Month: November 2025

If the question is why we continue to be drunk on airplanes, the answer is simple: because it is a business.

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We may all be more sensitive to flying from 9/11 attacksbut so is the feeling that every time there are more altercations inside airplanes with a common denominator: the alcohol. Scenes of drunk passengers causing delays, fights, vomiting or even attempts to open doors in mid-flight they are already part of the collective imagination of air travel. The question is almost obligatory: is there really no solution? An increasingly visible phenomenon. They remembered on CNN the recent case of the man who, completely intoxicated, forced to evict a plane in Chicago after vomiting during filming is just one example among hundreds of incidents documented year after year. In the United States alone, a review of more than 1,600 reports from the federal system revealed an incontestable pattern: alcohol in almost all levels of bad behavior, from arguments and disobedience to physical and sexual attacks. And although public perception confirms the problem (more than half of passengers in the United Kingdom claims to have dealt with with drunk travelers), there is still no consensus on how to stop it. Safety in the air. Plus: cabin crews operate in a space that is, by definition, a metal tube thousands of meters above the ground. They are the ones who must manage both the emotional tension of passengers and the consequences of alcohol mixed with fear of flying, long delays or increasingly narrow cabins. Without the ability to expel anyone mid-flight and with companies that do not always support their decisions, the attendants become in the first and last containment line. Although they receive de-escalation training, they face a type of passenger that did not exist a decade ago: the traveler who mixes alcohol with medications, stimulants or recreational substances, generating episodes of aggressiveness that are difficult to predict and control. Distribution of blame. And here comes the crux, because no one wants to assume the root of the problem. Airlines blame airports for allow consumption unlimited in bars and restaurants prior to boarding, pointing that they hardly sell alcohol on board, especially on short flights. The airports, in turn, point out that their role is commercial, not disciplinary, and that responsibility falls on the air operators. And within the flights themselves, the auxiliaries They blame gate agents for not blocking access to obviously intoxicated passengers, while pilots denounce that insufficient disciplinary measures are taken against repeat offenders. The fragmentation between ground and air causes each party to offload the problem on another, creating an operational vacuum that allows the situation to repeat itself flight after flight. The economic dimension. Behind the debate lies a factor that possibly outweighs any security protocol: alcohol, whether we like it or not, is one of the most lucrative businesses of the aeronautical industry. In airports it generates large margins for shops and restaurants, while in the cabin it is used as an incentive in higher categories. Precisely for this reason, rarely clear data is provided on income derived from its sale, and any attempt to limit consumption before boarding is met with resistance from both airport operators and airlines. The result is a permanent contradiction: The industry recognizes that alcohol causes problems, but depends on it financially. In other words, alcohol (and as a consequence, drunks) “interest(s)”, but with a small mouth. Public pressure. The number of passengers support restrictive measures It grows as incidents go viral and attract media attention. Some proposals already have a favorable majority: drinking limits at airports, breathalyzer controls before boarding or even total restrictions on certain routes. Meanwhile, regulators are toughening penalties: the FAA imposed its largest fine in history (more than $80,000) to an extremely violent passenger, and the airlines are expanding their ban lists to repeat travelers. However, the approach remains reactive, not preventive, and each solution encounters resistance in the chain of interests that sustains global air tourism. Between I want and I don’t want. Thus, the problem of the drunk passenger does not arise only from alcohol, but from a fragmented system where no one wants to bear the cost of controlling it. Airports that maximize profits, airlines that fear losing revenue, overloaded crews, regulators who act after the fact and frustrated passengers who see a drink as the instant answer to discomfort. Everyone agrees that there is a problem, but no one wants to be who imposes the solution. The result is a sky increasingly tensewhere safety depends on the professionalism of the crews and a kind of unstable balance that is broken too easily. Image | Instagram, X In Xataka | “This is the last time I pay 10 euros for a gin and tonic”: the anger of British tourists at the price of alcohol in Spain In Xataka | The “tourist cages” arrive in Valencia: holiday gentrification in Spain goes up a gear

