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What did the philosopher La Rochefoucauld mean when he talked about happiness?

March 11, 2026 by usatoday24

Get in the situation. You arrive at the office thinking that it will be just another Wednesday in March when suddenly your boss tells you that the company has decided to promote you and (in the process) double your salary. Not only that. While you are sharing the news with your colleagues you notice that your cell phone vibrates in your pocket, you take it out and find that that girl you have been pining for for months has just invited you to dinner. Dopamine through the roof. Endorphin rush. You feel like the king of mambo and it’s logical, right? After all, if happiness exists, it must be something very similar to that. From 17th century France François de La Rochefoucauldan aristocrat who liked to fill pages with his reflections, has a message for you: “We are never as happy or as unhappy as we believe.” Why do we do what we do? A question similar to that was asked in 17th century France by François de La Rochefoucauld, politician, aristocrat, writer and a keen moralist with a sharp wit. Answering it took time and giving shape to a fascinating work, Maximsa collection of short reflections with which the author basically seeks “portray the heart of man”. It’s curious what he says. And it is also curious how he says it, resorting to a perceptive, irreverent (sometimes even stark) tone, but in which sincerity prevails above all. To show a button. When La Rochefoucauld tries to clarify what friendship is, he comes to the following conclusion: “It is nothing more than a pact, a reciprocal respect of interests and an exchange of favors; in short, a relationship in which self-love always aims to gain something.” Hard? No more than when you observe, in the same workthat “old people like to give good advice to console themselves for no longer being in a position to give bad examples.” Searching for happiness. If there is an idea that is frequently repeated in Maxims It is that of happiness. What is it? How to achieve it? How to act before it? In trying to answer these questions, the French philosopher leaves reflections like this: “Happiness lies in our pleasure and not in things. We are happy for possessing what we love and not for possessing what others consider desirable.” And in case it wasn’t clear enough, insist a few pages later: “When peace is not found within oneself, it is useless to look for it outside.” There is however a ‘maxim’ by La Rochefoucauld that resonates with a special forcefulness in the midst of 2026: “We are never as happy or unhappy as we think.” In it, the philosopher reminds us that it does not matter if we feel overwhelmed with pleasure by a promotion, a raise in salary or the prospect of a date with our partner. crush. Not even if we have low spirits. In both cases, it is most likely that the brain ‘deceives’ us, adulterating reality. And is that true? To answer it, it is good to go back to the example with which we started this article. Imagine that you have actually just been promoted and your salary has multiplied by two. Does that guarantee you eternal happiness? Isn’t it likely that as the weeks go by you will adjust to your new position and salary? Same with your date. If you start a relationship, won’t that romance end up being incorporated into your ‘normal’? We don’t even have to go to such extreme examples. Doesn’t the rush you feel when you buy a car end up evaporating? A few months ago the coach Hailey Magee shared his own experience in Medium. All her life Magee had dreamed of publishing a book, a goal she had fantasized about as a child. The day she closed a contract with a New York publishing house she felt ecstatic, but that feeling was short-lived. Within a few days his brain was occupied by much less edifying questions: Would the book be successful? Was it good enough? What tasks remained before you finished the manuscript? “As I reached each new goal, the promised land vanished beneath my feet,” ironizes. The joys were ephemeral. They did not disappear or break down. They simply gave way to new objectives and purposes. The “hedonic treadmill”. Magee’s experience is hardly surprising. It responds to a human characteristic that experts have known for quite some time: “hedonic adaptation”the tendency that leads us to return again and again to a state of relative and stable happiness. It doesn’t matter if something great or a misfortune happens to you. The normal thing is that you end up returning to a base feeling. Just as if you were moving on a treadmill. “Even our biggest successes become our new normal and we end up chasing the next milestone just to feel the same,” explains the coach. This capacity for adaptation in which desires are modeled drives us to progress, but also represents a gun for those who seek to exploit our capacity to habituate ourselves to pleasure and the search for gratification. Lottery or accident? It may sound abstract, but it is better understood by reviewing the experiment carried out in the 70s by Philip Brickman and Donald Campbell. For their test they chose a group of people who had won the lottery and another group of people who had been left in a wheelchair due to an accident. They then investigated how their happiness levels evolved. What did they discover? Had the lottery winners’ feeling of happiness permanently increased while the second-place winners (those who had suffered serious injuries) experienced the opposite feeling? Answer: no. “They found that study participants adapted to both positive and negative changes and their overall happiness tended to stabilize over time,” remember Magee before clarifying that this ‘hedonistic adaptation’ is the result of a series of psychological processes, which includes the capacity for “habituation”, which reduces our emotional response to stimuli that … Read more

