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Germany wanted to see if working four days a week was efficient. 70% of companies think so

February 25, 2026 by usatoday24

The four-day work week started in Germany as an experiment to search for the maximum productivity of companies without having an impact on an exhausted workforce and without the ability to reconcile family life. Two years after the start of this test, the data confirms that for the companies that participated it was not a simple test, but rather it has materialized in a change in the way of working that many companies have decided to consolidate. Now the monitoring report prepared by researchers from the University of Münster together with the consulting firm 4 Day Week Global. It analyzes what happened after the pilot test that began in 2024 and what subsequent effects it has had. The main conclusion is that around 70% of the companies that participated in that test continue to apply some model of reduction of working hours a year later. A known formula and a varied sample. The original four-day week project in Germany was built around to the 100-80-100 model: 100% of salary, 80% of time and 100% of productivity. This model of reduction of working hours is the same one that was carried out in Valencia in 2023, Portugal either United Kingdom. In the initial phase, 45 companies from different sectors participated, dedicated to manufacturing, insurance, technology, media, commerce or education. Furthermore, to be as representative as possible of the German industrial fabric, companies of different sizes were chosen: from micro-businesses with 1 to 9 employees, to large companies with more than 250 employees. The first data already gave clues. Researchers have been collecting data from participating companies and their employees since day one. A few months after starting the test, the companies were delighted with the results, to the point that in preliminary results73% said they would not return to the traditional five-day week. The new report provides the perspective that time gives and whether that initial impetus has been consolidated. Two years after the start of the test, seven out of ten companies that participated in the test not only maintain the four-day workdaybut they have integrated it into their normal operation. More than four days: flexible reduction of working time. One of the most interesting findings from the monitoring is that the four-day workweek model has evolved and every organization has implemented it adapting it to your needs. Not all companies have opted for a Monday to Thursday work week. Around 22% of the participating companies have adapted the initial scheme towards more flexible formulas: reduction of annual hours, alternate weeks or internal adjustments according to workload. The report itself speaks less of a “four-day week” and more of “reduction of work time“. The label matters less than the redesign of the work day and the elimination of superfluous tasks, fewer unnecessary meetings and greater autonomy of the teams. No impact on profits or productivity. In business terms, the German test has been a success since, despite having maintained 80% of the initial day, there have been no drops in either the level of profits or in productivity or slightly improved with respect to the starting point. That is, they have managed to do the same thing in less time. What it did have a strong impact on was the well-being of employees, where 90% reported improvements in the balance between personal and professional life. As a result of this improvement, employees reported feeling less stress and greater commitment to the company. 38% of companies indicated that sick leave and absenteeism of their employees had been reduced, while 56% claimed to have detected no changes. Lights and shadows in the reduction of working hours. Progress was also observed in job satisfaction and in the perception of the company as an attractive place to work. The study indicates that 87% of companies detected improvements in talent retention. For their part, 75% claimed that their companies now had a greater capacity to attract talent in selection processes. This, in a scenario of labor shortagerepresents a competitive advantage. However, as happened in other tests of the four-day work week, not all companies have followed the same evolution. About 30% stopped applying the initial scheme or returned to the traditional five-day week. The main reasons were operational, difficulties in coordinate with your clientswork peaks that are difficult to absorb or inflexible internal structures. In Xataka | Employees in Spain clear up doubts: working fewer days is better than working fewer hours, according to a survey In Xataka | Spain already has its first municipality with a four-day work week. It is not in Madrid or Barcelona, but in a corner of Cádiz Image | Unsplash (Gonzalo Leon Jasin, Josue Isai Ramos Figueroa)