a 1cm screw

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At the dawn of the new space race, when public agencies and private companies they promise orbital tourismreusable ships and commercial stations, the most uncomfortable reality prevails again: in an environment where everything is calculated to the millimeter, where engineering reaches almost obsessive degrees of perfection, a tiny fragment is still enough to leave a crew without a return vehicle. The last ones, the chinese. The invisible fragility. Actually, enough with very littlea screw, a metal splinter, a grain of paint that advances at 28,000 km/h, to leave the astronauts stranded. The recent episode of the Shenzhou-20probably hit by a fragment so small that it could not even be traced, has once again demonstrated that, beyond the marketing of “new space”, the basic vulnerability of manned missions remains intact. Recent history, since Chinese Tiangong station to the ISS, confirms that extended stays, disabled capsules and improvised returns are not anomalies: they are the inevitable price of operating in an environment saturated with objects traveling at hypersonic speeds and where any unforeseen It triggers complex logistics chains for which no one is fully prepared. The perfect storm. The exponential increase of activities in low orbit has created an ecosystem where the number of active satellites far exceeds 9,000 and where dozens of thousands of fragments Majors follow the trail, but millions of microremains (the size of a screw or less) evolve without possible detection. The practical consequence is that any capsule, no matter how robust, faces a permanent risk of invisible impacts which can crack windows, damage heat shields or render thrusters useless without warning. In parallel, the logistical complexity grows: more private actors, more different vehicles, more dependence on the weather and more critical points in each mission. The combination of orbital saturation, increasing use of space stations and increasingly compressed operating cycles widens the margins of error and multiplies the chances of a crew being temporarily left without safe return. It is not a hypothetical scenario: it is already recurring, and affects equally to China, the United States and Russia. The Shenzhou-20 as a structural symptom. He chinese incident It synthesizes all contemporary problems. A ship ready to bring the taikonauts back it develops tiny cracks in one of its windows. There is no obvious alarm, but the possibility of this damage compromising reentry is enough to declare it useless. The outgoing crew must wait nine more days and end up returning in the newly arrived capsule. This maneuver, in turn, leaves the new crew without an escape vehicle and forces the Chinese agency to launch against the clock. an emergency capsule. The process works because the system is designed to improvisebut the sequence reveals the absolute dependence of each module and the fragility of losing a single one. The Shenzhou-20 is moored to the station to be returned without crew. Thus, the “centimeter screw” becomes in main actor of a chain of decisions that affects several crews and requires the mobilization of launchers, equipment and additional resources. In the era of megaconstellations and commercial flights, this vulnerability not only persists: is amplified. History of space “strandings”. He chinese case It is not isolated. In recent years, similar incidents have affected the United States and Russia. Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore nine months passed on the ISS because their Starliner was not safe for reentry after propulsion failures. Frank Rubio stayed a full year in orbit when his Soyuz was pierced by a micrometeoroid and his capsule became unusable. History repeats itself: a critical device is no longer reliable, a contingent improvises, another vehicle arrives and the astronauts return via an alternative route. Even external factors (weather, a previous accident, a geopolitical conflict) can leave a crew with no immediate return. Since the Soviet collapse caught Sergei Krikalev on Mir until the flight suspensions after the Columbia disasterthe notion of “staying longer” is deeply embedded in agency culture. Astronauts do not perceive it as a failure, but at an operational level it marks constant points of tension that tend to worsen as low orbit becomes more crowded and unpredictable. Space junk. The most disturbing factor of this new stage is that a growing part of the risk comes from objects that cannot be detected. Current radars track relatively large pieces, but the swarm of microfragments (these from collisions, tiny detachments from aging satellites, metal particles, loose paint, glass, microscopic screws) follow the dynamics described decades ago by the Kessler syndrome: more objects generate more collisions, which in turn multiply the fragments. These small objects cannot be dodged because they cannot be seen. And yet, they possess enough kinetic energy to puncture a ship or cause imperceptible structural failures that only reveal themselves when a mission is about to return. In such an aggressive environment, the question is no longer whether a capsule will receive a minuscule impact, but when and at what critical point it will occur. The Shenzhou-20 does not inaugurate a trend: confirm that we are already inside it. Persistent risks. Impacts are not the only cause of prolonged stays: the ships themselves, even the most modern ones, show vulnerabilities inevitable. Reentering the atmosphere involves braking from 28,000 km/h to zero in minutes, a process that requires each component to operate with absolute precision. Thrusters, heat shields, sensors, valves, life support systems and automatic sequences are constantly tested, but physical and thermal stress is not supported margin of error. The first missions for new vehicles often reveal unexpected glitches, such as It happened with Starliner. In these contexts, the safest measure is always the same: extend stay and wait for an alternative spacecraft, such as the Dragon or a Soyuz, to become available. History itself confirms that this logic works and saves livesbut it also emphasizes that the redundancy that is taken for granted on dry land is much more difficult to reproduce hundreds of kilometers away. Space tourism and “normality”. Plus: the boom of space tourism enter a disturbing contrast. While agencies accumulate cases of … Read more

In 2001, a yacht took refuge on a remote island in the Atlantic. Days later its inhabitants breaded fish with coca

