badly

one with the supercars of Saudi millionaires parked badly

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One of the most important tasks of the traffic police of any big city. Cars in double rows, speeding, parking in wrong places, etc. However, as how they collect British media, this task has intensified especially in the wealthiest area of ​​London, where the great Saudi sheikhs and magnates notice the insignificant amount of a parking fine, less than the tip they leave for the waiter who parks their car. In this context, the recent scene of a Saudi Rolls-Royce raised on a crane and that of a convoy of hypercars blocking the sidewalk in front of a luxury hotel summarizes well the fight that is being fought between the Westminster authorities and an elite that uses the street almost as a private garage. London and the problem of Saudi supercars In the Mayfair neighborhood, near the former US embassy, ​​Westminster City Council has begun to act more harshly against luxury cars parked directly on the sidewalk next to The Chancery Rosewood five-star hotel. “The vehicles are registered abroad (the ones we photographed have Saudi registration plates), so the chances of recovering the costs are practically nil. The owners of the vehicles, which include Rolls Royces and Lamborghinis, are so rich that the fines have little effect,” said a spokesperson for Westminster City Council. According to they explained sources from the council to the British The Standardneighbors complained about wealthy guests parking their luxury cars on sidewalks “Pedestrians should not have to face a sea of ​​illegally and selfishly parked supercars when trying to walk through Westminster.” The response of the authorities has gone one step further and instead of continuing to accumulate fines that many millionaires do not even pay, they have chosen to remove the vehicles with a tow truck when they block the path of pedestrians. Source: Westminster City Council Recently, a Saudi Rolls-Royce valued at about $330,000 was removed with a crane and moved a few streets further, a scene that became for a few minutes an unprecedented urban spectacle, while serving as a warning to navigators of those who decide to park their luxury cars in inappropriate places. The hypercar “sandwich” in front of the hotel However, the joy was short-lived for traffic authorities. A few hours after that withdrawal, the sidewalk opposite the one where the Rolls-Royce retreat took place was once again filled with raised mobile phones, this time to photograph a convoy of four very special cars. Two Bugatti Chirons parked in front of the door of the luxury hotel, flanked by a huge Mercedes-AMG G 63 6×6 and a Rolls-Royce Cullinan. Tap on the image to go to the original message The set, which occupied practically the entire pedestrian space, easily raised more than 9 million dollars on the pavement if the base prices of each model are added. The Bugatti Chiron is announced with a starting price of $2.5 million, including no customization, more than doubling its initial price. For his part, the Mercedes‑AMG G63 6×6 It hardly goes below a million dollars in the most exclusive second-hand market and the Rolls-Royce Cullinan starts at around $325,000 in its basic version. Faced with such a display of supercars (and millions of them), the authorities preferred not to move and, this time, the tow truck did not appear. A luxury that goes beyond the car: the “1 V” license plate Beyond the value of the cars, there was a detail that went unnoticed by many pedestrians who could not help but raise their cell phones to capture the unprecedented moment to upload it. to your social networks: the Saudi license plates, and in particular that of the white Bugatti Chiron that was part of that convoy of supercars. Only a number and a letter were read on its plate, “1 V”, an extremely rare format in Saudi Arabia and which is part of a lucrative market for personalized license plates managed by the Saudi General Directorate of Traffic through electronic auctions. As and how he published Gulf Newsin one of those auctions held on the government platform Absher, the “1 V” license plate reached a bid of more than 10 million Saudi riyals, equivalent to approximately 2.3 million euros at the exchange rate, becoming one of the most expensive license plates that have been auctioned. Tap on the image to go to the original message Behind this bid is Yazeed bin Mohammed Al Rajhi who, in addition to being businessman and rally championis the son of Sheikh Mohammed Bin Abdulaziz Al-Rajhi, co-founder of Al Rajhi Bankone of the largest Islamic banks in the world. Thus, the cost of that small metal rectangle is close to the price of the car, turning this license plate into a symbol of wealth, luxury and exclusivity almost as powerful as the Bugatti Chiron itself. In Xataka | The richest king in the world: his empire covers 17,000 properties, 38 private jets and a collection of 300 luxury cars Image | Westminster City Council, Bugatti

One of the most relevant actors in ‘Back to the Future’ fell so badly that we never got to see his face: it was a mask

