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“We don’t see the promise of the four-hour work week reaching society. I don’t expect AI to change that”

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Every technological advance brings the same promise: fewer work hours, more leisure time and a less stressed life for employees. It happened with the steam engine, with the computer and with the arrival of the internet. Now it’s up to the AI ​​to take charge. that collective illusion. Sam Altman, the man who more has pushed This wave with ChatGPT has just spoiled the party. He did it in a talk with host Ti Morse, on the podcast ‘Relentless‘. There he made a devastating statement: the founder of OpenAI does not believe that AI is going to bring the four-hour day. Not even now, nor ever. A promise that is never fulfilled. “For a long time, technology has promised people that they will work less and have a lot of free time,” Altman said. He acknowledges that this has been partly the case. Today we have more leisure and a better quality of life than decades ago. But that’s where the consolation ends for the dedicated employees. “For some reason, we never see the promise of the four-hour work week reach society on a large scale. And I don’t expect AI to change that,” the manager said. In itself it is a powerful phrase, but it is even more so coming from the founder and CEO of the company that has most promised to change work. as we know it. A game of comparisons. Why doesn’t it happen? According to Altman, human nature itself is to blame. “We always want more. We think of new things to do, to create for others, to wish for ourselves,” Altman justified. “It’s like a comparison game. People focus a lot on how they are doing relative to others.” That’s the key, according to him. Productivity does not translate into restbut in new goals. “I think we are all going to be much busier than we thought in a post-superintelligence world,” the manager concluded. “We will continue to complain, but secretly we will be happy.” Competition, he says, drives the economy and he doesn’t believe that will stop. What is already happening in the offices. The data, for now, give him some reason. a study of Harvard Business Review confirms it. After eight months observing a US technology company, he found that AI does not simplify work. Expand it and modify the processes. The report Work AI Indexfrom the Glean Institute, goes further in its conclusions. Workers spend an average of 6.4 hours per week just doing make AI work well: check errors, relaunch prompts, clean results. They call it “botsitting“Almost 70% admit to having submitted AI-generated work without reviewing it first. Not everyone thinks like Altman. On the other hand, Altman’s statements contradict what OpenAI itself recently published in its report Industrial Policywhere proposes just the opposite: 32-hour days without touching the salary, thanks to the so-called “efficiency dividends” that AI brings. Bill Gates is also among the supporters that AI will be a key piece in the arrival of the reduction of working hours. In a talk with host Nikhil Kamath, the millionaire founder of Microsoft assured that “you’ll be able to retire earlier, work shorter work weeks.” Jamie DimonCEO of JPMorgan, and Anthony Scaramucci also talk about three- or four-day weeks in the coming decades. The human that survives. Meanwhile, the technological labor market no longer aspires to reducing working hours, but rather to not continue losing jobs. According to Layoffs.fyimore than 200,000 people have lost their jobs so far this year in the technology sector. Altman himself recognized that many companies were using the AI as an excuse to apply the staff cuts that were carried out after the overhiring of 2021 and 2022. Altman, however, believes that certain aspects of human work are not going away. In his speech he used a curious metaphor: cooking for others. “You’re not creating much economic value in the world, but it shows love. I think people will continue cooking and eating together long after robots can cook just as well.” The four-hour day may still be a myth, but at least we will have the kitchen homemade. In Xataka | Sam Altman: “I’m glad I was wrong about this, I thought cutting jobs would have had more impact by now” Image | Flickr (World Economic Forum/Pascal Bitz), Unsplash (Annie Spratt)

Psychology says that people who thank drivers when crossing the street don’t do it just out of gratitude.

