smelled Archives - usatoday24

All this smelled like singe to the market.

February 27, 2026 by usatoday24

Everything indicates that hostilities have ceasedand with a result that at this point few observers expected: Netflix has given up bidding more for Warner Bros., paving the way for Paramount to take over the media giant for about $111 billion. It is the (foreseen) outcome of a bidding war that started in October 2025 and that now gives a new kick and unexpectedly reorders the panorama of the streaming and global entertainment. The war dates back to 2016. That is, to the purchase of Time Warner by AT&T in October 2016 for $85.4 billion, including debt. The intention was to combine the largest telephone company in the United States with the assets of HBO, CNN, Warner Bros. Pictures and DC Comics to build a technological and entertainment giant. There were problems from the beginning (the merger was delayed almost a year due to legal issues) and it deprived the company of the optimal launch window for HBO Max in a market that was already beginning to become saturated with streaming services. streaming. In 2021 AT&T would give WarnerMedia to Discovery. Expenses and more expenses. The new Warner Bros. Discovery had ambition. Its CEO David Zaslav presented a project of 20 billion annual expenses to reach 400 million global subscribers, but none of that was fulfilled: the shares have fallen 60% since 2022, with losses of 35 billion dollars in market capitalization. In June 2025, Warner advertisement which was separated into two companies: one for studios and streaming and another for linear networks (with CNN, TNT Sports, Discovery and Bleacher Report). The aim was to release the burden of the cable channels, which were mainly responsible for a debt of 37,000 million. Back to the ring. This split once again makes Warner Bros. a more attractive target than a conglomerate with dozens of cable television channels and millions in debt. In October, it formally opened a sales process, which boosted its price by more than 10%. Three names stood out from the rest: Netflix, NBCUniversal and Paramount Skydance. The first two only wanted studies and streamingthe third was willing to buy the entire company. According to some analyststhis made the operation very risky for Paramount, but very interesting for Warner. David Ellison, CEO of Paramount, had even made three informal offers before October, which had been rejected. Bidding war. In November the three candidates presented their proposals non-binding: Paramount at $25.50 per share (the first of all, a month earlier, had been $19), Netflix and Universal with non-public offers. In December there was a second round, and Paramount rose to $26.50 per share. Universal pulled out. On December 5, Netflix was considered a winner from the auction with $27.75 per share and without counting the channels. Paramount’s tantrum. Three days later, David Ellison launched a hostile offer directly to WBD shareholders: $30 per share in cash for the entire company. The offer was supported by the Ellison family, the private equity fund RedBird Capital, the sovereign wealth funds of Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates. From there, offers followed. backed by the CEO’s fatherLarry Ellison. He continued to raise the price and continued to address shareholders directly, without success. Paramount’s triumph. In February, Netflix granted Warner a seven-day waiver to resume talks with Paramount: after what Sarandos described as “flooding the area with confusion,” Paramount was forced to come up with its best proposal or be ruled out. On February 24, put on the table $31 per share in cash, plus the assumption of debt and several extras: a regulatory penalty fee of $7 billion if regulators blocked the closure, the assumption of payment of the $2.8 billion that WBD would owe to Netflix if it broke its current agreement, and a holding fee for shareholders if regulatory approval was extended beyond fall 2026. The shareholders waited for a counteroffer from Netflix, but it did not arrive: the profitability projections Above $30 per share were very complicated: the share price had grown 63% compared to Paramount’s first offer. Ted Sarandos, co-CEO of Netflix, had traveled to Washington that same day to meet with Trump administration officials, is spoken that looking for more data on the regulatory environment. Before the end of the meeting, Netflix had already spoken: it was not going to raise its offer for purely financial reasons, which made Paramount’s option more than possible a winner, in the absence of formal confirmation from shareholders. And now what? Well, immediate effect: Netflix shares rose about 13%, Paramount gained 5%, Warner fell 2%. That is to say, the market celebrates Netflix’s retreat. On the table, a few issues to resolve: the formal board vote and the regulatory approval phase (which, in the best scenario projected by Paramount, will not conclude before September 30, 2026) that can explode in countless areasalthough the climate is favorable given the political situation (the relationship between Larry Ellison and Trump – one financed the other’s campaign – is more than public). Where are we now. Netflix has many other tentacles to grow with. For example, it has just reached an agreement with Sony whereby the company’s releases (the Spiderverse films, yes, but also the next ‘Zelda’ or the Beatles films by Sam Mendes) will have an exclusive world premiere with the platform. Something similar happens with Universal: Netflix is the streaming premiere platform for franchises like ‘Jurassic World’. Netflix ended 2025 with more than 325 million paying subscribers and projects revenues of between $50.7 billion and $51.7 billion by 2026. It is not doing badly, and will increase its investment in content to approximately $20 billion annually, according to its quarterly letter to shareholders. On the other hand, we will have an entity that combines two of the five active traditional Hollywood studios with a multitude of linear channels and two streaming services. streaming. Of course, it is still early to talk about mergers between HBO Max and Paramount+, sales of Warner’s historical archive to alleviate debts or conflicts between CNN and CBS … Read more

