money

OpenAI knows that it needs to continue generating memes and virals. That’s why she’s willing to pay Disney a lot of money for her content.

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Disney and OpenAI have announced a three-year licensing agreement that will allow users to create short videos featuring more than 200 Disney, Marvel, Pixar and Star Wars characters through soraOpenAI’s AI video generation platform. The operation includes an investment of $1 billion by the Mickey Mouse company in the AI ​​startup. Change of sight. Disney has gone from sue AI platforms like Midjourney for unauthorized use of its characters to become OpenAI’s first major content licensing partner. The company also sent a cease and desist letter to Character.AI in September for the same reason. This change in strategy gives clues to Disney’s move, choosing to monetize and control the use of its intellectual property instead of trying to stop it completely. What users can do. Starting in early 2026, according to OpenAI, Sora users will be able to generate short videos for social networks with characters such as Mickey Mouse, Iron Man, Darth Vader, Elsa, Simba or Groot, as well as iconic costumes, accessories, vehicles and settings from these franchises. From ChatGPT, users will also be able to create static images of these same characters using text instructions. The agreement expressly excludes the faces and voices of real actors. The business model behind the agreement. OpenAI need viral content to maintain the attention of users, and in recent months it has made it clear to us that this route is its current main source of income to attract more users who want to go through the hoops of its subscription plans. Disney characters are precisely the type of content that fits this vision. That is why the company is willing to pay to license this intellectual property. Disney as a corporate client of OpenAI. Beyond the license, Disney will become a “major customer” of OpenAI, under the terms of the agreement. The company will deploy ChatGPT to its employees and use OpenAI APIs to build new tools, products and experiences, including functionality for Disney+. In fact, perhaps the most striking thing about the agreement is that a curated selection of videos generated by Sora It will be available to play from the streaming platform. Investment and purchase options. Disney will provide $1 billion in equity investment and will receive warrants to acquire additional stakes in OpenAI in the future. The transaction is still subject to negotiation of definitive agreements and approvals prior to closing. Commitments on responsible use. Both companies say in the joint statement that they will maintain “robust controls” to prevent the generation of illegal or harmful content, respect the rights of content creators and protect the use of people’s voice and image. OpenAI is further committed to implementing age-appropriate policies and other safety measures on the service. The vision of the CEOs. Bob Iger, CEO of Disney, assures that “the rapid advance of artificial intelligence marks an important moment for our industry” and defends that collaboration will allow “extending the reach of our narrative in a thoughtful and responsible way.” For his part, Sam Altman, head of OpenAI, affirms that the agreement “shows how AI companies and creative leaders can work together responsibly to advance innovation.” What’s coming now? It remains to be seen if this licensing model extends to other studios and large content owners. Everything indicates that it certainly will not be the only large company to take advantage of this type of agreement. The litmus test will be when all the content in Sora is released and if it gains enough traction on networks for OpenAI to consider it a small victory in its quest for make ChatGPT a profitable tool for your business. In Xataka | Quietly, a country is becoming a technological power thanks to data centers: India

That the US authorizes Nvidia’s H200 to reach China is not a concession, but a plan. They prefer money to competition

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The chip war between China and the US has mutated from a blockade to a commercial transaction. Donald Trump has announced that he will allow Nvidia export its high-performance H200 chips to China. The authorization carries an unprecedented condition: the US government will receive a 25% commission about these sales. This “reverse tariff” transforms China containment into a source of income, breaking with the strategy of total suffocation and offering a lifeline to Nvidia in its most critical market. End of free blocking. The decision is a direct result of a meeting last week between Trump and Jensen Huang, CEO of Nvidia. The White House’s logic has changed: it argues that this measure is carried out under strict national security conditions, extending the model to competitors such as Intel and AMD. It is a movement that formalizes what was already intuited a few months ago, when Nvidia managed, after a first meeting with Trump, lift veto on bottom H20 chip. At that time, a precedent was already established of transferring 15% of income to the country, a figure that now scales to 25% for the most powerful hardware. Tap on the image to go to the original post A dose for China. That they chose this chip is no coincidence: the H200 is significantly more powerful than the H20—the trimmed model that China had started to boycott— but it is still behind the cutting-edge Blackwell architecturewhich is still banned. According to advisors such as David Sacks, the North American country seeks to keep China addicted to its technology: if they are denied all access, they are forced to look for alternatives of their own. In fact, Huawei has already admitted that it will take two years to match the performance of the H200, making this chip the perfect tool to slow down Chinese development while monetizing its need. Cracks and black market. The reality is that the total blockade was failing. Recent investigations showed how Chinese companies used shortcuts through Indonesia to access the power of banned chips. Furthermore, the second-hand market had become the main avenue for China get H100 and A100 GPUs off the radar. By allowing the sale of the H200, the US is trying to regain control over a flow that already existed, but in the shadows. At the same time, the Department of Justice announced “Operation Gatekeeper” to dismantle smuggling networks in countries like Hong Kong. China’s response. The great unknown is precisely this, the reception of the news in Beijing. Although Trump claims that Xi responded “positively,” the reality on the ground seems different. China has been for months banning your local businesses buy Nvidia chips to promote its domestic industry. The CAC (Cyberspace Administration of China) came to investigate the H20 looking for rear doorssomething that generated a climate of mistrust that not even the previous July agreement managed to completely dissipate. Jensen Huang, who warned about the danger of an “AI silk road” If the US continued to block sales, with this pact it gets a golden opportunity to not lose a market that represents 13% of its income, although its Chinese clients must now pay the price of American geopolitics. Cover image | Composition with images from Nvidia and RawPixel In Xataka | China has just redrawn the map of strategic minerals: its new rules on rare earths target the United States

