Killed

She alone killed 309 enemies. Then Stalin sent her to Washington

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He killed 309 enemy soldiers in just ten months. Then Stalin made a decision that seemed incomprehensible: to withdraw her from the front and send her to Washington. The Soviet Union had discovered that your best sniper It could also become one of her most effective diplomatic weapons, a mission that would take her from the fighting in Sevastopol to the White House at the decisive moment of World War II. From history student to most feared woman. When Germany launched Operation Barbarossa against the Soviet Union in June 1941, Lyudmila Pavlichenko He studied History at the University of kyiv. Years before he had started practicing shooting sports almost out of pride, after hearing a neighbor brag about his aim and deciding to prove that a woman could shoot just as well. That hobby led her to train as a sniper while working in an arms factory, although the Red Army was not willing to admit women into combat units. Only after insisting and demonstrating her skill with the rifle did she manage to join the 25th Rifle Division, beginning a military career that would change her life and turn her into a legend. Ten months were enough. His baptism of fire came near Odessa, where he shot down two enemy soldiers at long range and began a progression almost impossible to believe. During the campaigns of Odessa, Moldavia and, above all, the siege of sevastopolPavlichenko accumulated 309 confirmed casualtiesamong them at least 36 German snipers and other Axis armies. The figure could have been even higher, since each death needed a witness to be officially validated. Her ability to camouflage, wait for hours, and shoot with precision made her a nightmare for the Wehrmachtwhich even dedicated specific resources to locate and eliminate it before it continued to decimate its troops. Germany tried to buy it and ended up fearing it. Pavlichenko’s fame quickly reached the other side of the front. According to would later relateGerman soldiers used loudspeakers to try to intimidate her, offered her chocolate, a supposed officer’s rank and better conditions if she deserted, and even threatened to tear her “into 309 pieces”, a direct reference to the casualties she suffered. had already accumulated. Far from impressing her, those threats confirmed that his reputation had crossed enemy lines. During the fighting she suffered several wounds and continued fighting as long as she could, convinced that each shot prevented more civilians and Soviet soldiers from dying under the Nazi advance. Stalin understood that his best weapon was not a rifle. In the summer of 1942, a serious wound caused by shrapnel changed course of his career. However, the reason he disappeared from the front was much more strategic than medical. The Soviet Union was going through one of the most delicate moments of the war and Stalin desperately needed convince the United States and the United Kingdom to open a second front in Western Europe to relieve German pressure on the Red Army. It was then that he made a surprising decision: withdraw the most effective sniper in the country and cturn her into an ambassador of the Soviet cause. He had killed 309 enemy soldiers, and now he had to try to change the course of the war with speeches instead of shots. Pavlichenko (center) with Judge Robert Jackson (left) and US First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt in Washington DC in September 1942 From the Sevastopol front to the White House. At age 25, Pavlichenko became the first Soviet citizen to visit the White House. There she was received by Franklin D. Roosevelt and established a close friendship with the first lady, Eleanor Roosevelt, who accompanied her during a tour of the United States and later Canada and the United Kingdom. Before packed auditoriums he explained what it was like to fight on the front lines and sent a message that would go down in history: “I am 25 years old and I have already killed 309 fascist occupiers. Gentlemen, don’t you think you have been hiding behind my back for too long?” That phrase perfectly summarized the mission entrusted by Moscow: pressure allies to accelerate their military participation in Europe. They expected a celebrity, they found a soldier. The trip also revealed the enormous cultural clash between both countries. While Pavlichenko talked about trenches, casualties and military strategy, much of the American press seemed more interested in his physical appearance. Some journalists asked her if she used makeup before fighting, how she wore her hair or if her uniform was too unfeminine. His response became another of the great quotes of World War II: “There’s no rule against it. But who has time to think about powdering your nose when a battle is going on out there?” On another occasion he showed his indignation because they criticized the length of your skirt soldier and responded that he wore that uniform with pride because it was stained with the blood of combat, while others seemed to care more about the clothes than the war. Neither invincible heroine nor simple propaganda icon. Pavlichenko’s public image was used intensively by soviet propagandasomething that has led some historians to debate the extent to which the Kremlin exploited his figure. However, this political use does not detract from its widely documented military merits. He was part of the approximately 2,000 women female snipers who served in the Red Army during the war, of which only about 500 survived the conflict. After returning from his international tour trained new shootersshe finished her university studies and worked as a historian for the Soviet Navy, although she never managed to completely shake off the physical and psychological consequences of the front, aggravated by the death of her partner during the war and by alcoholism problems that marked her final years. Your most important mission. Lyudmila Pavlichenko She died in 1974, converted into a of the great heroines of the Soviet Union, decorated with numerous medals and even remembered in songs and films. However, its … Read more

SK Hynix is ​​betting that the memory cycle is dead. He proves it by doing just what always killed him.

