SpaceX has requested unusually swift entry into several leading stock market indexes as a condition of its historic stock market debut. But the S&P 500 stock market index representing many of the largest profitable US companies has surprised market analysts by refusing to bend the rules for Elon Musk’s space and AI company.

The June 4 decision by S&P Dow Jones Indices—the company that creates and manages stock market indexes such as the S&P 500—means that SpaceX will not gain accelerated access to potentially billions more dollars through passive investment funds that automatically purchase shares of S&P 500 companies. An exception for SpaceX could have also allowed leading AI companies such as OpenAI and Anthropic to gain entry not long after their own expected initial public offerings (IPOs). That possibility has now been shuttered.

The news will likely come as a relief to people concerned about passive investor money and people’s retirement savings plans having greater exposure to the market risks associated with SpaceX’s big bet on AI and speculative orbital data center plans. AI companies are generally facing more challenges in funding and building expensive AI data centers, even as they shift more of the subsidized costs of running AI services onto shocked customers through usage-based pricing.

To weigh expedited entry for SpaceX, the S&P Dow Jones Indices held a monthlong consultation to consider changing or waiving several main requirements for so-called MegaCap companies with “unprecedented market capitalizations."

Those proposed changes included shortening the “seasoning period” for new IPOs from 12 months to six months, waiving the investable weight factor (IWF) requirement for MegaCap companies to make at least 10 percent of their shares publicly available, and waiving the requirements for MegaCap companies to demonstrate profitability in the latest quarter of the financial year along with the previous four quarters.

Such rule changes would have accommodated SpaceX’s plan to only offer approximately 3 percent of its IPO shares to public investors, and the fact that SpaceX is currently unprofitable with a growing debt load that has reached $29 billion because of its spending spree on AI infrastructure.

But in its final decision, the S&P Dow Jones Indices stated that “no changes will be made to the eligibility criteria including financial viability screens, seasoning period, or minimum IWF.” Even after the standard yearlong wait, SpaceX, Anthropic, and OpenAI may struggle to deliver the consistent profitability necessary to qualify for the S&P 500.

Money rules and exceptions

Swift entry into the S&P 500 would have triggered $14 billion of passive fund buying for SpaceX, according to Bloomberg Intelligence. The investment research arm of Bloomberg also estimated that OpenAI could have gained more than $8 billion, and Anthropic could have netted $4.6 billion from similar passive buying sprees triggered by their S&P 500 entries.

This is because $7.5 trillion in passively managed funds—popular among both individual investors and institutional investors—follow the S&P 500 by purchasing shares of companies according to their proportional representation in the S&P 500 index. For example, the Vanguard and Fidelity brokerage giants both offer passive investment funds that track the S&P 500 composition.

However, the S&P Dow Jones Indices did “carve out one concession” by changing the investable weight factor rules for “lower-profile benchmarks” such as the S&P Total Market Index and Dow Jones US Total Stock Market Index, according to Quartz. That could allow an IPO faster entry into those indexes.

By contrast, the Nasdaq stock exchange changed its rules to allow SpaceX to enter the Nasdaq-100 Index within 15 trading days as opposed to the usual three months. Similarly, the FTSE Russell index provider decided to give SpaceX and other follow-on companies accelerated entry to the Russell Top 500 Index after the close of the fifth trading day following an IPO.

The denial of accelerated S&P 500 entry for SpaceX comes just days after Morningstar analysts described SpaceX as having been “significantly overvalued” in the lead-up to its IPO. The investment research firm valued SpaceX at $780 billion—less than half of SpaceX’s $1.75 trillion IPO goal—primarily based on the strengths of SpaceX’s Starlink satellite service and rocket launch business.

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In the late 1990s, I was a precocious Mac nerd who pored over issues of Macworld, stayed up late chatting on IRC, and downloaded pirated software that I didn’t actually need. I came of age at the tail end of the dial-up modem and BBS era—and got to witness the early days of the World Wide Web.

I wanted to know where all of this had come from and how it had happened so quickly. The grown-ups around me seemed mystified at best and indifferent at worst.