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To the island of Sao Miguelthe largest and most populated of the Azores archipelago, is known as the ‘Green Island’ for its lush meadows. In 2001, however, the most appropriate thing was to refer to it as the white island. In one of those pirouettes of destiny that usually inspire Netflix scriptwriters (and in this case that’s how it was) began to arrive on the coasts of São Miguel, more specifically on those of the freguesia of Fish Taildozens and dozens of uncut bales of cocaine of extraordinary purity. The Atlantic brought them by surprise and without anyone in Rabo de Peixe being able to explain very well why or where they came from. What there is little doubt about more than 20 years later is that that episode changed history of the island. Not only because Rabo de Peixe was forever associated with surrealist images (it is counted that on the island there were families who they breaded mackerel with cocaine instead of flour), but for the mark it has left on a population of humble fishermen in which until then white powder was a luxury available to an elitist minority. Twenty-four years later, his story is back in the news thanks to streaming. Netflix has just released a new documentary about that episode, ‘White Tide: The surreal story of Rabo de Peixe’a launch that coincides with the premiere of the second season of a series inspired by the same event, the successful ‘Rabo de Peixe’. A drifting sailboat The Azores are a paradise on earth, but even the greatest of paradises can turn into hell. Antonino Quinzi saw this for himself at the beginning of June 2001, while steering a yacht of 12 meters across the Atlantic towards Spain. Although he was an experienced sailor and had recently completed the Canary Islands-Venezuela route, near the Azores he was surprised by a strong storm that damaged his ship’s rudder and threatened to set him adrift. Faced with such a panorama, Quinzi decided to postpone his original plan, which was to sail back from Venezuela to Spain, and seek refuge in some discreet cove of São Miguel. The word ‘discreet’ is not a minor nuance. To the residents of the parish of Pilar da Bretanha who saw how his yacht appeared on the horizon and sought shelter among the cliffs, Quinzi it seemed to them one more amateur sailor. One of the many sailboat owners who set out to sail the ocean without enough boards and end up finding themselves in trouble. In this case they were wrong. Quinzi was a hard-working Sicilian navigator and if he seemed to be stumbling along the coast of São Miguel it was because he was actually looking for a secluded place in which to hide the cargo he was transporting. On board his yacht, in addition to food and everything necessary for his long voyage, he hid hundreds and hundreds of kilos of cocaine from Venezuela. How many? Officially there is talk of half tonalthough there are those who remember that the ship could carry up to 3,000 kg and it would be strange for the Sicilian to embark on its ocean voyage without taking advantage of that cargo capacity. The fact is that Quinzi needed to reach a port where he could repair his yacht, but for obvious reasons he could not do so with the holds full of bales. To get out of trouble he decided to get rid of drugs. Some versions they count who used a boat to take part of the load to a cave, but had to abort the mission when he was surprised by some fishermen. Whether or not it is true, the fact is that to get rid of a large part of his cargo, Quinzi chose to another more radical solution. A wave of bundles Which? After ensuring that the bales would not be damaged by water, he placed them in fishing nets and then lowered them off the coast with the help of heavy chains and an anchor. Once he finished the task, he set sail towards the port of Rabo de Peixea humble and discreet fishing town located just over 20 kilometers from where he had hidden the shipment. The plan seemed perfect, if it weren’t for the fact that the same waves that had forced Quinzi to seek shelter ended up destroying the net that hid the coca bales. The result: dozens and dozens of packages began to emerge and the waves dragged them towards the coast. Guardian account how the first official notice was recorded on June 7, 2001, just one day after Quinzi’s yacht was seen lurking around the cliffs. While walking through a cove, a local came across a large black plastic sheet that hid what looked like dozens of packed bricks. He notified the police, who soon found that there were 270 bales that weighed nearly 300 kilos. Over the next few days, the authorities received similar notices from people who found bundles while walking along the coast. It is said that in just two weeks the agents seized more than 400 kg of drugs, which is not a bad balance if you take into account that the police estimated that the total shipment It was around 500 kg. But… And the rest? And above all, was the yacht actually transporting more drugs, as one of the Portuguese journalists who covered the event suspects? “The ship could carry up to 3,000 kg and no one would cross the Atlantic with only a small part of what it can carry,” argues Nuno Mendes, a reporter who traveled from Lisbon to cover the news. There was more or less drug, almost a hundred kilos or many more, what seems evident is that most of that unseized cocaine ended up in the hands of the inhabitants of São Miguel, where they barely live. 140,000 people. The focus is placed above all on the population of Rabo de Peixe, one … Read more