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When a car stops at a pedestrian crossing to let us pass, it is normal, almost instinctive, to raise our hand in gratitude. However, this gesture goes a little further than being polite to the other person, or at least that is what psychologists maintain. According to the experts’ conclusions, much deeper mechanisms hide behind this peculiar habit. Why pedestrians wave at drivers when crossing the street It’s no secret that traffic is not pleasant. It is usually synonymous with rush, stress and nerves, especially at certain times of the day. That’s why the simple act of raising your hand in gratitude is so striking. It is something that drivers also do, but it is much more evident in pedestrians when a car gives way to them. Psychologists classify this gesture as a prosocial behaviorthat is, small selfless actions that are perceived positively in our interactions with others. This type of behavior includes other options, such as helping to carry shopping bags, sharing a location with someone from outside, or comforting. Image | Jacek Dylag on Unsplash Experts associate this behavior with kindness, one of the traits of the Big Five personality model. This model establishes that human personality is made up of five main traits, namely: Openness to experience. Responsibility (or thoroughness). Extraversion. Kindness. Neuroticism (or emotional instability). Theoretically, people who automatically greet drivers when they let them pass show higher levels of empathy, warmth, friendliness, and willingness to cooperate. They adopt an altruistic attitude in their daily relationships with the rest of society. It is the combination and intensity of each of these factors that ends up defining our character. By making this gesture towards the driver, the pedestrian also shows, unconsciously, that he is aware of the people around him. This type of behavior serves to remind others that public space is a place shared by everyone, and a friendly greeting can be enough to reduce the tension of a stressful situation on the road. Via | Gry-Online Image | Gry-Online

We don’t know if today’s pop music is better or worse than that of 1960, but we do know one thing: it’s much more depressing.

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What does the music you listen to say about you? And what does the music that is published say about us, as a society? A group of scientists from the Queen Mary University of London (QMUL) has tried to answer these and other questions by analyzing tens of thousands of songs released between 1960 and 2023. The result is a vast study which has just been published in Nature and leaves a fascinating conclusion: in the last six decades pop has become more depressing. The question is obvious: Why? Much more than music. Anyone who has listened to music while working, playing sports or simply walking down the street will have experienced that songs are much more than an artistic expression: they are also a powerful lever capable of altering our mood. Not only that. Music, from the most sophisticated to the most popular, points directly to our emotions and obsessions. Aware of this, a group of researchers including Vjosa Preniqui, from Queen Mary University, decided some time ago to embark on a peculiar exercise: grab tens of thousands of songs mainstream and analyze their lyrics to find out what they are talking about. Almost 400,000 topics. The team examined more than 380,000 songs published between 1960 and 2030, hours and hours and hours of music composed by artists from several generations who sing about their obsessions. To be more precise, the researchers worked with two large music archives. The first consists of more than 377,000 songs with lyrics in English released between 1960 and 2010 and that have been added to the WASABI database. The second is made up of 5,500 songs extracted from the Billboard charts and that cover a longer period that extends from the beginning of the 60s to 2023. Objective: language. To manage such a musical collection, the researchers They turned to AI and language analysis techniques. They also focused the focus on a very specific aspect of the songs: they were not as interested in the harmony, instrumentation, rhythm or complexity of the compositions, as their lyrics. The focus was on language, emotional language and its relationship with morality. That is, what were the songs about? Of fidelity, decency and friendship or of conflicts, deception and rebellion? The goal, as Preniqi and his colleagues explain in his paperis to examine “the evolution of moral expressions in pop music lyrics” over six decades. It may sound very abstract, but the researchers paid attention to ten great timeless topics: ‘care’, ‘harm’, ‘justice’, ‘cheating’, ‘loyalty’, ‘betrayal’, ‘authority’, ‘subversion’, ‘purity’ and ‘degradation’. They also looked at the artist singing: whether it was a man, a woman or a mixed group. What did they find out? That today’s popular music is much darker than what our grandparents and parents listened to. By comparing the lyrics of the 60s with the most recent ones, Preniqi and her companions found that they have become “increasingly negative”. “Our results reveal an increase in moral vices and a decrease in expressions of virtues, along with an increase in negative feelings, anger and disgust,” they explain in the article of Nature. In short, today it is much easier to listen to songs that are about infidelities, hurts or degradation than in the 60s, when it was more common to sing about purity or mutual care. “This change, which extends until the 2020s and varies depending on the genre of the artists, highlights that expressions oriented to vices and emotional charges have increasingly gained prominence in music lyrics. mainstream“, concludes the study. Can it go further? The research provides some figures that help to better understand this transformation. In WASABI the letters related to degradation shot up by 52%, those associated with damage by 49% and those referring to deception by 48%. References to subversive acts also rose 41%. In the Billboard lists, which extend the ‘photography’ until 2023, the panorama is not very different: references to deception skyrocketed by nearly 71%, to degradation by 62%, to subversion by 50% and to injuries by 36%. less uplifting. If we look at the lyrics that deal with ‘virtuous’ behavior the trend is the opposite: Songs that talk about caring for others decreased by 24%, those dedicated to purity by 12% and those about loyalty by 11%. Again the trend is similar in WASABI and Billboard. The researchers did notice changes depending on gender of the artist (men and mixed groups seem more given to negative lyrics) or musical genresalthough these latter data must be handled carefully because there may be important imbalances in the samples analyzed. And what do the authors say? They claim that their study helps us understand both the evolution of popular music and our own obsessions. “Music is much more than entertainment, it is one of the ways that societies tell stories about themselves. By looking at song lyrics over several decades we can see how emotional expression and moral narratives evolve over time,” reflect Preniqi. “What we discovered was a gradual shift away from language associated with virtues such as care and decency toward themes that reflect conflict, harm, and other moral concerns. These patterns depend on several factors, such as musical genre and impact, but offer a fascinating perspective on the evolution of cultural values ​​and emotional expression.” Images | Spencer Davis (Unsplash), QMUL and Vjosa Preniqi et al. in Nature In Xataka | In 1992, Black Sabbath recorded a song about technology replacing humans. In 2026, it serves as a premonition