That’s how he got it

March 11, 2026 by usatoday24

The film directed by Ryan Coogler has broken the absolute record for nominations in the history of the Oscars. It is not a statistical accident: behind its success there is a wave of changes in the industry, seasoned by a decade of silent transformation of the horror genre, a business model with brutal returns and an exhausted industry that has been looking for years to see what comes after superheroes. Victory at the Oscars. ‘Sinners’ (or ‘Los sinners’, as it has also been known in Spain) 0 heads the list of Oscar nominees in 2026 with 16 candidates. In fact tops the lists every year: the previous record was 14, shared between ‘Eve Naked’ (1950), ‘Titanic‘ (1997) and ‘La La Land’ (2016). Ryan Coogler received his first nominations for directing and original screenplay, and Michael B. Jordan, after more than a decade as a headliner, also earned his first nomination as an actor. These numbers aren’t just awards history: They’re a portrait of something broader that’s been moving beneath the surface of the industry for years. The box office. ‘Sinners’ grossed more than $370 million on a budget of between $90 and $100, becoming the first original film to surpass $200 million in the United States alone since ‘Coco’. It is also the biggest box office success in original cinema (that is, one that does not belong to a franchise) since ‘Inception’, fifteen years ago. Coogler shot the film in Ultra Panavision 70 and IMAX, explicitly betting on the theater experience versus the streamingand precisely picking up the baton of another lover of large formats in cinemasChristopher Nolan. Terror and Oscar. Before continuing, let’s make it clear that ‘Sinners’ is a horror film: of course, it has a component of social criticism about the role of African Americans in the culture of their country, but the message is part of the nature of genre cinema. ‘Sinners’ is a vampire movie before anything else. And from that perspective, it is worth noting that only six horror movies have received nominations for Best Picture. ‘The Silence of the Lambs’ among all of them, very notably, won the five main Oscars. What has changed in the last decade is the appearance of a side of horror cinema more tolerated by the academy: they are films like ‘Hereditary’, ‘Midsommar’, ‘Babadook’, ‘The Witch’ or ‘Nope!’, often labeled under the loaded ‘high horror’ label. The 2026 Oscars are its first massive institutional recognition after the fantasy monopolized the nominations in 2025 with films like ‘Dune Part II’, ‘Wicked’ or ‘The Substance’. Devastating at the box office. The blockbuster of ‘Sinners’ It was not an isolated phenomenon.. Horror was the genre with best relative performance of 2025: ’28 Years Later’, the latest ‘Final Destination’ or ‘Weapons’ generated the type of cultural conversation that until recently brought together superhero franchises. Some calculations say that the terror reached 12.1% of ticket sales in the United States in 2025, compared to 9.8% in 2024. The business. The economy of terror explains much of the industry’s renewed interest: average a return on production costs 173%, the highest of any gender. Let’s remember hits like ‘Déjame exit’, which cost 4.5 million and grossed more than 250 million worldwide or ‘Smile’, produced for 17 million and which exceeded 200 at the box office. And they are not extraordinary or out of the ordinary examples: every year we have comparable figures, and always within the genre. ‘Sinners’, however, with its 90-100 million budget, broke the logic of “cheap horror.” Directors such as Robert Eggers, Julia Ducournau and Ari Aster, to name a fewhave been scaling budgets for years, following the path opened by Jordan Peele, who went from 4.5 million for ‘Let Me Out’ to 68 million for ‘Nope’ in just six years. And what fails. The other side of the equation has to do with what is going wrong. Talking about how no gender is a guarantee of anything by itself.Mike Barstow, executive vice president of the ACX Cinemas chain, said that “people have not stopped wanting to see horror or superheroes, they have stopped wanting mediocre films about those worlds. They demand more quality.” And that means fewer clone franchises, although in 2025 the trend was still alive: only one original movie It was among the ten highest grossing films. The canon of franchises and shared universes, which has dominated the industry for more than a decade, is facing IP saturation. Sequels, prequels, spin-offs and reboots have proliferated until the box office has begun to show signs of exhaustion. Horror, paradoxically, has been the refuge of originality for decades precisely because the big studios ignored it. The success of ‘Sinners’ does not show that the public only wants scary movies, but rather that they are betting on something intelligent, fresh and that does not seem assembled in a corporate laboratory. In Xataka | There are two reasons why Generation Z is returning to the movies: subscriptions and moving away from mobile phones

