The facts: Ceuta has a population of a little less than 90,000 inhabitants. Between 1995 and 2025, 85,000 people have arrived there irregularly. It has a population density of 4,500 inhab./km². An area of almost 20 km². And a GDP/capita of €23,000 (Spain, €34,190; Morocco, €4,600). The population with Moroccan nationality in Ceuta is 12%. The Muslim population, 45%. (In 1970 they were 10%.) The proportion of income coming from the General State Administration is 47%.Based on this reality and evolution, the future situation is foreseeable. 50% of the income is public. Little wealth is generated from private activity. The income is 68% of the Spanish one and five times the Moroccan one, which ensures intense irregular immigration destined for Ceuta or in transit to the EU.Spain's military and economic superiority over Morocco is indisputable, but the weapon of demography is an advantage for Morocco. The population versus the army: the Green March 50 years ago and the invasion of Ceuta a few weeks ago. Human life does not have, in Morocco, the same importance as in Europe.It is hard to understand why, in the long term, it is necessary to maintain Ceuta as a Spanish enclave in Morocco (except for the historical reason and the will to protect the population). There is no economic motivation. Spain, in case of conflict –and despite its military and economic superiority– would have two problems: 1) Morocco's demographic weapon (the population is used for political ends despite the risk it may pose to them). 2) An armed conflict would produce a rift in Spanish society that would be difficult to resolve (the right would probably be in favor and the left, probably, against). Morocco knows this and exploits it. Any alternative that is proposed in the short term must establish the Spanish nature of Ceuta. We cannot get out of one problem and enter another.

Europe does not have its own chip technology. Therefore, it is dependent on the technology of the United States or China, but the latter is not an option for industrial purposes for geopolitical reasons. Existing technologies, and in particular programming codes, are the property of private companies, Nvidia, Intel, and others. Using their code means losing technological independence and depending on them commercially and technically. It is, therefore, not an option.A few years ago, the University of Berkeley developed an open-source code with universal access, RISC-V. Europe is promoting it through the DARE program because it eliminates proprietary limitations. It is likely that for this reason RISC-V will become the universal code of the EU, and perhaps the world, in the short term, Brazil, India, the EU, except for the USA and China.Openchip is a public-private company that has a project of approximately 500 million euros and seven years of duration on the RISC-V code. It was created by a private partner, GTD, specialized in the field of embedded software, rockets and satellites of the ESA – the European Space Agency –, and the public entity BSC – Barcelona Supercomputing Center –, a successful creation of doctor Mateo Valero, eminent professor at the UPC. Openchip's industrial objective is to design and prototype general-purpose chips, from the most sophisticated, HPC (high performance computing), for supercomputers, to standard ones, for industrial use. Openchip will be a fablesscompany, without a factory, which will subcontract its manufacturing to third parties based on the prototypes.The European Commission has recognised the project as important and classified it as an IPCEI (Important Project of Common European Interest). It has contributed 111 million in non-reimbursable funds on the grounds that the initial risk of the project made it unfeasible to obtain private funds in the capital market to finance it. The Generalitat, understanding the high technical and industrial value of the project, has provided significant funds as a loan. This stage has been completed with success after 24 months, and the first chip, BER10, is already available.The management team comes in part from Intel. The CEO is a Catalan with twenty years of experience in the US. The company has gathered 350 engineers with delegations in six EU member states – Ireland, Germany, France, Poland, Italy, and Spain – in just two years. The conclusion is that the first stage of the project has been successfully completed in record time and, therefore, the foundations for future development are solid.The company is carrying out a capital increase of approximately 200 million euros, approximately 50% public and 50% private. The private partner can be an investment fund or ACS, a leading industrial company, which will also be a client, because it has an important data center project. The public partner is SETT, an investment company of the Ministry of Digital Transformation. The increase will cover the capital needs until Openchip becomes profitable, once the investments are amortized, and will cover the financial needs in the next two years that the project requires. Openchip must be capable of designing chips that compete with all market products, even those of the commercial leader Nvidia; not yet, but within four or five years.This expansion will consolidate the project if, as planned, the strategic direction that GTD and BSC have maintained until now at Openchip is maintained for the new reference partners, the new private investor and SETT as a public partner. The course should not be changed, the current one should be maintained. That is, the general and non-restrictive capacity to generate company products, technological excellence, diversification and, ultimately, the will to establish itself as the first chip design and prototyping company in Southern Europe. This strategic objective that has brought Openchip to where it is today must not be lost: in the EU among the leaders in the chip design sector.The fact that the developed technology is based on an open and public code like RISC-V has generated for Openchip the possibility of having worldwide clients without limitations of use or application. It has closed an agreement with a Japanese company with such a solid and deep-rooted technical tradition as NEC, to produce the chips it will need in the future for its processors, which will become the axis of its industrial activity.This project, now a company, is a paradigmatic example of a series of technical and industrial successes. a) Adopt the open and free RISC-V code for development. b) Select suitable and experienced personnel, consistent in their abilities and specialities. c) Select a top-level management team, with the appropriate technical, commercial, and industrial capabilities. d) Have an industrial partner with market experience, GTD, and a public one, BSC, with adequate technological experience, who can transfer knowledge without the long periods needed to do so. e) Develop a local capacity, Barcelona, Catalonia, and Spain, but with a European scope. f) Know how to take advantage of European funds for technical development and, ultimately, position oneself appropriately in the market, both in the commercial and product scope as well as in the industrial one.If all this continues to happen, Openchip will be a leader in chips in Europe, covering a European deficiency that is both technical and structural. More capital and more resources will be needed, but success attracts. It will not be difficult to achieve, once the success of the first prototypes currently under development has been demonstrated. The occasion is this, achieved through acumen, knowledge, and also luck. This is why the opportunity is singular and unique. We must know how to take advantage of it and continue this chain of successes. Now is a critical moment that must be overcome. There is no reason to doubt it, but we must point out what has been done well to continue doing it the same way. Success lies in continuing what has been done for more than two years.