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SK Hynix debuted on the Nasdaq with a rise of 13% last Friday, after placing $26.5 billion in the largest IPO of a foreign company in the history of the United States. And that money does not go to dividends or buybacks. He is going to build more factories. What has happened. The South Korean has sold 177.9 million ADRs at $149 eachwith a premium of 2.9% over its price in Seoul, something unusual in this type of placement (they usually come out at a discount to attract buyers). Demand has multiplied the available supply by seven. On the first day of trading, the title reached $170. With this operation, SK Hynix becomes the second South Korean company to exceed $1 trillion in capitalizationafter Samsung. In the last twelve months its stock has risen more than 630% in its home market, Seoul. Why is it important. The memory sector has been trapped in the same pattern since the nineties: Excess demand. Huge investments in capacity. Oversupply And price collapse. It has happened in 1997, in 2001 and in 2008. This time SK Hynix defends that AI has broken that pattern forever, that the demand for high-performance memory has no foreseeable ceiling. And to demonstrate it, it does the only thing that lit the fuse in the three previous crises: pouring billions into expanding factories just when margins are at historic highs. In figures: SK Hynix controls just over half of the global memory market HBMwhich NVIDIA GPUs need to train AI models. Its operating margin for the first quarter of 2026 was 72%, with a net margin of 77%. Together with Samsung, it has committed more than $500 billion to two new manufacturing complexes. The fund for extreme ultraviolet lithography equipment alone amounts to about $7.9 billion. The context. All this has a technical reason: the 16-layer HBM4. NVIDIA has asked SK Hynix, Samsung and Micron to have it ready before the end of 2026, when the previous 12-layer standard has not even entered mass production. Stacking 16 layers forces each wafer to be thinned to 30 micrometers, a third of a hair, with an almost zero margin of error: a single defect ruins the stack. SK Hynix has already shown a 48 GB module and plans to mass produce it this quarter. Samsung lags behind, with a yield per wafer of just 10% at the beginning of the year. Micron has preferred not to risk: it has already sold all of its HBM4 production from 2026 and postpones the jump to 16 layers until 2027. Whoever wins this race keeps the orders for the next NVIDIA GPU platform, where SK Hynix would already supply around 70% of the memory. Between the lines. The market says it believes in the end of the cycle, but it does not act as such. What you say vs what you do: In June, a simple comment from SK Hynix about slowing down part of its AI memory business led to the fifth-worst day in Kospi history. Micron, its reference in the United States, continues to grow a lot, but no longer at the rate of a few quarters ago. Yes, but. SK Hynix, Samsung and Micron together control more than 90% of the market and face a lawsuit for alleged price pact in the jump from standard DRAM to HBM. And all three are expanding capacity at the same time, with the Micron factory in New York without contributing real volume until 2028. When all this production arrives together, the sector will return to the usual question: what happens when supply catches up to demand. SK Hynix is ​​betting that, with AI, the answer is no longer the same. In Xataka | 0.3 nm chips have a definitive date: the IMEC laboratory has found a way to extend the life of silicon Featured image | Xataka

Sony won the most important generation by humiliating Xbox with physical games. 13 years later he killed them