three new stations with connection to a new neighborhood

March 11, 2026 by usatoday24

Plans to bring Madrid Metro Line 1 north are already underway. The Department of Transport of the Community of Madrid has published the informative study with the alternatives to take the metro to Madrid Nuevo Norte, which is where the capital is focusing its efforts on transforming the entire Chamartín station. Taking L1 to the north has been one of the five options on the table of the regional administration, and at the moment the favorite. The idea is to create three new stations and reorganize the current final section of the line to integrate with L4. We tell you all the details. What exactly is proposed. The alternative proposes extending L1 from Chamartín–Clara Campoamor about three kilometers to the north, with three new stops that have been nicknamed with provisional names: Business Center, Fuencarral Sur and Fuencarral Norte. The first would cover the office area planned next to Chamartín; The other two would serve the new residential neighborhoods that will be built on the old Castellana roads, and also the residents who already live in Fuencarral. The preferred option. The Ministry describes it, according to collect 20 Minutes, as “the most favorable option for carrying out this project after analyzing the different functional, environmental, territorial and economic issues.” The other four alternatives were committed to creating an independent driverless line exclusively for Madrid Nuevo Norte, but technicians ruled it out for being less efficient and more expensive in comparison. Of course, the initial budget of the chosen option is not exactly modest: the study, to which Somos Madrid had access, estimates it at 401 million euros (VAT included). The change that affects Line 4. This solution has a direct consequence on the current network, since the Bambú and Pinar de Chamartín stations, which today belong to L1, will become part of Line 4. This line, which currently ends in Pinar de Chamartín, will be extended to Chamartín, where it will connect with L1 and L10. On paper it is a reorganization that aims to benefit everyone, since L4 users will gain direct access to the train station, and L1 will become a continuous axis between the center of Madrid (Sol, Gran Vía, Atocha) and the new northern neighborhood. How and when it will be built. The works will not be done with a tunnel boring machine. As it is a short section and on land that has not yet been developed, the Belgian method (or classic Madrid method) will be used, which involves excavating from the surface. Just like they count from 20 Minutes, the cut and cover technique will be used for the stations (the same one that is being used in the expansion of L11) and for connections with L4 the German method will be applied. It is projected in two phases: First the redistribution of lines 1 and 4. Then the extension to Madrid Nuevo Norte. Work on the first phase is expected to be completed around 2030. Who will benefit. According to the estimates of demand from the studio itself, the extension will serve an environment with more than 200,000 residents and 140,000 jobs. The Community also estimates that the expansion will generate about 175,000 new daily users for L1. Where is the project now? With the publication of the five alternativesthe Ministry has opened a 20-day public information period so that citizens, associations and administrations can present allegations from the Transparency Portal of the Community of Madrid. Once the proposals have been studied, the final informative study must be approved, and from there the project would advance. Along with this, a tender has also been put out to draft the draft the future garageswhich would have a capacity of about 15,000 m² on the surface and 26,000 m² below ground, and also the commission to develop the construction project for the expansion, although for the latter we must first wait for the final study to be approved. Cover image | Madrid Metro In Xataka | Mayrit, the 1,500-ton “underground factory”, is about to start its engines with one objective: to transform Madrid’s L11

