New Zealand MP starts with new pay scales, 2008, Auckland

21, November, 2008, Auckland--I read something rather interesting regarding the politicians' annual income from the New Zealand Hearld Newspaper today. The article also showed the annual income of politicians from other countriesBelow are some abstracts:

Public sector pay rises have also been outstripping the private sector.

Others said base salary movements varied and depended on skills and competition for talent.

Official figures put public servant adjusted salary and wage rises in the year to June 30 at 3.7 per cent.

But unadjusted figures - considered the best indicator of "take-home pay" - were as high as 5.5 per cent for the public and private sectors combined.

Former Prime Minister Helen Clark was paid a salary of $375,000 over the past year, and her deputy Michael Cullen got $264,500.

As both have moved out of leadership roles and on to the Opposition benches, their pay will tumble to near $130,000 even when the new rise is taken into account.

Mr Key will get the rise added to the existing Prime Minister's salary of $375,000. His salary as Leader of the Opposition was $233,000.

Mr Key is a multimillionaire after a career in the financial world and gives most of his political salary to charities.

He has said he intends to continue doing that with the bigger pay packet.

The biggest winners are the National MPs who have gone from Opposition seats to Cabinet positions.

Among them are Gerry Brownlee, Simon Power, Judith Collins, Tony Ryall, Anne Tolley and Paula Bennett.

Their salaries will go from around $130,000 to near $240,000.

Ministers outside the Cabinet - who include United Future's Peter Dunne, Act's Rodney Hide and Heather Roy and Maori Party co-leaders Tariana Turia and Pita Sharples - get almost $200,000.

New Labour Party leader Phil Goff gets the same money for being Leader of the Opposition as he got for being a Cabinet minister.

As well as getting more money for becoming ministers, John Key's new team get expense allowances and the use of a fleet of silver BMW limousines.

WHAT THEY GET

John Key
* Before the election $233,000
* Yesterday $375,000
* From today $393,000

Helen Clark
* Before the election $375,000
* Yesterday $126,000
* From today $130,000

TOP POLITICIANS' PAY OVERSEAS

Australia
* PM A$330,000 ($388,000)
* Cabinet ministers A$219,000 ($258,000)
* Leader of the opposition A$235,000 ($277,000)
* MP A$127,000 ($149,000)

UK
* Prime Minister £189,000 ($514,000)
* Cabinet minister £138,000 ($375,000)
* Leader of the Opposition £131,000 ($356,000)
* MP £62,000 ($169,000)

US
* President US$400,000 ($728,000)
* Senate minority and majority leaders US $188,000 ($342,000)
* Senator US$169,000 ($308,000)

How do avatars have sex? Cyber Lifestyle, Second Life, virtual sex

THE ANSWER:

1. First characters need to buy genitals
2. Male characters can get aroused and have intercourse with female ones, but graphic depictions are very rudimentary
3. Intercourse is usually represented by an animated sequence

Characters interact socially

A couple have divorced after the wife saw the husband having online sex in the virtual world of Second Life. So how do avatars have sex?

Wife walks in and finds husband in a compromising position on the sofa with another woman. Wife feels betrayed. Wife files for divorce. Marriage ends.

It’s a familiar scenario in soap operas, but for one married couple it was all too real. Sort of.

Amy Taylor and David Pollard met in an online chatroom in 2003, got married and shared their interest in Second Life, a virtual world in which users create avatars to interact with each other.

But the marriage ended after Ms Taylor’s online character saw her husband’s avatar having sex on a sofa with a female prostitute.

So how do computerised characters have sex?

“First you need to buy genitals,” says technology journalist Adrian Mars, explaining the process in Second Life. “You start off with no genitals and then you buy some. These objects can do all sorts of things. You can have ones that ejaculate at the right moment.

“But there’s not much in the way of exciting mechanics. What you see on the screen is what you get and the best you can hope for is a bit of sexual humour, although some people do have intense relationships.

“Obviously the sex is not the same as in real life, but you’re still expressing yourself in a way that would, maybe reasonably, upset a partner.”

Participants can verbally communicate by voice or by typing speech that appears in a bubble above their character.

And although they can use the mouse and keyboard to move their character and pick things up, he says, the on-screen graphic depiction is very rudimentary. Undressing another character without their consent is not possible.

“You can touch and jiggle about a bit and you can emote and gesture in a way the other person would see. And you can have intercourse.”

Users can make their avatars sit, lie or stand for sex, says Kieron Gillen of gamerzines.com, but the intercourse is usually an animated sequence triggered by a click of the mouse on an interactive “node”, although it depends how they are programmed.

“People customize their avatars with animations and enormous e-phalluses which you can buy. It’s a player-generated economy and people exchange things they have created - someone builds it, someone buys it and someone puts it into action.”

For people participating in this, he adds, the sexual chat is more important than the avatar having sex, which acts more like a prop to get their imagination going.

And you can forget any notion of sensual touch. As crude, pixelated representations of humans, avatars can’t flex individual muscles, says Gabby Kent, a lecturer in computer games at the University of Teesside.

It would just resemble two clunky-looking characters rubbing their bodies against each other.