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For decades, millions of viewers remembered George McFly as one of the most beloved characters from ‘Back to the Future’with his nervous gestures, his strange shyness and that peculiar way of inhabiting the screen. But what almost no one imagined is that, when the saga returned to the cinema, what we saw was no longer exactly him. Or, at least, not in the way we all thought. An impossible artist. Crispin Glover He burst into popular culture playing George McFly with a performance that made the character one of the most recognizable souls. from ‘Back to the Future’. His performance, at once clumsy, intense and physically expressive, became an essential counterpoint to Marty’s dynamism and Doc Brown’s eccentricity. However, behind that iconic role, Glover was already a unique artistobsessed by the limits of narrative, by art as an act of critical thinking and by the need to escape from the corporate machinery that, in his opinion, turned cinema into an instrument of ideological complacency. The fame that the film brought him did not bring him closer to Hollywood: it pushed him away from hertowards a life of his own projects, marginal filmographies, performative tours and experimental books that he himself read on stage in front of his followers. That mix of massive success and countercultural sensitivity would end up leading, a few years later, to one of the legal conflicts most influential in the history of commercial cinema. The ideological disagreement. Glover never hid his discomfort with the final message of the first film. It bothered him that the climax was an economic reward: a family becoming a symbol of the triumphant middle class, a new car as an emblem of happiness and a moral that, according to himhe unequivocally associated money with life success. He was barely twenty years old, but he was already openly questioning an element that he considered propaganda. For him, the real prize should have been emotional reconciliation between the parents, not wealth. That conversation with director Robert Zemeckis, who according to Glover It led to notable anger from the director, marking a point of friction that would later be amplified when negotiations for the sequel began. Silent war. The actor felt that he had done a decisive job in the first delivery and expected treatment equivalent to that of his colleagues. The studio, on the other hand, perceived his comments as an artistic and personal challenge. The financial offers reflected this rupture: figures much lower than the rest of the cast and, according to Glover, a deliberate feeling of punishment, especially seeing that the script from ‘Back to the Future II’ It included scenes in which George McFly appeared hanging upside down, a physically uncomfortable position that he interpreted as a hostile gesture. By then, the aesthetic tension had already been transformed into a contractual and human tension. Plot Twist: The mask. When negotiations failed, Universal did not opt ​​for the usual solution of replacing the actor and continuing as normal. No, he did something much more aggressive: used a mold Glover’s facial created for the first film and placed on a different actor, Jeffrey Weissmanadding prosthetics, makeup, hairpieces and a meticulous imitation of her voice and gestures. It was, in practice, putting an interpreter to play Crispin Glover playing George McFly. Weissman, initially informed that it would be a simple photographic double, discovered during filming that they were asking him to replicate a foreign personality, not a character. It was even called “Crispin” on the set, and even heard jokes from Steven Spielberg about a supposed “million” that Glover would have demanded. One more thing. Many scenes relegated him to the background, carefully out of focus, or showed him face down to make recognition difficult. The rest was composed by mixing Glover’s real shots with Weissman’s new shots to create the illusion of continuity. For the public it worked: millions of viewers thought that Glover had participated in the sequel. For Glover, that was an outrage: his identity, his interpretive essence, had been used without consent to support a multimillion-dollar production. George Mcfly (with Weissman inside) A historic litigation. In 1990 Glover filed a lawsuit that, without looking for it, became one of the first early warnings about the risks of digital recreation, impersonation through visual effects and image rights in the era of technological manipulation. He argued that Universal had used his face, his voice and his acting style without permission, hiding behind the idea that they were only prolonging the existence of the George McFly character. His lawyer, Doug Kari, built a strategy that sought to demonstrate that it was not about perpetuating the character, but about appropriating Glover’s artistic identity. He wanted to depose Spielberg, Zemeckis, Gale and Michael J. Fox, in addition to accessing the studio’s accounting books. What happened? That the case did not go to trial: the judge encouraged both parties to reach an agreement, one that was finally closed by about $760,000. Consequences. But the psychological, industrial and legal impact was enormous. The SAG-AFTRA union was forced to review your rules. Hollywood began to debate to what extent a performance belongs to an actor and whether a studio can, without consent, reconstruct it for new installments. Years later, every time there was talk of digitally resurrecting a deceased performer, Glover’s name reappeared as a warning. In a way, his case anticipated current debates about deepfakes, avatars generated by AI and digital replicas hyperrealistic. Personal consequences. The process left no one unscathed. Glover managed clear your name and establish a red line in the industry, but the experience marked him deeply. He refused to attend conventions or photo sessions related to the saga because, according to himthat would be supporting a lie: that he had participated in those sequels and that Weissman’s artificial interpretation belonged to him. He also suffered for years from the emotional burden of fans attributing to his work gestures or moments that he never interpreted, even receiving criticism for what he did. … Read more

China needs garbage to burn and it needs it so badly that people are digging it up to sell it to incinerators.