that working more hours is profitable

February 21, 2026 by usatoday24

Germany gained a reputation for being one of the most efficient labor markets with very high productivity. However, the successive crises of recent years they have shown their seams exposing their weaknesses. The Government of Friedrich Merz wants to change the rules so that people are compensated for working more hours and stop depending on social assistance. Today, many Germans prefer to have a shorter working day, because if they work morethey lose benefits and end up earning the same or less. Work more to earn less. In Germany, if someone with a low income receives a social benefit and accepts more hours of work, the authorities subtract that extra amount from their support salary. For example, someone who collects a subsidy (a Minimum Vital Income, for example), accepts a minijob (a part-time job of up to 600 euros per month that does not contribute to Social Security), the worker is left in a situation similar to the one he would have if he only collected the benefit without working. This discourages the effort to get a full-time job, because the net money at the end of the month barely changes or even goes down. The commission of experts of the Ministry of Labor explains this phenomenon in his latest reportand proposes reducing the impact of income on aid so that working more always pays off financially. Chancellor Merz was pronounced regarding the content of this report highlighting that “this report is the basis for all the additional reforms that we will carry out together in the coming years.” Objective: promote full-time work. The Government proposes several concrete ideas to promote full-time work and reduce the negative impact of mini-jobs, which do not generate sufficient contributions for pensions or insurance and hinder the full-time job creation. One of the proposals is to eliminate the exemptions for this type of precarious employment and raise those for jobs close to full-time to avoid “erroneous incentives.” “We want work to be worth it,” stood out Bärbel Bas, Federal Minister of Labor. Without justified reason, there is no part-time work. The conservatives of the CDU, party of Chancellor Merz, they propose reduce the cases in which companies must accept requests for reduction of working hours. Currently, any employee with more than six months’ seniority in a company with more than 15 workers can request reduced working hours without giving any reason and the company must accept it as long as there are no operational reasons that prevent it. It is what has been called “lifestyle” reduction“. The Government raises the possibility of limiting this reduction only to justifiable cases, such as childcare or training, eliminating free use that slows down productivity. The challenge of family conciliation. According to data According to the Federal Statistical Office and Eurostat, Germany has one of the shortest working hours in Europe and one of the highest rates of part time employment. In 2024, 29% of the active population worked like this, but among womenthis day model reaches 50.3%, compared to 13.4% of men. That is to say, although many mothers would like to work full-time, the lack of daycare or support to care for children forces them to choose mini-jobs of about 18 hours a week on average. This problem aggravates the labor shortage qualified, because it leaves almost half of employed women out of the full-time labor market. The reform aims to facilitate conciliation with more flexibility, but without reducing the pressure for more and more employees to go to work full time. In Xataka | Germany believes it has found the most German possible solution to its productivity problems: work more Image | Unsplash (Maheshkumar Painam, Spencer Davis)

Spanish ants are using other species as “sexual livestock” to expand across Europe. And it’s working for them

February 17, 2026 by usatoday24

Nature has given us many ways to reproduce. From the simplest mechanism (clonality) to really very elaborate systems of sexual reproduction: where some species generate males and females, others produce a huge number of ‘morphs’ depending on the season, population density or social caste. But in all these cases, even the most complex ones, “the phenotypes produced by a female invariably belong to the same species.” Or so we believed. Because the Spanish ants have done so by jumping that “apparently universal restriction” into the air and are taking advantage of it to domesticate other species at will. They are doing what? As it sounds: after examining more than 120 populations and sequences of almost 400 different individuals, researchers from the University of Montpellier they came to the conclusion that the queens of Messor ibericus they are cloning males Messor structor to create hybrid workers that allow them to progressively expand throughout Europe. Evidently, although these hybrid workers are used as the workforce of the anthill, we are not talking about a system of slavery of other species analogous to the human systems of ancient times. However, it is fun and very interesting. Juvé et al. (2025) Why is this happening? When we talk about cocial insects, colonies function almost as if they were factories: if there are no workers, there is no nest, no food, and no viable reproduction. What happens in this case is that (according to the researchers) the queens of the Messor ibericus They cannot produce viable workers without the genetic contribution of other species. And, without thinking twice, they do it. Why is it important? For many reasons, but above all because it opens up an incredible melon: it brings back to the debate table the real meaning of “being a species.” It also forces us to rethink what we know about sexual reproduction and allows us to understand colonies as ‘superorganisms’ that are much more complex than we believed until now. So… can we really talk about sexual domestication? In this context, ‘sexual domestication’ appears as a visual metaphor of a complex process. However, there is no doubt that the appearance of colonies with internal reproductive ‘livestock’ changes the rules of the game. And not only on a scientific level: the fact that they are gaining ground throughout the continent shows that the strategy is successful. Very successful. Towards a European hegemony of the Spanish ant… No no. We can hardly say that. Today, all the ants on the continent are experiencing a real invasion: that of the Argentine or red fire ants. This is a biological invasion linked to globalization. In this case, what is happening is that by freeing yourself from dependence on M. builder (because it can produce reserves of its genetic material without needing colonies of this species), the M. ibericus They can move with complete freedom and that means they are moving into new and unexplored territories. But the complete battle, facing the fire ant, is yet to come. And they are already losing it. Image | Phil Honle In Xataka | New species of insects are not discovered in exotic places: we have just found two new ants in Andalusia

China wants to win the military space race and that is why it is working on a humble project: a space destroyer

