-off coach reportedly punching a horse.) All of which somehow trickled down to today, when Variety reports that Japanese TV series Ninja Warrior is now an official part of the Summer Olympic Games.