In my previous article there were ideas left in the drawer because there wasn't enough space to address them. My intention was to propose practical solutions because having plans is essential for moving forward. Let's continue.The annual increase in the cost of public healthcare is 5-6%, while the Generalitat's overall spending grows by 3%. The population is aging and requires more attention. Healthcare professionals have increased their professional level. New technologies derived from bio sciences –more specific– are more effective, but also more expensive. The efficiency of the Catalan health system is due, in part, to the low salaries of medical staff, who, however, treat patients with a professionalism and care not found in any other member state of the European Union.Universal public healthcare is an asset that generates well-being and social cohesion, and that preserves the essence of the service that its creators wanted and achieved. The first universal health system was created in Prussia in 1880 by Bismarck, a visionary conservative who feared the decomposition of the Reich by socialism and the proletarian masses, at that time strong and organized due to the industrial revolution. To avoid this, Bismarck adopted, for health, socialist principles. The system was based on funding from contributions paid by employers and workers as part of their wages.In 1941, Churchill asked William Beveridge to plan a universal health system for after the war, to be financed through taxes. When Labour won the elections in 1945, Prime Minister Clement Attlee implemented the system that Churchill had imagined. It was a success, a pioneer in Europe. The Spanish system is based on this structure.Catalan healthcare was an invention of Convergència. The party intended to strengthen and consolidate a society that had emerged from the dictatorship with “scars”, but also with the will to create a society for the new political environment where it was “Catalan whoever lives and works in Catalonia”. Health became an autonomous competence. Trias planned it, Ribó's left supported it and the government's work was completed... Today we have the result.Time passes, and the precious asset we have today —few will argue that the Catalan health system is not excellent— requires increasing funds to maintain the current quality level. It also needs a reform of the system to make it more efficient and reduce spending without affecting services. The problem with our health system is its cost, and reforms must be aimed at containing it. The system has an attribute that makes it unique: the combination of the staff's professionalism with a public-private mix – private entities, such as La Caixa, and public ones, such as universities, hospitals, and research centers, which maintain quality and innovation as their hallmarks –. Everyone wants to be treated by the public health system in case of serious illness.