We believed that “you don’t live anywhere like Spain.” This world ranking of quality of life does not have the same opinion

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“Where is it better to live?” The question is, obviously, subjective no matter how you look at it. But in the case that concerns us even more: the The Wharton School’s 2026 Best Countries Index takes as a basis How citizens around the world perceive the quality of life in different countries. That is, it is a study of brand perception and reputation (brand = country) that classifies the states that are considered to offer the highest quality of life in the world. This index classifies 85 countries according to 73 attributes grouped into such varied categories that range from entrepreneurship or openness to business to power or cultural influence through the generic “quality of life” and in its preparation more than 15,000 people from 33 countries have been surveyed. The report is almost 100 pages long, but Visual Capitalist has summarized it in a much more condensed and visual graph. Although the report has no trace of parameters such as GDP, investment in infrastructure, education or health, the brand image has its point: it makes the country more attractive for investment or tourism. For example, a button: the United Arab Emirates has gone from 17th place in 2024 to 10th place in 2026. Investing in improvements to its airport or the 2022 World Cup pays off. Simply put, having a country appear to have a high quality of life helps foreign investment or talent. Obviously, cultural biases and geopolitics also play a role. What countries seems who have a better quality of life The perceived quality of life. Visual Capitalist with data from the Wharton School The list is dominated by Europe, with 20 of the top 30 positions occupied by states from the old continent and the Nordic countries at the top. As a curiosity, Canada sneaks into the bronze and you have to look much further down to find its neighbor the United States: it is in 27th place, the last of the G7 economies and surpassed by Australia, Singapore, Japan, the Arab Emirates or China, which is just above. At the bottom of the table are Ukraine, Iran and Lebanon, places devastated by war or sanctions. The maxim “As in Spain you don’t live anywhere” seems to have its weight more within the Spanish state than outside: Spain scores with a 56.7 out of 100 scored by Sweden, placing it in 19th place out of the 30 best, immediately after Poland and just before France. It is far from the Nordic countries, but presiding over the Mediterranean countries. The lifestyle scores worse than the solidity of northern Europe. And despite this, Spain attracted almost 100 million tourists per year past, according to INE data. In any case, it is worth remembering that this is an index of perception and not real living conditions, so stereotypes and biases outweigh the daily experience of those who live there. Furthermore, the sample is relatively small to evaluate over 85 countries. In Xataka | Longevity experts are clear: “120 minutes of strength per week is associated with lower mortality” In Xataka | The largest expat platform in the world has chosen its three favorite cities to live. And they are all Spanish Cover | Visual Capitalist