February 14, 2026 by usatoday24

China has underway a space project worthy of ‘Star Wars’. In another context, it could sound like a tremendous exaggeration, but only one thing has to be said: the image that crowns this article belongs to a propaganda video from the Nantianmen Project. Specifically, it is the Luanniao, a larger space aircraft carrier than any aircraft carrier and able to throw hypersonic missiles and unmanned space fighters. More than terrifying, for some, it is simply high-tech theater. Nantianmen. First of all, you have to separate concepts. Nantianmen is a Chinese air force project that began in 2017 focused on the design of a global defense system. This includes practically everything we can think of such as fighters, weapons, autonomous vehicles, transport and launch platforms. It is a program that seeks to explore the paths that Chinese military aviation may have in the future, and it must be understood that, within Nantianmen, there are two types of designs: those that have been brought to the real plane through models and those that are on paper. An example of the first is Baidi, a manned aircraft that would become the jewel in the crown of the People’s Liberation Army Air Force. And an example of the second is the monstrous destroyer Imperial Chinese. Luanniao. The video that I leave above these lines is the one that the state channel CCTV published a few days ago in which we can see… a lot of 3D elements doing movie things. In certain fragments the Luanniao appears, but it is not the first time that this space aircraft carrier can be seen. As pointed out South China Morning Postin 2018, shortly after the project started, the AVIC Global Culture Communication Company – a subsidiary of the Aviation Industry Corporation of China – showed a conceptual model of the Luanniao at an air show. We now have some more details thanks to the most recent CCTV broadcast. According to the network’s data, the Luanniao will make any conventional aircraft carrier look ridiculous: 242 meters long. 684 meters wingspan. Weight of more than 100,000 tons. Capable of carrying 88 unmanned Xuannv fighters both inside and outside the Earth’s atmosphere. And a full weapons team, with particle acceleration cannons and hypersonic missiles. To give us an idea, the American aircraft carrier Gerald R. Ford It measures 337 meters by 77 meters. Pride. In the same video a model of the Baidi appears, a variable geometry wing aircraft that, as we say, seems to be the banner of Chinese aerospace innovation. In fact, the Asian giant is testing its new generation of both combat-ready fighters like those focused on air supremacy and reconnaissance. But, obviously, the one that attracts the most attention is Lunniao. From the network, it was commented that the aircraft carrier will become operational in two or three decades, and military analyst Wang Mingzhi, from the PLA Air Force Command College, affirms that technologies such as those of the Nantianmen Project reflect both the “expectations for future aerospace and space superiority and the directions being pursued to safeguard national security.” “It is not a question of whether they can be achieved, but rather which ones will be done first and when they will be implemented,” pointed out. “China is creating the impression that it is working on technologies that no one else can achieve. It is still ‘Star Wars’ material to inspire the Chinese audience” – Peter Layton Arching an eyebrow. Now, Western analysts are not so optimistic about something that has been described as mere propaganda rather than practical weapons development. Attacking the more earthly issue, defense analyst Peter Layton of Australia’s Griffith Asia Institute point Yes, the Luanniao would surpass both current defenses as storms when flying at an altitude higher than that which surface-to-air missiles and conventional fighter aircraft can reach. The “but” is that the technology to remain suspended at the edge of the atmosphere and launch missiles from there is science fiction. Layton comments that “it would require enormous amounts of fuel and propulsion mechanisms that have not yet been created,” ensuring that China has between 10 and 15 years left to develop the rocket technology necessary to put such an aircraft carrier into orbit. In D.W.space analyst Heinrich Kreft describe the project as “completely unreal from today’s perspective,” but he does not say that it is smoke because “much of what was fiction 20 or 30 years ago is real today.” Other analysts closer to the United States see the Luanniao as something with a single objective: to make the world believe that China has the technology to build this while hoarding resources to do other things. The undeniable. Whether it is psychological warfare, excessive ambition, smoke or something it is really working on, the undeniable thing is that China is taking giant steps in the new space race and weapons. We have already mentioned that they are accelerating the development of combat aircraft with stealth capabilities capable of standing up to whatever the United States deploys near its waters, but they have also joined that “first come, first served” space policy. Beyond satellites and systems that are a threat to security in space – according to the United States – they have been developing satellite technology for years. autonomous spacecraft and of reusable rockets with LandSpacethe answer to SpaceX’s Starship. But, in the end, all that is much more realistic than the enormous ship of 120,000 tons and more than 600 meters in span. But, as Kreft says, 30 years ago we also thought that current vehicles They were science fiction… Image | CCTV In Xataka | The US operation in Iran has staged one of the most impressive milestones of military engineering: the B-2 Spirit