More and more people admit to using AI to summarize books

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Marcos, a 21-year-old student, acknowledges that it costs him “a lot” read a book whole because he can’t find “neither the time, nor the way, nor the desire.” That is why he uses AI when he needs to read a text or book for class. “Who hasn’t used it today?” he asks. For her part, Raquel, 24, also relies on artificial intelligence tools when she doesn’t have the time or “inclination” to read. She admits that she has sometimes felt that by using AI she was missing out on a story that she might like, but she doesn’t regret doing it—and she’s sure she will do it again. Neither Raquel nor Marcos believe that using these types of tools is dangerous or worrying, they simply consider it a change like any other in their generation. “It’s not that shocking, generations simply change, we read differently. We are a generation that reads through mobile phones and technological devices,” explains Marcos. The search for shortcuts not to read It is not something new or exclusive to current generations. Students have always found ways to avoid books and get by on assignments or exams: copying summaries already made by publishers, asking a classmate for an explanation, or resorting to platforms such as Vago’s Corner. With the advent of AI, not reading is even easier. A search on social networks is enough to find dozens of publications with recommendations of applications, websites or AI tools that “promise” those who use them not need to open the book. Under titles like “Do you find it difficult to read books due to lack of time? I share 4 IA that read for you (and improve your understanding)!”, tools are released that summarize any text or book, and that are also capable of creating mental maps, presentations, videos or even podcast (in case you don’t even have time to read the summaries). Ok boomer. (Clay Banks/Unsplash) On these same platforms, young people express the relief they feel at not needing to read when they don’t want to. A Tiktok user He suggests in his videos that he is “happier” for not having to “read 765 pages of a PDF”, since he only reads “the summary and the flashcards” that an application creates for him. “Spanish people are reading more and more” AI has become another accessory in our daily lives, a tool that we use for more and more things. We have verified its potential by solving operations or programming, but also by writing and summarizing texts. From there a question arises: if artificial intelligence can write, summarize and even tell us stories, can AI replace reading? For now, in Spain, no. The statistics of reading in our country reflect a growing interest in reading in almost all age groups: the percentage of Spaniards who read in their free time This 2025 has exceeded 65% for the first time, breaking the myth that young people no longer read —75.3% of the population between 14 and 24 years old read in their free time. This good reading health coexists with a new reality: young people incorporate artificial intelligence into their daily lives with astonishing naturalness. According to the report This is how we are. The state of adolescence in Spain, by Plan International By 2025, 62% of girls and 59% of boys between 12 and 21 years old surveyed use AI to resolve questions related to their studies. In fact, 68% of them and 61% of them fear “developing a certain dependence on this technology.” Reading, therefore, does not disappear, but it begins to share space—and time—with a tool that can replace, complement or transform the way young people relate to it. AI’s abilities to write texts are already well known to users. teachers. What, according to Patricia Sánchez, a Language and Literature teacher at an institute in Leganés, is beginning to worry them now is another, less visible effect: how it can affect to development of students to delegate tasks such as reading, understanding or interpreting a text to the AI. “At certain ages there are tasks that we should not leave in the hands of technology,” says the teacher. Don’t ask him where he gets the summary of the book, mind you. (Emiliano Vittoriosi/Unsplash) Teachers like Sánchez warn that using AI to read, summarize or write instead of doing it yourself—especially at an early age—can slow down the development of fundamental skills such as reading comprehension, writing or analytical skills. Sánchez sees it as problematic that “they do not acquire certain skills”, that “they do not make efforts, that they do not make mistakes and therefore are not able to solve them.” Organizations like the UNESCO or the World Economic Forum They point out how delegating activities – such as reading – to technology can affect memory and learning ability. According to a analysis According to researchers at the University of Chile, the “passive use” of AI tools like ChatGPT can “undermine the very foundations of literacy.” The authors recognize that AI has a great potential in the educational field, but they warn of the need to work and “practice intensely with written texts” in order to develop “good reading comprehension and writing skills.” They agree with Sánchez that with reading we not only acquire information, but it is key to strengthening vocabulary, comprehension, reasoning and critical thinking. According to researchers, “reading acts as a workout for the brain.” The CEOs who no longer read Sánchez is not worried that his students have not read Bohemian lights; He is concerned that in the future they “will not understand” a news story when they read a newspaper, or that it will be more difficult for them to “understand the world in general, have the patience to stop, think, assimilate, be able to create an opinion…”. This is why a good use of technology must have a “prior basis.” Once the basic competencies and skills surrounding reading have been acquired, for Sánchez AI can be an ally. … Read more

Data centers consume a lot of water, but it is probably less than we thought. It’s a book’s fault