“I don’t understand Stallone, I have the impression that he only does it for money”

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That phrase from Clint Eastwood is not current, but belongs to 2003, to a profile that Lillian Ross wrote about Eastwood for ‘The New Yorker’. Curiously, after that Stallone returned to Rocky, but he did so with a film that was a huge critical and public success. And Eastwood did not return to any of his previous films. That is, a quarter of a century later, the quote is nuanced but it essentially means the same thing. What is it coming for? That “I don’t understand Sylvester Stallone. I have the impression that he only does it for money” was said within Eastwood’s broader reflection on his own career: he was talking about Harry Callahan, about the risk of stagnating artistically, about the need to grow instead of going backwards. At that time, it was not known whether ‘Rocky Balboa’ would end up being a worthy film or a nostalgic wreck. In 2003, filming hadn’t even started. It was cool. Three years later, Stallone wrote, directed and starred in that sixth installment. The critical reaction far exceeded that of its two predecessors: Rotten Tomatoes Today it scores 78% out of 180 reviews, well above the reception that ‘Rocky V’ had in 1990. In commercial terms, ‘Rocky Balboa’ grossed 155.9 million dollars with a budget of 24 million. The installment that recovered Rocky was a very worthy tribute to a classic character. Everyone sins. Eastwood was also not free from the impulse to resurrect characters. He played Harry Callahan five times between 1971 and 1988, until ‘The Blacklist’, the last installment of the saga. When a sixth Callahan was finally ruled out, Warner Bros. did not close the door: in 2004 it considered relaunching the franchise with Dwayne Johnson as a thirty-something detective. The plan died due to Johnson’s own box office failures. Without consequences (relatively). However, Eastwood has remained true to his words: in 2003 he had already abandoned Callahan’s films many years ago and was fully immersed in a career as a complete auteur accepted by Hollywood. Words are always relative, yes, because at the end of the day… what are films like ‘Unforgiven’ if not late sequels to his successes as a protagonist for directors like Leone, where the director wonders what happens when the icons reach an advanced age and all the treasures obtained by clean shooting have come to nothing? What remains The really valuable thing about this statement, which we must remember that the current nonagenarian Eastwood has not uttered, is that it is infinitely nuanced: Rocky returned to one of his classic franchises (and would do so again with ‘John Rambo’, another critical – to a lesser extent, yes – and public success), but it was a more than worthy return. And Eastwood would stay true to his words, but four Dirty Harry sequels are there to remind him that there is no one with a completely irreproachable career. In Xataka | “They were not used to silence”: when Clint Eastwood set foot in Spain for the first time in 1964, he was marked forever

A study reveals that we no longer know how to say “I don’t know”