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Sony has just taken a stab at video games in physical format. Those discs that allowed PlayStation to build its empire with CDs, DVDs and Blu-Ray on consoles like PS1, PS2 and PS3now they have a death date. Starting January 2028, there will be no more physical games for PlayStation consoles. The reactions have not been long in coming, with all industry players pointing out the impact of this decision. We will not own games because they are licenses, worry from small publishers, death to second hand and abandoning games and all because of a decision that makes industrial sense: absolute control by Sony in the distribution of games, their price and the margin they leave in their store. But since the newspaper archive is very bloody, it didn’t take long for those who, like myself yesterday, to remember a certain moment from E3 2013 to appear: the same moment in which PlayStation 4 won the competition Xbox One with three very simple decisions, but they disrupted Microsoft’s plans. Because it was at that same moment that PlayStation won the generation. And as the Xbox boss confessed some time later, they lost the worst generation that could be lost in the field of consoles. The battlefield? Physical games, the same ones that today have an expiration date. When you lose the worst generation you can lose June 2013, E3 plenary session. The great video game fair was preparing for a generational event. Both Sono and Microsoft had teased some features of the PS4 and Xbox One respectively in advance, but on June 10, the Xbox One would show off games and pricing, and on the same day but a few hours later, Sony would do the same for the PS4. What no one expected was what was about to happen. Xbox One already had controversies behind it due to the fact that the machine had been presented more as an entertainment system (with an emphasis on watching television on it) than as a console. Besides, in a gross communication failureit was also noted that the discs needed online verification every few hours for Microsoft to verify that the game was yours. This meant that if you didn’t have Internet, you might not be able to play your games, and the division’s boss himself sent out the message. “If you don’t have Internet access, we have a product for you. It’s called Xbox 360”. When you present your new machine, it is not elegant to say that if someone doesn’t want it, they have the old one because the easiest thing that can happen is that they end up looking at the competition. And the competition… tightened. After the mess with the verification of physical copies on Xbox One, Sony attacked. During his conference, starting at the hour and 57 minute mark, Jack Tretton, who was COO of Sony Computer Entertainment, spent a few minutes stating that they believed in the physical format, in sharing and reselling your games on disc and in doing whatever you wanted with them. Of course, there would be no ‘online check’ to verify the discs either. He won a lot of applause with the speech that you can see here: That moment, added to the fact that PS4 was going to cost 100 euros less than the confusing Xbox One, marked the generation, but there was more blood. On the same day of the presentation, PlayStation recorded a video in which two of its heavyweights did a complete tutorial of what the process of leaving games between PS4 users was going to be like. It is one of the most iconic moments of these fairs and one of the last moments I remember in which one company went so hard against another in this console thing: The previous generation, the PS3 and Xbox 360, ended with the two machines selling a very similar number of units, but the PS4 and Xbox One began with the Sony machine sweeping sales. Xbox retracted its policiesbut it was late and when Phil Spencer took the reins of the division and started making moves (lower the price, remove mandatory Kinect, etc.), it was… well, that’s it: late. Xbox One sold so little that Microsoft made the decision to stop providing data on consoles sold. When that happens, things go wrong because everyone likes to stick out their chests when the wind is in their favor, and a few years later, Spencer himself commented that they lost the generation they shouldn’t lose. “We lost the worst generation you could lose, the one where everyone built their digital games library” – Phil Spencer Among their arguments, one made all the sense in the world: the PS4 and Xbox One was the generation of change, of the change from physical to digital, of the change from a model of consoles that were a blank canvas to one in which people wanted to continue playing their games from past generations. And, above all, the generation in which it was more important than ever to provide continuity to that digital ecosystem. Spencer summarized with the phrase “we lost the worst generation that could be lost, the one in which everyone built their library of digital games.” As I say, it makes perfect sense because if you went from an Xbox 360 to a new console, it didn’t matter to you because there was no backward compatibility (it was added later in the case of Xbox). You had to start from scratch, and the same if you went from PS3 to PS4. Therefore, Xbox 360 users who were not happy with the new policies were able to switch to PS4 without fear of losing anything because there was nothing to lose. However, as On PS4 and Xbox One the digital ecosystem began to developusers began to buy more and more games in that format. If you had a PS4 with an account in which you had invested money in dozens of games, it was … Read more

In 2003, NASA suffered a serious accident that killed seven people. The person in charge: a PowerPoint

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On January 16, 2003, NASA’s STS-107 mission was underway. The space shuttle Columbia was launched with its seven crew members into low orbit to test the effects of microgravity on the human body. Those seven people never returned to Earth. The tragedy could have been avoided, but years later the analysis of everything that happened those days has left a terrible conclusion: a presentation of PowerPoint He killed those seven people. The launch, as said James Thomasseemed to be perfect. The crew began to carry out their task, and were expected to spend 16 days in space performing 80 experiments. Just one day after the mission began, NASA officials realized that something had not gone right. NASA has a protocol for reviewing the launch with external cameras. After 82 seconds, a piece of spray foam insulation (SOFI) fell off one of the ramps that attached the shuttle to its external fuel tank. As the crew rose at 28,968 kilometers per hour, the piece of foam collided with one of the tiles on the outer edge of the ship’s left wing. The insulating foam coming off was nothing new: it had happened on the four previous missions and was the reason the cameras were deployed to analyze the launch. The problem is that the blow had occurred in the layer that protected the ship during its re-entry to Earth. The slides of yore What did NASA do? Study the possibilities and conclude that there were three: First, the astronauts could have done a spacewalk to check the helmet. Second, NASA could have sent another shuttle to pick up the crew. Third, they could risk simply re-entry. Those responsible for the mission analyzed the situation with Boeing engineers and created a report in the form of a PowerPoint presentation with 28 slides. The conclusions revealed something important: it was assumed that the wing tiles could tolerate foam impacts, but that assumption had been made under very particular conditions. The pieces of foam in the tests were 600 times smaller than those that had hit the Columbia. To reflect those details, the engineers created this slide: At NASA they listened to the explanation, and the engineers believed they had conveyed the risks well. However, NASA believed that the engineers, even without being certain, suggested that there was no damage that would put the lives of the crew in danger. The option they chose was the third. Columbia would re-enter on February 1, 2003, at 9:16 AM (EST). At 9 that day, Dallas residents saw how the ferry had disintegrated into pieces. The entire crew died. The investigation into the tragedy revealed that NASA and engineers had had the right information, but had made a bad decision. Edward Tufte, a Yale professor, explained that the problem had been with that damn slide and the way it had been presented. The title already seemed to indicate that the risk was not particularly high, but the slide also had four cascading points with no detailed explanation of what they meant: interpretation was left to the reader’s discretion. It was not clear whether the first point (1) was the main one, or if the rest of the points had the same relevance. The different font sizes, strange hierarchy, and text density didn’t help. There were over 100 vague words and adjectives (“sufficient,” “meaningful”), making the slide too open to audience interpretation. The biggest problem is in the last two points, where it was indicated that what they had tested in the preliminary tests was very different from what had happened. NASA itself indicated in your report after the investigation that they had relied too much on PowerPoint. The expression ‘death by PowerPoint’ has been used for years to indicate how there are presentations that induce boredom or fatigue due to their information overload. A bad design and the overuse of points to order each data are common problems in this and other similar applications. Unfortunately, in this case that expression became tragically true. In Xataka | A new “solar system” has just been discovered. There’s just one problem: it shouldn’t exist. In Xataka | Boeing was trying to put the Starliner fiasco behind it: NASA has just classified the 2024 incident at its highest level