We have serious problems in Catalonia and Spain. And we have arrived where we are because we have not mobilized identified solutions. Planning problems does not solve them, but it creates hope for a solution; it changes the perception of them. Let's list the present problems:Housing: price and accessibility. Education: deterioration of quality and conflict with teachers. Commuter rail: poor service and unresolved management problems, excessive unionism and lack of investment. Environment and agriculture: climate change, fires, outdated food supply chain, excessive bureaucracy. Distribution of public funding between autonomous communities and the central government: insufficient resources for autonomous communities with the largest part of current expenditure. Judiciary: in conflict with the executive and legislative branches. For these problems there are solutions.Housing. Municipalities should be able to transfer land to autonomous communities for 30 years, with the possibility of purchase at the end of the transfer. A public-private company (50%) builds and rents. Public capital provides a 30-year loan at 3%. Private capital, an investment with a 5% indexed remuneration. An 80 m² or 100 m² dwelling built on land transferred by a municipality costs approximately €150,000. The annual costs of a property under these conditions would amount to €7,500: €1,250 for loan interest; €2,500 for capital repayment, and €3,750 for the private investor's dividend.The annual income of a low-to-middle income family, after deducting income tax, is €25,000. Housing costs should be less than 30% of income: €7,500/year. It fits. This is the solution adopted in Austria – 100 years ago – and in the Netherlands – 40 years ago.Education. Resolving the conflict requires management and direction, not bureaucratic practices. The problem is not money – there has been an increase in teacher remuneration – nor the reduction in teacher-student ratios, which have decreased. The problem is the management of schools and the improvement of teacher training: the scientific component must be increased to promote an increase in STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) vocations. Today, these studies represent 18% of university students, when they should represent at least 21%, to maintain harmonious development with R&D policies and the modernization of the economy. And students decide what to study while they are in secondary school.In the 2024-2025 academic year, there were approximately 39,000 primary and early childhood teachers in Catalonia, and around 43,000 in secondary and post-compulsory education. After the agreed-upon reforms, this represents an annual expenditure of 5.9 billion euros, to which 2.2 billion must be added for subsidized education. The problem is not economic: there has never been so much money. The negotiation has been union-based and not professional. The authority of school principals is reduced while the selection and promotion of teachers becomes more rigid; the opposite of what is needed. Having teachers as civil servants, and discontented, is a mistake. We are harming ourselves on an issue that is our future. The strength of Catalonia, Spain, and Europe lies in its people, and not excelling in education has a high cost. We are seeing it.Rodalies. The service is bad. In Catalonia there are two networks, with two different gauges that facilitate disintegration: the UIC gauge – which, in communicating Catalonia with Spain and France, must be the responsibility of the central government – and the Iberian gauge. Only commuter and regional trains (and freight that will cease to run in the future) run on this second network. There is an investment deficit of 15,000 millions of euros in this network over 40 years. If we add the new coast line – the current one is precarious – and the garages and workshops, the necessary investment is 20 billion euros. An expense of 2 billion euros over ten years is affordable.Renfe and Adif must be eliminated from Commuter and regional services. They are public companies of the central government, controlled by a corporate union, and in which the maintenance of union power will always be superior to the improvement of the service. This has been seen in recent months. This union, which defends its interests to the detriment of citizens', has fewer than 1,000 members in Catalonia. Overcoming this resistance to establish a new company to manage regional and commuter trains is feasible, despite union opposition. It is better to hire new staff than to "convert" the current ones. Those who do not wish to can stay at Renfe and Adif.An easy and urgent initiative is a train traffic information service that reaches users' mobile phones and allows them to know, in real time, the actual train schedules for that day. It would save thousands of hours for citizens and reduce the annoyance of not knowing when trains will arrive at stations. With current technology, the cost is practically nil.Environment and farming. We need a change in food production to improve efficiency and reduce the impact on the environment. We must increase plant production over animal production, which consumes more water and pollutes more. Eating habits cannot be changed suddenly, but they can be changed progressively with a 20-year policy.Financing. The new financing plan for the Autonomous Communities, pending approval, involves a transfer of €21,000 million per year from the central government to the communities. It is not enough, but it is a step in the right direction. If we don't do it, it will be for reasons of "narrow path" policy.Judiciary. There are more than 5,000 judges in Spain. How is it possible that there are almost no sanctions for inappropriate conduct? Although the majority are competent and carry out their activities professionally, it is not possible for everyone to always do everything well in a group of this size. A reform of the system is necessary, which, today, is politically impossible.I will leave for another article the issue of healthcare – a high-quality but overloaded and unsustainable service, a future problem that needs to be addressed now – and tourism – excessive concentration in peak months, need to reorient the offer towards less quantity and higher quality–. For the rest, it is clear that in many areas – not all – what needs to be done can be done. Politics must serve to solve problems, not to argue. Voters must be clear about this.