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I notice that it is increasingly difficult for us to say “I don’t know.” Maybe it is one of the most honest acts that a person can do and, on the other hand, with the arrival of AI and with all the information at our disposal, it seems that we are losing that habit in conversations. a study He wanted to put some data on the table regarding the subject. And the conclusion reached by a group of researchers from different universities in Paris, Rome and Milan, by bringing together 3,100 participants, has been that having access to an AI, even if it gives wrong answers, pushes people to stop recognizing the limits of their own knowledge. I know everything. Recognizing that we don’t know something is more useful than we think, since it is a mental skill that prevents us from acting guided by false beliefs. The authors of the study they call her “suspension of judgment”, that is, the ability to stop before responding when there is uncertainty. As AI assistants sneak into more and more aspects of our lives, the research, signed by Chiara Marcoccia (École Normale Supérieure of Paris), Walter Quattrociocchi (Sapienza University of Rome) and Valerio Capraro (University of Milan-Bicocca), wanted to verify if the simple presence of these chatbots it alters the moment when we decide that we already know enough to answer. The experiment. To isolate the effect, the team purposely designed questions that were almost impossible for an AI to get right, with very specific visual details from movies, such as the color of the kit in ‘I Want to Be Like Beckham’ or the vehicle a character drives in ‘Like Cat and Mouse’. This is data so specific that it barely appears on the internet, so the model used in the experiment (Step 3.5 Flash) almost always failed. Participants could ask the AI ​​if they wanted, but they also always had the option of leaving the question blank or admitting they didn’t know the answer. Figures. In the group that did not have access to any assistant, 44% of the participants admitted not knowing the answer when appropriate. Among those who could ask AI for help, that percentage plummeted to 3%, according to collect the study. Furthermore, the proportion of correct answers also fell, from 27% to 9%. That is, people answered more questions, but they got much less right. The most striking thing is that, despite making more mistakes, the participants felt more confident, since according to the study, their confidence in the answers went from 30% to 76%, almost double. What if there is money at stake?. The researchers suspected that paying for getting it right (and penalizing for getting it wrong) might correct the problem. It did indeed help, but very little, because with financial incentives, the willingness to admit that they did not know the answer rose from 3% to 8%, and the correct answers went from 9% to 16%. Interestingly, the authors themselves expected the effect of AI to be weakened by money, but their data did not confirm this. And the pull towards trusting the machine turned out to be practically independent of the economic incentive. Boundaries. Capraro, co-author of the study, explained told The Register that people “became much worse” at their performance, being only one-third accurate than the non-AI group, but ended up “twice as confident” in their own answers. For the researcher, this ability to say “I don’t know” represents neither more nor less than “the recognition of the limits of our own knowledge.” On the other hand, Capraro was especially concerned about the effect that this phenomenon can have on children. According to declared In the middle, adults “already have formed critical thinking” before the massive arrival of these tools, but children who grow up using AI from the beginning “run the risk of never developing that basic ability to question an answer.” Cover image | Solen Feyissa and Dylan Gillis In Xataka | Meta warns: “We have been building infrastructure for humans for 20 years, we may have 20 months to rebuild it for agents”

“children don’t play anymore”