Working in a nuclear power plant is not the best way to avoid cancer. Now it turns out that its waste also serves to cure it

December 27, 2025 by usatoday24

If there is a terrifying and mainstream disease, it is cancer: after all, according to the WHOone in five people will develop it at some point in their life. Although in some cases the risk factors vary depending on the type of cancer, working in a nuclear power plant poses some riskas long as there is greater exposure to ionizing radiation, even if there are no accidents or more intense exposure through maintenance work. Paradoxically, the activity of nuclear power plants, which can cause cancer, also serves to generate the basis of the medicine to cure it. And we are not talking about a potentially distant study, but rather something that can already be materialized. In fact, the United Kingdom has already taken a step forward to transform some of its radioactive waste into anti-cancer medication. The world’s first lead-212 radiopharmaceutical ecosystem. Because in the UK they have closed an agreement between the public body Nuclear Decommissioning Authority and the biotechnology company Bicycle Therapeutics for which the latter will have 400 tons of reprocessed uranium to extract the valuable (for the medical industry) lead – 212 for 15 years. Behind Bicycle is Sir Greg Winter, co-founder of the company and winner of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2018. This will provide them with the infrastructure to create the world’s first end-to-end lead-212 radiopharmaceutical ecosystem, from discovery to commercial supply. So explains it Mike Hannay, Chief Product and Supply Chain Officer at Bicycle Therapeutics. The benefits of lead – 212. Lead – 212 is an isotope used in therapeutic contexts thanks to its particular decay properties, so that it emits both alpha and beta particles. While the former provide high-energy, short-range cytotoxicity, the latter have a more extended range, targeting micro-metastasis. In a simplified way, this medically applicable isotope is essential for precision treatments against tumors resistant to other therapies. Thus, it carries radiation and acts directly on cancer cells to destroy tumors, minimizing the damage to the surrounding healthy tissue. This type of technique offers promising results in prostate cancers and neuroendocrine tumors of organs such as the intestine or pancreas. Extracting lead-212 is an arduous task. Converting the waste from nuclear power plants into cancer treatments seems like a fantastic idea for two reasons: because of the cure for cancer itself and the problem of dealing with radioactive waste, one of the great challenges faced by these energy industries, which have also explored other avenues such as take advantage of the remaining energy. But getting here has not been easy: the extraction process of this isotope has been carried out by the United Kingdom National Nuclear Laboratory (UKNNL) with a complex chemical process that requires the isolation of scandalously small quantities of the precursor material from the used nuclear fuel. Thus, first the Thorium-228 is extracted from the reprocessed uranium to later process it into Radium-224. It is then loaded into a lead-212 generator that has been custom-made for Bicycle Therapeutics’ needs by US company SpectronRx. This is a continuous regeneration, producing enough lead-212 to deliver tens of thousands of doses of precision therapy per year. The laboratory explains that the critical part is in the beginning: “The initial precursor material extracted is comparable to finding a single drop of water in an Olympic swimming pool.” From that minute amount, an even smaller fraction of lead-212 is separated. First discover the universe, then cure cancer. In addition to this unexpected use of nuclear power plant waste, in recent weeks a group of researchers from the University of York have evidenced in a study that the intense radiation captured in the beam absorbers of particle accelerators could be reused to produce materials used in cancer therapies. Those particle accelerators They are used, among other things, in experiments to discover the matter of which the universe is composed. In Xataka | The rarest element on Earth aims to cure cancer. And Europe is already accelerating its production In Xataka | We have been believing that bacteria are a weapon against tumors for 150 years. And finally we have discovered how Cover | Jakub Zerdzicki and Ivan S

The European Bizum wants to be working next Christmas, but first a problem must be resolved. One of power sharing