Microsoft killed the traditional Xbox by saying that everything was an Xbox. Now he wants to resurrect it with Project Helix

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Microsoft has quietly withdrawn its “This is an Xbox” campaign, the initiative with which it had spent 16 months trying to convince the world that any device (television, mobile phone, tablet) It was technically an Xbox.. The deletion coincides with the replacement at the top managementthe debut of Project Helix at GDC and a market paradox: Sony and Microsoft have become, at the same time, the main defenders of the concept “a console is a console.” The campaign. The series of ‘This is an Xbox’ ads were launched under the presidency of Sarah Bond and functioned as the great manifesto of the post-hardware era of Microsoft Gaming. Now it has disappeared without an official statement: the blog entry that opened it on Xbox Wire gives error 404and searching for the term in the official Xbox news repository only returns one article about ROG Xbox Ally. The files indicate that the page was still accessible on March 1, 2026. What was it about? The idea behind “This is an Xbox” was, in theory, reasonable: expand the ecosystem beyond its own hardware, bet on the streaming in the cloud as a gateway and normalize that playing Xbox did not require purchasing an Xbox console. The problem is that the argument, taken to its extreme, destroyed the reason for the hardware. The campaign generated more confusion than interest, with fans wondering why they would buy an Xbox if the titles were available on any platform. The rejection. Apparentlythe initiative was not well received internally, and the company made some strategic lurches. For example, the announcement of an Xbox mobile store in summer 2024 never materialized. A few months later, with the arrival of Asha Sharma as the new CEO of Microsoft Gaming and the departure of Phil Spencer and Sarah Bond, the campaign has ended up being withdrawn. The phrase with which Sharma summed up this new change of direction speaks for itself: “The plan is the plan until it isn’t“. More from Helix. The same day that the 404 of “This is an Xbox” was discovered, Microsoft had a presence at GDC 2026 with the Developer Summit dedicated to Project Helix. Jason Ronald, vice president of Next Generation at Xbox, presented the technical details of the upcoming hardware: a console powered by a custom AMD SoC, co-designed for next-generation DirectX and FSR technology, and which the company describes as “an order of magnitude leap” in gaming performance. ray tracing: pscaling Next Generation ML, ML Multi-Frame Generation and Ray Regeneration for games with path tracing The technical details that AMD provided completed the picture: the custom chip is built on RDNA 5 architecture and TSMC’s 3nm process, and incorporates a dedicated NPU that will power all advanced rendering capabilities, including FSR Diamond. Developer alpha kits will begin shipping in 2027, and the company is committed to maintaining compatibility with games from four generations of Xbox. Not everything is perfect. The complicating point in the “return to consoles” story is that Microsoft told the developers at GDC that “build for PC” is the correct approach going forward, suggesting that Project Helix is, at heart, a PC disguised as a console. That is, it is closer to the ambitious project of Valve with its Steam Machine that of the Sony gives up making more PC games. In addition, Xbox Mode will arrive on Windows 11 in April, bringing the console experience directly to the desktop PC, and the Play Anywhere catalog already exceeds 1,500 titles. The Sony thing. It is commented that Sony is returning to the old strategy of exclusives as a hardware sales lever after the PC ports did not work as expected. Part of the problem was one of timing: games arrived on PC months or years after the console launch, making it difficult to build a stable audience on the platform. There is Steam data very significant: ‘Marvel’s Spider-Man Remastered’, for example, reached a peak of just 66,000 simultaneous players, a figure that did not justify the continued investment in big-budget game ports. Sony and Microsoft, two companies that took opposite paths in the last generation (one opening up to the PC, the other trying to dissolve the very idea of ​​the console), have simultaneously reached the same conclusion. A console is a console, and hardware has to have value. In Xataka | “We will not flood our ecosystem with soulless AI garbage.” We already know what Asha Sharma wants to do as CEO of Microsoft Gaming