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Before Amazon carts and unboxing videos existed, many childhoods were built glued to glass. On any given Saturday, the children would gather in front of the window of the toy store, with their noses leaving mist on the moon, absorbed in that Scalextric track, the Nancy with a new dress or the plastic castle that might arrive in Epiphany. Light bulb lights, catalog folded in the pocket and the look of trying to memorize details that will later have to be explained to the parents. Or write it in the letter. For decades, the Malaga dream board (not the tablao) had its own name: entering Juguetes Carrión was almost a rite of passage for many families. Mid-April 2026 They lowered the blinds of their last store. “Children no longer play, the sector is no longer profitable,” the manager of the firm wieldsArturo García Carrión. As you can see from your websitethere is no longer sale to the public. From olives to toys. The most amazing thing about this story begins at the beginning: The story is not born as a toy store. In 1953, Francisco Carrión Ruiz, creator of Aceitunas Carrión, bought a store on Compañía Street. He calls it Almacenes Carrión. Sells clothing, perfumery, haberdashery. And also toys. I know it well because in my town, Quintanar de la Orden, there was an enclave of Aceites Carrión that fed several families for a lifetime. Because wow, they did well. Toys became the nerve center of the business. During the 80s they opened stores in Mártires, Alarcón Luján, Santa Lucía and Mármoles. The main warehouse was established on Bodegueros Street, parallel to the El Gallo artery, in the Ronda Exterior industrial estate. Many Malaga residents remember this warehouse full of boxes. The second generation, with María Dolores Carrión Martín, turned the company into a chain. In the 90s it had almost 30 stores spread throughout Andalusia, including in shopping centers, where every December they dressed up with their Christmas trees. 25 stores and a legendary brand. Don Dino, the brand that brings together other independent associates, was added to the parent toy brand and ended up spreading throughout Spain. A decade ago, the family business had 25 of its own stores and up to 45 franchises under the Don Dino banner. In practice, the network covered a good part of eastern Andalusia, with its own premises in Malaga, Granada and Jaén. A little over two months ago, the map was already much smaller: only the three stores on Nueva, Juan Sebastián Elcano and Motril streets remained. Also the Bodegueros warehouse, which was already focused on digital conversion, serving web orders and functioning as an outlet. The requiem began with the store on Velázquez Avenue, then followed by the Teatinos store, and so on until the third generation decided that there was no way to balance the numbers. “We have tried every way possible,” they said. “Children don’t play anymore”. “We cannot continue losing money, it is not profitable,” García Carrión said a few months ago. Consumption habits have changed: more time with screens, less time with physical toys—inheritance and direct influence from those themselves. parental consumption habits—. And fierce competition comes from everywhere. From hypermarkets, which sell toys on a large scale to platforms like Temu and AliExpress that will even continue to make noise despite the new tariffs, that “Shein rate” of 3 euros plus VAT for each B2C distance sale sent outside the EU, which already applies to all imports of purchases less than or equal to 150 euros. High street stores are suffering the perfect storm because, with minimal margins, increasing rents and fixed costs that cannot be cut without emptying the store, there is no choice but to go elsewhere, how it happened to Tobarix. And those of us who compare prices with our mobile phone also have no arguments to go downtown. Except when we remember that humane treatment and professional selection and recommendation will always be worth more than the price of the product we want to give as a gift. The map that shrinks non-stop. The closure of Carrión is just another example of the death of an entire sector. Or in retreat, at least: between 2019 and 2023, Spain went from 1,340 specialist stores to 1,160. There are 180 fewer toy stores in four years. The figure has continued to declinelike the country’s birth rates. Iconic chains like Imaginarium, the brand that served as a gateway for my children, have fallen. It closed after 32 years in operation. Poly Toys also disappeared. Juguettos was the one who bought its brands and nine of its stores, and is already working on a restructuring to close the year with about 200 operational stores. At the end of 2025 there was talk of 44 associates, 700 people on staff and the objective of reaching 100 million in 2026after its alliance with Eurekakids. Of course, although toys continue to be the heart of the business, they are by no means exclusive. Which ones remain? Juguettos and Toy Planet concentrate half of the specialized toy stores left in Spain. Behind them are networks such as Don Dino – with its headquarters in Carballo (A Coruña) and link in Aldaya (Valencia) -, Drim or Juguetilandia. They all fight in a market that is weakening little by little. The death of the sale of video games in physical box It will also hit the ankles of this chair that is the showcase shops. Lego summarizes it with a fact as simple as that, in Spain, its “number one retail partner” is Amazon, which grows 25% annually. The global online channel grew by 30% and the store channel decreased by an equivalent figure. Given this lack of options, not only a few meters of shelves disappear, those spaces where creatures touch, try and order without going through an app are also lost. In weeks Málaga has been left without two mythical ones such as Carrión and Confitería Aparicio de … Read more

We’ve been hearing for years that adults don’t have to drink milk. The latest studies say the opposite.

