Safe House Trailer

A must watch movie..
When a CIA-operated safe house is targeted by a group of bad guys, the facility's house-sitter is tasked with the dangerous job of moving the criminal.

Dream place !

Heaven on Earth !!

Where are you on the global pay scale?

If there were no rich and poor, and everyone had an equal share of the world's total pay packet, how much would they earn?

The total value of world income is closing in on $70 trillion (£43.9tn) per year, and there are seven billion people in the world, so the average income is heading towards $10,000 (£6,273) per person per year. Easy.
But not everyone has a job and some of those seven billion are children. So another question you could ask is: "What is the world's average wage?"
That is more tricky to answer, but a group of economists at the United Nations' International Labour Organization (ILO) has had a go, though they have never gone public with this information. Until now.
Let's consider the scale of the Herculean task the number crunchers at the ILO set themselves.
First, they work out the total wage bill for every country in the world. To do that they get the average salary from each office for national statistics, and multiply that amount by the number of earners in each country.

In this way, they are able to give more weight to countries which have more workers in them. The average salary in China has more influence on the world average than the average salary in New Zealand, where many fewer people live.

Once they have the total wage bill for each country, they add them all together and divide by the total number of earners in the world.
That gives you the answer - the world's average salary is $1,480 (£928) a month, which is just less than $18,000 (£11,291) a year.
But these dollars are not normal US dollars. The economists use specially adjusted exchange rates - the average salary is calculated in Purchasing Power Parity (PPP) dollars. One PPP dollar is equal to $1 spent in the US.
Essentially, the PPP dollar takes into account the fact that it is cheaper to live in some countries than others. The idea is that we don't care how many actual dollars somebody is paid in, say, China, but we care about what sort of stuff those dollars can buy.

"If someone in China takes their salary of 1,500 yuan per month and they go to the bank, they will actually get $200," ILO economist Patrick Belser explains.

"But this is not what we use to compute this global average, because what is important here is what people are able to buy with these 1,500 yuan, and this is where we compare to the purchasing power of the US dollars and find that it is actually equivalent to around $400."
Another way of putting it is that the conversion to PPP dollars expresses how much it would cost you in the US to get the equivalent goods and services you can buy with your salary locally.
Let's put the world's average salary - in PPP dollars - of $1,480 a month, or almost $18,000 a year, in context:

• It is less than half the average salary of the UK and the United States, where average monthly earnings are just over $3,000 a month, or around $37,000 a year
• It is twice the average salary of Bulgaria, and the same as the average salary in Poland
• The country at the bottom of the average earnings league is Tajikistan, where the average wage is about $2,700 a year - while the country out on top is Luxembourg with average earnings of around $48,000 a year

You might think that $1,480 a month, or $18,000 a year, is quite high. It comes to $75 a day for a 20-day working month - but it's well known that more than a third of the world's population lives on less than $2 a day. How can these two views of global incomes add up?
In truth, the economists at the ILO have had to rely on very patchy statistics. Data is missing for some countries - even a country as large as Nigeria, for example. And also, the economists at the ILO are only counting wage earners.
They exclude huge numbers of people who appear in the poverty statistics but not in the calculations for the average wage - pensioners, children and stay-at-home parents, for example, and even the self-employed.
The number of self-employed is huge. In developed countries about 90% of working people are paid employees, but that figure is lower in many developing countries. For example, in South Asia, where many people are self employed or independent farmers, just 25% of workers are salaried.
But calculating the world's average salary is still an exercise worth doing, according to Belser.

New traffic signals

Who works the longest hours?

Chill winds sweeping the world economy have left many people out of a job, and some of those still working have been asked to worker longer hours for the same pay. Recently the UK government urged the country to work harder, after slipping back into recession. So which countries put the most hours in?

A look at the average annual hours worked per person in selected countries puts South Korea top with a whopping 2,193 hours, followed by Chile on 2,068.
British workers clock up 1,647 hours and Germans 1,408 - putting them at the bottom of the table, above only the Netherlands.
Greek workers have had a bad press recently but, as we reported in February, they work longer hours than any other Europeans. Their average of 2,017 hours a year puts them third in the international ranking, based on figures compiled by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD).
"Asian countries tend to work the longest [hours], they also have the highest proportion of workers that are working excessively long hours of more than 48 hours a week," says Jon Messenger, an ILO expert on working hours.
"Korea sticks out because it's a developed country that's working long hours," he says. "Normally it's developing countries like Bangladesh, Malaysia, Thailand, Sri Lanka - countries like this that are working long hours."
But working longer doesn't necessarily mean working better.
"Generally speaking, long working hours are associated with lower productivity per hour. Workers are working very long hours to achieve a minimum level of output or to achieve some minimum level of wages because frankly they're not very productive," Messenger says.