December 17, 2025 by usatoday24

“Wow, but if it gives me the option to pay with Bizum, how cool.” That was my expression a few months ago when in an online purchase the online store offered me to pay directly like this. No debit or credit card, no Google Pay. With a Bizum. The instant payment system that is triumphing in Spain is so good that What we want is for it to work further. And that is precisely what the banking entities of the European Union want, who saw a “European Bizum” as a great idea. There’s just one problem. Who will control it. The European Bizum is approaching The European Central Bank he has been fighting for five years for that application that does the same as Bizum but throughout Europe. There was a major power struggle here with two large factions. On the one hand, the consortium Spain-Italy-Portugal. On the other, that of France-Germany-Belgium-Holland, who wanted to impose its own Bizum, called Wero. Fortunately, in recent months we have seen how the positions of both consortiums have become closer and the unification now seems almost definitive. This is what they indicate in five dayswhere they quote “market sources” who talk about the agreement being signed in early 2026. The European Bizum should start operating at the end of next year if everything goes as expected. This system may not be a new application, as requested by the French and German entities, but rather a system that interconnects existing ones. It is a somewhat more confusing solution but also more practical, because users will not have to change apps. For example, a Spanish user will be able to send a Bizum to a German at no cost, and the German will receive that money in his Wero app in a way that is transparent to him. The European banks participating in the negotiations have reached an agreement to establish a new company that will be the owner of this interconnection technology. There was talk of applying certain commissions, “but it was finally rejected in favor of a multilateral network.” Power distribution And there is the new challenge: Who is in charge in this new society? The distribution of power is now the great unknown, and there are several options. On the one hand, each national platform receives practically the same participation. On the other hand, the distribution should be made based on the volume of each country and then corrected. The Bizum model seems like it can also be applied to that pan-European solution. It is interesting to realize that as explained in the economic newspaper, the owners of Bizum are 22 Spanish banks, among which the participation varies: Caixabank: 25% Santander: 21% BBVA: 18% Sabadell: 12% Other minority banks such as Unicaja, Bankinter or Cajamar have lower participations, but Bizum’s statutes establish that no bank can have more than 25% participation. Do we need a digital euro? Europe has been looking for a solution for some time that would allow it to mitigate its dependence on the two great giants of electronic payments: Visa and Mastercard. The European Payments Initiativecreated in 2020 by 16 banking entities, had precisely the objective of creating a European interbank network that competed with these platforms and with others such as PayPal. And little by little it has been proven that Bizum was precisely a great candidate to achieve this. The application, with more than 30 million users in Spain, has not stopped growing in benefits and alliances like the one a year ago they signed with Revolut. There are still other obstacles in the creation of this European Bizum. For example, building a common deposit guarantee fund to deal with large US entities. It does not seem that this is going to be a major impediment to the implementation of the pan-European alternative, and that makes us wonder what happens now with the digital euro. The European Central Bank (ECB) has been designing the design of this digital asset for years. There have also been important movements in that sense, and if the European regulations are approved in 2026, there will be a pilot starting in 2027. The EU seems to want to be ready for a possible first broadcast in 2029. However, that European Bizum will theoretically solve part of what the digital euro wants to achieve, so does it make sense? It is very likelyespecially since the digital euro is a legal tender issued by the ECB. It is not just a way to transfer money, but a digital form of official money itself. Both alternatives can coexist, and this European Bizum may be the best way to promote the use of the digital euro. In Xataka | The Treasury confirms it: payments for dinner and gifts to your friends through Bizum do not go to the Tax Agency