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Until a few years, China was the dumping ground of the world. Voluntarily. Since the 1980s, garbage imports have helped China supply raw materials for its industry. Today, the situation has changed and China continues to have a very intense relationship with waste management. But a very different one. What they have left over now is not garbage, but incinerators to burn it. And that has caused old landfills to begin to be unearthed. Many plants of the country They are burning garbage from 20 years ago today. The great Chinese love affair with garbage. In 2016, China imported 7,350,000 tons of plastic and Hong Kong another 2,850,000. In total, they imported almost 70% of all the plastic waste moved around the world that year. That’s not counting paper, scrap or textiles. China was, for more than two decades, the world’s dumping ground. And it wasn’t an accident. In the 1980s, faced with the shortage of certain raw materials, the Chinese Government decided to start importing certain especially useful waste (plastic, paper, mineral slag or textile waste). “The most notorious case was probably the importation of electronic waste that was dismantled and reprocessed in terrible environmental conditions,” Erik Baark explained to us. Everything has an end. However, by the late 2010s, the Chinese situation had changed. In those years alone, the total volume of urban solid waste generated in the Asian giant increased from 158 million tons to more than 249 million. Suddenly, the Government understood that it was running out of space. So he took several measures. And what did he do? On the one hand, got serious about environmental regulations. In the summer of 2017, more than 800 companies were prosecuted for not complying with recycling standards. And, a few months later, authorities arrested more than 259 people for the illegal importation of 303,000 tons of garbage. But it wasn’t enough. And they prohibited imports. That was what affected us the most: the 2017-2018 decision plunged to the international garbage market (and especially to Western recycling systems) in a crisis from which we have not yet emerged. However, it was not the only thing they did. As Baark explains“the 12th Five-Year Plan (2011-2015) explicitly supported the incineration of municipal solid waste, with the aim of increasing the proportion of waste treated by incineration from 20% to 35% at the national level.” However, China does not know how to do anything by halves. In less than five years, incineration power plants experienced a real boom (from 428 in 2019 to 1010 in 2023). The goal for 2025 — a daily incineration capacity of 800,000 tons — had already been exceeded in 2022. And shortly after, this energy production system came to “process” 80% of the country’s waste. Today they have literally run out of trash. As I said, in recent months, Chinese and international media have reported on waste incinerators for energy recovery in large cities that operate at low capacity due to a lack of raw materials. It is the story of how the impressive operational capacity of the Beijing government goes too far, yes. But the consequences are very curious: because the plants continue looking for waste to burn. In fact, to the extent that plants compete with each other: the price of garbage is rising. And that seems to be causing in many areas of the country “old” garbage is being dug up. A present that is ending. But no one is aware that this is something temporary. If Chinese waste continues to grow so little by little (10% in recent years), the incineration model is going to enter a crisis. First, for the most obvious thing, of course: it is not sustainable. but also because It is still an emergency resource and not a rational waste management policy. The most interesting thing for us is that this more than predictable crisis It will also change our world. Image | 烧不酥在上海 老的 In Xataka | The European waste industry has been lying to us for years: in 2018 everything blew up and we still haven’t recovered