It has always been a source of inspiration for artists to play with time and the impossibility of returning to the past. In In Search of Lost Time, a long, slow novel with exquisite prose, Marcel Proust recalls his childhood. It is the evocation that makes the story attractive, that makes it unique, that transports the reader to a past that no longer exists, but which can still be imagined and dreamed of.Let's think of a long line. At one end are subatomic particles, and at the opposite end, the universe, distances measured in light-years, and black holes – concentrations of mass with such gravitational pull that not even light can escape them. Until the last century, only a part of the reality represented on this line was known to us: we did not have the technical means to observe the very small or the very large.Now, however, we even know that time slows down in the presence of mass. It is an experimentally proven fact: for the man who lives in the mountains, further from the mass of the Earth, time passes more quickly than for the one who lives on the plain. When we move at high speed, time also changes: it slows down. If we could travel in a spaceship at the speed of light, we could explore the universe without time passing for us. The comparison of two clocks—one at rest on Earth and the other orbiting at high speed, between 20,000 and 30,000 km/h, in an artificial satellite—shows that time shrinks and stretches. It has ceased to be a fixed and universal constant.Albert Einstein formulated it in the theory of relativity years before being able to prove it; the ability to understand before seeing constitutes the essence of scientific thought. The physicist postulated that the only universal constant is not time or space, as was believed until then, but the speed of light. And he raised a problem that was more philosophical than physical: what is the meaning of now and later if for each of us time is different?Until the 18th century, there were two predominant views regarding time. For Aristotle, it was the measure of change: without events, time did not exist. For Isaac Newton, time was immutable, independent, and constant: without changes, time flowed at a constant speed. The principles that Newton formulated in the 17th century, in his theory of universal gravitation, made it possible to explain the movement of the planets. But Newton was not able to explain more than the part of reality that he could see.

Let's think about the man sentenced to thirty years in prison who looks out the window and sees, beyond, through the bars, the green meadow where he thinks he can go, free, one day. It is hope that sustains him. But thinking that something desired will happen, although it alleviates the suffering of waiting, is not enough: the wait must be active, actions must bring hope closer to reality.The actors are the ones who can change the plot. For the world's geostrategy, it is the citizens of the United States, Israel, and Europe, who vote, who can most actively influence the historical moment we are living in; not those of China or Russia, to whom their states do not grant this possibility. The weight of the BRICS in world politics – that is, of the Global South – is growing, but it is not yet decisive.In November, the midterm elections will be held in the USA, and it is possible that the majorities in the chambers of Congress and the Senate will shift from Republican to Democratic. More possible in Congress, more difficult in the Senate. There are reasons for the American voter to feel deceived: the unnecessary war in Iran, growing inflation – after Trump criticized Biden's – the president's abuse of power – which the Supreme Court has corrected – in attempting to suppress the right to citizenship for those born in the USA... And also the failure of immigration policies: in what way has ICE, the US border police, improved them, beyond reducing the rights of American citizens and causing suffering and anguish to immigrants, more or less in an irregular situation, but settled in the country? And tariffs, what has changed? And in Ukraine, the war that Trump said he could end in a day, where are we now? The conflict created with NATO and the EU, what has it served? Member states are backing out, actively or passively, of investing 5% of their GDP in defense, as Trump demanded. More than a state policy, it was a business.Now Trump is talking about the communist threat. Is he inventing a problem again to later claim he has solved it, as he did with Iran? The president can claim that in Central and South America – in Colombia, Peru, Venezuela, and Argentina – he has friendly governments that are stable. Or are they stable because they are his friends? Isn't this practicing the interventionism he denigrated before winning the elections two years ago? He has taken on a burden he didn't have. It is true that the voter's memory is short, but, so much so? If citizens have a thread of memory, Trump and the Republican Party could lose this November. The distance between what he promised and what he has achieved is great.Elections in Israel could cause Netanyahu to lose his majority. The reason? Citizen fatigue with a war that has been changing objectives – eliminating Hamas terrorism in Gaza, protecting northern Israel and ending Hezbollah in Lebanon, stabilizing Syria, defeating Iran...–, the end of which is not on the horizon and which makes one think it is being maintained to postpone the prime minister's trial. This is a difficult argument to refute for the Israeli voter, right and left, and highly destructive for Netanyahu. Who should they vote for? And why? If maintaining the war distances them from collaboration and understanding with the states in the region – Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Oman, Emirates, etc. –, if the Abraham Accords are dead with this policy, why don't they move to the next phase of the conflict and extract benefit from the war they have supposedly won? What is the "eternal" war for? Changing the government could prevent the problem they already have from getting bigger, after the extermination war in Gaza and the apartheid in the West Bank, which have changed the international perception of Israel: from victims they have become seen as perpetrators. But, above all, the US no longer monolithically supports Israel as before; their interests are beginning to diverge.