We believed that human programmers would end up being code reviewers. Anthropic just killed that

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The rise of the Generative AI The world of software development seemed to follow a clear script: models would write the code and humans would review it. It was the new balance. Well, Anthropic just killed him. The problem of programming with AI. What we know today as vibe codingthis practice of giving instructions in natural language to an AI so that it generates code at full speed, has skyrocketed software production in companies. Anthropic affirms that the amount of code generated by each of its own engineers has grown by 200% in the last year. And now there’s a problem: there’s so much new code that reviewing it has become the bottleneck of the process. Human developers can’t cope. Many pull requests (change proposals that must be reviewed before integrating new code) are skimmed or not read very carefully at all. What Anthropic has done. The company Code Review has been releaseda tool integrated into Claude Code that, instead of waiting for a human to review the code, deploys a team of AI agents to do it automatically every time a pull request is opened. This new system is now available in preview phase for Team and Enterprise plan customers. Cat Wu, Product Manager at Anthropic, explained told TechCrunch that the question they constantly received from their clients’ technical managers was always the same: “Now that Claude Code is generating a ton of pull requests, how do I make sure they are reviewed efficiently?” How it works inside. AI agents work in parallel autonomously the moment a pull request is opened, examining the code from different perspectives. An end agent then aggregates and prioritizes the issues it has found, removing duplicates and sorting them by severity. The result reaches the developer through a featured comment, accompanied by more online comments about specific bugs. The focus, according to Anthropicis in logical errors, not in matters of style, something designed on purpose so that the feedback does not generate too much noise. Issues are labeled by color depending on how important they are: red for critical, yellow for attention, and purple for pre-existing code. Numbers. The company has been using Code Review internally for months before launching it to the market. According to what they saybefore implementing it, only 16% of their pull requests received meaningful review comments. With the tool, that percentage rises to 54%. In large pull requests (more than 1,000 modified lines) 84% returned results, with an average of 7.5 problems detected. And less than 1% of those results are flagged as incorrect by the engineers themselves. In one of the cases documented by the company, they spoke of a single line change that seemed routine. However, Code Review marked it as critical, as it apparently could have broken the entire service’s authentication. The bug was fixed before integration. Furthermore, according to the company, the engineer later acknowledged that he would not have caught it alone. ANDhe new role of the programmer. The narrative that had spread in the last two years was that developers would evolve towards a profile closer to that of a reviewer or supervisor of code generated by AI. Now that transition is also being automated, at least in part. Anthropic does not eliminate the human from the equation (in fact the tool does not approve pull requests), but it does compress the review work that was supposed to be the last bastion. It seems that now the human goes from reviewer to final arbiter. Price. It is not a cheap tool. Each revision has a cost based on token consumption. Anthropic esteem The average price per review is between $15 and $25, depending on the complexity of the code. It is a cost that the company justifies in the context of large technology companies where errors that escape review have a much higher price. Cover image | Compagnons In Xataka | Software companies sank on the stock market for a simple reason: investors are panicking about AI

ASUS just killed its phone line for good reason. Goodbye to the Zenfone

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ASUS, the Taiwanese giant known for its computers, had been competing in the smartphone field for years. The Zenfone family is one of the ones that has convinced us the most at Xataka: phones with a ROM similar to that of the Google Pixel and top-of-the-line specifications. The proposal, solid on paper, has had low commercial success for years. And given the great opportunity in formats that AI allows, ASUS is clear: there will be no more Zenfone for a while. A harsh goodbye. ASUS has made a stoppage official in its smartphone division. It not only affects the Zenfone family, but also ROG Phone, its division of phones aimed at gamers. The company is now emptying its release calendar to leave a division whose future is uncertain. “ASUS will no longer launch new mobile phone models in the future.” Jonney Shih, president of ASUS. What’s wrong with my ASUS. If you have a company device, you will be covered. ASUS will maintain both guarantees and support for existing mobile phones, but there will be no room for new launches. And now what. The company’s strategy is clear: they are leaving the field of mobile phones to focus on new solutions and formats linked to artificial intelligence. The group’s revenue from its AI server business has doubled expected resultsand the robotics and smart glasses divisions will be the main beneficiaries of the death of Zenfone. Why is it important. ASUS’s strategy gives us a clue about where the industry wants to move in AI beyond the smartphone. The race in this field is being won by an unstoppable Gemini that has forced Apple to take its handand with Google distributing Android, competition beyond OpenAI does not seem possible. But in smart glasses Meta operates with its own technologies, Google has its proposals based on Gemini, and There is still room for participants who want to develop their own solutions. Even fiercer is the war in robotics, Why outside the smartphone. The mobile phone business represents a very small part of ASUS’ strategy. Their smartphones are niche products, and they never had it easy to conquer the general public. Abandoning a territory that is high in costs and difficult to obtain profits offers additional room for maneuver to invest in new product categories. Image | Xataka In Xataka | Artificial intelligence guide: main characteristics of the main AI models, points for and against, and comparison

