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There are thousands of scientific articles that ask you to pay to read them. Sci-Bot has arrived to access them for free

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Scientific knowledge is supposedly something that nourishes all human beings to continue advancing, but the problem is that in many cases the articles that contain this knowledge are in tools that require a subscription to read them. This limitation in access to universal knowledge has led to the emergence of different platforms that bring together all these articles, such as Sci-Hubwhich now improves with his AI called Sci-Bot which promises to put an end to ChatGPT’s “hallucinations” in the scientific field. How it started. At the end of this same month of April, a message on networks published by Mushtaq Bilal began to go viral, and no wonder, since it gave a notice in which, ironically, it invited us to use a new Sci-Hub tool that allowed access to scientific advances for free. Something they do through the back door and that already it almost cost them closure forced by the famous ‘Pirate Bay’ But logically this publication had the opposite effect, going viral, and also revived the eternal debate about the paywalls in science they can block access to this knowledge. But now Sci-Hub’s new tool has arrived to change this (partly). A great library. To understand the magnitude of Sci-Bot, you must first look at the size of its brain, since since Elbakyan founded the web in 2011, Sci-Bot has become in a headache for scientific dissemination giants such as Elsevier or Springer, which are behind the publication of thousands of top-level articles. Here, according to the official data of the platform itselfSci-Hub hosts 88,343,822 research documents and books, so we are talking about 100 TB of human knowledge covering more than 95% of the publications of the main scientific publishers. And with free access and without going through the checkout, as happens on the websites of some of these publishers. The jewel in the crown. As Sci-Hub’s own page reveals, Sci-Bot is an AI that is designed to be able to search within the titanic database to select the most relevant studies and compose articulated responses. Its main attraction is that compared to generalist AIs like ChatGPT or Claude there are hardly any hallucinations, such as its creators pointed out in a scientific article in which tests were carried out in this sense. And this is something very important because I have been able to experience with my own eyes how AI invents bibliographical references or assigns research to authors who have nothing to do with it. But Sci-Bot, being anchored to a real database from which it draws the information, means that there are direct references to the original papers, allowing users to jump over the hated paywalls to access scientific evidence. Still needs improvement. At the moment it is starting in its alpha phase and that is why it has different limitations, such as that it can only answer one question at a time and does not maintain the thread of chained queries, even if they are on the same topic. But the truth is that it is quite promising to have access to the vast majority of human knowledge. They put obstacles in his way. Here, logically, the magazines have a lot to say, since they do not like having the articles freely available when they request a subscription to access them. This means that right now Sci-Bot has the most recent scientific articles as its blind spot, since due to the new and aggressive security measures implemented by large publishers in recent years to avoid scrapingthe database has some gaps in articles published in the most recent months. This makes the AI ​​unable to respond regarding the most recent evidence. But without a doubt we are facing an advance that began with the arrival of Sci-Hub with the promise of democratizing science, although through the back door by freely publishing articles that are actually ‘private’. And the only thing this will do is create a new front between open access and large publishers seeking financial returns. In Xataka | More and more media outlets are going over the paywall in Spain, the big question is whether there will be subscribers for everyone

We paid for the most expensive tomato in the last decade and farmers claim that they can’t pay the bills. They are right