So I turned to books. I read Fire in the Valley (1984), Where Wizards Stay Up Late (1996), Infinite Loop (1999), and Dealers of Lightning (1999). In my mind (and to a lesser degree, on my actual bookshelf), I had built a mental list of my favorite selections of late 20th-century tech journalism.

Despite its 21st-century publication date, Geoffrey Cain’s latest book, Steve Jobs in Exile, would make a comfortable addition to my old list.

I already knew the basic beats of this story: the origins of Silicon Valley, the establishment of the ARPANet, the creation of Xerox PARC, the founding of Apple, its near-collapse, and Jobs leaving the company to launch NeXT.

Credit: Cyrus Farivar

Cain reminds us, in stunning detail, that Jobs’ “exile” era at NeXT was not only critical to his evolution as a man and an entrepreneur, but that it mattered for the rest of us, too. The technological innovations that came out of NeXT—notably, the NeXTSTEP OS—continue to live on in what we now call both macOS and iOS.

As Cain puts it, “NeXTSTEP was Steve’s attempt to make Unix taste sweet.”

I was raised in a Mac household, beginning with the 128k and extending through the Plus, the Classic II, and so many Performas. (One of my dad’s friends even gifted me a Newton. Like Jobs himself, I found the experience of actually using it quite confounding.)

By 1998 and 1999, we were all surfing those Bondi Blue iMac G3 waves—my high school journalism classroom even had a few! It was the dawn of a new millennium, and Y2K fears aside, things were looking pretty good.

At the time, I knew only vaguely about why Apple had struggled—OK, sucked—in the mid-90s. Why did Jobs start NeXT? What happened to a “computer for the rest of us”? What took place between Apple’s glory days of the early 1980s and its iMac-fueled, late-90s renaissance? (And what counts as a “workstation,” anyway?)

Steve Jobs in Exile answers all of these questions and more.

While the general narrative—Jobs left for NeXT but returned to save Apple—is easy to see in hindsight, Cain’s telling brings new tidbits, detailed texture, and three-dimensional characters to the fore in ways that haven’t been fully realized previously.

Three brief passages highlight the amount of new information uncovered by Cain.

Near the middle of the book, Cain writes about how in 1989, NeXT and Jobs hired Adamation, a two-man Black-owned, Oakland-based software development company, to make some of the first software for NeXT's nascent platform.

While that project for William Morris, a notable Hollywood agency, ultimately fizzled, Cain notes that “Steve [Jobs] protected Adamation’s reputation. He never blamed them publicly for the failure, and NeXT kept sending [Adamation] high-profile clients: the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department and then a luxury real estate broker called Alain Pinel Realtors.”

In this brief moment, almost a footnote, Cain underscores how much Jobs valued people who could share his vision of better and easier-to-use software. (NeXT’s hardware turned out to be too little, too late.)

Second, while many tech nerds know that Tim Berners-Lee created the first World Wide Web server on a NeXT machine while working in Switzerland in 1990, few know that NeXT employees were wary of bringing the news to Jobs. Why? They feared his wrath “and that he would dismiss [the web] as ‘shit.’” (In another timeline, NeXT might itself have capitalized on this world-changing innovation.)

But perhaps one of the wildest anecdotes that Cain uncovered was how one voicemail changed computer history forever.

In 1996, when Apple was solidly in its mediocre Performa era—and considering buying BeOS as the basis for its new operating system—a mid-level NeXT product manager asked aloud, “Why don’t we just frickin’ call Apple?” (NeXT was also struggling during this period.)

And so someone did. As Cain writes:

Garrett left the group of managers, walked back to his office, and took a risk. He picked up his designer phone and called the head of software at Apple. He left what he described as "one of my more inspired sales pitches" on the man’s voicemail, explaining why Apple should be looking at NeXT instead of Be... In any other universe, Garrett’s call might have gotten him fired. But in this timeline, it worked out. And thanks to him, Steve [Jobs] was about to enter Apple’s airspace once again.