ban octopus farms worldwide

March 11, 2026 by usatoday24

On February 25, Mexico presented a reform of federal law of fishing to prohibit cephalopod farms throughout the national territory. It may seem strange, but when Maki Esther Ortiz Dominguez stood in front of the Senate of the Republic and defended the moratorium on aquaculture farming of octopuses, squid and cuttlefish, what she said made sense. Not only is it that they are a terribly difficult business, it is that there is more than firm evidence (always according to the senator) about the enormous problems of cannibalism and risks to public health that these farms bring. So much so that Mexico is not alone. Chili approved a similar ban in October 2025 and seven US states also have it. And it’s curious because what is being banned, in reality, doesn’t even exist on a commercial scale. The world (also Spain) is trying to prohibit something that is not being done. Which does not mean that it is not being tried. In fact, the Mexican initiative to prohibit “the reproduction, pre-fattening and fattening of cephalopods” in captivity is based on data from the Sisal facilities (Yucatán)the only farm of this type that is operational on the entire American continent. There, with the collaboration of UNAM, they have been trying to make octopus fish farms viable for 12 years. AND the data is terrible: mortality rates higher than 52%, 30% of deaths attributable to cannibalism, extremely inefficient conversion rates (three kilos of fish are needed to produce one kilo of octopus) and systematic mistreatment of these species that, if that were not enough, are considered especially intelligent. Especially intelligent? And ‘sentient’: in recent years, there has been no shortage of statements on the subject (Cambridge, 2012 and New York, 2024); but there is also extensive bibliographical reviews which point out that when we talk about cephalopods, we are talking about animals that are cognitively much closer to us. And that, of course, has generated consequences. In the same way as the publication of ‘Animal Liberation‘ contributed to creating the animal rights movement, all this research on octopuses has led to an unprecedented legislative trend. “Unprecedented” because, perhaps for the first time, the legislation comes before farms are a reality beyond experimental centers. And it’s coming very quickly: this regulatory wave has come together in a couple of years. And who would want farmed octopus? The simple answer is everyone. If the resulting problems are not made visible and affordable cephalopods are available, everyone will eat farmed octopus in a few years. Above all, because they are running out. At least in Spain, there is a whole combination of factors that They have made the octopus migrate north. In Spain, in fact, a proposal in this regard was already presented in the summer of 2025 and the European Parliament discussed the issue in December of the same year. It’s a matter of time, it seems. And, for now, Mexico and Chile are in the lead. Image | Milada Vigerova In Xataka | England is experiencing an unprecedented invasion. The problem is that they are octopuses, and they are devouring everything they can find.

insurance doesn’t cover it

March 11, 2026 by usatoday24

In almost all Western armies there is a little-known paradox: private insurers rarely cover the most obvious risk of the military profession. For decades, protection systems for soldiers have combined commercial policies with special state regimes, because combat (due to its unpredictable nature and enormous potential cost) is often left out of conventional insurance almost everywhere in the world. Controversy at the heart of the military profession. The beginning of 2026 has unleashed a strong controversy around collective life and accident insurance for personnel of the Armed Forces and the Civil Guard in Spain. The reason is a clause that excludes deaths or disabilities derived directly from acts of war, which has caused outrage between military associations and families of soldiers deployed on missions abroad. The discussion has gained special strength in an international context increasingly unstablewith Spanish troops present in sensitive regions like Lebanon or the eastern flank of Europe, where the possibility of serious incidents is not theoretical but real. The small print. The controversy revolves around the technical concept of “risk of war”a common exclusion in the private insurance sector. Standard life and accident policies are designed to cover death or disability due to accident or illness, but they usually leave out events derived from armed conflictsconsidered extraordinary risks that are difficult to insure commercially. In the case of group insurance contracted for 2026, the clause establishes that private compensation will not be activated if death or disability is direct consequence of war declared or armed hostilities, which means that coverage is limited to ordinary service situations or non-war accidents. What happens when a soldier dies in combat. As They counted in MoncloaAlthough the exclusion has generated public alarm, the protection system for military personnel is not based solely on private insurance. In Spain (as in most NATO countries) coverage against combat or war actions is not articulated through commercial policies, but rather through compensation state pensions, extraordinary pensions and specific regimes for acts of service. This means that, if a soldier dies in combat or in a military operation, the main compensation comes of the public system of benefits and not of the group insurance contracted with an insurer. The role of private insurance. Group insurance managed by 2026 by insurance company MetLife It functions as an additional layer of protection designed to cover common service risks: accidents, non-war deaths or permanent disabilities. These types of policies are used in many armies to complement the public system, but rarely include explicit coverage of war because the actuarial cost would be extremely high. In practice, insurance acts as additional compensation for certain circumstances, while combat risks are integrated into the state compensation system. A model repeated in NATO. The truth is that the Spanish scheme is not an exception within Western military alliances. The United States, for example, covers its soldiers through federal programs such as the Servicemembers’ Group Life Insurancefinanced and supported by the State. In the case of the United Kingdom, the Armed Forces Compensation Schemean administrative compensation regime. For their part, France and Germany resort to systems of military pensions and compensation legal. Be that as it may, in all these models the logic is similar: war is not insured as a commercial risk, but is compensated through public legislation. The debate and controversy. Even so, the controversy has opened a deeper debate on the economic protection of military personnel and their families. Professional associations maintain that the war exclusion in private policy leaves a symbolic and financial void which can affect the perception of security of deployed personnel. In short, and although from the Ministry of Defense it is insisted in which no soldier is left unprotected thanks to the system of extraordinary pensions and compensation for acts of service, the truth is that the episode has highlighted a structural tension: the difficulty of fitting into the insurance market a risk that precisely defines the essence of the military profession. Image | Navy, Air and Space Army Ministry of Defense Spain In Xataka | The same day that the US threatened Spain and said it did not need the Rota base, the US invested 13 million in expanding the Rota base In Xataka | The great paradox of Spain is 7,000 million euros: nobody wants to take up weapons, but they are making money by selling them