It is a common place to affirm that politics consists in choosing the least bad of two deficient alternatives and that democracy serves to oust those who do not do well. In the Declaration of Independence of the United States, in 1776, Thomas Jefferson wrote that “all men are created equal and are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, among which are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness”. Citizens have the right to be free and to try to be happy.In Spain, for years we have found ourselves mired in a confrontation that has turned politics into a war of communication where anything goes to harm the opponent, who has already become an enemy. We have moved away from the principles proclaimed by Jefferson and practiced by Adams, and we have built a political environment based on what is negative and bad rather than on what is good and positive, and on the fact that telling lies is "legitimate" if it is effective. "That's politics," they say. It is not.It doesn't matter if a person hasn't broken the law or abused their power if I can accuse them of doing so, with false reasons or half-truths. Once the accusation has begun, social networks will do the rest and, from anonymity, will convince many that what is not true is true. The problem is that the enemy of truth is not lies, but half-truths, which, by containing part of the truthfulness, make it difficult to discern the degree of falsehood.

The Pope's visit has made us reflect. What is religion today? At what point is the discrepancy between believers and non-believers? Historically, this discrepancy has been reduced to whether man is a creation of God or God a creation of man. For believers, God is an eternal reality who creates man in his image. For non-believers, God is a concept invented by man in search of refuge and protection. This discussion has existed for as long as man has been man and expresses a desire and need for transcendence.Among the philosophical attempts to demonstrate the existence of God, that of the medieval scholastics stands out. One of the first scholastic approaches in this regard was made in the 13th century by Thomas Aquinas, who establishes five ways of demonstration in the Summa Theologica, his major work. According to the way of motion, everything that moves is moved by another, it is necessary that there be a first mover, and this must be God. According to the way of causality, there must also be a first efficient cause: it must be God. According to the way of contingency, since beings in the world can exist or cease to exist (they are contingent), there must be, in their origin, a being that is not contingent, but necessary: God. According to the way of degrees of perfection, the existence of a gradation of qualities means that there must be a being that is maximum in goodness and other virtues, and this must be God. According to the way of finality, in the world all things tend towards an end, but they could not do so without being directed like an archer's arrow: there must be an intelligent being who has designed them this way, and this must be God.But what about today? Today, both what is enormously large (the universe, space and time, mass and energy) and what is extraordinarily small (the quantum world, or light, which is made of particles and waves at the same time) are explainable without a first cause. The paths of Thomas Aquinas are no longer universal. And Newtonian physics is no longer sufficient for us to understand the world. Science has changed our perspective.