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“I’d rather throw away the harvest than pay us 80 cents per kilo of tomatoes.” Almost a year ago, Riojan farmer Clara Sarramián gave an interview to Jaime Gumiel that still kicking. Above all, because it explains in a simple and accessible way the last five years of tractor units. And yet, no matter how much it is repeated, Sarramián’s speech and that of other farmers never ceases to surprise: “they wanted to pay me half as much as the previous year. I preferred to throw it away. If we all go through the hoop, we are going against ourselves,” he says. We have heard it many times, yes; but does it make sense? Are they right in their complaint? That is the first thing to clarify and the truth is that if we look at the data, it is difficult to say no. The origin-destination commercial margin of tomato reached in 2025 81.1% (second highest in a decade)according to data from the Observatory of the Junta de Andalucía. In fact, without leaving aside the case of the tomato, a 2020 study by the Institut Cerdà on the value chain pointed out that the total cost of tomatoes is €0.61/kg (labor 0.258; seeds 0.081; structure 0.078; fertilizers 0.059; others) compared to the €0.57/kg paid to the producer. And this is data from 2017: the situation has only worsened since the war in Ukraine. It doesn’t seem like the best business in the world. In fact, it seems like a pretty bad one. Above all, because although we have been developing regulations for years that allow us to limit the impact of these problems, they all end up in a dead letter. Furthermore, the external pressure (especially from Morocco for the tomato issue) is enormous. And many of the main market players play “double agents” because they are conglomerates with investments on both sides of the Strait. Why should we care? I imagine that the simplest data to understand how this impacts the consumer is this: we are paying for fresh tomatoes. the highest price in the last decade and, at the same time, the farmer who grows it in Spain affirms that it does not pay him to harvest it. And, anyway, as we have just seen, he is right. And, under these circumstances, why would they want to throw away the harvest? That is to say, it is worth paying below cost; But something will always be better than nothing, right? And that idea makes sense, but it ignores some important things. To begin with, that between 25 and 30% of agricultural costs They occur in collection, packaging, transportation and wholesale sales (with possible associated losses). If they are not collected, the farmer loses what he has already invested, yes. But it does not incur more costs that it cannot recover. Furthermore, as we have seen in situations like lemon either the bananaletting part of the harvest be lost prevents prices from collapsing. It is not an easy strategy to implement (because there are always people with incentives to sell as the price rises), but it is a rational strategy. Tick ​​tock Tick ​​tock All this happens in a very specific context: in June it begins the negotiation of the post-2027 CAP and that is what makes the key question not “why does Clara Sarramián throw away her tomatoes?” but “how do we ensure that one of the central industries of the Spanish economy (the only one that supports the emptied Spain) does not die in a matter of a few years?” Image | Rachel Clark In Xataka | We have a problem with pesticides in agriculture. And a bigger one with the panic they generate

The Spanish atmosphere has been loaded with fuel and now it’s time to pay the bill

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Spain has been chaining one temperature record after another for a week and the culprit, as we have been explaining, is a subtropical ridge that the country has maintained between five and ten degrees above normal. Nothing particularly surprising, nothing that hasn’t happened two dozen times in the last few years. For complete the déjà vuIn fact, the same number has dragged a disproportionate amount of Saharan dust for days. And now, it’s time to suffer the consequences. Never corner a DANA. As I said, we can describe the third week of April with three words: heat, stability and suspended dust. But starting on the 23rd the situation changes and a trough is becoming detached from the general circulation and It is going to be configured in the form of DANA. The party starts here. The synoptic configuration is clear: a DANA in the southwest with the ridge still strong in the east and very warm air between the two structures. We have the basic ingredients of convection. What can we expect? AEMET forecast stormy showers locally stronghail and very strong gusts of wind in almost the entire interior of the Peninsula. Today, the highest risk areas are the west and center of the peninsula (Extremadura, Castilla-La Mancha, Castilla y León, western Andalusia), the Pyrenees and the Iberian System. If everything continues as it is, April will end up as the third warmest month on record and all that atmospheric energy will be channeled over the land. To put it in perspective: all this is going to cause average temperatures to drop more than 14 degrees in a matter of days. What does the heat have to do with the storm? Physicists use the Clausius-Clapeyron equation to explain that the atmosphere’s capacity to retain water vapor grows by approximately 7% for each degree of warming. The hotter, the more water vapor; more water vapor, (if the conditions are right) wilder storms. It is true that we are experiencing an unusual April… but the average temperature in Spain has risen 1.69 °C between 1961 and 2024 and heat waves last three days per decade. That is, the “outside the norm” in this case It means things are changing. and what we are going to experience (the passage from the 36 to the flood) is the new normal. Image | BenBaso | Xataka In Xataka | In two days, AEMET is clear that spring is suspended: an “early summer” arrives in Spain

ChatGPT enables pay per click ads. And with them the problem that destroyed the credibility of SEO is repeated.