These kinds of online worlds are navigated fairly intuitively, she says, so just by clicking on a door could make your avatar walk through it, without the need to move your hand to find the handle.

In a similar way, some games could just have a special sequence cutting in to represent sexual intercourse. But even those offering the characters more control are unlikely to look very real. Yet that doesn’t mean it’s harmless fun.

“In Second Life, all the characters are real people somewhere in the world and that’s why there’s always such betrayal felt,” says Ms Kent.

Antlers

One blogger writing about his experience in Second Life describes the range of male genitalia on offer to buy, including skin colour control, sound, animations, ejaculation, urine and some that are touchable by other players to lead to arousal.

He visited virtual sex shops and sex clubs where he saw people having sex in a number of different ways.

It is only to be expected in a world where players pick every detail of how their avatars will look, says Mr Mars.

“You can design any object. You can buy your own antlers, for instance. Sex has become a big thing [in Second Life] but I suspect it’s full of teenagers, so that’s no shock.”

Some Second Lifers have been known to misbehave - a US journalist was attacked by flying penises when conducting an interview in his virtual office.

And infidelity is not the only thorny ethical issue thrown up by virtual sexuality - some players have had sex with animals.

Freakish Fatalities: Strange But True!

Claim: A damaged cactus falls onto the man who had harmed it, killing him.

Status: True.

Example: [Collected on the Internet, 1999]

In southern arizona they have the sorts of cacti that have great arms like you see on old westerns, called saguaros. they're quite protected by various laws and live to be hundreds of years old.

The story goes that some guy was out with his shotgun shooting signs and such. Well, he decided to blast some cacti too. As he stood within a few feet, perhaps 10, of a giant old cactus, he blasted a few holes in its giant trunk. It gave way and fell right on top of him, crushing and impaling him with nail-like spikes. He died, being alone and unable to crawl away.

Origins: People do stupid, unthinking things. Most of the time, they get away with them . . . .

In 1982, roommates David Grundman and James Joseph Suchochi decided pack up the guns and go wandering in the desert two miles north of Arizona 74, just west of Lake Pleasant. One or both of them was struck with the brilliant notion of taking pot shots at saguaro they found growing there. Maybe it was the Devil in them. Maybe it had to do with the eerily manlike shapes these monstrous plants can grow into.

Grundman shot a small saguaro in the trunk so many times that it thudded to the ground. "The first one was easy!" he cried, according to Suchochi. He next chose a specimen which stood 26 feet high and was estimated to be a hundred years old. Before the ringing in his ears had stopped, a four-foot spiny arm, severed by the blast, fell on Grundman, crushing him.

Grundman's demise is chronicled in "Saguaro," a song by the Texas rock band, the Austin Lounge

Lizards.

There are other stories in urban lore about Nature's children taking revenge on their human tormentors (the dynamite dog and Gucci kangaroo, for instance), but this is the only one where a plant strikes back. Then again, the saguaro is one very special plant.

Saguaros are tall cactuses that can reach heights of 60 feet and grow only in the Sonoran Desert in the southwestern United States. For the first 75 years of their lives, they have only huge central trunks; their distinctive outstretched and upwards-bent arms develop later, if at all. Their usual lifespan is 150 to 200 years, though some have lived to be 300.

Oh, one other fact about saguaros; they can weigh up to 8 tons. As Grundman found out.

Electric Avenue: A True Story

Claim: A tourist was electrocuted while crossing a street in Las Vegas.

Status: True.

Origins: Las Vegas, Nevada, is a desert town, hot and dry. Daytime temperatures in July and August are in the hundreds, sometimes climbing to the hundred-and-teens. Rain, when it does come, often arrives in torrents that quickly build to flash-flood proportions.

On Saturday, 16 August 2003, a 39-year-old mother of four met the Grim Reaper while doing nothing more remarkable than crossing Las Vegas Boulevard, the famed "Las Vegas Strip" of the travelogues. Yet it was not a car that brought about Rebecca "Becky" Longhoffer's demise — she was

electrocuted in mid-stride when she stepped on a cast iron plate on a traffic island. The plate, which covered electrical wiring feeding traffic signals, had been soaked by a heavy downpour and was obscured by a puddle several inches deep, residue of a recent unexpected storm which swept the area.

Officials suspect that a combination of frayed wiring, dampness from the sudden storm, and open-toed shoes worn by the victim combined to deliver the electric shock that snatched a life without warning. The box that delivered the fatal charge had not been inspected since it was installed in late 1995 or early 1996; over the years thousands of pedestrians have walked across that wiring box, and the tread of many shoes on the plate may have worn down the insulation of the wires concealed therein to the point of dangerous exposure.

Clark County officials estimate Las Vegas has about 16,000 of the same type of traffic signal boxes. They announced they would begin inspecting the other boxes on the Las Vegas Strip within the next few weeks.

Ms. Longhoffer was making her first trip to Las Vegas, accompanying her fiancé who was participating in a billiards tournament. Moments before she died, she had been talking to her brother on her cell phone. She left behind four children, ages 22, 15, 12, and 13 months.