“One cannot live in the lie of mutual benefit through integration when integration is the reason for subordination”, said Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney at the Davos Forum in January. And it is evident: global integration implies subordination to the big ones, the United States and China. Consequently, the strategy of second-tier states can be none other than to collaborate to ward off dependence; this is the policy that the BRICS practice, with success, and it must also be that of Europe.The US and China are preparing for economic confrontation. The former due to the scarcity of rare earths, and the latter because they aspire for the renminbi to become a reserve and trade currency, like the dollar. Today, the dollar represents 57% of central banks' reserves. In the new post-globalization commercial environment, which will be one of fragmentation and confrontation, even the big players will have to deploy trade weapons to protect themselves.Donald Trump assures that he will bend nations through tariffs because the US market is the most important in the world for imports. It is, but it accounts for only 13% of global imports. From a global perspective, not selling to the US will have little impact on any state's exports: in relation to world trade, trade with the US is small. Even Canada, with trade traditionally linked to the US, does not suffer particularly from American tariffs. It has found alternative markets; hence its approach to Europe.Tariffs only have important effects if trade is concentrated on a scarce good. When Trump imposed tariffs on most states in April 2025, China responded by limiting the export of rare earths. Ford temporarily closed some factories due to a lack of raw materials and Raytheon had problems maintaining the production of Tomahawk missiles. Within weeks, the US reduced its tariffs on China.Let's look at another case. When the US department's import rules tightened, China limited the export of equipment containing technological components. The US was forced to give China freedom to buy highly sophisticated material; for example, Nvidia chips. Thus, the US allowed the trade of its most strategic product with its greatest competitor. The gap between what Trump says and what he does continues to grow.

On March 1, 2026, a spokesperson for the Iranian government announced on television: “After a lifetime of incessant and tireless struggle (...), the supreme leader Ali Khamenei drank the sweet chalice of martyrdom and entered Paradise.” He described Khamenei as “the tireless leader who has guided the state for the last 40 years” and, at the end of his statement, could not contain his tears.Not everyone in Iran thinks this way. There are citizens who would be willing to negotiate a reduction in economic sanctions and an agreement with the US, but they have no vehicle to express it. In an autocratic state, the opposition does not have the capacity to express itself. Even less so in Iran, where the opposition is physically massacred, with thousands of deaths and dozens of executions.Khamenei has been able to politically nullify his adversaries over the almost 40 years he has been the supreme leader –reformists at different levels: Rafsanjani, Khatami, Ahmadinejad, Rouhani, Pezeshkian–, and has consolidated his orthodoxy of intransigence with the support of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, the backbone of a police state. The fact that the one chosen to succeed him has been his son, Mojtaba, confirms this.The relationship between the US and Israel has mutated under the Trump administration into an alliance of equals. Beyond the supply of American weaponry, ammunition, and military intelligence since the birth of the Hebrew state in 1948, the alliance between the two countries to conduct a shared war in the Gulf seeks to obtain an incontestable political, military, and economic supremacy, which both imagine as viable and for which Israel has openly fought since 1967 and the US since the 1980s.

In the last 300 years, technology has increased productivity exponentially. In 2020, one hour of work produced 24 times more goods and services than in 1870. The reason is innovation: converting knowledge into solutions through technology. As economist Paul Romer says, the dark matter of growth is ideas.In OECD countries, growth –measured in GDP per capita– was 4% annually from 1950 to 1973, 2% from 1976 to 2007, and 1% from 2010 to 2021. This slowdown may be due to a lack of disruptive and innovative ideas for various reasons: the loss of acceleration in technological growth produced by World War II, the withdrawal of the private sector from basic science, the aging of the scientific workforce, the transformation into a more comfortable and risk-averse society…Juan Antonio Zufiria, former director of IBM, has written an excellent report on the issue, on which this article is based. Zufiria, like Daniel Susskind, is optimistic and believes that it is possible to recover the pace of growth with innovation and technology. Both Zufiria and Susskind believe that technological change must be directed and prioritized. The biggest drawback to achieving this is the decoupling of capital and labor incomes: lower growth in labor incomes in developed nations – the EU and the USA – has led to increased inequality, measured by the Gini index. It is in these societies that innovation and technology are concentrated, and internal inequality is a brake on the improvement of their productivity. There is a relationship between efficiency and inequality.In the 20th century, production was linked to a workforce. When General Motors had a stock market capitalization of $300,000M, it had 300,000 employees. Today, Google or Microsoft, with double the capitalization, have 30,000. The workforce has lost power entrepreneurially and only maintains it as "quality", with few highly qualified workers. The battle between capital and labor that the Industrial Revolution brought – and that Marxism theorized based on Hegel's principle of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis – does not exist today: it is beginning to be testimonial, except in public service. At the same time, the ability of companies to outsource activities has contributed to increasing the decoupling between labor and capital.The equality between poor and rich countries has increased thanks to globalization. Absolute equality reduces economic efficiency, but inequality above a Gini index of 0.4-0.5 also does, and this is what will end up happening within developed countries if the current trend is not corrected. Ten people currently concentrate 0.52% of world wealth.Development occurs in the world, and the world has limited resources. Economic growth is entropic, meaning it reduces the quality of energy in a way that the second law of thermodynamics makes irreversible: burning wood and running train machinery makes it impossible to return to the origin and recover the burnt wood. Fundamentally, this reality can be synthesized into the warming of the world and the progressive destruction of its reserves.