There is a trick to make AI models more reliable: talk badly to them

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If you greet ChatGPT and thank it when it responds, you’re not getting the most out of it. Some researchers wanted to check if the tone we use when asking the AI ​​for things changes the results and they have discovered something interesting: being rude makes them more trustworthy. Rude. They tell it in How to AI. A study carried out by researchers at the University of Pennsylvania has analyzed whether the tone we use when writing a prompt has an effect on the result and the conclusions are clear. Prompts with a ‘rude’ or ‘very rude’ tone elicited up to 4% more accurate responses than those with a more polite tone. The study. To test it, they generated a list of 50 questions on different topics such as history, science or mathematics. Each of the questions was asked using five different tones: very polite, polite, neutral, rude, and very rude. The model they used was ChatGPT-4o. The results. The researchers did ten rounds with all the questions in different tones and the conclusions are very clear. If we look at the variations, the difference between the neutral or rude tone is only 0.6%, but at the extremes the difference becomes more evident. When using a ‘very friendly’ tone, the average accuracy was 80.8%, while if we went to ‘very rude’, it increased to 84.8%. Kindness by default. We tend to speak kindly to chatbots, this is reflected the survey that Future conducted at the end of 2024. At least 70% of respondents admitted to using “please” and “thank you” when using AI chatbots. Many claimed to do so as a matter of custom, culture and “because it is the right thing to do”, although a small percentage admitted to being afraid that robots would rebel in the future. It is expensive. Regardless of the reasons that lead us to be kind to AI, there is a reality and that is that “please” and “thank you” have an absurd cost. When we thank ChatGPT, requests to the language model increase, which increases electricity and water consumption in data centers. We don’t have figures, but Sam Altman assured that kindness has cost OpenAI “tens of millions of dollars well spent.” The prompt. Despite the enormous advances in AI, language models continue to amaze and are not 100% reliable. However, many times the fault that the answers are not exact does not lie with the model, but with how we are asking it. There is tricks to get a good prompt and being friendly or using fillers like “if you can, I would like to…” is one of the points to avoid. It is not a question of treating them badly either because that does not contribute either, but the more direct and clear you are, the better the result will be. Image | Pexels In Xataka | AI agents want to take our jobs. First they will have to learn not to fail in 70% of the tasks

There are experts who believe we are showering badly after exercising

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As if it were all part of the same rite, the shower forms almost an indivisible part of our sports routineswe are already exercising for health, for work or for hobby. Practice can approach perfectly in our training but there are those who believe the same does not happen with showers. In other words: there are experts who believe we are showering badly. The shower after sport is more than a matter of hygiene. A study published in 2019for example, found that the shower after exercise can help us recover thermal comfort, something if it is more important now that we are in summer and this may require more time. Another study carried out a few years ago in the United Kingdom found a curious correlation between the habit of showering after exercise and the physical activity levels of British schoolchildren. So what could we be doing wrong? The key to this supposed error in time. Generally, after exercising we will go almost direct to the showerafter a few minutes we will have dedicated to stretching and “cooling” after exercise. Routines after exercise are important and not only include stretching but also require our body to recover normality in terms of pulse or body temperature. Give time to this process may require postponing the shower At least for a few minutes. In this sense, experts of HealthlineFor example, They stand out The importance of dedicating between five and ten minutes of our physical activity to a relaxed exercise that allows us to reduce our pulsations at the same time that our body is gradually cooling. Once our pulse has been relaxed, it will be time to stretch, another important part of our exercise routine that allows us Avoid injuries And, at the same time, it also requires some dedication time. Once the stretching is finished we can move to the shower, but that takes us to another old dilemma, the temperature. Cold, hot shower Part of the debate about whether it is better to wait a little before taking a shower has to do with thermal contrast when we exercise our body is heated, how our muscles react to thermal contrast. The solution to the problem might seem evident (shower with hot water), but as usual, reality is a bit more complex: we know for several studies that cold water showers after exercise can also have benefits for our health. An example is The study Posted in 2019 in Journal of strength and conditioning research. The analysis responsible for the analysis indicated that cold water showers could promote the feeling of Thermal comfort When doing precisely our pulsations accelerate a time of exercise. In certain warm contexts, this could reduce heart stress after exercise. The recovery period after exercise is fundamental and perhaps we are not paying as much attention as we should. Several scientific teams have tried to find out which are the best routines and habits, not only at the time immediately after exercise but also during the extensive period between one training and another. Recovering our temperature, our pulsations and our resting muscle activity is important, but it is also to hydrate to recover lost water and sleep properly. The “recovery science”It is an incipient subdiscipline that has evolved substantially in recent years but must still accumulate a better understanding of its object of study, indicated the expert in biomedicine and physiology Jonathan M. Peake In an article In the magazine Current Opinion in Physiology. In Xataka | Crossfit is the past, Hyrox is the present: the new obsession in gyms is also a clue about the future of the exercise Image | Kenny

I’ve been sleeping badly for years, so I’ve tried “sleep headphones.” They haven’t been what I expected

