rarity

Earning more than 600,000 euros a year seemed like a rarity in Spain. The Treasury has already counted almost 19,000 cases

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Twenty years ago, coming across someone who earned more than 600,000 euros a year was like the girls in Galicia: there are there there arebut it is difficult to find them. That exclusive club existed, but its members could fit on a city bus. Today a few are needed. According to data provided by the Tax Agency on the salary ranges of taxpayers in Spain, the highest incomes grow much faster than the rest of salaries. The jump that breaks the historical series. According to consolidated data for 2024, 18,829 taxpayers declared income from work above 601,000 euros annually. This figure represents a jump of 27.8% in a single year, and is the highest figure since the history of this series exists. Although almost 19,000 people receiving that annual salary may seem like a good figure, it is enough to put it in context to determine that they barely represent 0.08% of the almost 25 million declarations submitted that year. Since 2007, when the financial crisis broke out, this group has grown from 10,580 people to almost 19,000 today. It is an increase of close to 78% in less than two decades. Madrid, the magnet of large incomes. If this Treasury statistic confirms anything, it is that wealth is not distributed the same between territories. 8,278 of those 18,829 taxpayers live in the Community of Madrid. Catalonia follows, and specifically Barcelona, ​​with 4,040 taxpayers with a salary of more than 601,000 euros per year. These figures far exceed those offered by Andalusia, the Valencian Community or Galicia, which are the next in number of employees in the highest percentile. This concentration has an explanation beyond the location of the headquarters of large companies. As and how they stood out In the tax consultancy TaxDown, Madrid maintains, by far, the lower rates of autonomous personal income tax of Spain. Its maximum aggregate rate reaches 43.5%, compared to the 54% that can be paid in Catalonia or Valencia. Added to this is a Wealth Tax that has been practically canceled for years. This combination of tax cuts has been pointed out as a clear case of tax competition between communities (dumping), which helps attract large assets from other regions. The rest of the tax pyramid. It is advisable not to lose sight of what salary ranges the majority of workers in Spain really fall into. He largest section continues to be that of those who earn between 30,000 and 60,000 euros per year, concentrating 5.8 million people, 23.5% of the total filers. Just behind are the immediately lower ranks, those who charge between 21,000 and 30,000 euros (4.6 million) and between 12,000 and 21,000 euros (4 million). They are the salary brackets that, in practice, support the bulk of the country’s salary income collection. Although it does not represent an increase as spectacular as that of employees in the range above 601,000 euros per year, the growth in the number of taxpayers in the range between 150,000 euros per year and 600,000 euros also stands out. This group is made up of 194,681 taxpayers, which represents 0.79% of the total, but has experienced an increase of 20.9% in just one year. Action, reaction. This rebound in high incomes explains some data that until now seemed unconnected. According to data of the “World Wealth Report 2026” prepared by Capgemini, the number of large assets in the country has also increased by 5.3% in the last year. That is, according to the data in that report, the 13,100 new millionaires that Spain added, could be the same ones that in recent years have been added to the highest salary range recorded by the Treasury. In Xataka | “I am a millionaire and I don’t know what to do with my life”: a millionaire is looking for ideas because money has not given him happiness Image | Unsplash (Ru Dur, Mads Eneqvist)

Sleeping four hours a day and performing at your best is not a myth, it is a genetic rarity of 1% of the population

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There are people who boast of sleeping only four or five hours a day and claim to wake up fresh as a lettuce, something that can generate a lot of envy, but also skepticism, since it seems hardly credible being able to sleep little and be so active. And science has not stopped saying that sleeping little it is very bad for your healthalthough there is an exception to the rule (as we are used to seeing). What we knew. For decades, the unwavering recommendation of the World Health Organization and sleep medicine experts they have been clear: a healthy adult needs between 7 and 9 hours of sleep night so that your immune system, your metabolism and your mental health function properly. Getting out of there, below, is buying tickets for diseases such as, for example, Alzheimer’s to appear. The exception. Given this rule, there is 1% of the world’s population that has a true genetic superpower that allows them to bypass this rule without any consequences. And the culprit has been detected by researcher Ying-Hui Fu, who after tracking down these people has seen that it has an important genetic component. How it looked. To do this, the researcher decided to analyze entire families where several of their members ‘functioned’ perfectly with just six hours of sleep, without showing daytime sleepiness or cognitive deterioration, while the rest of their family members needed more than eight hours of sleep. And from here, the culprit had a first and last name: the mutation of the DEC2 gene, known as BHLHE41. Although this finding has been the tip of the iceberg, because subsequent studies in animal models and entire families of humans have found a real cocktail of mutations in other genes that seem to optimize sleep so that four hours is more than enough. And it even gave them a ‘protective shield’ against cognitive decline when they faced even shorter nights. In the end they are all benefits. Because you don’t have to try. Reading about these mutations can be tempting, since, after all, different very relevant figures have sold us the myth that we should sleep little because it is a waste of time, and we should get up early at five in the morning. But the truth is that it is vital to separate these people who have an alteration in their genetics from people who sleep little because they want to. If this is not the 1% of the population (which is most likely), science suggests that chronically sleeping six hours or less during middle age increases the risk of suffer from dementia by 30%and even the chances of suffering from diabetes or hypertension also increase. This means that the body should not be deprived of sleep when it is ‘asking for’ it. Something that is noticeable as soon as you wake up. Future views. The interest of the scientific community aims to perfectly understand how these genes can make sleep much more efficient, and above all how they protect against different diseases related to sleep deprivation. In this way, the long-term goal is not necessarily to create pills so that we all sleep four hours and work more, but rather to develop therapies for sleep disorders or prevent diseases such as Alzheimer’s. Images | user18526052 on Freepik In Xataka | Drink water right before going to sleep? Science has finally clarified whether it is a good idea or a terrible enemy of sleep