In Catalonia, the population grows by 1% each year. In a population of 8 million people, this means 80,000 more people annually. According to Idescat, it's 76,000. If there are 3 people per household, this is equivalent to about 26,000 new homes each year (80,000/3 = 26,000). When land is ceded by municipalities, the construction of a home of about 80 or 100 m² has a cost of €150,000. The total annual investment to do this is, therefore, 3.9 billion euros per year (26,000x150,000 = 3.9 billion €/year). We must start by creating a territorial plan for Catalonia that identifies available land and facilitates municipalities making it available to the Generalitat for construction. However, is it viable to create a public-private company that builds these homes and rents them directly to individuals? If the investment amortization period is set at thirty years, the public debt it will entail will be around 117,000 million euros (3.900x30 = 117.000 M€). In the case of a 50% public and private investment, it would amount to 58,500 million euros.The average gross income of a Catalan family with two workers is €36,000/year (€1,500 x 12 months x 2 people = €36,000). The net income, after deducting income tax, is €25,200 (€36,000x0.7 = €25,200/year). The cost of a rental property should not exceed 30% of net income to live with some margin; that is, the rental cost should be less than €7,560/year (€25,200x0.3 = €7,560/year).The income generated by this rental —the  7,560 €— should remunerate three concepts. Calculated per dwelling and year, they are:—The return of the invested public capital (€75,000, equivalent to 50% of the €150,000 construction cost, over thirty years). €75,000/30 = €2,500/year.—The remuneration of the private investor (the remaining €75,000, starting from an investment of 5% profitability). 75,000x0.05= €3,750/year.—The payment of the debt interest (assuming an interest rate of 3% per year and calculated with a margin to cover interest variation and management cost). 75,000x0.03 ≈ 2,500 €/year.Therefore, the families'  7,560 € would not be enough to remunerate the sum of the three concepts, which amounts to  8,750 €.This situation would only be possible if families' income tax were halved during the rental period; that is, (36,000-25,200)/2 = €5,440/year. Thus, available family income would go from €25,200 to €30,560 (€36,000-€5,440 = €30,560). The percentage of net income after taxes dedicated to housing would be 8,750/30,560 = 29%, and it would meet the objective set by independent organizations.A rental housing system financed by public and private capital can be a solution, which, moreover, has the advantage of offering security and profitability to private investment. According to the Draghi report, the European Union has more private savings than the United States, but no mechanisms for investment. This would be one. However, the following conditions would need to be met:—The agreement must be controlled and guaranteed by public administrations, private investors, and tenants.—The project must be maintained as a whole; not individually, housing by housing. It gives security to the investor and the tenant.—Getting municipalities to cede square meters of municipal land is not possible unless it is with the patronage of the State.This is a model that promotes housing for the population with medium-low incomes at a moderate cost. It has been used in Holland and Austria. It is a safe, but not a quick, solution.