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I’ve been sleeping for years regulate. The classic culprits are discarded: I don’t take late or copiously, I don’t drink alcohol, I don’t take caffeine, I do sports, No mobile abuse just before going to bed… Simply I find it hard to fall asleep and sometimes wake up at several times during the night. So I wanted to whose car more and more manufacturers are climbed. In my case I have tried the Anker Soundcore Sleep A20. Let’s see how. What they are and what they promise Sleep A20 are wireless headphones designed exclusively for sleep. The first thing for what they attract attention: they are dwarves. The second: They are very light. The third: its profile is very low, they do not stand out from the ear. The closed box. Image: Xataka. Image: Xataka. Image: Xataka. They also come with several silicone and “wings” tips to adjust it, something especially important in some vermin that we are going to take sleeping for hours. The important thing is that they are not just headphones: Its application includes several environmental sounds, sleep monitoring and specific functions for the night. They can work in two modes: Bluetooth mode to reproduce any sound from our mobile. Sleep mode with soured sounds in the headphones. The experiment The first night was adaptation. I had never slept with a headset in my life. In addition, I usually sleep sideways. It seemed unlikely that a headset did not bother me. Minipunto for these, because I immediately forgot that I was wearing them. The flat design and the soft, gummy, flexible material, made it barely noticed additional pressure. Zero problem. They stand out practically anything. Image: Xataka. Image: Xataka. Then there was the issue of listening. Put to try, I let the application surprise me with its own proposals, which they call “brain waves with the” created specifically to help us fall asleep. We can choose whether listening to them only for a while, only until we stay asleep or all night. I tried the three: Only for a while: It gives what it promises. If we mark 45 minutes, at 45 minutes it will stop ringing. Only until we stay asleep: The same, detecting the moment we fall. All night: What a bad time. The sound made me wake up a couple of times, something disoriented by him. Perhaps it is a personal issue and there are people who have a reparative dream with the headphones sounding throughout the night. It is not my case and I advise to set the timer in a generous way to ensure that the shutdown will occur. The Yay and the Nay There are four elements that work really well here: Exceptional comfort. They have never been a nuisance. They are soft and with the low profile they are not noticed or sleeping sideways, as a soil alternate. Spectacular battery. 14 hours in sleep mode is something that I can never check for myself. After seven hours of night use, when they woke up they still had about the remaining 50%. Passive noise block. Without active cancellation, but with the right tips they isolate surprisingly well. Reasonable, at least. Useful sleep monitoring. The application records sleep phases, number of turns in bed and preferred position. There is enough correlation with what it says My garmin on duration and phases. And then there are four other elements where they fail. Mediocre audio. That nobody expects audiophile quality. Nor is it the vocation of these headphones. The sound is functional, music lacks depth and warmth. Very limited pre -recorded sounds. There is some variety, but many sound compressed and artificial. The most effective are the noise of color (white, brown, pink). Application Faluta. He tells me that I slept 16 hours when the reality is that at seven hours I took them off and left them on the bedside table. I should understand that absolute immobility for nine hours cannot be equivalent to very deep sleep. In addition, it is not very intuitive when applying one way or another. Problematic tactile controls. In the dark it is easy to activate some function. About the application Falutathere is an example. I have not sleeping 11 hours possibly from the day before my birth. That lack of logic in detection is a negative point. Yes, you can see how much I move during the night: my wife says that 16 turns seems like a fairly reasonable figure. The data collected by the application. Image: Mockuuups Studio, Xataka. Also Atina that I am only able to sleep aside, and I have quantified what I already imagined: I usually sleep more towards the side of the edge. The final verdict The big question with these headphones is whether they really help sleep better. The answer, in my experience, is not. I did not notice differences between the nights with them sounding before sleeping and the nights without them. I thought That the scientific approach of pre -registered sounds would better induce sleep, but it has not been so. My Garmin data, with me every night, indicate very similar patterns with them and without them. And something worse when I tried to wear them playing all night, as I said before. At 150 euros are not cheap, but Yes I see them a clear target audience: the people who need to fall asleep listening to something. For that, I don’t think there are much better options for the low profile and night comfort. And without disturbing the bed couple, if there is. There I see an obvious sense. But for those who do not sleep wonderfully and look for allies of any kind to fall asleep, and not to simply hurry a podcast of True Crime Until we fall round, at least in my experience, these headphones do not miracles. Anker Soundcore Sleep A20, Sleeping headphones with noise block, small design for people who sleep from side, 80 hours of autonomy, Bluetooth 5.3, sleep monitor, personal … Read more

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