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ChatGPT already charges advertisers for each click their responses generate. OpenAI has activated a cost-per-click (CPC) model of between $3 and $5 within its advertising platform, as it progresses DigiDayuntil now limited to large advertisers who paid for impressions. Why is it important. This marks the moment when ChatGPT stops being a neutral tool and becomes a system with direct economic interests in which answer appears first. And that leap has consequences for anyone who uses AI as a source of information. The context. OpenAI launched its advertising business a few months ago with a CPM model (pay per impressions) and with a minimum investment of $250,000. In that time, the price has dropped from $60 per 1,000 impressions to $25, and the minimum has been reduced to $50,000. The direction of the movement says a lot: OpenAI needs more advertisers and it needs them faster. Between the lines. A CPC of 3-5 dollars is equivalent, in effective CPM, to figures much higher than the market average. OpenAI is not looking for cheap volume: it wants to position itself as premium inventory, at the level of Google Search, where clicks are worth more because the user arrives with a clear intention, especially in certain types of searches: health insurance, urgent loans, lawyers specializing in traffic accidents, etc. The problem is that this intention premium still needs to be demonstrated. The inevitable conflict. The CPC model introduces a conflict that any content platform knows well: the best answer for the user and the answer for the payer are not always the same. It is not a problem exclusive to OpenAI or search engines. It is the fundamental contradiction of any business that combines information and advertising revenue, including the media, and that each actor manages with greater or lesser success depending on their size, reputation and incentives. Google has been navigating this conflict for 25 years with increasingly debated results. Let’s think about what a Google results page looked like in 2005 and what it is like today. It’s not even your only conflict of interest. OpenAI inherits that same conflict from day one, without the reputation cushion that gave Google margin for two decades, and at a time when the demand for transparency about how AI systems work is increasing. Yes, but. There are those who argue that the LLMs They are different because contextual conversation generates a more qualified intent than traditional search, which would justify the premium price and make the advertising presence more tolerable. It is possible. But the same thing was said about branded contentof the native advertising and SEO in its beginnings. If history tells us anything, it is that economic incentives end up winning over product design, not the other way around. In Xataka | AI already knew how to create images. OpenAI says it has found the missing piece with the new ChatGPT Images 2.0 Featured image | Xataka

pay young people for dating apps

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To desperate problems, desperate solutions. In full demographic debaclethe authorities of Kōchi (a prefecture in southern Japan) have decided to help their young people find a partner a peculiar shape: paying for their subscription to dating apps. The aid is only aimed at residents under 40 years old, cannot exceed 20,000 yen (110 euros) and is limited to a list of certified social networks, but it gives an idea of ​​the extent to which the Administration is determined to reverse the birth crisis that is clouding the future of the country. That it has focused the focus on apps is not a coincidence either. Help to flirt. Japan is not willing to sit idly by while its birth rate declines at a rate record speed and the country is moving deeper and deeper into a demographic catastrophe of unpredictable consequences. Over the last few years, the Japanese authorities have launched millionaire programs to activate their birth rate, which includes from numerous ‘baby checks’ to job improvements that facilitate conciliation. In few places, however, have they been as imaginative as in Kōchi Prefecture. There the Government has decided help your young to pay dating apps. “Helping singles”. Kōchi’s idea is as simple as it is shocking. a few days ago the prefecture announced a “subsidy program to cover app usage fees.” Said like this, it may not seem too interesting, but things change when you go down to detail. Its objective is very specific: to lend a hand to young people in the region who want to register on dating platforms and, ultimately, “to help singles who want to meet someone or get married.” With small print. The measure, of course, has fine print. Only Kōchi residents between 20 and 39 years old can apply and must prove that the app began to be used on April 1. In fact, the aid is designed to pay for subscriptions between April 2026 and March 2027. Its amount is also limited: in no case can it exceed 20,000 yen, about 110 euros. The curious thing is that Kōchi is not the first to use this trick. In the region of Miyazaki They also launched a similar program in 2025, although with an aid of only 10,000 yen per year, and in Tokyo they have even promoted a dating app focused on a very specific user profile: people looking for a stable partner. Is any application worth it? No. That is another of the peculiarities of the Kōchi initiative. The prefecture subsidizes only subscriptions to certain apps preselected, although among them is Tapple, a platform very popular among singles in Japan. Curiously, just a year ago it incorporated a function that allows its users to verify officially their marital status, which allows the rest of the people in the network to know if they are married or not. In the list from Kōchi also includes Pairs, D3 or Omiai, among others. A well-calibrated bet. That the Kōchi authorities have decided to bet on dating apps is no coincidence. A few years ago the Government carried out a survey in which, among other questions, he asked the Japanese how they had met their partners. A quarter (25%) of those who had gotten married acknowledged that they contacted their better half through dating apps, which makes them the great matchmaker in the country. 21% said they had met their spouse at work and 10% at a school. How much does it cost to flirt? It is also no coincidence that Kōchi has set its subsidy at 110 euros per year. “The current price of annual membership fees is just over 20,000 yen, so we set the amount to cover most of it,” explains an official to The Sankei Shimbun. Those who benefit from the measure will only have to cover the rest of the costs. In its efforts to make it as easy as possible for singles, the prefecture even has a specific program which helps those who move to Kōchi to look for a boyfriend or girlfriend. Again it may seem like a strange initiative, but in Japanese society only a tiny percentage of babies are born out of wedlock. If Kōchi (or any other region) wants more children, it first needs more couples. Goal: more babies. Although Japan is not the only country suffering the effects of demographic winter, the situation there is particularly worrying. Their multiple efforts to reactivate their birth rate do not seem to be giving results (unlike what seems to happen in South Korea) and in 2025 the country recorded its tenth consecutive year of decline, reaching a new historic floor. The outlook is so discouraging that Japan is moving at a minimum demographics I didn’t expect to see until the 2040s. Kōchi is no exception. Macrotrends shows that takes years losing inhabitants. Images | Kochi Prefecture Victoriano Izquierdo (Unsplash) In Xataka | Japan wanted to know what bothers its citizens most about tourism. The answer is extremely Japanese