China has turned OpenClaw into a viral phenomenon. And then it has prohibited its officials from using it

March 11, 2026 by usatoday24

The appearance of the AI agent OpenClaw has meant that we are living in a kind of second “DeepSeek moment“They know it well in China, where its use has exploded in such a way that the Government has had to act. And it has probably done well. An absolutely viral AI. The OpenClaw project has caused a real earthquake in China. In cities like Shenzhen there are queues to physically install it and people paying for others to install it remotely or in person. The AI agent is breaking all popularity records for programming projects, and for example has already surpassed two legends such as React or Linux in terms of stars awarded on GitHub, a measure of the popularity of open source projects. In just three months, OpenClaw has managed to surpass the legendary leaders of this ranking in GitHub stars: react and linux. Source: Star-History.com Solution to Chinese fragmentation. The secret of this success in the Asian giant is not based only on the curiosity of users, but also on the fact that OpenClaw provides a striking solution to an endemic problem in the country: the fragmentation of business software. With an average of 150 independent IT systems per company and 60% of them without APIs or documentation, AI integration seemed to be an insurmountable wall. OpenClaw solves the problem because you can take control of the machine, “see” buttons and text boxes, click and type in browsers, and operate as if you were a human. Tokens everywhere. That ability has turned this project into an absolute “token hole.” Unlike a conventional chatbot like ChatGPT, OpenClaw works continuously and autonomously, and it is not uncommon to see an advanced user consume 50 million tokens daily. The impact has been massive: at the end of February, Chinese models such as Kimi 2.5 or DeepSeek were already devouring 61% of the global OpenRouter tokens, a platform that allows you to easily use APIs from dozens of AI models. The fever has been such that Kimi has generated in 20 days more income than all expected by its creator, Moonshot IA, by 2025. Alarm. The problem is precisely that: when software has the ability to “see” everything that happens on a screen and execute commands by itself, the security risks are enormous. This has made the Beijing government go from enthusiasm—cities like Shenzhen offer million-dollar subsidies for their development—to a policy that is now totally restrictive. Government agencies, state-owned companies and large national banks have received urgent notices prohibiting the installation of OpenClaw in office devices and even in mobile phones that are used in this type of segments. Be careful with your data. Practically since it went viral, many have warned of the cybersecurity risks involved in using OpenClaw. An initial audit of the skills available on ClawdHub detected hundreds of them as malicious. That was the germ of the OpenClaw alliance with the Spanish cybersecurity firm VirusTotalpart of Google. The risk with this project is threefold: You have access to private data Can communicate with the outside You are exposed to untrustworthy content and attacks from prompt injection One of lime and one of sand. For large Chinese technology companies, the government’s measures are bittersweet. On the one hand, they have rushed to offer one-click OpenClaw deployments in their clouds for interested users. On the other hand, state restriction has meant that some of the AI startups such as Zhipu (Knowledge Atlas Technology JSC Ltd.) or MiniMax Group have quickly fallen on the stock market for the news. China and control. There is another key element in that political movement: the loss of control. The Beijing government has already fought a battle in the past to curb the power of giants like Alibaba, and that caused the “Asian Jeff Bezos”, Jack Ma, came out very badly. An autonomous AI agent that operates outside of that government control represents a challenge to the mechanisms that China has been perfecting, especially with its Great Firewall. An uncertain future. These new restrictions pose a complex future for the project in China. The Asian giant has embraced AI more than anyone else, but the security risks in this case are so clear that limits had to be set before things got out of control. Even so, the project is Open Source, which will make it difficult for its deployment to be halted by end users and enthusiasts, no matter how much the Chinese Government wants it. Image | OpenClaw | Paul Kagame In Xataka | Every time Facebook had a competitor, it bought it: it is exactly the same thing that OpenAI is doing