Drones are disguising themselves as Russian soldiers, and it’s working

December 12, 2025 by usatoday24

More than three years after the start of the Russian invasion, the war in Ukraine has transformed into a conflict that seems have no end in sight, trapped in a logic slow wear and cumulative in which each meter gained costs weeks of combat and a constant flow of resources. In this scenario, the border between high military technology and elemental ingenuity to survive has been blurring: drones with AI coexist with improvised traps, robots armed with solutions born of scarcity, and the most advanced innovation It is mixed with the raw creativity of those who fight every day to stay alive. Thus, Ukraine has just found something: speakers. Against a higher power. The Ukrainian command assumes that the conflict has become a war of attrition in which Russia part with advantage structural by population, industry and replacement capacity, so the strategy involves maximizing enemy losses while minimizing one’s own. Oleksandr Syrskyi, Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, has described recently made this approach clear: Ukraine cannot win by volume, but it can do so by constantly raising the human and material cost that Moscow must pay to advance, and to do so it has turned unmanned systems into the central axis of its way of fighting, both on a tactical and psychological level. Drones that attack the mind. One of the most striking innovations is the use of drones equipped with speakersused not to directly destroy but to deceive and wear down the enemy. These drones reproduce military vehicle sounds that simulate imminent attacks, forcing Russian units to deploy reconnaissance drones and single-use loitering munitions that cannot be recovered, also revealing their positions. The exchange is radically asymmetric: Ukraine uses a cheap and reusable system to force the adversary to waste valuable and limited resources. The voice in Russian. The most disturbing variant of this tactic takes psychological warfare to a new level, with drones that emit Russian recordings of screams for help, moans or desperate, shocking calls for help. In essence, the drones are disguising themselves as Russian recruits. In a front saturated with tension, these voices explode basic human reflexes and they push Russian soldiers to leave safe positions to check the source of the sound, at which point they are exposed to artillery or attack drones already prepared. It’s not just about killing more, it’s about inducing errors, eroding trust, and turning compassion into tactical vulnerability. The climate in favor. It we have counted before. The thick fog, the freezing rain and the wind have reduced the effectiveness of Ukrainian FPV drones in key sectors, enabling recent Russian advances, but the response has been integrate aerial drones with ground robots hidden in approach routes. These systems detect the passage of vehicles enemies and transmit precise data to operators who position attack drones at low altitudeusing the fog itself as cover and waiting in ambush until the objective enters the impact zone, a solution that has proven to be effective in stopping armor without exposing infantry. Armed robots so as not to risk. The use of armed unmanned ground vehicles illustrates the extent to which Ukraine seeks to replace soldiers with machines in lethal missions, as demonstrated by the use Droid TW 12.7equipped with a heavy machine gun M2 Browning. counted this week Insider an example. It happened in a night ambush, when this system was able to destroy a transport Russian armored vehicle MT-LBpierce its armor, incapacitate the crew and eliminate the transported infantry, showing that these UGVs are no longer experiments, but combat tools designed to take risks that previously fell on people. Extreme ingenuity where there is no margin. Constant pressure and supply shortages have reinforced a culture of improvisation in which damaged drones are reused like explosive traps, buildings they become in improvised weapons and unexploded Russian ammunition launches again against enemy trenches. This ingenuity not only maximizes resources, but also fits with the general logic of attrition: each recovered object and each improvised trick reduces logistical dependence and maintains offensive capacity even in adverse conditions. Laboratory of the future. In the end, this entire set of tactics relies on a Ukrainian industry that has accelerated the development of drones with better navigation, computer vision, artificial intelligence-assisted control and swarming capabilities, sending them quickly to the front to be tested in real combat. The result is a continuous cycle of adaptation in which technology and doctrine they evolve togetherturning the front into a test bed (it has been for virtually three years) that is not only shaping the course of the current war, but also the way future conflicts will be fought. Image | RawPixel In Xataka | The new episode of terror in Ukraine does not involve missiles or drones: it involves leaving a city without cell phones In Xataka | Shahed drones were a piece of cake for Ukraine’s helicopters. Russia has just transformed them into its biggest nightmare

from working 120 hours to thinking that in 20 years work will be optional

December 2, 2025 by usatoday24

Elon Musk gained his reputation as a tireless worker when became public that his days at Tesla stretched beyond 120 hours a week and that he even slept in his office at the Austin gigafactory during the production crisis of Model 3. However, the millionaire seems to have changed his mind upon seeing the evolution of AI and has surprised the world with a futuristic vision about work: “working will be optional,” assured the richest person in the world in a recent speech at an investor forum in Saudi Arabia. From 996 to “working is optional”. Elon Musk, famous for defending 80-hour days to achieve great goals, published a message in November 2018 on his social network wrote the millionaire In an interview on the podcast ‘People by WTF’ by Nikil Kamath, Musk has changed his mind and has come to believe that, in a period of “between 10 and 20 years, work will be optional. Like a hobby” thanks to the increase in productivity promised by the evolution of AI and the progressive arrival of humanoid robots like Optimus that Tesla is developing. In his talk with Kamath, Musk compared working to growing vegetables in your own garden: “You can grow your own vegetables in your garden or you can go to the store to buy them. It’s much harder to grow your own vegetables. But some people like to grow their vegetables, and that’s fine. But it will be optional, that way, is my prediction,” said the Tesla CEO. Its formula: universal income. Musk believes that a universal income It will cover all the basic expenses of the population, eliminating the need for mandatory employment. This would allow people to live in the countryside or the city without depending on a job near an office. The businessman added: “You won’t have to be in a city for a job. If you can think of it, you can have it, that will be the future.” This vision of a population financed by a universal basic income aligns with the experiments with basic income funded by Sam Altman, former founding partner of OpenAI and Musk’s current rival. The future of AI comes together. With this change of heart regarding the workday, Elon Musk aligns himself with figures like Bill Gates, who predict that AI will automate almost everything and lead to three-day work weeks in less than a decade. Eric Yuan, CEO of Zoom, also pointed out in an interview with The New York Timesto the theory of the three-day week thanks to the increase in productivity. Jensen Huang, CEO of Nvidia, it coincided a few days ago with Musk on stage at the Saudi Arabia Investor Forum. There he agreed with the Tesla CEO’s postulate. Huang has long argued that AI will boost the four-day work week, promoting idea generation and projects beyond current capabilities. AI is a concern for Gen Z. While the predictions of technological CEOs come true, the reality is that the evolution of AI has become a serious concern for young people of generation Z who are starting your working career. The first data They already point out that some large companies are reducing hiring in entry-level positions, which were usually occupied by recent graduates. A recent survey from the Deutsche Bank Research Institute revealed that generation Z was “very concerned” about AI stealing job opportunities. As the question moves to older generations, that concern fades away. In Xataka | We still don’t have a four-day week and there are already CEOs dreaming of the next level: working only three days Image | Flickr (Gage Skidmore)