be earning an indecent amount of money

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The transformation from Rheinmetall from just another contractor in the European military ecosystem to an industrial superpower with margins greater than 20% reflects the new reality of a continent that has gone from defensive austerity to massive reactivation from its military base. And here a problem has arisen for the company: winning too much money. A driven giant. While Germany commits to rebuild the largest army conventional Europe, the company has multiplied its weight thanks to almost total vertical integration: it manufactures complete ammunition, from the case to the propellant, and can produce at a rate that leaves its competitors behind. This scale has allowed it to go from margins of 5% in the previous decade to figures close to 19%with the declared objective of reaching 30% in its ammunition business by 2030. The paradox is evident: the more it produces to reinforce European security, the closer it approaches profitability levels that they can be uncomfortable for governments that finance these purchases with public money. So profitable that it threatens to become unsustainable. The paradox explained this week Bloomberg. The risk for Rheinmetall is not an eventual peace in Ukraine, but earn too much. The plan to quintuple income up to 50,000 million of euros at the end of the decade, together with a potential operating profit of 10 billion annually, raises fundamental questions: how will taxpayers react when a private arms company obtains profits comparable to those of a technological giant? Rivals like BAE are expanding their factorieswhich could balance the market and put pressure on prices. And in parallel, economists and analysts remember that defense industries have an “acceptable threshold” of profit before proposals for extraordinary taxes or regulatory controls arise. Unlike other partly state-owned European players, Rheinmetall is entirely in private hands, meaning that the impressive revaluation 1,400% since 2022 it has barely benefited German citizens. The commitment to automation. He runaway growth is supported by a wave of investments: more than 8 billion for new ammunition and gunpowder factories in Eastern Europe, automated lines capable of producing 350,000 projectiles a year with just 120 workers and a strategic expansion into the naval field after acquiring Lürssen. Rheinmetall aims to become the main supplier of NATO weapons in Europe (up to 25% of allied spending) and seeks to replicate its industrial model in traditionally less profitable sectors, like the naval. However, this intensive robotization raises another political contradiction: the huge defense budget boom does not translate into the increase in employment that many governments had promised. Unpredictable future. The key question for analysts is how long Rheinmetall can sustain a growth and margins that far exceed those of any other Western weapons manufacturer without awakening a counterattack political, fiscal or competitive. If the company continues to rack up record profits as it climbs to dominance European industryStates could demand lower prices, impose new rules or force greater public participation in the sector. In the new European war economywhere safety and profitability coexist, Rheinmetall has become a symbol of a bigger dilemma: the increasingly fine line between the urgent need to rearm and the discomfort of financing extraordinary private benefits with state funds. Image | włodi In Xataka | The “rearmament” of Europe has begun at a Volkswagen factory in Germany: instead of cars they will produce tanks In Xataka | In Europe rearmament prices are rising and cars are falling. And a Basque components factory wants to take advantage of it

The afternoon began as something more or less spontaneous. Today there are already companies that are “franchising” it to make money.