Volotea begins to charge extra due to the rise in oil prices on its flights. 97% of passengers have agreed to pay it

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More and more airlines are already taking measures to contain the energy chaos that has arisen as a result of the conflict in the Middle East. Although many of them have chosen to cancel a good number of flightsothers have chosen to make their tickets more expensive. One of them has been Volotea. And the Spanish airline has launched a price adjustment policy linked at the cost of fuel which can make the ticket already purchased more expensive up to a week before flying. Crisis in the Middle East. The blockade of the Strait of Hormuzthrough which it passes about 40% of oil consumed by European airlines, has skyrocketed the price of fuel and forced the sector to look for ways to avoid absorbing the blow on their own. Volotea has been the first Spanish airline to transfer this cost to the passenger explicitly and with its own mechanism. What exactly has he done. Since March 16, Volotea has applied what it calls the Fair Travel Promise: seven days before the departure of each flight, the airline consults the market price of fuel in public sources and, if it has increased compared to the time of the reservation, charges the passenger a supplement of up to 14 euros per person per trip. According to they count From 20 Minutes, most surcharges are between 7 and 10 euros. And the adjustment can also work the other way around: if the price of fuel drops, the company returns the difference. What options does the passenger have? The traveler who receives the surcharge notice has a period of 48 hours to decide what to do. You can pay the supplement and continue with your plans, request a full refund of the ticket, or take advantage of the time offered by the airline to modify or cancel the reservation for free up to four hours before takeoff. The company ensures that its customers are aware of this policy before booking, since they must accept it at the time of purchase. The numbers that Volotea manages. According to data from the airline itself, 97% of affected passengers have chosen to pay and keep their trip. The company interprets that percentage as a sign that the measure “is aligned with customer expectations,” in its own words. In addition, it has canceled a small percentage of flights due to higher fuel prices, although it assures that it affects less than 1% of its total schedule. Countermeasures. Not all airlines are acting the same. According to Expansioncompanies such as Air France-KLM, Qantas or Cathay Pacific already apply fuel supplements, while IAG (the group that owns Iberia and British Airways) or Ryanair do not do so at the moment. Groups such as Lufthansa or Ryanair itself have asked the European Union to study a joint purchasing model for kerosene, similar to the one that was launched with gas after the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Why can it go further? If the Strait of Hormuz blockade is prolonged, pressure on fuel prices could intensify. The Airports Council International (ACI Europe) and Ryanair already have warned that the problem of cancellations in the industry could worsen if supply suffers. Spain has some margin thanks to its national refining capacity (almost 9.9 million tons of kerosene per year, according to share El Mundo), but it is not a structural solution. Volotea has moved in a different way, and now we wonder if more airlines will join this strategy. Cover image | Dylan Agbagni (Wikipedia) In Xataka | Airlines are becoming more imaginative to save costs: Lufthansa is going to clean economy class less