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For decades, milk was the undisputed pillar of any healthy breakfast. However, in recent years we have witnessed a real demonization of dairy products and we have heard practically everything, from being “unnatural” for adults, to being the culprit of increased cholesterol or even the risk of cancer. But we are faced with several myths that are important to deny. We are designed for it. One of the most repeated arguments is that we are the only mammal that consumes milk in its adult stage. The experts they explain that, although a part of the world’s population loses the ability to digest lactose after childhood, many others maintain this enzyme active throughout life thanks to a genetic adaptation. Therefore, there is no basis to recommend that all adults stop drinking milk because of this enzyme. Here science is quite clear, since a population study made in Galicia with 850 people showed that, although the alteration of lactose metabolism affects 38% of individuals, when normal physiological quantities are consumed such as a simple glass of milk or yogurt, symptomatic intolerance plummets to 2% for milk and 8% for yogurt. Mortality. Another of the most widespread myths is precisely that dairy consumption in adults increases the risk of mortality and cardiovascular diseases, but science says the opposite. Here, one monumental umbrella review of 2021 pointed out that the evidence does not support that milk is harmful and in fact, in most scenarios its impact is neutral, and in several it is clearly favorable. But if we want to sharpen our aim, a 2026 dose-response meta-analysis, based on 29 cohorts and more than 1.6 million participants, has drawn the exact curve of how dairy interacts with our life expectancy. The researchers found a “U”-shaped association, seeing that the optimal point of consumption is located between 250 and 300 grams a day. Cancer. The alleged relationship between dairy products and cancer is another of the great battlehorses on the internet. However, the most recent reviews they point in another direction, since it has been seen that dairy consumption reduces the risk of suffering from colorectal, bladder, liver, oral cavity and even ovarian and breast cancer. The calcium dilemma. With the rise of plant-based diets, it is common to hear that “spinach or oat drinks have as much or more calcium than milk.” This is where a crucial scientific concept that the nutrition label doesn’t cover comes in, which is bioavailability and the food matrix. We see this in a study published in 2024 that measured exactly how much calcium our body actually assimilates, and was seen that with the consumption of dairy products there was a bioaccessibility of between 19 and 34%, while the vegetable alternatives were 5 and 20%. And this is explained because the joint presence of lactose and casein peptides in milk acts as a “vehicle” that favors the absorption of calcium in our intestine. But in addition, many vegetables rich in calcium are loaded with phytates and oxalates, compounds that “sequester” calcium and prevent us from absorbing it. Your proteins. From a protein point of view, dairy products play in a higher league. If we use the DIAAS index, dairy proteins get scores higher than 1and this means that they provide an excellent amount of highly digestible essential amino acids, far surpassing most plant proteins. Images | Pixabay In Xataka | One in every ten liters of “milk” sold in Spain does not come from any animal: the unstoppable (and silent) growth of vegetable drinks

Generation Z is breaking a rule Baby Boomers have always followed: don’t talk about money

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Nightly, in The Revoltdozens of guests face two of the most uncomfortable questions that can be asked of a person: about your sex life and about money. With the arrival of sex education to the classrooms, the taboo of talk about sex has been reduced, but when it comes to talking about salary, almost everyone hesitates. They change the subject, let out a nervous laugh, or dodge the answer as best they can. Money is still the true taboo of spanish after-dinner. Outside of Spain, something similar had been happening for decades. There was no talk about salary, neither with friends nor family. That unwritten rule, which boomers and generation X strictly followed, generation Z is definitively breaking. We don’t talk about money. The silence about money did not come out of nowhere. It has roots in social comparison: talking about what you earn puts you in a success or failure scaleand that is uncomfortable. The ethics of effort also weigh, the idea that having little money is synonymous with little ambition, something that in Spain is also mixed with a religious component that associates wealth with greed, as the economist Joan Tubau said. in an interview for The World. The sociologist Iván Parro matches in which money stopped being just a means of exchange and began to become a means of identifying social status. Having or not having money defines, in part, your place in the group. That’s why building a wall on your salary also protects your ego. Nobody wants to expose their position on that scale in front of others. Generation Z does not shut up. Mary Julia Koch, editor of the Wall Street Journal, explained it in one of his interventions in Fox Business. His generation has grown up publishing his entire life on social networks: romantic relationships, friendshipsuniversity life and work. Talking about salary was, according to her, the next logical step. And that step is already being taken on a massive scale. According to a Stepstone study74% of those under 30 years old already talk openly about their salary, compared to less than half of those over that age. Economic pressure helps to understand this opening: high rents, precarious jobs and a generation that needs to compare figures to know if they are being paid well. “Generation Z and Millennials are increasingly better informed about the salary they can expect, as they discuss it more openly than older generations,” the report notes. In Spain it is still difficult to talk about money. Here the change goes more slowly. According to data from a Younited analysis collected by The Newspaper51% of Spaniards prefer not to talk about money openly, and up to 60% of those under 40 believe that it should not be done in public. Culture is important, but so is the lack of training. The Bank of Spain itself makes it clear in its latest Financial Competencies Survey: almost half of the population considers that their knowledge is low or very low. When you don’t know how something works, it’s easier to avoid talking about it than to risk appearing ignorant. A new language to talk about money. This change in tone also has its own face in Spain. Streamers like Ibai Llanos have managed to talk about salariesrents or mortgages sound like a normal conversation and not a meeting with the bank, something that has helped the creators become the gateway to financial education for many young people. The secrecy of a lifetime is being dismantled little by little, between reels posted on social networks and a generation that already sees silence about money as more of a disadvantage than a taboo. In Xataka | If the question is how much money does it take to be happy in Spain, a study has the answer: double what you earn Image | Unsplash (Marionel Luciano, Emil Kalibradov)