Spotify killed the record and the industry pivoted to concerts. Netflix killed cinema and the industry was left with a “space crisis”

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Never in history have we seen so many movies: the streaming It allows us to see several a week but, nevertheless, the movie theaters are empty. Literally emptier than ever in decades. We consume audiovisual content en masse, but not where we historically enjoyed it. Meanwhile, concerts have become the leisure alternative par excellence. Why do we pay hundreds of euros to go to a stadium with 50,000 other people, but not fifteen to see a blockbuster on the big screen? The answer lies in how we value physical space in the experience economy. Some figures. Let’s look at some box office figures: the summer of 2025, traditionally the most lucrative season in the industry, has been the most disastrous since 1981 adjusted for inflation. There is no dream of returning to pre-COVID figures: in October 2025 in the US, only 445 million dollars were raised, less than half of last October before the pandemicwhich exceeded one billion. The average viewer attended only 2.31 times to theaters in 2024, a drop of 33% compared to the 3.5 annual visits in 2019. In Spain, theThe 2025 data is equally dark: The total box office falls by 14% (almost 30 million less), and Spanish cinema itself declines by 2.5-3%. The author of this last study, Pau Brunet, expressly says that “the Hollywood fantasy is crumbling.” And the erosion is constant: Spain had more than 105 million viewers in 2019, which represents a loss of a third of its volume in five years: we are now at 71 million. Windows that don’t perform. The problem is so multifactorial that it is ridiculous to focus only on the drop in the box office to explain it. For example, we have the collapse of display windows: The pre-pandemic standard was 90-120 days in theaters, three or four weeks later in digital sales and then home formats and streaming. After the pandemic, these windows were reduced by more than 60%, and although they now vary depending on the studio, Universal and Warner leave a 45-day window for their most sought-after productions (it can be reduced to 17 days), with the exception of Disney, which operates them for 60 days. In any case, the rest of the windows have been shortened or disappeared, and it is common to watch a movie in streaming just a month and a half after its release in theaters. It is one of the main reasons why people have left the theaters: even blockbusters like ‘Wicked’ can be seen streaming just 40 days after their release in theaters. Even China. A few years ago, China was the market that seemed destined to save Hollywood accountsbut experienced its own collapse in 2024: the box office fell 23% to 42.5 billion yen ($5.8 billion), returning to figures from a decade ago. Attendance fell by more than 200 million viewers compared to ten years ago. One of the main reasons is the degradation of the theatrical experience: cinemas without air conditioning and without customer service staff beyond the bar, a characteristic that has been spreading to theaters around the world for years. The crisis has been going on for a long time. In reality, this fall does not have its roots in the streaming not even in the pandemic. The attendance of the American public had been falling since the sixtiesgoing from one visit per person every two or three months to just twice a year before the pandemic. The real price of admission (adjusted for inflation) has remained stable since the 1980s, but consumers have decided that they no longer want to go to theaters. The problem, as this Bain & Company study states The thing is that, for decades, the industry has placed all the emphasis of its production on pure content, but the films have ended up arriving home in a few weeks. Meanwhile, music has come to understand something fundamental: the value is not in the recorded content, but in the unique, unrepeatable event. The triumph of music. He Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour It closed in December 2024 after 149 concerts in 51 cities, ggenerating gross revenues of 2,077 million dollars. That is, more than the annual film box office receipts of entire countries (compare with the pyrrhic 71 million box office receipts in Spain in 2024). AND We’re not just talking about the concerts.: The average expense per attendee ranged between $1,300 and $1,500, including transportation, accommodation, merchandising and dinners. More than fans, they are tourists generating systemic economic impact. “Swiftonomics“has ceased to be a metaphor and has become a real analytical category in government economic reports. Beyond Taylor. Swift is not an anomaly. The global live music market generated $28.1 billion in 2023 and projections place it at $79.7 billion by 2030. That growth is equivalent to tripling the size of the market in seven years, while cinema struggles to recover the levels of a decade ago. What does live music have that cinema has lost? The term “funflation“: Consumers prioritize spending on memorable experiences even during periods of high inflation Festivals have capitalized on this logic: They sell identity, belonging and experiences that are impossible to replicate at home. Just the opposite of cinema: a film is exactly identical all over the world and once seen, the incentive to repeat it in theaters is minimal, especially knowing that it will be in streaming in 45 days. Reinvention is required. The cinema crisis is not a death sentence, but it is a demand for reinvention. Because the physical space of entertainment is not dying, it is being reformulated. The path that the music industry has followed by completely pivoting its business model with the disappearance of physical formats is the one that cinema has to follow. At the moment, theaters have not gotten the premium experiences right (sophisticated restoration, more comfortable rooms, improvements in image and sound quality), but that is because they still do not differentiate themselves enough from the domestic experience. Cinema needs its own Taylor … Read more