allow retirees to continue working

October 18, 2025 by usatoday24

In September 2023, Europe turned in unison to Germany. What was normally one of the most solid economies in the euro zone was sounding the alarm: adding greater life expectancy to a demographic scenario of an inverted pyramid and an inflationary context left a very unpromising outlook for who are going to retire soon. In fact, the system was bringing retirees back to look for work to supplement pensions. Two years later things have not improved, so the government has normalized them. A structural turn. The Government of Friedrich Merz has put a clear and pragmatic proposal on the table: allowing retirees who decide to continue working receive up to 2,000 euros per month tax-free, a measure (the so-called “active pension plan”) designed to tackle the growing labor shortage that grips Europe’s largest economy. The initiative is part of the package of reforms that the Executive has sold as his “autumn of reforms” and, according to the legislative draft in hands of the Financial Timeswill come into force on January 1. The coalition with the Social Democrats is preparing to approve it with the argument of retaining experience and knowledge in companies and increasing the employment rate in a country that faces one of the most severe demographic transitions on the continent. What is offered and what is maintained. The measure exempts taxes up to 2,000 euros per month of additional labor income for retired people, but it does not eliminate contributions: employees and employers will continue to pay social contributions on those salaries, which (according to the Executive) will help strengthen healthcare and pension finances while improving the liquidity of companies with senior experience. The already existing advantages for those who opt for early retirement (the legal age It’s still 67 years oldwith incentives to retire at 63). The change is intended, rather, to offer a tax incentive so that those who can and want to prolong their working life do so. Public cost and projections. The Government itself estimates that the renunciation of collecting taxes for this incentive will cost around 890 million euros per year since its entry into force, a figure that some institutes consider optimistic: the IW Institute calculates a higher annual cost close to 1.4 billion and places the potential universe of beneficiaries at around 340,000 people. Economists such as Holger Schmieding warn, however, that the net impact could turn positive in two or three years if the increase in economic activity and contributions compensates for the initial tax loss, in addition to the possible “psychological effect” of socially valuing the contribution of the elderly. International lessons. The Government looks, among other examplesto Greece: when Athens allowed retirees keep their pension full and were additionally taxed at a reduced rate (10%) for their labor income, retired workers went from 35,000 in 2023 to more than 250,000 in September of the following year, a jump that illustrates the power of tax incentives to mobilize labor supply in older groups. That experience is used in Berlin as a sign that politics can workalthough the scale, work structures and employment cultures differ. Consequences in the labor market. The gesture aims to attack several structural symptoms: Germany today records some of the average working hours shortest in the OECD and marked growth from part-time work (which now reaches 30% of the workforce, more than double what it was at the beginning of the nineties). The policy aims to both increase effective hours and retain human capital that would otherwise escape companies. Keep staff on staff senior can help reduce bottlenecks in sectors with a shortage of qualifications and facilitate the transfer of know-how, but it also poses the challenge of adapting positions, ergonomics and internal policies to an older workforce. Political and economic risks. The main risk it’s double: On the one hand, the measure may penalize young people and employees in early career stages if companies choose to retain positions with cheaper payrolls and more experienced workers. On the other hand, the Executive’s fiscal estimate could fall short if membership is high, putting pressure on public accounts at a time when the cost of social systems is already putting pressure on the budget. Besides, recalled the Times that there is a dimension of equity and public narrative: promoting people to work longer is politically sensitive when there are sectors with precarious employment or stagnant wages. Pragmatism with doubts. Ultimately, the plan to allow 2,000 euros tax free to working retirees is, in essence, a pragmatic and technocratic response to a demographic shock and the lack of skilled labor: seeks to monetize experience, sustain contributions and gain economic muscle without resorting solely to mass immigration or abrupt increases in working hours. Yet, your success will depend the magnitude of the accession, how it is combined with other labor policies (training, conciliation, redistribution of part-time employment) and the honesty of the fiscal projections: if the reception is high, the cost could approach the most pessimistic figures, and if it is moderate, the initiative can become a respectable exercise in institutional adjustment that contributes to lengthening the active life of many and partially mitigating the bill of aging. An unknown scenario that Japan also considers. Image | Pexels, Public Domain In Xataka | A disturbing idea has begun to gain strength in France and Germany: the welfare state is no longer sustainable In Xataka | It is not that Germany is promoting the four-day work day, it is that it is the country that works the fewest hours per year