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The late afternoon has taken hold in Spain. And it has done so much that, in just a few years, it has gone from being a word that required clarification of language academics to become a kind of ‘franchise’, a brand that is incorporated into events and even business. After all, since the pandemic, Spain has shown that it is not only capable of enjoying nightlife… it also likes evening entertainment. And there are people willing to take advantage of that opportunity. What has happened? That lateness has permeated so much into our daily lives, it has become normalized to such an extent that there are those who are already dedicating themselves to ‘franchising’ it. It is not surprising if we take into account two factors. The first, that the concept took root a few years ago in Spanish society (it caught on especially during the pandemic). The second is that its link with leisure, hospitality and the entertainment industry makes it a juicy business. Especially in a country like Spain, where the population pyramid widens in the age group between 30 and 50, the public more given to advance the party hours, and lose weight among twenty-somethings, usually the most night owls. What is tardiness? In case there is still anyone with doubts in November 2025, here is a simple answer extracted from the web Fundéu official:tarardar is “spending the afternoon having drinks and tapas or with other recreational activities, so that leisure comes forward and does not extend until late at night.” That is essentially its main idea: nightlife is still leisure, but it is no longer nocturnal. Spain (country of bars) has a long tradition of evening entertainment, but the origins of the afternoon as a rising concept are not that old: they can go back a few years, to before the pandemicalthough it really gained appeal during the health crisis, when the hospitality industry (and the clients who demand its services) were forced to adjust to schedule restrictions and capacity. Was it that important? Yes. Like they explain At Bartalent Lab, it was then (during the pandemic) that the search for “alternative consumption moments during the day” took root as an alternative to traditional parties at night. The philosophy took shape to such an extent that today it is easy to find initiatives and business that put the emphasis on that concept (the “lateness”) or articles that speak of the importance it has gained among hoteliers in certain cities. In July for example The Voice of Galicia explained that, with nightlife losing steam, the evening offering was becoming a lifeline for the locals of Pontevedra. “We have been exploiting the afternoon long before it was called that,” confesses a local hotelier who organizes concerts to energize the environment, especially during autumn and spring weekends. In other cities, such as Valladolid either Saragossathere are also examples of establishments that have opted for afternoon teas. Why does it succeed? For a sum of factors. The key to being late is basically that it allows leisure to be brought forward several hours (since I said it in 2021 Fundéu), offering an offer more or less similar to the nightly one without having to pay a ‘toll’ the next day. That is, it guarantees customers an experience similar to what they have traditionally had in nightclubs at night, but without risking waking up the next morning exhausted and hungover. If you want to enjoy music, dancing and a few drinks, why have to wait until midnight? Why not bring those plans forward to six in the afternoon? The concept seems to have caught on among different generations, but there are those who point out that it has triumphed above all in the population segment of between 30 and 45 yearsa not inconsiderable market if one takes into account the drift of Spanish demographics. But that’s nothing new, right? Exact. What is novel and interesting is that this success has led to a sort of ‘franchising’ of the afternoon, with people taking advantage of the attractiveness of the concept to promote evening leisure offers or even establishments. What does that mean? What’s there premises, cultural proposals and events They are incorporating the name (and philosophy) of the Tartaro into their brands, just as if it were a business franchise. Perhaps the most obvious case is that of Afternoon Indie Cool,an initiative that emerged as an online project linked above all to an Instagram account and has grown to expand its offer throughout Spain. In fact, its first afternoon was organized in Barcelona two years ago and now similar events are held in cities such as Madrid, Malaga, Granada, Seville or Vigo, always with the afternoon as a flag. What does it consist of? The event is presented as an event that mainly combines indie music (also pop and rock), drinks and an atmosphere similar to that of festivals in well-known venues. All at a time when clubs are usually closed or warming up, between 6:00 p.m. and midnight. “They come to sing and share an atmosphere that cannot be found anywhere else,” claims David Coolfounder of Indie Cool, in an interview with The Vanguard. The formula caught on and in fact has ended up being exported beyond Barcelona. “Each city lives it in its own way, but the spirit is the same.” Its most common audience is between 30 and 45 years old, but Cool assures that the proposal has managed to attract people from different generations. “There are groups of people in their twenties, in their forties, even in their 50s. The beautiful thing is that they all share the same energy.” In their case, the Tardo philosophy is combined with a commitment to indie music, established groups and other emerging ones, a formula that works in Barcelona, ​​but also in other cities to those that have expanded. Images | Afternoon Cool (Instagram) and Jacob Bentzinger (Unsplash) In Xataka | Sex has entered a crisis in the West. If … Read more

Football has become the anchor of operator subscriptions. And LaLiga is making more money than ever