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We can criticize the AI ​​boom for many reasons, but there is one that deeply affected society: the environmental impact, more specifically water consumption of each interaction with the AI, necessary to be able to cool the servers. The problem is realbut everything indicates that it has been magnified and the origin would be a miscalculation in a popular book. the book. It is ‘Empire of AI’ written by Karen Hao and which we already talked about in Xataka. After interviewing hundreds of former employees and people close to the company, the author constructs a detailed and highly critical account of OpenAI, more specifically its CEO Sam Altman. Among the criticisms of this ‘AI empire’, Hao mentions the excessive water consumption of AI, going so far as to state that a data center would consume 1,000 times more water than a city of 88,000 inhabitants. The criticism. Andy Masley tells it in his newsletter The Weird Turn Pro. According to their calculations, in reality 22% of what the city consumes or 3% of the entire municipal system. Furthermore, Masley states that the book confuses water extraction (temporary withdrawal that is returned to the network) with real consumption. The calculation error. The author herself has responded to the article de Masley citing the email he sent to the Municipal Drinking Water and Sewage Service of Chile (SMAPA), from whom he requested information on the total water consumption of Cerrillos and Maipu, the towns he used to make the consumption comparison. The problem is that Hao requested the amount in liters, but they responded without specifying the units and everything indicates that they were actually cubic meters, hence the large discrepancy. The author has consulted again with the SMAPA to clarify this information. It seems that, indeed, there is an error. Estimates. How much water AI consumes has been a recurring question in recent years. In September 2024, a study published by Washington Post He calculated that, to generate a 100-word text with ChatGPT, 519 milliliters of water were needed. The calculation was made taking into account the total annual consumption of data centers and the type of cooling used. It’s truly outrageous. What companies say. AI companies are not very transparent regarding the water and energy consumption of their data centers. The big technology companies give the total annual consumption data in their sustainability reports. We know that a large part of the consumption goes to data centers, but it is not possible to know the real consumption of each search. Google has been the only one that has published specific energy and water consumption data from its AI. According to the company, the water consumption for each Gemini consultation was 0.26 milliliters, or in other words, about five drops of water. We cannot extrapolate this data to all data centers or all companies, but it does seem that previous estimates are quite exaggerated. Water controversy. All of this doesn’t mean there isn’t a problem with water and AI. In fact, the Cerrillos data center where the alleged calculation error is It was never built because the Chilean justice system paralyzed it. due to the climatic impact it was going to have, especially in the context of drought in which the region found itself. Data centers need a lot of water, so much so that initiatives are emerging to cool them submerging them in the ocean. The other problem. Water is just one of the problems data centers face, energy demand poses an even greater challenge. In 2024, Data centers already accounted for 4% of total electricity consumption in the United States and in the surroundings of some of these beasts the electricity bill has risen 267% in recent years. Big tech is already warning: there is no power for so many chips and they are being raised since create nuclear power plants until take their data centers to space. Image | Google In Xataka | What is happening in the US is a warning for Spain: data centers driving up electricity bills in homes

Images no longer mean that something was real. Welcome to the era of permanent visual doubt

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There was a time, probably less than a year ago, when you saw a picture on the Internet and simply believed it. You didn’t stop to analyze it, or look for its context. You didn’t think “is it real?”, you simply processed it as information, and moved on. That moment will not return. We no longer talk about deepfakes very hardworking people who deceive some journalist (of that We already warned seven years ago). We are talking about something much more banal and therefore more devastating: Your brother-in-law can create a photo in three seconds of you, completely drunk, at a bachelor party you never went to. Your ex can fabricate a photo of you in a pose you never had. A student can generate a compromising image of his or her teacher during the transition between classes. The question is no longer whether the technology is good enough. It is perfect, we are seeing it with several tools and with the recently launched Nano Banana Pro to the head. In fact, it’s too perfectto. And perhaps for the first time, technical perfection has come before social perfection. Who is capable of seeing the photo on the right and assuming that neither the woman nor the waiter nor the bar actually exist? Let’s go having to learn to do something different from what we have been doing all our lives: learn not to be able to trust our eyes. Our entire epistemology—from court testimony to family photo albums—rests on a simple principle: seeing is a way of knowing. Not perfect, but sufficient: For 300,000 years of human evolution, if you saw a tiger, there was a tiger. For 199 years of photography, if you saw an image of a tiger, someone had been close to a tiger. That chain just broke. And it doesn’t break little by little, with warnings and an adaptation period. It breaks suddenly, on any given Tuesday, when you discover that the viral photo you shared was fake and you ate it without hesitation. Or worse: when you discover that everyone has assumed that the real photo you shared is actually fake. What we are losing is not the ability to distinguish what is real from what is fake. That got complicated a long time ago. What we are losing is something more primary: the possibility of operating under the assumption that the visual is, by default, a reasonable starting point. There’s the catch. for a decade we become obsessed with fake news. We were worried about Russian bots, troll farms or organized disinformation. All that was industrial. It cost a lot of money, left footprints and required coordination. What Nano Banana Pro brings is different. It is artisanal misinformation, common at home. You don’t need an authoritarian government or a budget behind it. You just need a smartphone, whatever it is. We could combat industrial misinformation with fact-checkers and media literacy. How do you combat the fact that each person is now a printing press for alternative realities? How do you verify 10 billion images daily? You can’t. The least obvious consequence is the most devastating: we are going to beg for a lock next to our real photos. If anyone can make any image, only those with verifiable certification will matter. Encrypted metadata, digital chain of custody, institutional authenticity seals. Anything, but something. The photo without a stamp will be suspicious by default. Who is going to offer that certification? Google, Meta, Apple, maybe governments. The only institutions with resources to verify on that scale. We are going to pay them for something that has been free for two centuries: the presumption that what was photographed existed. Because the alternative – a world where no one can be sure of anything – is simply unlivable. But The worst thing is not losing confidence in the images. It is losing confidence in memory. Your brain doesn’t store experiences, it stores reconstructions. And every time you remember something, you reconstruct it with the help of fragments: smells, emotions, images. Photographs have been crutches for memory for decades. They consolidated the rest of the memory. And then there is exhaustion. Every image you see now requires a little evaluation. Is it real? Do I verify it before sharing it? Will I look like a tolili if I send her to the group? Another tab for our internal CPU. Our parents never had to do this cognitive work. We are going to spend the rest of our lives in suspicion mode. Not because they are cynical, but because they are rational. That permanent suspicion has a cost. In attention, in mental energy. Perhaps in a capacity for wonder. In the possibility of seeing something extraordinary and simply believing it. Never again. There is hardly a solution for this: You can’t train an AI to detect AI-generated images perfectly: it’s an infinite arms race. Each detector upgrades the generators. Each generator improves the detectors. Each higher wall is an incentive to lengthen the pole. You can’t educate people to “think critically” on each of the thousands of images it processes per day. We don’t have bandwidth. and nor you can legislate the problem because technology is faster than the law and more accessible than any prohibition. The only thing left is adaptation. Cultural and psychological. Our grandparents trusted what they saw. We trusted what was photographed. Our children are not going to trust anything that does not come certified. Maybe the blockchain It was also invented for this. AND When everything needs verification, nothing can be spontaneous. When every image is suspect, none is memorable. When reality requires constant authentication, we stop inhabiting it naturally. Photography died the day it became indistinguishable from the imagination. We will continue taking photos and we will continue seeing them. But They will no longer do what they did for two centuries: tell us what was real. Welcome to the era of permanent visual doubt. In Xataka | There is a generation … Read more