Working remotely for another country is not so simple

October 15, 2025 by usatoday24

A programmer’s innocent question about the availability of remote positions on a development platform in Spain has sparked an interesting international debate in X about a reality of the Spanish labor market that many were unaware of: those companies who hire in Spaineven if they are remote, must pay taxes in Spain. The problem is that not everyone can bear that additional cost. A complicated labor market A Spanish software developer asked in X to the CEO of Vercela cloud infrastructure platform of Argentine origin, on the availability of vacancies in Spain since, when carrying out the search, they only appeared in Germany and the United Kingdom, when in the past they had hired in Spain. The manager’s response It was simple, but it hid a reality that many companies that want to hire engineers and programmers in Spain face: “Unfortunately, we had to leave Spain; it was incredibly difficult to hire staff and expand our company there. We tried!” The expert analyst of technological employment trends, Gergely Orosz, witness to the conversation, pointed out some of the difficulties that companies that want to hire in other countries find, even if it is a remote work agreement:”(…) explains why ‘remote’ positions are often ‘remote in country X’. When a company employs someone who works remotely in country Y, they must follow the country’s regulations and following those regulations can be costly and time-consuming. Present rigid procedures, mandatory processes with a lot of paperwork, etc. “Most American companies are baffled by these requirements in European countries,” the analyst wrote. You hire in Spain, you pay taxes in Spain Spanish and international legislation, described in article 15 of the Tax Agreement on Income and Wealthdoes not make distinctions between remote or in-person hiring. Therefore, a foreign company that wants to hire someone with tax residence in Spain and who is going to work remotely from the country, must meet exactly the same tax obligations and requirements What if you hire her to go to a physical workplace every day. The problem, to hire someone in Spain, is that the company needs to be registered with Social Security to pay contributions, and have a Tax Identification Number. That is, it is necessary to be a natural or legal person in Spain. This implies that the company should have a tax representative in the country or what is called Permanent establishment. In other words, the foreign company must have a headquarters based in Spain to channel through it hiring in Spanish territory and comply with tax and labor obligations. Tap on the image to go to the original message As entrepreneur and developer David Bonilla points out in a message response thread from the founder of Vercel, there are several options for hiring in Spain, but none of them are easy for companies or workers, especially if they do not have the capacity to open a headquarters (or subsidiary, branch, permanent establishment or any other legal figure of representation) in Spain. The risk of going from worker to “headquarters” Once the headquarters option has been ruled out, the alternatives result in the employee becoming a service company by becoming self-employed or by establishing a limited company and billing its services to the foreign company as a commercial activity, not labor. However, that would mean walking on a knife’s edge for two reasons: the first is that if there is not a very clear definition of the commercial terms and conditions, the relationship can be interpreted as signs of employmentwhich brings us to the figure of the false self-employed. On the other hand, the Tax Agency could consider that these self-employed workers or companies act as a subsidiary of the company to which they invoice, so they must respond not only for their activity, but also for that of the “parent” company. On the other hand, it is also possible to do it by intermediary recruitment platforms as Deel either remote. These companies act as a bridge between the worker and the companies, preventing the contractor from having to assume all the tax procedures. Therefore, in some way, despite working for the company that contracts the service, from an administrative point of view you will really be working for the intermediary that provides the service. The use of these intermediaries (Employer of Record or EOR) increases the labor cost bill by between 10% and 20%, which leaves Spanish employees in a less competitive position with respect to other countries. In general terms, the difficulties that the CEO of Vercel pointed out for its deployment in Spain is that, to hire a single person in Spain and remotely, they need to comply with the same requirements as for hiring 1,000 employees. If the company’s priority is not to be present in the Spanish market, the implementation effort to hire one or more people is not worth it. This implies that it is conditional to hire in Spain, even if it is for work remotely from Spainbecause that company already has infrastructure in the country. This tax and labor policy is much more lax in countries like the US, the United Kingdom or India, which is why it is much more common for large technology companies to hire programmers and remote employees in those markets. In Xataka | Finding a job had always been a good way to escape poverty: in Spain it is no longer true Image | Unsplash (Magnus Andersson, Thammy Kolb)

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