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It is not necessary to consult reports to understand that, for many, life has become more expensive faster than salaries. Many of us check this when making a purchase, looking for a home or renewing insurance. Even so, there are few consumer decisions that endure as much as football. Not only do we continue to see it, but it is more present than ever in the television packages, in the bars, on the platforms and in the subscriptions we take out. This prominence is not only reflected in the way we consume it, but also in how it is valued as a product. LaLiga, the organization that manages professional competitions in Spain, has awarded the domestic audiovisual rights for the new cyclewhich will cover from 2027/28 to 2031/32. The result marks a historical maximum: 6,135 million euros, 9% more than the previous cycle. Telefónica and DAZN will repeat as partners, ensuring the broadcast and exploitation of the content for five more seasons. Where do the 6,135 million come from? The record figure is not explained only by households, but by the diversification of the product. The residential block represents 5,250 million euros, but the segment HORECAwhich includes bars, public premises and hospitality establishments, is close to 650 million. LaLiga Hypermotionwhich is the Second Division and takes its name from the Hypermotion technology used in soccer video games, contributes about 175 million. Added to this are more than 60 million in open rights and summaries. Football is no longer sold in a single format. Football as an anchor for subscriptions. For streaming operators and platforms, football has become the product capable of sustaining their business models. It’s no longer just about gaining users, as PwC warns and Simon-Kucher Consultingbecause the market is beginning to show clear signs of saturation, but of obtaining more income from each subscriber. And there football is decisive. Telefónica, with Movistar Plus+, and DAZN have opted to maintain the rights because it allows them to maintain customers, justify prices and build packages that cannot be understood without this content. That football continues to be part of our social life is reflected in the figure for the HORECA segment: close to 650 million euros, compared to 500 million in the previous cycle. The bars and restaurants that hire the service not only offer the content, they offer a place to experience it in company. LaLiga knows that the value is not only in the broadcast, but in the environment that accompanies it. Second division, HYPERMOTION brand and added value. With Hypermotion, LaLiga has turned its Second Division into an audiovisual product with its own entity. Not only does the name change: the way of presenting and exploiting it changes. This block, as we say, will contribute around 175 million euros, 40% more than in the previous cycle. The crusade against illegal emissions. Part of the increase in value is explained byLaLiga’s crusade against illegal broadcasts. The organization has intensified control over platforms that distributed content without authorization, with legal actions that have generated debate, like the case of Cloudflare. Javier Tebas defends that this strategy It has allowed “increasing the number of operators’ users” and reinforcing confidence in the product. It has not been without controversy, but LaLiga maintains that it has had a real impact on the market. The agreement not only brings income, but also time. LaLiga points out that a five-year cycle offers clubs and operators sufficient margin to plan, renew contracts, invest in technology and reinforce the audiovisual structure. By bringing forward the trend and detaching it from the new UEFA framework, the competition avoided the negative effects that other European leagues have faced. The message we want to convey is stability, legal security and continuity of the model. What does all this mean? This model has a direct link with consumer habits. Increasingly, platforms are designing their packages thinking about who is willing to pay more for certain content, and football fits into that category. It doesn’t just attract users, it retains them and gives them reasons to stay. This behavior explains why football maintains its central position in the catalog and why companies consider it a strategic piece. Images | LaLiga In Xataka | The NFL was going to place the Bernabéu in the center of the United States. Americans have not been impressed

OpenAI needs a lot of money. And to keep giving it to them, they are promising things that cost even more money.