Five top offers to take advantage of the bargains at the MediaMarkt outlet in technology and entertainment, today, November 30

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MediaMarkt has a device outlet on eBay with a guarantee from the main store, and there are quite a few that we can find on sale with the most reasonable prices. In this article we are going to review the best deals after Black Friday in technology and entertainment products. PlayStation 5 Slim by 382.49 eurosthe current generation console in its digital version. Google Pixel 9a by 339.15 eurosa mobile phone that offers very good photographic results. Apple Watch SE by 186.15 eurosa very interesting smartwatch for its price. Kobo Clara Color by 149 eurosan eReader with a color screen. LG S60Q by 169 eurosa sound bar with wireless subwoofer. PlayStation 5 Slim If you don’t have one yet PlayStation 5 and you are looking for a good price, the Slim digital version is found in the MediaMarkt outlet for 382.49 euros. It is a new device that has never been opened and still has the original packaging. In addition, it includes a DualSense. PlayStation 5 Slim (digital) The price could vary. We earn commission from these links Google Pixel 9a He Google Pixel 9a It was one of the mobile phones that was found in stores at a very good price and now at the MediaMarkt outlet it was purchased 339.15 euros. It’s a exposure device that has been used previously; It may show superficial deterioration, but works perfectly. It incorporates a 6.3-inch screen and its photography section offers very good results. The price could vary. We earn commission from these links Apple Watch SE If we talk about smartwatches or smart watches, MediaMarkt has the Apple Watch SE second generation by 186.15 euros. In this case it is a display device that has been opened but not usedand that shows no signs of use or wear. The screen looks great in broad daylight and is very comfortable to wear. The price could vary. We earn commission from these links Kobo Clara Color If you are looking for a good eReader to devour electronic books, MediaMarkt has the Kobo Clara Color for a price of 149 euros. It is also a display device that has been opened but not usedand that shows no signs of use or wear. Incorporating a six-inch color screen, it offers excellent performance and water resistance with the IPX8 certification. The price could vary. We earn commission from these links LG S60Q And if what you want is to set up a home theater because the TV speakers fall short, the sound bar LG S60Q It is available for a price of 169 euros. Again we talk about a display device that has been opened but not used. It is in perfect condition and comes with a wireless subwoofer, together offering a power of 300W. Additionally, it is compatible with Dolby Atmos. The price could vary. We earn commission from these links Some of the links in this article are affiliated and may provide a benefit to Xataka. In case of non-availability, offers may vary. Images | MediaMarkt and Compradicción (header), PlayStation, Google, Apple, Rakuten Kobo, LG In Xataka | The best mobile phones (2025), we have tested them and here are their analyzes In Xataka | Best sound bars in quality price (2025). Which one to buy and seven recommended models from 159 euros