A streamer shared out-of-print movies. Now Enrique Cerezo wants him to go to prison for two years and pay 870,000 euros

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In October 2021, five riot police equipped with shields, tactical shotguns and a battering ram burst into the home of a YouTuber from Burgos known as “El Feo”. They were not looking for weapons, drugs or criminals who had committed blood crimes, but hard drives with movies. Films out of circulation, that no one offered almost anywhere on the Internet and whose exploitation rights remained in legal limbo until that moment. David against Goliath. With that assault, the judicial process begins, which culminated on April 9 with the trial in Burgos against El Feo, the nickname of the person responsible for the YouTube channel. The Cursed and the now closed Zoowoman website. The private prosecution, headed by EGEDA (the entity for managing the rights of audiovisual producers that Enrique Cerezo has chaired since 1998), requests two and a half years in prison and compensation that the parties estimate between 850,000 and 870,000 euros. No profit motive. Zoowoman was a platform without advertising, subscription or any type of business model. Its purpose was to rescue and make available to the public out-of-print audiovisual works, films whose production companies had disappeared or that had erratic or zero commercial distribution. Zoowoman functioned as a collective repository of links: the community’s own users shared access to films hosted on external servers such as MEGA or archive.org, without the files residing on the web. Sister website. La Filmoteca Maldita, the associated YouTube channel that is currently still active, functions as an archive of essays that provide historical context and cultural readings of genre and cult cinema. It includes nearly 4,000 film analyzes (according to data provided by El Feo’s defense), which is pertinent when approaching its intentions as a cultural disseminator, rather than as a mere exploiter. Several of these videos, as well as the often unfindable films that resided in Zoowoman, have been used as teaching material in universities such as UNAM, the University of Buenos Aires or the University of Medellín, as Feo himself states in a video where he explains his case. The legal argument. The prosecution cannot claim direct profit from El Feo because Zoowoman did not generate income, so it relies on the reform of the Penal Code of 2015which expanded the definition of piracy to include “indirect economic benefit.” Under this interpretation, offering free movies can be considered a “hook” to attract followers to the main channel and reinforce the reputation of the creator and generate income through other means, which would constitute criminally relevant profit even if there is no money involved. The police investigation estimated the alleged indirect profit obtained in this way at around 12,000 euros. The defendant defended himself by explaining that this amount is equivalent to his total income as streamer during its first four years of activity, and that the messages that the agents interpreted as codes from a piracy network were donations from its community (“for your birthday”, “so that you can have a drink”), consistent with the crowdfunding model of any independent creator. In January 2025, before the trial was to take place, the prosecution tried to reach an agreement: if he pleaded guilty and paid 100,000 euros, the sentence would be reduced to one year in prison. El Feo rejected him. Who sues? Enrique Cerezo, apart from presiding over the plaintiff entity, is the owner of Video Mercury Films, the distributor that controls between 70 and 80% of all Spanish cinema, with a catalog of more than 7,000 titles. He is also the president of Atlético de Madrid and the promoter of FlixOléthe platform streaming launched in 2020 with the intention of disseminating Spanish cinema from all eras, much of it out of print or not seen for decades. The complaint that ended the 2021 raid occurred shortly after the launch of FlixOlé, whose catalog largely coincided with that distributed by Zoowoman. The logic, described by the accused himself, is that Zoowoman offered for free what the new platform charged in a subscription. Cerezo has not made public statements about the case. EGEDA acts as a private prosecutor on behalf of the producers whose rights it manages, which includes films in the Video Mercury catalogue. This is not the first time that EGEDA has embarked on complaints of this type: in 2017 it denounced WebTV device distributors and in 2022, to 17 websites that they spread content without permissionamong which was Zoowoman. Beyond the trial. If the thesis of indirect profit prospers, any free cultural dissemination channel that builds an audience could potentially be prosecuted under the same legal umbrella. There are international precedents that point in the same direction. In the United States, the case of Hachette against Internet Archive, resolved in 2024 with a defeat of the digital archive, demonstrated that courts tend to prioritize the rights of the owner over arguments of cultural access, even when the model is non-profit. The legal question. Spain has a regime for orphan works (transposed from a European directive in 2014 and developed by Royal Decree in 2016) but its use is reserved exclusively for public cultural institutions such as museums, libraries or film libraries. An individual or an independent digital creator cannot rely on it, which leaves precisely the type of initiative that Zoowoman represents without legal coverage and which is called into question from the very moment Cerezo creates FlixOlé so that these films are no longer inaccessible. Image | House of America In Xataka | AI has been built by plundering the content of the Internet. Now there are people who want to charge for allowing it