Spain is letting the lisp die in Andalusia without knowing that the /θ/ sound is a global rarity that we are losing

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In recent days, the University of Granada has presented a macroatlas with almost half a million audios that shows how the way of speaking of Andalusians has changed. The research is very interesting for many reasons, but today I want to focus on something specific: the slow, but inexorable agony of lisp. What is lisp. While the distinction between ‘s”https://www.xataka.com/”z’ and seseo gains ground in the south, lisping is losing speakers in the only place where lisping is used. It is a sociological question, yes: researchers are clear that stigma is the main force against this phonetic subsystem. But there is something else Because, in reality, what we are seeing is not just the death of the lisp, it is the end of the sound (θ) itself: one of the most unknown oddities of the Spanish language. A Spanish oddity? Although it is not something that is often explained much, the ‘c’ sound (/θ/) is relatively rare in the world — only in 43 of 566 languages ​​(7.6%) in the world. WALS sampling appears and only in 4% of the counts in typological databases (UPSID: 3.99%; PHOIBLE: ~4%). That is, very few living languages ​​have that sound among their phonetic repertoires. To give us an idea, the phoneme of the ñ (ɲ), quintessence of Spanish, appears in 35% of the world’s languages. But… what about the ‘c’? The usual explanation Why (θ)/(ð) are less frequent and why they are disappearing is simple: they are “soft” fricatives; That is, they are less strident sounds than (s)/(z) and, therefore, have less perceptual salience. This is what makes them tend to be lost or transformed easily over time. That does not mean that the Spaniard of the future is going to be sesante; but there is a high probability that it is sesante. The heritage of a language in the trash. It is clear that it cannot be argued from a philological point of view that the disappearance of (θ) is a bad thing. The Earth turns, languages ​​change. But it is striking that in a society in which historical heritage continues to be “valued”, the progressive loss of a sound does not set off alarm bells. And that it does so because we are not capable of accepting the diversity of our own language, normalizing it and defending it in the public sphere, is perhaps worse. Image | Wiebrig Krakau (Modified) In Xataka | “The most serious attack since there is memory”: Pérez-Reverte has started a crusade against the RAE from within the RAE

Serial murderers had their boom in the 80s. Today they are a statistical rarity

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If there is a genre of entertainment that has emerged strongly in recent years, that is certainly True Crime. There are series, podcasts and even documentaries made with AI On real crimes. Many of them deal with the stories of dreaded serial killers; Ted Bundy, Jeffrey Dahmer, John Wayne Gacy… They all have their series. However, although serial killers have become a cultural phenomenon, the figures show that their activity was concentrated in a very specific period of time and in a special country. Why are there no serial murderers? An American phenomenon Number of serial murderers per country. Source: Radford University He FBI defined the serial killer as the one who has killed more than two people on two different occasions. According to him Annual series murderers report and victims of the University of Radford of 2020, 67.7% of registered cases came from the United States. There are countries that have registered more than a hundred cases such as Japan, India, South Africa, Canada or England with almost 200 cases. However, we talk that the United States has 3,690 documented cases, while the rest of the countries in the combined list reaches 1,168 cases, the difference is abysmal. Because There are more serial murderers in the United States? A reason is that there is More records and statistics that in other countries, so the real percentage could be biased. The media impact and glorification From some of these murderers it would also have been a determining factor for others to act as imitators. In addition, the ease of geographical mobility within the country facilitated that these profiles could act without being detected. Three decades of “fashion” Cases of serial murderers in the United States. Source: Radford University, Graphic of Vox.com The graph represents the moment in which the murderers began to kill and we see how most of the most notorious cases They are concentrated in a period of three decades. Here the crimes of Ted Bundy, Jeffrey Dahmer, David Alan Gore or Tommy Lynn Sells occurred, to name a few examples. The wave began to rise in the late 50s, when the criminal records were improving, rose radically in the 70s and reached its peak in the 80s. According to IFL Sciencein the 80s there were 254 active serial killers, with its maximum peak in 1987 where there were more than 400 victims. In the 90s the figure dropped to 227 active murderers. The trend was falling pronounced and in the 2010 only 66 cases were recorded. Why there are no serial murderers Researchers blame the decline of serial murderers to several factors, especially related to Advances in criminal investigation. Police records are more exhaustive and communication between the different security forces is better. This allows to find similarities in cases and facilitate the identification of possible serial profiles. Research methods are more sophisticated. The DNA test It began to be used in cases of murders In the mid -80sbut the first techniques were more rudimentary, the analysis took a long time and there was not a wide database to compare. Technological advances are another determining factor. The presence of Security cameras In shops and public places he has helped resolve countless crimes worldwide. For example This study He concluded that the British transport police could increase its crime resolution rate from 23 to 48% thanks to the security cameras material. The Internet searches They have also been decisive in many cases, such as Brian Walshethat when his wife disappeared he looked on Google “how much time passes until a body begins to smell” and “10 ways to get rid of a corpse.” This, together with images of the suspect buying cleaning material and an ax in Home Depot, led to their arrest for murder. But perhaps everyone’s greatest advance has been mobile telephony. In addition to the images of the cameras, the triangulation of the signal of mobile phones It allows to locate both the suspects and the victims, being able to reconstruct their movements. Mobiles are key tools in many investigations and we have seen it in notable cases such as Asunta Basterrahe Urban Guard Crime or that of Diana Quer. The decline of serial killers coincides with a Generalized fall of violence since the 90sbut without a doubt all advances in research and technology have made it easier for today to catch the culprits. In potential serial murderers, in many cases They do not commit a second crime. Cover image | Netflix In Xataka | A person has made Media Spain hook the most horrendous crimes: Clara Tiscar and ‘Criminopathy’

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