how to check if it is down or if it is your problem

March 11, 2026 by usatoday24

Let’s tell you how to tell if claude is down and it doesn’t work because of a bug that is happening to everyone. Like any other online service, artificial intelligence as Claude They can also have problems and fall. They can be specific errors that are solved immediately or larger ones that take hours to solve. When this is the case, there is always a moment of confusion in which you doubt whether it is a general error or just your fault, and we are going to tell you how to do this check. These crashes can be due to problems with the servers, a cyber attack and many other reasons, but the first thing is always to check if it has really crashed or if the problem is yours. How to check if Claude is down To check if Claude suffers a general fall, you will have to use one of the websites specialized in detecting these problems that can occur. These are websites in which users report drops, and you can see the level of these reports in a graph. When the graph goes up a lot, it’s because there is a massive problem. It’s not you, everyone is reporting these bugs. The best option on Claude’s profile on Down Detector, which you can access on the web downdetector.es/problemas/claude-ai. Here you can see in real time the number of problems reported by users in the last 24 hours. The higher the reporting curve, the bigger and more people the fall will be affecting. You can also search for information on some social networks such as Threads, Bluesky, Mastodon or When you see that the fall is general, there is nothing you can do to solve it. You will have to wait for Claude’s owners or the downed service to fix the problem. It is also convenient that pay attention to a possible communication after solving it in which they give some kind of explanation. In these communications they should clarify the type of error they have had, and even warn if it is due to a hack that has exposed user data. In Xataka Basics | The best prompts to save hours of work and do your tasks with ChatGPT, Gemini, Copilot or other artificial intelligence

If the question is why the US has not yet attacked Kharg Island, the answer is simple: fear of the second later