that talent has to pay to work

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Japan needs foreign workers. The really need and urgently. But its hiring system for foreigners experiences a curious paradox: the country needs these foreigners, but charges them a fortune and places innumerable obstacles for them to go to work. Well, to be exact, it’s not actually the government that charges them to work, but a network of intermediary agencies in recruitment who take a good commission before the worker even sets foot on Japanese soil. According to the second edition of the survey on foreign workers in Japan85% of foreign workers who arrive in Japan do so through some type of intermediary. The majority pays a bill for this service that can exceed 6,000 euros. Import workers due to low birth rate. According to the Japanese Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfarethe number of foreign workers in the country reached 2.57 million at the end of 2025, 11.7% more than the previous year, and the thirteenth all-time record consecutive. That is, in 2025, that figure was almost three times higher than that recorded a decade earlier. The manufacturing industry accounts for 24.7% of the total foreign employees, followed by the services sector with 15.2% and wholesale and retail trade with 13.3%. By city, Tokyo, Aichi and Osaka host more than 43% of all these workers. These data show that there are entire sectors that cannot fill the majority of their vacancies with local workers and need this foreign workforce to fill them. They pay to go to work in Japan. According to the data collected According to the Japanese Ministry of Labor, the vast majority of these workers arrive through a recruitment agency at origin that charges them a fee of between 200,000 and 400,000 yen (the equivalent of between 1,200 and 2,400 euros), while 13.2% of foreigners paid up to 6,000 euros just to have the opportunity to go to work in Japan. Of the 10.9% of workers who reported having had labor disputes in Japan, 18.6% indicated that the cost of agencies was excessive, and 14.9% admitted not having known who to turn to when difficulties arose. Meanwhile, 69% of companies cited labor shortages as the main reason for hiring foreign staff, up from 64.8% a year earlier. The end of the system that allowed it. Much of this friction has its origin in how the Japanese immigration system itself was designed. For more than thirty years, the Technical Internship Program (TITP), launched in 1993 with the stated objective of training workers from developing countries. In practicethis program functioned as a way to obtain cheap labor that, once in the country, had very little capacity for maneuver, denouncing marathon days, salary failures and the impossibility of freely changing sectors or jobs. In June 2024, the Japanese Parliament approved its replacement by the system Ikusei Shuro Seidowith entry into force scheduled for June 2027. For the first time, the Japanese government officially recognizes that the goal of the new program It is to train and retain foreign labor to cover the talent shortage, something that the previous regulations did not allow. Unlike the TITP, the new model does allow changing companies within the same sector under certain conditions, and sets a limit on commissions from recruitment agencies equivalent to two months of the worker’s salary. More visas, more sectors, more talent. The Japanese government has opened new entry ways to foreign labor. In March 2024, the Specific Skilled Worker (SSW) visa program incorporated new sectors in which foreigners can work, raising to 17 the total number of sectors covered. Those who arrive with a university degree can benefit from the J-Find visaaimed at graduates from the top 100 universities in the world. This visa allows you to reside up to two years in Japan to look for work or prepare a business project without having to have an employer to guarantee your arrival. Unlike the SSW or the TITP, the J-Find is a commitment that goes beyond filling vacant positions, and what it seeks is to compete for highly qualified talent at a global level and encourage the creation of startups and innovation projects in Japan. Companies also have their share of the problem. In addition to demographic pressurethe companies themselves have spent years unable to fill vacancies with local workers. According to the MHLW survey30% of the establishments declared having difficulties and “linguistic and cultural barriers” with their employees, and “complexity of the procedures to manage their residency status.” That is to say, not only is it a complex bureaucracy for workers, but Japanese companies are also having problems with this hiring system. The reforms underway aim to correct the most problematic points of the system, from agency abuses to the rigidity that tied workers to a single employer. The reforms will not be completed until 2027, so until that time comes, the paradox that Japan is experiencing still the same: a country that urgently needs foreign workers, in which those same workers have to pay a high sum to be able to work. In Xataka | Japan is being the canary in the mine of the labor market in Spain: reversible retirement is the proof Image | Unsplash (Il Vagabiondo)