If you buy a house there it is to live there

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The Canary Islands have an idea to alleviate their serious residential crisis and make it easier for people who live and work on the islands but are unable to find an affordable home: limit purchases of housing among non-residents. It is not a new proposal nor is it free of controversybut in recent days the island Government has managed to sneak it back into the center of the public debate. He has even achieved the direct backup of the Ministry of Housing. The big question, in view of the latest data of purchase and sale, it is… Will it really help the Canaries to opt for “decent homes”? What has happened? That the Canary Islands want to limit the purchase of housing among non-residents on the islands. It’s not a new idea and it’s not easy either put it into practicesince it would have to fit into the community legal framework, but in recent days the island Government has managed to sneak it into the center of the debate. First to raise that restriction publicly during a European summit. Second, by getting the Ministry of Housing support your position. What exactly has he done? To begin the Government of the Canary Islands has transferred to Brussels for its “concern” about the lack of a “courageous strategy” on crucial issues affecting the island territories, such as housing. This was stated last week by the vice-adviser of the President’s Cabinet, Octavio Caraballo, during the Conference of EU Peripheral and Maritime Regions held in Barcelona. In that forum, Canarias went further and put an idea on the table: protect those who buy houses to actually live in them. “The Canary Islands maintains its efforts to establish limits on the purchase of housing on the islands by non-residents to guarantee a decent home for the people who live in the archipelago,” explains the regional government, which reminded the conference that foreign purchases and vacation rental boom is “straining” the market and reducing the housing supply available to locals. “It compromises social sustainability.” Has it stayed there? No. His proposal has been in the news again this week because the Canary Islands Executive he put it on the table during the meeting held on Thursday with Minister Isabel Rodríguez to discuss the State Housing Plan. From that meeting the Canarian authorities left with the “express support” of the State to limit the purchase of housing by people outside the islands. “He has shown his support for the defense that we are carrying out before the EU to protect the right to housing of all Canary Islands and limit the purchase of housing by non-resident foreigners,” assures counselor Pablo Rodríguez. Without going into details, the ministry issued a statement after the meeting in which he confirmed that he is in favor of the EU allowing “speculative purchases” to be prohibited. Is it a new proposal? No. Just a year ago the Canarian Government already announced which was looking for a way to take advantage of the islands’ Outermost Region (ORP) status to restrict the weight of non-resident foreigners in its real estate market. The truth is that the idea it’s been a while installed in the public and political debate, where it has not reached the necessary consensus for get ahead. Nor is it an idea exclusive to the Canary Islands. In 2024 Add came to present a non-legal proposal for the Government to veto the acquisition of houses by investment funds and non-resident buyers in Spain for three years. It did not prosper, among other reasons due to the vote against the PSOE. The same idea has sounded in the Balearic Islands either Cataloniawhere the markets are also very marked by vacation rentals. Why this interest? In the words of the Canary Islands Government, to guarantee that those who live and work on the islands can reside there and are not “expelled” by rentals for tourists and a market in full escalation. According to Idealista, since 2020 rents have become more expensive than 50% and the price of residential m2 has risen 68.3%. Housing is so expensive that there are temporary workers who have no choice but to stay in caravans. The island government assures that in recent years “a third of sales in the Canary Islands have been carried out by non-resident foreigners”, which complicates accessibility to a residential market that already deals with a “limited supply and growing demand”. To solve this, the Executive proposes restricting purchases by foreigners who do not live in the region, a measure that has precedents in other countries but faces a challenge: the European lawthat explicitly protects the “free movement of capital.” Is housing that expensive? Yes. At least it’s expensive enough to be in production. a curious phenomenon: foreigners themselves are being expelled from the market. a report published in October by the General Council of Notaries shows that, while in communities such as Asturias, Castilla y León or Galicia, home purchase and sale operations grew during the first half of the year, in tourist-rich markets such as the Canary Islands they have declined. In the Balearic Islands they ‘punctured’ by 6.8%, in Navarra by 3.7%, in the Valencian Community by 3.6% and in the Canary Islands by 7.7%, a decline that comes in the midst of a rise in prices. Images | Reiseuhu (Unsplash) and Bastian Pudill (Unsplash) In Xataka | There are those who think that the housing crisis can be solved by building. At the Polytechnic University of Catalonia they believe they are wrong

While the US and China dominate different sectors, Europe leads an unexpected leadership: heat pumps