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That OpenAI is in trouble is something we’ve been talking about from long agobut the last few weeks have aggravated the situation even more if possible. The company continues burning money like there’s no tomorrow and the income does not match. OpenAI needs investors and to justify those investments it needs to diversify into new markets. It’s going to be very difficult. The problem. On the one hand we have an OpenAI that dominated the AI ​​chatbot market with ChatGPT, but no longer enjoys the technological advantage it used to. Sam Altman himself acknowledged in an internal email that Google was technologically catching up with them with Gemini 3 and user figures indicate that Gemini is getting dangerously close, with 650,000 monthly users in front of the 800,000 weekly ChatGPT users. Losing the market leadership they themselves created would be a serious problem, but unfortunately for OpenAI, it is not the only one. The other problem. OpenAI’s spending projections for the next eight years are $1.4 trillion, said by Sam Altman himself. Let’s pause: 1.4 European billion, that is, 1,400,000,000,000. Thirteen figures, that’s nothing. To justify those astronomical investments, Altman talks about getting into robotics, cloud computing services and the highly anticipated (although nothing concrete) personal device designed by Jony Ive and which It will be “the iPhone of AI”. It sounds good, the problem is that at the moment OpenAI does not have the infrastructure and it does not say how it plans to compete in these markets. The OpenAI business. The barrier to entry to create an AI chatbot in 2022, when ChatGPT came out, was much lower than that presented by the sectors with which OpenAI is flirting. In the Wall Street Journal newsletter They point out something key: they are markets with fierce competition and huge companies that have been well established for years. Let’s look at the panorama they face: Robotics: Humanoid robots are still a developing segment and we have doubts that it becomes mainstreambut already There are many companies competing to put a robotic butler in our home. That OpenAI would manufacture its own robots seems completely unlikely because they do not have the infrastructure and it would cost them a fortune, something they do not have. The most feasible scenario would be to work with a robotics company to integrate their AI. In the United States it would have to compete with Figure and Tesla, both with their own AI. In China, with Unitree and Deep Robotics. Complicated. Cloud computing: getting computing power is another of OpenAI’s problems and the center of its multi-million dollar deals with amazon, NVIDIA either amd to mention a few. Setting up your own business in the cloud would mean competing with giants like Microsoft, Google or Amazon, who are also your own partners and you need them. Not to mention that Personal devices: It is the sector in which they have a more concrete plan, and yet we hardly know anything about this supposed “iPhone of AI”, a device so revolutionary that the smartphone would be a thing of the past, or so Ive and Altman said. We have not seen a single image of the device and the project has been delayedbut assuming OpenAI ends up launching it, it has the difficult task of convincing the world that it is better than a smartphone. Humane didn’t make it. For now it works for them. In October OpenAI closed a share sale that raised its valuation to $500 billionmaking it the most valuable startup in the world. It is an astronomical figure especially considering that the company’s expenses are also astronomical; only in the last quarter They lost a whopping 11.5 billion dollars. Investors have remained confident until now, the question is how long the party will continue. OpenAI needs it to last several years to be able to have that business that is going to cost 1.4 billion to build. Images | Wikipedia In Xataka | We have reached a point where not even the CEOs of Google or Microsoft deny that we have an AI bubble