Jobs passed away in 2011 at the age of 56. It’s worth remembering that 12 of those years were spent building NeXT.

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Some thoughts at National Security Journal about how to end this stupid war:

The President has no good options. The Iran War is a whirlwind of executive incompetence, embarked upon for no good reason, conducted with no clear strategy, and drawing to no visible endgame. It is difficult at this point to see how an accord will leave the US in a better position than when it started, beyond the unlikely possibility of a sudden collapse of the Islamic Republic. That said, the President’s precarious domestic situation offers an opening for some kind of war termination, if not on terms that the United States would prefer.

A basic deal would involve easing both the US and Iranian blockades in stages. Iran may insist upon a greater degree of control over the Strait than it enjoyed before the war, although any charges will be described as “fees” rather than “tolls.”

There will be no meaningful controls over Iran’s ballistic missile or drone programs, or a relaxation of its support for militias in Iraq and Yemen. The nuclear program remains the toughest place to find a face-saving compromise for both sides, but as we draw closer to the November midterms, the nature of that compromise is likely to increasingly favor Iran.

A deal along these terms could end the war… for now. It will not, however, eliminate the core issues that led to the conflict in the first place, meaning that war is likely to resume in the not-too-distant future and once again entangle the United States.

The post Ending this Stupid War appeared first on Lawyers, Guns & Money.

Microsoft Office 2019 and 2021 for Mac will reportedly drop into "reduced functionality mode" on July 13, 2026, when a license-validation certificate expires, leaving perpetually licensed apps able to open files but not edit or save them. Slashdot reader joshuark shares a report from OSnews: "Microsoft Office 2019 and 2021 for Mac view-only conversion (2026) is a scheduled remote degradation of perpetually-licensed Microsoft Office software for macOS and iOS, set for July 13, 2026 when a license-validation certificate used by the Office apps expires," reports the Consumer Rights Wiki. "After Office 2019 for Mac reached end of support in October 2023, Microsoft assured customers their installed apps would 'continue to function.' The July 13, 2026 conversion instead drops the apps into a Microsoft-defined 'reduced functionality mode,' in which files can be opened and viewed but not edited or saved. By May 30, 2026, the original 2023 end-of-support page had been re-dated and rewritten on Microsoft's site; the 'continue to function' clause was removed." Microsoft's advice to the users they're stealing from is to keep using the applications as mere viewers, switch to the free Office 365 web applications, pay for a 365 subscription, or buy a brand new regular copy of Office 2024. None of these make any sense, and clearly, all of this should be illegal, but it's not because the software industry is a clown show.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Trump administration is moving to dismantle the National Science Foundation's $368 million Ocean Observatories Initiative, a network of more than 900 deep-sea instruments used to monitor ocean currents, marine ecosystems, carbon absorption, heat waves, fisheries, coastal flooding, and climate change. The NSF said it would send ships in June to begin the removal of the instruments anchored off Oregon, Washington, Alaska, North Carolina, and an area between Greenland and Iceland known as the Irminger Sea. The New York Times reports: The ocean observation system began operating in 2016 and was expected to continue for 25 years. Jim Edson, a marine meteorologist who led the Ocean Observatories Initiative, called it "the world's most advanced continuously operating ocean observing systems." When it was first proposed, the science foundation said it was important to have a long-term presence at scientifically important sites in the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. Removing the instruments could take 15 months. Seismic instruments positioned around an active underwater volcano off Oregon will continue operating until 2028. Each observation station consists of several moorings that secure long arrays of devices connected to wires. The devices measure ocean currents as well as chemical and biological conditions from the water's surface down thousands of feet. The instruments were hardened to resist the pressure of the deep ocean, corrosive seawater as well as marine plants and animals that can foul electronics. Remotely controlled robotic vehicles and gliders around the moorings collect and transmit data to research laboratories. It cost $48 million annually to operate the network. The Trump administration repeatedly tried to shutter it, proposing to cut its funding by 80 percent in both 2025 and again in 2026. Congress pushed back, restoring the money. To try to reduce costs, managers turned off some of the instruments and collected less data, according to a December 2025 presentation about the observatories at the annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union, a nonprofit organization of scientists. Still, the science foundation moved ahead to decommission the observatory network.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

I spent over forty hours traveling to and from Hong Kong last week, and I found myself unable to sleep on the trip home. Overall, I did some academic work, read a good chunk of a history of the Qin and Han empires, and then finally gave up and looked at video screens. This is a post about what I watched.

