It’s so easy to see the pink Klarna logo guiding you when you browse Asos that it’s hard to resist the rapture of their marketing. And even more difficult is not to jump on his bandwagon when you know the tempting offer he has for you: an option to buy what you want now and pay for it later. Generations Z and millennials are throwing themselves into the arms of new loan apps for online purchases and boast about it on TikTok, further enlarging a chain that does not stop growing. But the “buy now, pay later” phenomenon is drawing…
Author: Ezra
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The squats they have already become a summer classic. Despite the fact that statistics tend to be elusive, the shadow of the occupation hovers over the front pages of the media and casual conversations. The most striking case in recent months has been carried out by an 89-year-old woman living in Madrid, a Moroccan immigrant and one of the most famous “intermediary” groups in the country, Desokupa. With an ending far removed from the amplified story on social networks. The rumor. Widely spread by some media, it read like this: a young Moroccan caregiver of a 90-year-old woman, Carmen Franquelo,…
Extreme heat a reality. This summer, brutal temperatures scorched hot spots in North Africa and southern Europe. Spain broke historical temperature records of 47 ºC, just three below the overall European record. Climatologists have been warning us for decades about the heated future that awaits us. Many studies suggest that heat waves are up to seven times more likely to occur between now and 2050, and 21 times more likely between 2051 and 2080. If what is coming is presented like this, our way of life will have to change, adapt. Not just buildings, but also devices, vehicles and industry.…
Who is more dependent on whom? The platforms of its great stars, of the communicators that draw massive audiences; Or the stars of the platforms, the ecosystem that allows them to grow and achieve fame? On social media, the question has almost always been resolved in favor of platforms. Twitter can afford to live without a journalist who has become famous thanks to the social network; not the great journalist. The same can be said for Instagram and its influencers. But what about the streamers? A strike. More than 5,000 streamers Americans yesterday paralyzed all their broadcasts on Twitch. The…
Millions of Spanish households have seen a drastic increase in the price of electricity in recent months. The reasons are varied: from a tariff reform that has put the accent on consumption segments to the rise in prices of raw materials, mainly gas, from which combined cycle plants are supplied. As in so many other occasions, it is not something exclusive to Spain. Europe is experiencing the same escalation. Comparing. Earlier this week the price of a megawatt hour (MWh), the standard used by the industry to estimate the real cost of electricity (excluding taxes, fees and charges), reached a…
If you’ve ever walked through a museum or art gallery, you may have noticed that much of the works on display are fully on display. In fact, with the exception of some of the most famous in the world, you could easily fall and damage some of the most valuable paintings or sculptures in the world. Let’s say you do it on a priceless one, an irreplaceable one. What would happen to you? Probably nothing. But each case is a world. Not for breaking three fingers of a Bonaparte. Exactly one year ago, an Austrian tourist in Italy ripped three…
Sure the name of Ningbo-Zhousan does not tell you anything, but it is very likely that it comes from there a good percentage of the things made in China that you have in your house. Ningbo-Zhousan, which overlooks the East China Sea about 200 km south of Shanghai, is the second busiest port in China. He only handles the annual equivalent of some 29 million six meter high containers. At the time of writing (August 18, 2021), it has more than 50 ships waiting to dock. That’s because the Ningbo-Meishan terminal, which handles about a fifth of the port’s total…
An earlier version of this article was published in 2017. You’re watching a movie or a series and, boom, all of a sudden the plot starts to screech at you. You’re about to give it a bad grade when you go to register it on Sensacine or Letterboxd. Why? Because the work has just fallen into a trite resource (that the virginal girl is the last to die in a horror movie, that the solution in a superhero movie arrives as if by magic at the last minute or that the butler has been the murderer during all this time)…
During decades it was thought that our metabolisms were beginning to slow drastically from the moment we are 20 years old. Now a revealing study has shown that our metabolism, also known as energy expenditure, remains relatively stable between the ages of 20 and 60, before starting to slow down later in life. The researchers in this meta-analysis analyzed pre-existing and 29-country studies on energy expenditure. Total, analyzed data from nearly 6,400 people from birth to 95 years of age. Each study measured energy expenditure using the same method, that of “double labeled water.” This method involves participants drinking a…