that you pay to make friends

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Never before have we been so connected and, at the same time, so isolated. Loneliness is one of the big problems that we face as a society and, of course, the market is finding ways to make it profitable. Do you feel lonely and would like to have more friends? Well, rent one. Loneliness. They count in The Country that unwanted loneliness affects more and more people. According to data from Soledades Observatory of the Once Foundationin 2024, 20% of Spaniards admitted feeling lonely and at least two thirds claimed to have felt this way for years. It is not something exclusive to our countrybut a global trend that is already classified as a priority public health problem. In this context, all kinds of services are emerging that expand your circle of friends in exchange for a subscription, of course. RentFriend. The name leaves little to the imagination and it is exactly what it sounds like: a service that allows you to rent friends by the hour. You just have to choose your area, if you want a man or a woman, where you want to go (to the movies, to the gym, shopping, to accompany you to a wedding…) and the age range. The users who advertise are the ones who choose how much they are going to charge you for their company. In Valencia I have found people who charge 20 euros an hour, others 10 euros and some who do not charge anything. It is not the only portal of this style, there is also another service called RentAFriend or Rent A Local Friend that have a very similar operation. Timeleft. The proposal of this service is different. In exchange for a monthly subscription, they organize dinners for you with groups of six people who have similar interests to yours. Of course, you pay for dinner. If you like someone, you can continue talking through the app and repeat a meeting. “Embrace the uncomfortable. From sitting at a table with strangers. The vulnerability of accepting that you are looking for friends,” they say on their website. The subscription cost is about 20 euros per month. One of the reviews of the app says “I find it a little overpriced since they only ask you a game of questions during dinner and little else.” GroupVibe offers a very similar service. The app, available in 40 cities including Madrid and Barcelona, ​​organizes meetings for between four and six people from the same city to have a coffee, brunch or dinner. WeRoad. If you like to travel and don’t have anyone with you, this service organizes a group trip with like-minded people; You choose the destination and the dates and they assemble the group. You travel with a WeRoad coordinator who takes care of arrangements such as check-in, booking activities, and keeps track of the common fund. By default the accommodation is in shared rooms, although you can go in pairs and in that case they put you with your companion Mussa. It is a service aimed exclusively at women that works with a subscription model that gives access to different events. Among the experiences they offer there are embroidery workshops, photography workshops, Pilates classes and even bingo nights. The subscription costs 30 euros per month, but then you have to pay for each activity. There are some that are free, but most have a price that can range from 5 euros to 60 euros or more. There is a country that has years of advantage. If there is a country where a phenomenon like this is already normalized, it is undoubtedly Japan. In 2017 there was already talk of renting people for all types of situations, from people who offer their company even companies that They rent actors to impersonate your partner or family. This business responds to a culture where social isolation is profound. Services like Family Romance cover everything from dinner companions to fake family members at weddings. Although some see it as a practical solution, others criticize that it reinforces the real disconnection. Image | Xataka In Xataka | Sweden has encountered an unexpected problem for the country’s defense and health: an epidemic of loneliness

More and more Spanish bars refuse to let you pay at the table. Its objective is very simple: greater rotation