I finally got around to seeing Shinichirō Watanabe’s most recent anime, Lazarus (2025), which is currently on Netflix (HBO Max). The show’s marketing, as well as its look and feel, lean very hard into the whole “new anime by the creator and director of Cowboy Beebop” thing. I don’t recall his intervening works having quite the same vibe, so I am sure there’s some kind of story behind this.

Lazarus pivots around a team of misfits assembled in search of a genius scientist. Per Wikipedia:

In the utopian year 2049, the world-renowned neuroscientist Dr. Skinner has discovered a miracle analgesic drug known as “Hapna” that completely relieves the user of any pain, shortly before disappearing off the face of the Earth. Three years later in October 2052, Skinner resurfaces to the public in an online video to announce the drug has a three-year half-life and that soon, everyone who took it will die. A task force of five agents, called “Lazarus”, is assembled to locate Skinner within 30 days and get him to divulge a vaccine before the first wave of Hapna users die

Lazarus was… fine. I enjoyed it, but the main plot really didn’t hold together very well, and one of its final “reveals” didn’t really add up. I am still unsure if the audience was supposed to spot Dr. Skinner fairly early on — thus putting us, in principle, into the domain of Hitchcockian suspense — in much the same way as I remain unclear as to whether the “drink switch” in Knives Out: Glass Onion was intended to be so obvious as to defy misdirection. But I won’t go into more details, since I think the statute of limitation on spoiler-free discussions doesn’t run out for another year or three.

I also caught up on the seasons 2–4 of Invincible, which I thought was terrific. The storyline and characterizations involve a decent amount of meta-commentary on the superhero genre, but it mercifully avoids becoming yet another retread of the arguments Alan Moore made four decades ago in Watchmen. So it’s interesting that James Gunn genuflected toward Invincible in his recent Superman film. Indeed, like Gunn’s The Suicide Squad and Peacemaker, Invincible blends genuine humor with a bit too much gore — yes, even in the sanitized television adaptation.

Per my last comment, I just finished reading through the entire run of the core Invincible comic. My take is that the television show is the superior version. The show is a kind of revised edition. It recreates some scenes word-for-word, but it also rearranges plot elements for the better, uses superior models for some of its key characters, and mercifully addresses some of the more problematic ways in which comic handles sex and gender.

In the comic book, for example, Mark Grayson’s (aka Invincible) first girlfriend, Amber Bennett, has two character traits. She’s hot, and she wants to wait to have sex with Mark. Their early relationship mostly takes place “off panel” (so much so that I looked back over the early issues to see if I’d missed anything). In the cartoon, though, she’s a much more developed character and, more importantly, both exercises and cares deeply about her own agency. Regardless of what one thinks of the specifics of Amber’s retooling, the show at least tries to make its audience invested in Mark and Amber’s relationship. The comic book treats it as a throwaway — nothing more than a device to delay a coupling that readers have already figured out is inevitable.

These kinds of changes, while often subtle, are something of a leitmotif in the television adaptation. Allen the Alien’s girlfriend, Telia, is portrayed (mostly) as a scantily-clad sexpot in the comic book. In the show, she’s a general in the Coalition military. In the show, Telia actively participates in major storylines. In the comic book, she mostly seems to scold other characters in unpleasant ways. Simple gender swaps – such as making Shrinking Rae, Tech Jacket, and Green Ghost women — not only bring greater balance to the cast but also, in some cases, allows for better storytelling.

Anyway, I give Lazarus a generous B and Invincible an A-. If you have your own opinions, please share. Or just discuss anything you’ve been watching or reading in recent weeks. That’ll work, too.

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