The invisible hand, according to Adam Smith: “Each person uses their capital to satisfy their immediate needs, but an invisible hand leads them to promote an objective that is not in their intentions, promoting efficient markets in a complex aggregate that no one can fully understand [...]”. The supremacy of the market. Hayek described this invisible hand as an imperceptible and unfathomable, but solid and determining, pattern. Market dynamics make it possible for people to act on their own, in ignorance of the whole, without anyone having to tell them what to do.Conventional capitalism, until the 21st century, was sustained by a reciprocal relationship between business and society, between economy and democracy. When in 1965 General Motors had a value of approximately 25,000 million dollars (about 225,000 million dollars today), it employed 735,000 workers; today, Alphabet (Google's parent company) has a value of approximately 2 trillion dollars and about 190,000 workers, and Meta (Facebook's parent company), more than 1 trillion dollars in valuation and 79,000 employees. Reciprocity has been lost, even more so due to the capacity companies have to condition demand: they do not need the market, they create it. The alignment between business, economic, political, and social interests has weakened. Some maintain, with good reason, that past reciprocities were at the origin of the amicable relationship between market and democracy. They needed each other. That balance has been lost. The market dominates democracy. Hence the growing relevance of stark economic profit. The right does not hide its interests at all...

A key thinker of the 20th century died a few days ago. Jürgen Habermas, a German, was born in 1929, during the Great Depression. He lived through the defeat of 1945, the Constitution drafted by the Allies for the new Federal Republic in 1949, the crisis of East Germany in 1989 and reunification, and lamented the missed opportunity of not creating a new constitution for Germany in 1990. Habermas defended a political reality based on three principles: promoting participation and transparency of information. He believed that individuals should be able to distance themselves from events and exercise their own judgment, to think for themselves, but his opinion has been largely forgotten. He observed with concern the drift toward technocracy and the erosion of solidarity. He was a political conciliator and a representative of the Frankfurt School and of the more European, restrained, and analytical German thought. An anchor for stability. His passing is a loss for Europe. He said on numerous occasions that the homeland of Europeans should be Europe, not small national homelands. Habermas thought big.

On January 29, 1981, during a cabinet meeting, Prime Minister Adolfo Suárez resigned. "I am leaving without having been asked to [...] I am leaving so that this system of freedoms, for which I have suffered greatly [...], is not abruptly interrupted [...], but it has been worth it. If my sacrifice once served to build democracy, this one must serve to prevent its destruction." "I have lost the trust of the powers that be, I have lost the acceptance of the press, I have lost legitimacy in the eyes of the opposition, I have lost the credibility of a large part of our electorate, I have lost my own party [...]". The moment was solemn. The Minister of Defense, Agustín Rodríguez Sahagún, inappropriately requested the floor and announced the appointment of General Alfonso Armada as Deputy Chief of the Army Staff. Prime Minister Suárez glared at him.

This article aims to define how train services in Catalonia can be separated with two objectives: to clearly identify the responsibilities of the Catalan government (Generalitat) and the central government, and to facilitate their management. The proposal negotiated between the Republican Left of Catalonia (ERC) and the central government does not achieve this goal. Responsibilities are shared, and management is entrusted to Renfe, an operator that has demonstrated its shortcomings in the current model. This is the solution that will most likely be implemented because it is the quickest and most practical: first, we recover the commuter and regional train services. When the system's limitations become apparent again in the short term, it will be necessary to remember that better alternative solutions exist. The one proposed here is one of them.

When the wind blows strongly and the waves are large, if the boat lacks power, it becomes uncontrollable. The sea and the wind win. Therefore, the sail area should not be reduced, but increased. It is the sails that give the boat the power to overcome the sea.

There are so many pronouncements on the matter that it's likely the average citizen won't understand either the essential or the secondary aspects. Two essential matters.

Until 1914, without the UN or the League of Nations, the world was governed by spheres of influence. There was one, Europe, and a single influential state, the United Kingdom, which based its control of trade on its colonial empire.

In the Chinese market, electric cars can be found for €10,000. An equivalent American model costs €30,000. China dominates 80% of the solar energy market and, in 2024 alone, installed 277 gigawatts of solar capacity, more than five times the amount installed in the United States during the same period. To a large extent, China's expansion is a consequence of its state-run, planned economy. Years ago, China focused on the production of coal, cement, steel, and other raw materials. Today, it's consumer goods and advanced technology.