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“To pay, at the cashier.” It doesn’t matter if you live in the very center of Madrid, the most touristy area of ​​Barcelona, ​​next to Malagueta, in Vigo or a remote town in Bierzo, it is most likely that at some point in the last few months you have heard that phrase when you ask a waiter to please charge you. To pay for the coffee you just had, you must get up and go to the checkout yourself. Or what is the same, you do not have the option of being charged at the table. It seems like a minor issue, but this decision is not accidental: it responds to a logic that seeks to speed up the rotation in the premises and get the most out of them. “Excuse me, can I have the bill?” In Spain there are some 87,000 restaurants and food stalls, almost 163,400 drinking establishments and 270,200 “food and beverage services”, according to INE datawhich gives a pretty clear idea about how we live in Spain: we like (a lot) to go out for coffees, beers and tapas. Therefore, no matter what region you live in, chances are that in recent months you have sat at a table in a bar or restaurant. And that’s also why you’ve probably noticed that it’s becoming more and more common that when you want to pay and ask for the bill, answer the same: “To pay, at the cashier.” Unraveling the mystery. The question is obvious. Why the hell are they asking us to pay at the cashier? Are we not hindering the passage of other customers like this? Does it have any advantages over the option of paying the bill directly at the table? The mystery was cleared up a few months ago Jairosanbor, a tiktoker that usually publishes on his account videos related to the world of hospitality. And the answer is quite simple: although several factors come into play, everything is limited to a simple question of rotation in the premises. In other words, make a business profitable and get the most out of it. Time and agility. The logic is simple. If the customer receives the bill at their table, pays and the waiter charges them, even having to return to the bar to get change, a process is lengthened that could be simplified if the payment is made at the cashier. It may be a matter of minutes, but over the course of an entire day, a week, a month or a year (even more) that time can translate into higher turnover. More rotation. More clients. Higher income. “A little trick”. “What you get is that the customer gets up without any problem and leaves you the table free so that someone else can automatically sit down. If you had him here waiting for you to bring him the bill, charge him, he leaves and comes, in the end more time is wasted,” comments Jairposanbor in his TikTok video, of just 30 sure. “It’s a little trick for the rotation.” Personnel issue? The “little trick”, as the hotelier defines it, may seem simple, but it has given rise to a good number of articles about the themein the pressand some debate in the comments of the video. There are those who relate it, for example, to the greater or lesser availability of waiters in the establishment. “Another trick: add more staff and if the customer leaves happy that they don’t have to wait, they’ll probably come back,” comment a user. Another adds that charging cash may increase turnover and profitability of the establishment, but it can have a negative effect: it places more workload on the employee behind the bar. Cash vs card. They would come into play more keys. For example, although it is increasingly common for restaurants or cafes to allow payment by card, especially in large chains, in those cases in which the business only accepts cash, the “collection at the counter” rule simplifies the process quite a bit. No picking up cashround trips between the bar and the table to look for change or for the money to ultimately pass through several hands within the business. Useful, not infallible. Of course the tactic can be useful, but it is by no means infallible. First because, as some users also comment on TikTok, there are customers who do not like being sent to the bar to pay for their drinks. Second, because rotation is not 100% guaranteed either. As another remembers tiktokerthe trick fails when there is more than one person at the table, only one gets up to pay and then returns to his seat to continue chatting. A sector in change. César Sánchez-Ballesterospresident of the Tourism and Hospitality Federation of the province of Pontevedra, Feproturprovides some extra keys. Tricks like the one shared by Jairoposanbor seek greater optimization, but that is not the only way that hoteliers follow to achieve it. For years the group has opted for new strategies, such as online reservations, letters with QR codeapps that allow you to make orders and pay… Until reaching extreme examples such as experiments of McDonald’s in the US, with stores where there is hardly any interaction with staff. Of orders, payments… and personnel. “We see more and more examples of optimization,” comments Sánchez-Ballesteros, who remembers in any case that the client always has the last word, as has been made clear in the comments of TikTok: he is the one who decides what compensates him, what practices he considers good, what bothers him or the services he is not willing to give up. Against this backdrop, there is another factor that conditions work in restaurants and bars: the shortage of qualified personnel, which further reinforces the urgency that businesses have when it comes to polishing internal processes. It’s nothing new. For years the hospitality industry has been pointing out on a recurring basis the shortage of professionals, a deficit that becomes especially visible in times of … Read more

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