Google has smelled blood with AI, so it has decided to spend more in 2026 than the GDP of 158 countries in the world

February 5, 2026 by usatoday24

New year, new budgets. Big tech companies are beginning to detail their roadmap for 2026 and the trend is clear: spend even more on AI. a few days ago, Goal announced that the planned capex (capital expenditure) rose to 135,000 million dollars and Microsoft too pointed to a similar figure. Alphabet (Google) just told everyone to “hold my hands.” May the rhythm not stop. The bomb was announced during the last results conference. Alphabet plans to spend between $175 and $185 billion, doubling 2025 capex, which was $91.4 billion, and almost quadrupling 2024 spending (52.5 billion). To put it in context, it is more than the GDP of Morocco, Kuwait, Bulgaria and up to 158 countries. At the same time, the company announced record results, surpassing 400 billion in revenue for the first time. The net profit stood at 132,000 million. Vertigo. That’s what investors seem to have felt. They count in Financial Times that, in the hours following the news, Alphabet shares fell 7% after the capex announcement, but then the fall was reduced to -1.5%. Microsoft experienced a similar response after its earnings call a few days ago, it is the response of investors to these exorbitant figures. However, as long as the results are good, it seems that the scare will not last long. Everything’s fine. They count in Fortune that Pichai assured that this year’s capital expenditure is “a look at the future” and justified his strategy by highlighting that the demand for his cloud services and DeepMind (Gemini) is extraordinary, so the investment must also be. He also announced that AI searches now surpass traditional searches and that Google Search’s business has grown 17% compared to last year. Additionally, the order book for its cloud has increased by 55% during the last quarter. It still won’t be enough. The CEO of Alphabet admitted that, despite the record results, there are insurmountable bottlenecks such as computing capacity, problems in the chip supply chain and energy limitations. These restrictions make it take a long time to get a data center up and running, or in other words, it was preparing investors not to expect an immediate return. Gemini, full out. The Google chatbot is in its sweet moment. The viral success of Nano Banana, Gemini 3 sweeping its competition in benchmarks and Apple choosing him as the new brain for the new Siri They have given a boost in popularity to Gemini, which already has more than 750 million users. OpenAI is still ahead with ChatGPT, but Google is closing the gap and Altman’s people have reacted going into panic mode. He moat of Gemini. Benchmarks are fine, but there is something much more important. During the conference, Pichai announced that they had reduced Gemini’s service costs by 78% “through model optimizations, efficiency and utilization improvements.” It is no longer that its AI is surpassing its competition, it is that it is cheaper and there OpenAI does have a problem. With its advertising businesses, the cloud and more revenue, Google has plenty of room to skyrocket its capex. In Xataka | OpenAI’s entire financial strategy depended on achieving a monopoly with ChatGPT: the opposite is happening Image | Wikipedia

every time I stepped on the brake it smelled like singeing

November 6, 2025 by usatoday24

Some cars at auction They seem like a bargainbut what one does not expect is that something that appears first-hand ends up holding a rather strange surprise. As and how did he count police in Ludwigsburg (north of Stuttgart) on their Facebook profile, someone bought a Mercedes-Benz GLE 400a high-end SUV that originally costs about 100,000 euros in its base model. However, on the way back home, the new owner discovered something that literally smelled like singeing every time he stepped foot. the brake pedal. “Eco-friendly” brake system Every time the new owner stepped on the brake pedal, he noticed that it began to smell like burnt wood, in addition to not braking as expected of a car worth almost 100,000 euros, so he decided to take it to the workshop. There, the mechanics made an impressive discovery: the front brake pads were actually blocks made of wood that fit perfectly into the space that the brake calipers were supposed to occupy and that, to make matters worse, even had the word “Brembo” written in marker, a popular brand of high-end brakes. This discovery led to the local Ludwigsburg police becoming involved in the investigation to discover what happened. The police themselves were surprised by the discovery “You don’t see something like this every day: wood instead of brake pads! It’s ingenious, but dangerous,” they published on your Facebook account. Tap on the image to go to the original message Obviously, the police confirm that this is not a case of counterfeiting of original parts of the brand. Something that, on the other hand, would not have been strange. According what was published by Self-easyIn 2023 alone, a team from the German brand working together with the police removed 1.6 million counterfeit parts and components from the market, and in 2024 the figure rose to 1.5 million components that are manufactured in clandestine factories. How did those wooden pills get into a luxury car? According to one of the hypotheses that the German police are considering, it seems like a strange mistake that probably occurred in a workshop. Some shops use wooden shims to hold the pistons that activate the pads in place while they are changed for new onesespecially after bleeding the brake system. It is possible that the replacement was delayed and that the workshop had to move the car within its facilities, so the “vegetable” pads covered the gap in the brake pads and allowed the car to be started to move it, since to start it it is necessary to press the brake pedal while pressing the start button. For some strange reason, no one noticed that the replacement of the brake pads had not been completed, so the car, perfectly functional thanks to the “trap” of the pads, was taken to the auction site without anyone noticing. Once the mystery of the ecological brake padsthe agents are trying to locate the workshop where this intervention was carried out to clarify if it was negligence and prevent something like this from happening again. Beyond the bizarre nature of the situation, this is a serious case of involuntary negligence on the part of the repair center. Driving with these brake pads poses a huge risk to road safety that could have caused a serious accident. Something smelled like singeing at that auction. In Xataka | I always dreamed of buying a Ferrari. What I never imagined was that I could buy it for 150 euros Image | Mercedes-Benz