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Europe is experiencing an energy and industrial crisis that has reopened old fears: factories that lose competitiveness, homes punished by gas and a political debate that looks backwards. But behind the noise, the data tells a completely different story: Europe is not going backwards. It is leading the largest energy transformation in the world. And at the center of that transformation is a technology that is already changing the rules: heat pumps. The real problem: an industry trapped by gas. A large part of public opinion believes that European industry is becoming more expensive because of climate policies. But, As Jan Rosenow points outOxford energy professor, in EUobserver, the reality is exactly the opposite: “I do not accept the analysis underlying the reversal narrative. The idea that green policies must be dismantled to lower prices is nonsense.” According to Rosenow, the real shock came after 2021, when Europe lost access to the cheap Russian gas pipeline and had to replace it with much more expensive LNG from the United States. The impact was brutal: energy-intensive industries stopped production and never returned to pre-Ukrainian War levels. Ember’s report quantifies it: Europe paid an accumulated extra cost of 930 billion euros during the energy crisis due to its dependence on imported fossil fuels. The conclusion is uncomfortable, the problem is not that Europe has gone too fast in the transition, but too slow. Europe leads the solution, although it does not know it yet. While the political debate goes in circles, the market advances. Europe is, today, world leader in heat pumpsa title that he does not hold by chance. In residential adoption, some countries are decades ahead of the rest of the world: Norway has 632 heat pumps per 1,000 homes and Finland has 524, according to European Heat Pump Association (EHPA). And the surprise is in the laggards, countries like Poland, Ireland or Portugal continue to grow even in years of weak market. The European industry dominates the market. European manufacturers such as Vaillant, Stiebel Eltron, Bosch, Viessmann, Danfoss, NIBE or Clivet dominate the global market. Unlike what happened with solar panels, Europe has retained manufacturing capacityalthough it still partially depends on imported compressors and electronics. Still, most employment, engineering and assembly remain on European soil. A revolution underway. Industrial projects are not prototypes: they are signs of the times: So why do we still depend on gas? Despite technological leadership, adoption is slower than it should be. There are four main blocks: Electricity continues to be weighed down by the price of gas. In much of central Europe, gas sets the marginal price of electricity. This means that even if renewables lower the cost, gas increases it again at the peaks. As the Financial Times points outthe result is an obvious paradox: the most efficient technology (the heat pump) seems expensive because electricity is distorted by gas. Taxation. The Oxford Professor details that the majority of European countries They charge more taxes on electricity than on gas. This penalizes the clean option and favors the fossil option. Lack of installers. The European Commission calculates that they are needed 750,000 additional installers before 2030. The German company Apricum adds that the experience installation remains “complex and fragmented”. Cultural barrier. As Rosenow explains: “Most industries are used to burning things.” Fire is perceived as safe and familiar, even though it is more expensive and inefficient. But this barrier disappears when you look at northern Europe: Sweden, Finland or Denmark already use heat pumps on a large scale even at sub-zero temperatures. Electrification is not a green whim. Heat pumps are not a technological anecdote, but the pillar of a broader movement: the electrification of the continent. According to the EMBER reportelectrification could halve the EU’s fossil dependence by 2040, and that two-thirds of energy demand could be met by mature technologies: heat pumps, electric vehicles, storage and solar. Today, however, the EU has barely electrified 22% of its final energy, which reveals ample room to triple that share in the coming years. The European Commission agree with this diagnosis. Brussels estimates that Europe will have to reach 60 million heat pumps installed in 2030 – compared to 25.5 million currently – to meet its climate and energy security objectives. Also, remember that the entry into force of the new ETS2 from 2027 fossil gas will progressively become more expensivenaturally accelerating its replacement by more efficient electrical technologies. Europe needs to trust its own leadership. European politics is trapped between nostalgia for cheap gas and the fear of losing competitiveness compared to other regions. But the data tells another story: Europe is leading the technology that can free it from those dependencies. While some in Brussels debate whether the Green Deal should be slowed down, the market and European engineers are saying the opposite. If Europe wants secure energy, strong industry and affordable bills, the answer is not in returning to gas, but in something much simpler: plugging itself in. Image | dbdh Xataka | Aerothermal energy is the heating of the future, but the electrical installation is stuck in the past

SpaceX is known for its rockets. What is less known is its growing and striking fleet of aircraft

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To build the largest rocket in the world, SpaceX needs logistics commensurate with its scale. And that includes a Boeing 737 with the company logo. SpaceX planes. Elon Musk’s aerospace company not only manages rockets and satellites. As it has grown, it has bought airplanes until ending up with a small private airline that connects its centers in California, Texas and Florida. Until a year ago, the entire fleet was made up of private jets, but SpaceX ended up acquiring a complete commercial plane: a Boeing 737-800 that it uses to move workers and components with agility. The history of the N154TS. A few days ago, the Los Angeles “planespotters” recorded a landing of SpaceX’s largest plane, in its black and dark gray livery, with details such as the Starship thermal tiles on the tail. The Boeing 737-800 entered service in 2002 for Air China and was later converted into a cargo aircraft. Now, under ownership of Falcon Aviation Holdings LLC (a subsidiary of SpaceX) makes trips between Los Angeles, Brownsville and Florida, where SpaceX’s three major headquarters are located: Hawthorne, Starbase and Cape Canaveral. The four Gulfstreams. SpaceX is a private company, but thanks to crawlers like GrndCntrl We also know the rest of the fleet. Owned by SpaceX are: a Gulfstream G650ER primarily associated with Elon Musk, two Gulfstream G550s used for critical logistics and executive transportation, and a Gulfstream G450 linked to Gwynne Shotwell, SpaceX’s president and chief operating officer, who lives between Washington and Starbase. The Boeing was the last plane to join the fleet. While a private jet like the Gulfstream moves a few executives, a 737 can transport dozens of engineers and support teams in a single trip, something vital for moving a workforce during a launch campaign. But is it profitable? Buying a commercial plane instead of charter flights only makes economic sense for a company the size of SpaceX. The ability to move engineers with sensitive tools and hardware without going through commercial airport security saves a billion-dollar aerospace company thousands of work hours a year. In addition, there is an undeniable aesthetic component. Like its rockets, the company takes care of the image of its planes. As they commented from Teslaratithe aircraft is not only functional for transporting support equipment between launch sites; It also has a coat of paint that attracts everyone’s attention.

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