The bidet is dead. The square meter killed it and Scandinavian design buried it

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In Spanish bathrooms, a classic element is quietly disappearing. The bidet was in almost every home, as inseparable from the toilet as the mirror from the sink. But something has changed. Today, in new urban apartments and modern renovations, the bidet has become a spatial luxury. Instead, as detailed by interior designer Pia Capdevila in Architecture and Design: “Some time ago we replaced them with sanitary showers, which take up less space and are much more functional in small bathrooms.” What do you mean, a faucet? The change has been progressive but unstoppable. Around the 60% of Spanish households They still have bidets, but in new constructions and renovations their disappearance is almost total. The reasons are simple, as interior designer Ana García explains for El Mueble: Bathrooms have been reduced – in cities they are usually around 4 square meters – and every centimeter counts. Maintaining a bidet means reserving about 60 centimeters of width next to the toilet, a space that can be used for a larger shower, a piece of furniture with drawers or simply to gain comfort. In this context, the hygienic shower or “sanitary shower” has become the great substitute. “They are faucets with a small hose and sprayer that are installed next to the toilet. They require almost no space and are very functional,” adds García. In fact, in countries like Thailand or Indonesia, this system—popularly known as boom gun— is the standard of domestic hygiene. A new aesthetic that invades everything. Saying goodbye to the bidet is not just a matter of space, but of cultural and generational change. The architect Carlos Alonso thus sums up the phenomenon in an interview for El Muble: “A client who already has a bidet will surely want to keep it. But one who has never had one will probably not even consider it.” Personal hygiene is understood in a different way, faster and more functional, without additional pieces that interrupt the clean aesthetics of the bathroom. Homes, increasingly smaller and more versatile, prioritize visual order and efficiency. The architect Miriam Gómez in the same medium he points out: “Placing a bidet in the bathroom is a very typical mistake. It takes up a lot of space and is hardly used. We replaced it with a sanitary shower next to the toilet.” Only some cases – large bathrooms or homes with elderly people accustomed to its use – justify maintaining it. But the classic bidet, that low and robust toilet, is already a piece from another era. So what is better? The dilemma is no longer “bidet yes or no?”, but how to maintain the same hygiene without losing space or style. In today’s bathrooms, where the square meter is worth gold, the solutions include compact and functional options. The most common are hygienic showers or side showers, small taps with a hose that are installed next to the toilet and allow you to wash with water without taking up more space. “When space does not allow a bidet, we recommend a faucet attached to the toilet, with two water channels. It is more aesthetic, takes up less space and is just as functional,” explains the architect Carlos Alonso. However, if what you are looking for is one more step in comfort, the future is already here: Japanese toilets – also called smart toilets or washlets – are gaining ground in Spain. According to Architecture and Designmore and more homes are incorporating them, especially in new homes, due to their functionality and compact design. They integrate washing, drying, temperature control and even automatic deodorization functions. Designer Eva Mesa, from Tinda’s Project, explains it with personal experience: “The first time I tried a Japanese toilet I understood that it was a more coherent, cleaner and more evolved system. Once you get to know it, there is no turning back.” And what is more hygienic? Although the bidet has lost ground, medical experts continue to advocate the use of water as the most hygienic method for personal cleansing. According to Dr. Cindy Kina colorectal surgeon at Stanford University Medical Center, water is the standard treatment for removing body dirt in almost all contexts. In addition, it points out that those who use bidets or water showers have between seven and ten times less bacteria on their hands than those who use only toilet paper. Finally, it details that water prevents the irritation that dry paper can cause and is especially recommended for people with sensitive skin, hemorrhoids or in the postpartum stage. The future of the bidet depends on the map. A publication of The Big Data Stats that went viral On networks it showed how more than 60 countries in the world still use the bidet or some similar water hygiene system. The map did not reveal anything that we could not intuit, but it did confirm it with data: the bidet is still alive, although not everywhere in the same way. In Spain, specifically in Zamora, its installation is still mandatory by urban planning regulations, an exception that surprises even municipal architects. Looking towards our Italian neighbors, the bidet is also law: since 1975 it has been mandatory in all bathrooms. For its part, crossing the Atlantic, in Argentina, Paraguay and Uruguay, the bidet maintains a strong cultural presence, as deeply rooted as mate or the water bottle. On the other hand, in much of Asia and the Middle East, the custom remains, but in another format: that of the side faucet or manual shower, as occurs in Thailand, India or Egypt, or even in Brazil, where the version with a hose prevailed over the traditional bidet. The bathroom of the future. The trend is clear: the bathroom will be more compact, technological and sustainable. Perhaps in a few years we will remember the bidet as a domestic relic, like the landline or the record player: something that was essential and barely survives today. But its essence—hygiene with water—is still more alive than ever. Because in … Read more