there is more money in less time and too many eggs in few baskets

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The expectation and unbridled optimism about the AI ​​revolution is giving way to a stage of nervous laughter. The question It is no longer whether there is an AI bubblebut when it will explode and what impact that explosion will have. It is inevitable to compare this situation with the one we experienced with the rise of the internet and the dotcom bubble, but this is even worse. Dog years, mouse years. Vinton Cerf, one of the fathers of the internet, spoke in 1999 how “a year in the internet business was like a dog year, that is, seven years in the life of a normal person.” Everything was going very fast then, but now it is spoken of “mouse year”: each of them would be equivalent to about 35 human years. In AI everything certainly goes much faster, and that is very, very dangerous. Stock market crashes don’t help. Until a month ago, the extraordinary optimism that existed in this market had caused the big technology companies to continue growing on the stock market while the rest of the economy barely did. NVIDIA has been the best example of this, but in the last month a good handful of technology stocks have fallen. NVIDIA itself, (-4%), Microsoft (-10%), Meta (-20%), Amazon (-2%), Broadcom (-4%), Oracle (-30%), AMD (-20%), Intel (-10%). Only Google (+15%) and Apple (+3%) seem to resist this downward trend. The bubble is huge. The last estimates for capital expenditures (capex) added to the investments of venture capital already exceeds 600,000 million dollars by 2025, and the consulting firm Gartner indicated that according to its data in 2025, spending related to AI will amount to 1.5 trillion dollarswhen in 2024 it was 988,000 million. By 2026, it is estimated that it will exceed two trillion dollars. And it has grown much faster. As explains Analyst Fred Vogelstein, that spending “is happening in a fraction of the time. The internet bubble inflated for 4.6 years before bursting. The AI ​​bubble has inflated in two-thirds of that time.” The numbers continue to grow without stopping, they get bigger and they start to make no sense. And when they don’t make sense, they probably don’t really make sense. Too much concentration. There are differences between this bubble and the dotcom bubble. For example, much of the gigantic investment in data centers comes from technology companies themselves, and not so much from venture capital or investment firms. Even so, the concentration is enormous: Microsoft, Alphabet, Meta, Amazon, NVIDIA, Oracle and Apple represent approximately a third of the critical S&P 500 market, which was already aiming for it years ago, even before everyone started talking about AI. We have already seen this year how if technology companies fellthe economy suffered noticeably. This is not an investment, it is a bet. Companies like Microsoft, Alphabet, Meta or Amazon are talking about projected capital expenditures (capex) of $70 billion to $100 billion in data centers. These companies are risking everything on AIwhen at the moment there is no reasonable justification to do so because the uncertainty is total. The best way to understand that philosophy is to remember what Mark Zuckerberg said about his investment in AI: “We’re going to invest aggressively. Even if we lost a couple hundred billion dollars it would be a bummer, but it’s better than being left behind in the race for superintelligence.” Or what is the same: if you don’t risk, you don’t win. OpenAI, bubble paradigm. If there is a company that represents the AI ​​madness, it is OpenAI. This valued at 500 billion dollarsbut the company itself estimates that until 2029 you will not start earning money. It is estimated that its “cash burn” in 2025 will be $8 billion, and that in 2026 that figure will be $17 billion. It’s growing in revenue, yeahbut not at a sustainable pace at the moment. The accounts don’t come out, but the important thing for Sam Altman (and his investors) is that theoretically they will end up coming out. Or so they say. Source: Bloomberg. Circular financing. We are experiencing another warning sign with the recent circular financing agreements between big companies technological. In these alliances OpenAI and NVIDIA (among others) are becoming something like banks and investors that guarantee the demand for their products. This means that these companies will probably emerge stronger, but it also increases the systemic risk of this bubble burst. We are seeing it with Oracle, which issued $18 billion in bonds and has raised its total debt above $100 billion. Others are in a compromising situation also. Crazy reviews. And we have more disturbing warnings, of course. Among them, those that affect the multimillion-dollar investments and valuations that AI startups are receiving. Reflection AI, the company founded by two former Google DeepMind researchers, has raised 2000 million dollars in one round, while Safe SuperIntelligence, the startup created by Ilya Sutskever, is valued at 32 billion dollars without having any public product. It is estimated that there are 498 AI unicornsand it does not seem that the investment fever has stopped, as demonstrated by the interest in Yann LeCun’s imminent startup. Altman, Nadella and Pichai warn. Even the technological leaders They recognize that there are signs of a technological bubblealthough they do it with nuances. Pichai talked about observing “elements of irrationality”, and in that same vein they were Satya Nadella (Microsoft) or Sam Altman (OpenAI). Meanwhile, Robin Li, CEO of Baidu, explained months ago that we are facing a bubble that will make only 1% of companies survive. China. This excessive spending has also been helped by the rise of China in this area. The Asian giant has demonstrated its ability to develop open models extraordinary. The DeepSeek effect It caused companies in the US to add even more fuel (money) to the fire while China takes a position more conservative. Mastering AI is a major national security concern and that ties assessments to political and tariff unpredictability. Source: Financial Review … Read more

Congress will force Renfe to return the money for delays of 15 minutes. Renfe’s response: we’ll see

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Last year, Renfe expanded the strict criteria for returning money to its customers in case of delay. The measure came with controversy since these criteria had been applied since 1992 when the first AVE was launched. Almost 25 years later, the company relaxed these criteria to the point that two million passengers lost their money last year. Now, Congress forces Renfe to return to its previous criteria. But Renfe is not up to the task. When and how much money does Renfe return? Right now, to receive a partial payment for our ticket, the delay on the Spanish high-speed Renfe has to exceed 60 minutes. From 2024the company does not give half the money if the delay does not exceed one hour. In the event that we aspire to receive a full refund of the ticket, it will not arrive until we exceed 90 minutes. What has changed? Yesterday, November 13, The Congress of Deputies approved the Sustainable Mobility Law. It included an amendment from the Popular Party that returned the compensation that Renfe has to apply to those prior to the 2024 change. That is: Delays of more than 15 minutes: payment of 50% of the ticket Delays of more than 30 minutes: 100% payment of the ticket The change is substantial because this summer, four out of every 10 Renfe high-speed trains have arrived late. However, with the changes applied from 2024 they have been left without a refund around two million passengers. We’ll see. This is what the Ministry of Transport seems to say. And in statements to EFEsources from said ministry have described the amendment (which has been supported by Vox, Junts, ERC, Podemos and BNG) as “a demagogic operation and a toast to the populist sun.” Not only that, since The World They already state that Transport assures that they will look for “the legal formula to maintain the current system.” That is, the customer does not receive any refund for their ticket until after 60 minutes of delay. And that the total amount is not delivered until after 90 minutes. In the media they also report that Transport sources have indicated that the decision “only wants to penalize Renfe, a Spanish and public company, and not competing companies.” such as Ouigo and Iryo”, while highlighting that Renfe is a “public company that is fundamental to the structure of Spain”. In addition, Óscar Puente himself, Minister of Transport, has questioned the amendment. “Let’s see how it goes,” they say in The World who has responded about the new obligation. At a disadvantage? What Transport maintains is that the amendment promoted by the Popular Party puts Renfe at a clear disadvantage compared to Ouigo and Iryo. What the Government alludes to is that the reimbursement conditions by these companies are less favorable for the client, allowing them a competitive advantage. Ouigo compensates in the following cases: Delay of more than 30 minutes and less than 60 minutes: 50% refund of the ticket in a non-refundable purchase voucher. Delay of more than 60 minutes and less than 90 minutes: 50% refund of the ticket in a refundable purchase voucher. Delay of more than 90 minutes: 100% refund of the ticket in a refundable purchase voucher. Iryo partially or totally refunds the money in the following situations: Delay of more than 30 minutes and less than 60 minutes: refund of 50% of the ticket in purchase voucher or cash. Delay of more than 90 minutes: 100% refund of the ticket in purchase voucher or cash. Competence. What the Ministry of Transport points out is that this puts them at a disadvantage compared to the competition because Renfe adapted its compensation criteria to formulas similar or equal to those offered by its competition. However, the amendment introduced in the Sustainable Mobility Law only toughens the criteria for Renfe. It must be taken into account that the company has been around for more than a year experiencing a punctuality crisis. Although the Government points out that its punctuality is among the best in Europe, criticism has surfaced because trains that do not arrive on time have multiplied. Of course, when sharing roads with Ouigo and Iryo, it may be the case that a road blockade due to a breakdown of the latter ends up causing a delay in times when Renfe does have to return 100% of the ticket and its rivals will only deliver half of it. Photo | Carlos Teixador Cadenas in Wikimedia and Congress of Deputies In Xataka | If the summer has taught us anything, it is that Spain does not need more trains. You just need them to work.