March 11, 2026 by usatoday24

With the US and Israel attacking thousands of targets Iranians, including shipsdefense systems and oil facilities and supply, Kharg island It is a paradox in itself. Most analysts agree that it is the great Achilles heel of the Islamic Republic, a point at which Washington could cause considerable damage to the ayatollah regime. However, despite this strategic value and the intense US and Israeli offensive, after more than a week There is no record of Kharg being damaged during the war. The question is obvious: Why? On a distant island… Iran may be in a privileged position to control the Strait of Hormuzplace of passage almost 20% of the planet’s crude oil and gas; But on a geographic level, Tehran also has some disadvantages. The main one, its coast. It is not the best for maritime traffic. It is too silty and lacks the draft necessary for docking oil tankers. More than six decades ago, this handicap led Iran, with the help of the American company Amoco, to create a huge oil terminal on the neighboring island of Kharg. Although it is a tiny island, just over 20 km2its waters are deep enough to accommodate large ships. Since registering its first major shipment, in 1960Kharg has been gaining weight in the Iranian oil industry until it has become its nerve center. The island of black gold. The “nerve center” in this case is more than justified. Despite its small size, Kharg has been equipped with an enormous infrastructure, with loading docks, oil pipelines and warehouses, which allow it to channel about 90% of Iran’s oil exports. It is estimated that they pass through the island every day between 1.3 and 1.6 million of barrels of crude oil, although it has capacity for much more. JP Morgan estimates that in February, when war drums were already sounding, Tehran increased the flow to three million barrels a day. There are those who say that if he put his mind to it he could reach seven million. Added to them are its reserves, estimated at another 18 million. A perfect target. With such numbers, Kharg has become two things. A central piece in Iran’s oil network. And a perfect target for the US and Israel. A certain blow would come to cause considerable damage to the island and, consequently, to the finances of the Islamic Republic, contributing to its destabilization. Its strategic value is so clear that Israeli politician Yair Lapid recently insisted in the advantages that a direct offensive would have. To be more precise, Lapid has advocated for “destroying all of Iran’s oil fields and energy industry on Kharg Island.” “That is what would cripple the Iranian economy and topple the regime,” he reasoned. In the last days Tel Aviv has hit the country’s oil infrastructure, damaging deposits and crude transfer centers in Tehran and Alborz. However Kharg remains intact. And that on Saturday Axios wakefulness that Israel and the US have discussed the possibility of controlling the island as part of a greater deployment in Iran. Why don’t they attack her? That is the question that several analysts have asked themselves over the last few days, including Dan SabbaghDefense and Security editor of Guardian. The advantages of attacking Kharg are evident for the US and Israel (it would hit the heart of Iranian industry, destabilizing their regime), so… Why does the island seem immutable, at least today? To understand it you have to handle several keys. Some geopolitics. Other economic ones. About the latter was pronounced on Monday JP Morgan, which reminds that an offensive on Kharg would cause an earthquake in the oil market. Not only for hitting the Iranian industry. It could also trigger a violent response from Tehran that extends to the Strait of Hormuz and the oil infrastructure of other neighboring Gulf countries. It’s not crazy. Iran has already punished them. “A direct attack would instantly halt most of Iran’s crude oil exports, likely triggering severe retaliation in Hormuz or against regional energy infrastructure,” the bank warns. Beyond oil. “We could see the $120 per barrel price that we saw on Monday rise to $150 if Kharg were attacked,” warns Neil Quilliam, from the Chatham House think tank. “It is crucial for global energy markets.” It may sound exaggerated, but it is worth remembering several facts. Iran is not just any country. It occupies one of the top positions in the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries and pumps 4.5% of supply world. Much of its production goes to China, but if its supply were knocked out, the shock wave would spread to the entire market, influencing prices. Especially at a time of deep instability in Hormuz. We’re not just talking about oil. As remember In France24 Sonia Martínez-Girón, ITSS analyst, its market is closely connected to other very sensitive economic sectors, such as transport or food. And then… what? That is the other question that analysts ask. If Kharg is hit, the Iranian regime is hit, but… What comes next? What would be the next step? Richard Nephew, of the Center for Global Energy Policy at Columbia University, recognize that attacking the island would represent an escalation in the war, especially since it could require a ground deployment. “The US and Israel are aware that, if they attack it, they run the risk of Iran attacking the oil infrastructure of the Gulf countries,” warns. Not only that. Rebuilding Kharg would take time, so the coup would affect any hypothetical new Iranian regime, complicating the country’s stability. “Kharg Island is so important to the Iranian economy that destroying its facilities would mean abandoning any pretense of waging war to create a better future for Iran,” points out in Guardian Lynette Nusbacher, former British Army intelligence officer. Added to this handicap is the cost it could have within the US, where Trump’s interventionist is already causing a fracture of the MAGA movement in the middle of an election year. Images | POT, Natalya Letunova (Unsplash) and … Read more