If the question is “how ancient Rome smelled” the answer is “yes”

August 24, 2025 by usatoday24

Smelling a colony, a room or a plate of food causes our mind to jump and travel over time. It is something tremendously powerful And that has led to investigate ways to smell video games, The cinema either to the Internet. These systems existed And, although it would be the definitive immersive experience, None finished curdlingPerhaps the problem is that we don’t want to sniff certain things. And, definitely, something we would not want to experience is the smell of ancient Rome. It smelled strong. Thomas Derrick, a doctor at Macquarie University in Australia, believes that ancient Rome would have been extremely smelly for Anyone of today. In statements a RNZthe researcher specialized in people’s daily lives during that historical period in Rome believes that “it probably smelled quite bad.” Ok, but … to what extent? “You would smell human waste mixed with smoke resulting from the burning of firewood, animal droppings and other things rotting and decomposing.” And the sewers? The problem is that there was not a single source of those bad smells, being the result of a stinky combination not particularly pleasant. Rome had a sewer system (the ‘Maximum sewer‘It is an example), but not some sewers like the ones we can imagine to carry the waste of the latrines to a black well or something like that, but something more similar to a river drain to evacuate the stagnant water of the public areas. Derrick says in an article to The conversation that “we can assume, with enough security, that the owners did not have latrines connected to the sewers in the big cities, perhaps by fear of the entrance of rodents or the bad odors.” In addition, they did not have valves such as those that currently prevent things from the sewer, so the gases that originated from the waste, such as methane, could enter the houses. And considering that lamps with a flame were used, The danger of explosion was there. Nothing was wasted. Most likely, the most humble had a nearby black well. And, in addition to the feces, it must be taken into account that the garbage could also be thrown into the same place … or directly to the street, as was the case with urine, thrown from the windows of the buildings of several floors. Apart from human waste, there were work animals that were used regularly in cities that They did their things in the streetsas well as decomposition corpses of both these animals and people. And what is garbage for the vast majority, for others it is a “treasure.” There were professionals who collected stool to use them as fertilizers, but urine could also be used to wash clothes. That urine is still rich in ammonia, so could be used to disinfect. Patches for poop. If the streets were up of excrement (and what are not excrements, another question that arises is how they could walk through them without ending up to the stool knees. The answer they found was the placement of large stones in the streets to dodge both the mud and the waste. Pompeya is one of the places where you can see these “stones to cross”, a cobblestone that also allowed a simpler step for animals that were used to load or for tasks such as moving the large stone mills that were used in the bakeries. Again, more animals … and more waste. Humanity. Derrick says that this nausebound smell of the big Roman cities was not only due to the feces of each other. “Roman settlements would have strongly smelled of body sweat,” he says. Also demystify that Image of Roman public bathsaffirming that they were not as hygienic as we can think if we visited the ruins of some of them. And yes, although they were places where you could carry out hygienic activities, especially were meeting points in which it defined and ate, pulling the remains to the ground. In addition, although the Romans knew the soap, they preferred to scratch the skin with a bronze curved tool called strígile and use perfumed olive oil for personal hygiene. And the mixture of oil and dead skin was thrown (again) to the ground or water. And since water and oil are not mixed, when the water disappeared, only that greasy mejunje remained. The author comments that the bathrooms, “were surely quite dirty places.” That tool would be strígile There were always classes. The elites could have more refined customs and even use perfumes that, yes, existed in ancient Rome. To elaborate them, they mixed animal and plant fats and they were impregnated with aromas such as roses, cinnamon, lilies, incense or saffron. They could bring spices to India thanks to the vast Commercial networks of the Empireand if these perfumes were applied in the human body, they mixed with body smell to work for something … different. Where they were used with more olfactory success it was in the statues, since they sought to enhance that aroma of the gods and goddesses with perfumes that exalted the cult of deities. What is clear is that what for us would be something nauseabundo, for the ancient Romans was everyday, the smell of the home. Do you remember the Maximum sewer? That class difference was also there: while the popular classes had blind wells, some Domus rich did have direct connection with the sewerage system. And now I can’t stop imagining how to smell some lentils reminds me of winter afternoons when I was little … and how for a Roman legionary away from home, smelling a swamp could make him think “as at home, nowhere.” Images | Pinterest (Peter Connolly), Featuredpics In Xataka | While modern concrete cracks within a few decades, the Pantheon of Agrippa has been standing for 2,000 years: myths and realities of Roman concrete

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