If you bought your house before 2013 and paid off the mortgage with its sale: The Treasury owes you money

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If you bought your house before 2013 we have good news for you: now you will be able to recover up to 1,356 euros on your tax return thanks to an important change in the way in which the Treasury recognizes mortgage deductions. If you used the money from the sale of your home to pay what you mortgage pendingthis change in Treasury doctrine can directly affect you. The new resolution of the Central Economic-Administrative Court (TEAC) opens the door for thousands of taxpayers to review their statements from recent years and request returns that they couldn’t ask for before. An opportunity to save on rent. The Central Economic-Administrative Court (TEAC) has dictated a change of doctrine in a resolution in which he has clarified that, if you use part of the money from the sale of your house to pay off the remaining mortgage, you can also deduct that amount on your income tax return. This changes the way the Treasury saw things until now and may mean recover more money on your taxes. Previously, you could only deduct mortgage payments while you lived in the house and owned it. If you sold the home, you lost the deduction from the day of the sale, even if you used part of the money to pay off the mortgage. An example to understand it easily. The TEAC resolution has been based on the binding consultation of a taxpayer from Santa Cruz de Tenerife, so his case can serve as a practical example. This taxpayer sold his home in June 2018 and used 10,202 euros of the amount obtained from the sale to pay off the mortgage. At that time, the Treasury only allowed him to deduct the installments paid until May, the month before the sale of the home, because the cancellation payment for the same, although it is part of the investment in that home, was no longer counted because it was no longer his property. With the new TEAC criteria, this cancellation with the money from the sale can also be deducted and therefore the excess withholding in personal income tax that was not previously recognized can be recovered. This represents a real change for those who have sold their house and paid off their debt with the money from the sale, since their right to the deduction does not disappear the day they sell the house, but remains in force as long as they use that money to pay the cancellation of their mortgage. Conditions to access the deduction. As and as they remember in IberleyIn order to benefit from this deduction, a series of conditions must be met. The first condition is that the home had to be your habitual residence until the moment of selling it. The second condition is to have purchased that home before 2013 and to have applied the personal income tax deduction prior to its sale. The maximum base for calculating the deduction is 9,040 euros per year, and the Treasury allows you to deduct 15% of what you pay for the loan. That leaves a maximum deduction of 1,356 euros per year which, if you had not applied it after the sale of the home, you can now claim if applicable. Review of declarations from 2021. From Idealistic stand out that, although this deduction is only for those who bought before 2013, those taxpayers who have sold their home and canceled the mortgage since 2021 can review their returns to see if the personal income tax deduction was correctly applied, including that final cancellation amount. This means that there may be pending returns for those who did not claim it at the time and meet the requirements in the years between 2021 and 2024, as long as their term has not expired. In Xataka | Just in case Madrid had few problems with housing, now it adds one more: US millionaires investing in the city Image | Wikimedia Commons (Jordiferrer, Ruth Leong)