The competition in the AVE has killed its bus line

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Something is moving on the Spanish bus map. That something is the government’s intentions to reform the concessions that make up current photography. On the way there has been talk of reforming the entire system but also how many concessions already where they should be delivered. And that directly attacks very specific lines. In coma. Among all the concessions that Spain has awarded for bus service, The Madrid-Valencia line is one of those that agonizes. In fact, nobody wants to get that concession because with the high -speed line next to him does not come out profitable. After the concession, Alsa (the company that was exploiting this line) resigned to continue with it given its null profitability. Then a contest was convened to exploit a line that crosses all the Spanish width, from Badajoz to Valencia, passing through Madrid. That contest was completely deserted. Concessions? Yes, concessions. Bus lines In Spain they compete for concessions that are then exploited exclusively. These concessions last for years and, obviously, the company has to face the possible changes in the flows of movements that can occur between its passengers. In the system, therefore, it is competed before putting the buses on the road. A line is taken to competition and awarded the best bidder. In high railway speed, companies that demonstrate that they can technically operate on the road come to compete directly. On buses, that does not happen because the chosen company has exclusivity for a certain time. A deep change. What the government raises is that Spain needs a deep change in the concession system. In recent years, the market has been completely opened and that it is the companies that rival on the road at a price. However, the final intention is to take out a great contest maintaining the current concession system. Of course, given the large number of lines whose competitions are empty or companies that do not want to maintain their concessions, from the government advocate drastically reducing the number of runners. The intention is to pass Of the current 77 concessions to a total of 22. From the government they point out that this decision goes through the difficulty of placing these concessions but also because the way of moving of the Spaniards has changed in recent years. The cities have atomized (even more) the exits and arrivals but, in addition, the high -speed train and the competition have completely transformed the panorama. It is not competitive. What happens? When high speed has affordable prices, the bus is not competitive. In the Galician corridor The train has managed to eliminate travelerseven to the plane that is faster. In the case of the bus, the situation is even more complicated because, in addition, it is slower and uncomfortable. That leaves lines like that Badajoz-Madrid-Valencia without interested companies. With such a low volume of customers and a faster and more cheap alternative, prices have to be much more expensive to compensate. It is obviously the worst option. Whenever you travel to Badajoz, Madrid, Valencia or any of the stops where the train stops. What about us? All this directly impacts the paths of those who do not live in those cities or larger populations where there is a high -speed rail stop. The bus is in charge of generating a capillary network of paths among small populations where the only alternative is private transport. This is what they defend from Travel more by busan association that defends a competitive alternative so that this means of transport can survive. They bet on a complete liberalization in these lines that have to fight with high -speed lines. They point out that with the rates raised, The bus trip between Madrid and Valencia would entail an expense of between 40 and 50 euros for the client and a duration of more than four hours. With Renfe, Iryo and Ouigo fighting on the train, it is possible to make that same trip in the middle of time in half of the money. According to the CNMCthe average price of traveling with these companies in a Madrid-Valencia is 27.46 euros. What solution is there? According to this platform in defense of these less profitable bus lines, open them to direct competition. They point out that with the current layout, it is contemplated that the rates for operating will be recalculated with inflation and that, therefore, in 2035 the average price of the ticket will return to around 50 euros despite the fact that at the time of the new award a price of about 40 euros is established. In the other side of the currency we find associations like Confebus They point out that these concessions allow companies to better study the market and their profitability but, they defend, the traveler is protected because once the service has been awarded, the company has not to leave the line overnight. Photo | Artem Makarov and Xataka In Xataka | This Barcelona bus has been working with a fuel that we all produce: our excrements

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