Tighter labour laws in developed countries, particularly in Europe, have also reduced working hours. The differences between the most developed nations are small but leave entitlement makes a difference.

Messenger says the average Briton works 150 fewer hours than an American.
"The difference is really driven by the fact that the US is the only developed country that has no legal or contractual or collective requirement to provide any minimum amount of annual leave," he says.
The UK, in contrast, is subject to the European working time directive, which requires at least four weeks of paid annual leave for every employee.
Some European countries have a higher statutory level of paid leave - 25 days in Austria, Denmark, France, Italy, Luxembourg and Sweden in 2010, according to the European Industrial Relations Observatory (Eiro). And some employers provide more paid leave than the statutory miniumum.
Paid public holidays, which come on top of that, averaged between nine and 10 in the European Union in 2010.
"The combined total of agreed annual leave and public holidays varied in the EU from 40 days in Germany and Denmark to 27 days in Romania - a difference of around 48% or 2.5 working weeks," Eiro said in a report published last year.
When comparing hours worked, however, there's one more thing which must be acknowledged.
Each country collects its own data, and their methods may be not always be perfectly comparable.

 

Identity check

Barcode everyone at birth !

 

“If I were empress of the Universe I would insist on every individual having a unique ID permanently attached - a barcode if you will; an implanted chip to provide an easy, fast inexpensive way to identify individuals.

It would be imprinted on everyone at birth. Point the scanner at someone and there it is.
Having such a unique barcode would have many advantages. In war soldiers could easily differentiate legitimate targets in a population from non combatants.
This could prevent mistakes in identity, mistakes that result in the deaths of innocent bystanders. Weapons systems would record the code of the use, identifying how fired which shot and leading to more accountability in the field.
Anonymity would be impossible as would mistaken identity making it easier to place responsibility accurately, not only in war but also in non-combat situations far from the war.

Facts and figures about Facebook

Facts and figures about Facebook

Facts and figures about Facebook, which priced its initial public offering:
- Facebook has more than 900 million active users. If the company were a country, it would be the third largest in the world after China (population: 1.34 billion) and India (population: 1.17 billion).
- Some 488 million people use Facebook on mobile devices. That is more than half of its members worldwide, and the reach is even bigger in countries such as South Africa, Nigeria and Japan, where mobile use is 70 to 90 percent.    (source: socialbakers.com).
- With 157 million members, the United States has the most Facebook users. Brazil recently jumped to second place with 47 million, followed by India with 45.8 million, Indonesia with 42.2 million and Mexico with 33.1 million.    (source: socialbakers.com)
- Facebook is the most popular social network in every country of the world, with the exceptions of China, Japan, Russia, South Korea and Vietnam.   (source: comScore)
- In April, Facebook announced a billion-dollar deal to buy the startup behind wildly popular smartphone photo sharing application Instagram, its biggest acquisition to date. The US Federal Trade Commission is reviewing the deal.
- Facebook has minted four billionaires: Mark Zuckerberg, Dustin Moskovitz, Eduardo Saverin and Sean Parker. The 27-year-old
Zuckerberg’s net worth was estimated at $17.5 billion on the 2011 Forbes list of the wealthiest Americans.
Moskovitz had a net worth of $3.5 billion but pipped Zuckerberg for the title of world’s youngest billionaire, being eight days younger.
The Brazilian-born Saverin, who left Facebook early on after a falling-out with Zuckerberg, had a net worth of $2 billion. Parker, the Napster co-founder who briefly served as Facebook’s president, had a net worth of $2.1 billion.
- Chris Hughes, one of Facebook’s four co-founders, served as director of online organizing for Barack Obama’s successful 2008 presidential campaign.
- Facebook says it had an average of 526 million daily active users in March 2012, an increase of 41 percent from a year ago. It had registered 125 billion “friend connections” as of March 31 and 3.2 billion “likes” and comments.
- More than 300 million photos are uploaded to Facebook every day and more than 488 million active users access Facebook using mobile devices.
- “The Social Network,” the 2010 film about the origins of Facebook, won four Golden Globes, including for best picture and best director, but flopped at the Oscars, walking away with only awards for best adapted screenplay, original score and film editing.
- Facebook, which currently employs some 3,500 people, has announced plans to hire “thousands” more over the next year. Some studies suggest that Facebook-related firms and apps have created many more jobs and economic value.