neither saves money nor saves resources

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The rejection of the new Coca-Cola’s AI Christmas ad It has been basically unanimous: although their bet has technically and visually improved the very promising 2024 bet, the complaints are no longer about the theoretical as much as about something more intangible. An advertisement that appeals to traditional and artisanal things should not be made with a tool that ignores human creativity. Or has it not been like that? Some recent data that has come to light after the first negative reactions casts doubt on whether it was just a matter of pressing a button for an ad to appear. The announcements so far. In November 2024, Coca-Cola became the internet’s quintessential corporate villain. Its Christmas ad was recreated with artificial intelligence the iconic ‘Holidays Are Coming’ spot from 1995and was received with a wave of criticism, especially for its multiple errors: rigid truck wheels, faces of people frozen in an inhuman rictus… Artists such as Alex Hirsch, creator of Gravity Falls, dedicated to the corporation such strong phrases like “Coca-Cola is ‘red’ because it’s made with the blood of out-of-work artists.” A year later, Coca-Cola does not back down, but launches a new version of the advertisement, more technically advanced and starring less risky entities: anthropomorphized animals. Pratik Thakar’s quoteglobal vice president and head of generative AI at Coca-Cola, “the genie is out of the bottle and no one is going to put it back in,” has become a symbol of these new times. No matter how much these types of decisions are criticized, the savings in energy and personnel are so significant that these types of changes are here to stay. Or not? Less effort? There are some figures, made public by Coca Cola itself and by Jason Zada ​​of Secret Level (the company that developed the ad) that cast doubt on the effectiveness of the entire effort. For example, it took approximately 70,000 AI-generated video clips before arriving at the final result of 60 seconds. Behind them, an army of professionals: approximately 100 people distributed between Coca-Cola, the WPP agency, and the Silverside AI and Secret Level studios. And among them, at least 5 AI specialists worked specifically on technical refinement and content generation. Zada talks about a direct team of 20 people dedicated to this announcement. It is not a revolution in efficiency, but an amount comparable to that of any traditional animation spot. The difference: no physical equipment, locations or cameras were needed, but all the usual production apparatus in this type of ads: creative direction, design, narrative construction, artistic supervision… Zada ​​states that there is “a lot of human craftsmanship involved. Hand-drawn character designs, world-building… it’s not just about writing words and pressing buttons.” The paradox of money. If we talk about video generation tools like Sora, Runway or similar, each clip has an associated cost. Multiplied by 70,000 generations, the expenditure on server infrastructure, processing and rendering time reaches considerable figures. To this we must add the cost of a hundred people working for approximately a month (this is what Coca-Cola claims is an advantage in terms of time, compared to the several months that traditional production would require). We don’t know how much the ad cost, but Manolo Arroyo, the company’s marketing director, is limited to stating which was “cheaper and faster than traditional methods” But the important thing here, perhaps, is not how much we save in money, but… is that saving worth the reputational cost? What is the difference. The type of work, not the amount. Where a traditional studio would spend weeks on 3D modeling and animation, this project invested that time in a process of mass video generation, selection and refinement. Instead of building a 3D model of a herd of seals and animating them, the team generated thousands of different versions of seals until they found the ones that worked. And then, and here is the key, it is able to multiply the result. Zada says, “We could create a 90-second version in addition to the 60-second spot, and a custom version. We couldn’t do that without the efficiencies of AI.” That’s the secret: not to do the same thing cheaper, but to do more things with the same budget. Coca-Cola doesn’t save money, it redistributes it. Instead of one definitive version of the ad, they got multiple versions tailored to different markets. Instead of investing in filming equipment and physical locations, they invested in management capacity and immediate multiplication: the industrialization of factories that we experienced at the beginning of the last century is now the industrialization of content. The genie in the bottle. Generative artificial intelligence is already part of the daily life of audiovisual production. And the controversial Coca-Cola ad exemplifies what companies want to get out of this new situation: it is not just about greater speed, or saving money, something that we already see is not being achieved, but rather a commitment to the future, perhaps to a different economic model, perhaps to some spots that are still to come, indistinguishable from those made in a traditional way, and that do not unleash the pejorative comments that, for the moment, these ads made with AI are collecting. In Xataka | The “divorce” between Coca-Cola and Nestlé leaves a big question: who owns the “formula” of the soft drink

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