has AI in its favor

March 11, 2026 by usatoday24

During the first two months of 2026, China exported integrated circuits worth $43.3 billion, according to SCMPwhich represents an increase of 72.6% compared to the same period in 2025. This information comes directly from Chinese customs records, so it is presumably reliable. However, the most astonishing thing is that all of this country’s exports has grown by 21.8% during January and February, so it is evident that the semiconductor industry has been stimulated with much more intensity than other sectors. This behavior largely responds to the very high demand for chips for artificial intelligence (AI) that extends across a good part of the planet. The US and its allies have worked hard over the past five years to prevent China from achieving the photolithography equipment of the Dutch company ASML that it needs to manufacture cutting-edge chips, which has caused the country led by Xi Jinping to be forced to achieve self-sufficiency throughout the semiconductor production chain. Domestic demand has stimulated the growth of the Chinese chip industry in recent years, but the figures I have collected in the first paragraph of this article show that external demand is also very strong. Huawei, Moore Threads either Cambricon Technologies They are some of the Chinese companies that already have AI GPUs with competitive features, so it is reasonable to assume that these chips are being acquired by foreign companies that are most likely having difficulties accessing the solutions that the Taiwanese company TSMC produces for NVIDIA or AMD. Mature chips remain one of the pillars of the Chinese industry SMIC (Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp), the producer of integrated circuits most important in the country led by Xi Jinping, has the capacity to manufacture 7nm semiconductors. And maybe also 5nm. In this process it uses the UVP lithography equipment that it purchased from ASML before the US and Netherlands sanctions prevented it from acquiring more units of these machines, but to produce these chips, as we have explained In other articles, you are using a technique known as multiple patterning. Presumably SMIC doesn’t make 7nm chips on a large scale. And possibly a good part of them are bought by Huawei This strategy broadly consists of transferring the pattern to the wafer in several passes with the purpose of increasing the resolution of the lithographic process. The problem is that it has an impact rise in the cost of chips and a decrease in production capacity, although it works. In practice this means that SMIC presumably does not manufacture 7nm chips on a large scale. And possibly a good part of them are bought by Huawei. In that case it is reasonable for us to ask ourselves what type of integrated circuits are being mass produced by Chinese manufacturers. And the answer is very revealing: these are chips derived from mature integration technologiesusually 28 nm or less advanced. After all, the semiconductors that we mostly find in electronic devices, household appliances or cars, among other products, have been produced using them. Many Chinese chip manufacturers, such as Hua Hong Semiconductor, China Resources Microelectronics or Guangzhou ZenSemi, are manufacturing 28 nm integrated circuits or with even more mature technologies. And the Beijing Yandong Microelectronics (YDME) company is going to build a 4.6 billion dollar plant expressly to produce 28nm semiconductors on 300mm wafers. It is evident that these companies would not focus on the manufacturing of mature chips in this way if it were not a profitable strategy, and, above all, necessary to sustain the Chinese integrated circuit industry at a time as critical as the current one. Image | Generated by Xataka with Gemini More information | SCMP In Xataka | China is preparing for the worst scenario: it fears that the US will prevent TSMC from delivering chips for cars and smartphones

El Niño is coming back in a big way

March 11, 2026 by usatoday24

Since mid-2025, we had no news on the front: the equatorial Pacific has been governed for months by a tremendously weak, decaffeinated and boring La Niña. But things end. And this La Niña is, in fact, ending very quickly. As I write, Kevin waves are transporting heat into the eastern Pacific and major seasonal models are signaling with unprecedented fixation that El Niño is just around the corner. What’s more, they point out that the next episode of ENSO is going to be between strong and very strong before we know it. First of all… what is El Niño in 127 words. What we know as El Niño-Southern Oscillation (or ENSO) is a cyclical (although somewhat irregular) climate phenomenon that has large effects on the global climate. During the warm phase (during El Niño itself), the lack of trade winds to cool the surface causes the temperature of the Pacific waters to skyrocket. And that, precisely that, disrupts all the Earth’s weather systems, causing the thermometers of the entire planet to skyrocket. As explained from AEMET“El Niño, through different atmospheric teleconnections, gives rise to drier than normal conditions in certain parts of the world; while in others it causes more precipitation. Some countries have to deal with significant droughts and others with torrential rains.” What happened now? Something quite curious, really. In just one week, we have gone from the most absolute tranquility (60-70% chance of neutral conditions) to 80% of a strong or very strong El Niño before summer ends. What has changed, as I said above, are the ocean signals: NOAA have found signs of significant subsurface warming, and that warming is the classic first sign that something is starting to change. Basically, since the beginning of the year there have been three episodes in which warm water from the western Pacific has been moving eastward. Changes in the wind pattern have also been detected. And why does it concern experts? Because these rapid changes are very similar to what happened in 1997. The super El Niño of 97-98 was one of the strongest ENSOs in recent years and caused numerous problems: the estimates say that he alone caused damage to global economic growth of around 5.7 trillion dollars. Obviously, many things They can go wrong between now and summerbut we would be wrong if we do not pay attention to the Pacific. We are at the doors of a global food crisisthe last thing we need is for El Niño to hit the Southern Hemisphere hard during the last months of the year. Image | NOAA In Xataka | Long periods of drought are going to become more and more normal. It’s time to get used to them

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