China’s longest underwater tunnel has 600,000 LED points calculated so you don’t fall asleep at the wheel

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A few months ago we unraveled everything about the Taihu tunnel in China and its LED ceiling that has turned the infrastructure into a tourist attraction. However, in addition to the very curious aesthetics offered by this illuminated ceiling, there is another reason why this infinite screen runs through the tunnel, and that is so you don’t fall asleep at the wheel. It is normal, since we are talking about the longest underwater tunnel in the country. Eyestrain. Traveling the 10.79 kilometers of the Taihu tunnel at the maximum permitted speed takes almost ten minutes under the lake, enclosed between concrete walls, without windows or external references. And it is precisely this scenario that is most conducive to the appearance of visual fatigue, a danger especially if we are behind the wheel. For this reason, when the tunnel was designed, lighting was no longer considered only a matter of visibility and aesthetics and also began to become a safety tool. Tthree “heavens” distributed along the route. The engineers divided the tunnel into three sections and placed, at the junction points between them, what the technical documentation calls a “visual wake-up system against fatigue.” There are three ceilings made up of LED dot screens, very common in tourist locations in China. Each of these roofs is made up of about 200,000 LED light pointsand the system can show different scenes, from a blue sky with clouds, a night sky full of stars or, on specific dates, the five-star flag of China. The control system can automatically switch between these scenes by time slots and sections. According to Baidu Baikethis “visual awakening” system seeks to relieve the tension and feeling of overwhelm caused by driving for a long time in a closed space. Why those colors? Those responsible for the project chose blue, yellow and cyan as the main colors of their activation zones, combined with warm tones to generate dynamic changes. There is scientific support behind this decision, since light with cold tones and short wavelengths, such as blue, has non-visual effects on the brain that go beyond allowing us to see better. Different studies have verified that the color temperature of the light influences the mood, alertness level and reaction time of drivers, something related to how this type of light stimulates the brain mechanisms that regulate wakefulness. Just like share From Motorpasión, simulator tests showed that blue-toned lights were the ones that increased drivers’ attention the most, followed by red-toned ones, precisely the colors that are repeated the most in the images showing the tunnel ceiling. On the other hand, researchers presented their results at an IEEE conference in 2024, having conducted field tests in the Taihu tunnel itself to see how different LED configurations modified the eye movements and physiological responses of drivers in real conditions. lThe walls also “speak”. Throughout the entire route, the side walls of the tunnel are decorated with stripes of blue, yellow and green that intertwine in geometric gradients, as if they were ribbons. According to they count From the local media Sohu, all this display of lights is managed by an intelligent lighting system that not only decides which scene to show and when, but also monitors its own operation. The system incorporates real-time monitoring of breakdowns, with automatic alerts that inform the exact point where a failure occurs, which facilitates the maintenance of an installation that, after all, has to operate uninterruptedly under a lake. Cover image | FeatureChina/AP (cnn) In Xataka | Chile wants a tunnel under the Strait of Magellan to link Tierra del Fuego with the continent. The project exists, the agreement with Argentina does not

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