A taxing experience

The usual story of boy meets girl, Romanian student needs €60.000 to pay for her college tuition, a computer studies course in Germany, and decides to sell her virginity on line to the highest bidder in order to raise the cash.

After the initial setback of the advert being pulled, not for any moral issue regarding selling sex but beacause her old school teacher announced she is not a virgin (no mention of exactly how he should know this) the advert went back up and an Italian won with a bid of €10.000.
Not exactly what she, Alina, was targeting but still a reasonable sum, enough to buy 3.268 big macs in the Euro area according to the famous Big Mac index.

Now the problem, under German law selling sex or prostitution is perfectly legal, even on a student visa, however there is a special 50% tax rate levied, also she could be liable for sales tax currently at 19% and the German inland revenue are obviously anxious not to miss a trick...no pun intended.

Therefore from Alina´s initial €60.000 target she received €10.000 which will be reduced by €5.000 prostitution tax and possibly €1.900 sales tax leaving her with €3.100 for her labours.

Interesting that a Romanian girl has sex in Italy and pays 70% of it to the German government, you have to take your hat off to this kind of legislation.

Perhaps more relevant is that selling sex is illegal in Italy since 2008 although they seem to have a reasonably relaxed attitude on the issue, a top down culture one would imagine.
Less relaxed is the Italian taxation system which on these values charges 25%, if cumulative the poor girl could pay another €2.500 leaving her with a paltry €600 to remember the weekend by.

Too many fingers

They say history repeats itself and certainly my password frustration seems to be doing so. Having suffered many years from an excess of passwords; banks, creditcards, internet stuff, airline programmes, elevator security etc. you name it, I was hoping that modern technology might ease this load.
But no, recently I have uncovered a new frustration just as inconvenient and vexing as this, finger identification.

In a perfect world we could all be recognised by proximity or eyes etc., but the finger identification seems to have been made as complicated as possible.

So there I am trying to get into the office in São Paulo and I forgot that it is standardised, everybody pushes the asterisk and places the right thumb over the laser, the door magically pops open.
As we have a lot of security you have to do this on 2 doors to get to my desk, there is a further door but my thumb doesn´t have the relevant clearance, database companies are up there with MI5 and Mossad for security you know. (Actually ours is better than MI5 as they have reportedly lost 5 laptops and a Blackberry this year so far, although if I had to use a Blackberry I would have chucked it somewhere by now too)

Back to the fingers, I couldn´t get into the office, I simply forgot the sequence and correct finger. At my gym I have a code number followed by a button with no sign, obviously used so much it rubbed off and then the left thumb, also standardised for all. So there I am, trying all the fingers, looking bewildered until a good samaritan buzzed me in.

After a frustrating day forgetting fingers then I get back to the condominio and have to place the correct finger over the laser, if I get this wrong it triggers a kidnap warning and previously smiling men get angry and run around waving guns.
A close relative on the first entry managed to put the wrong finger on the laser, luckily she realised and screamed out false alarm, prior to an international incident occurring.

Perhaps I am the only one troubled by this so far, but am sure that as more places implement these systems there will be an almighty cock-up at some stage, maybe I should tattoo the info on each finger to get it right first time.

How to get your profits up whilst staying cheaper

Interesting to see the Ryan Air marketing strategy.
The "low cost" airline really does charge a low price for the ticket, but they have developed the paid extras into a fine art.

You can no longer get a ticket at the airport and to print a ticket at home you pay around U$D 8 per leg and if you have baggage it´s charged per item and weight, also the food and drink is all separate. These all seem to be fairly obvious value add opportunities, but there are some new ideas that are even more creative.

Among the new ideas are toilet charges (anyone attending an old fashioned English school will remember this from their early days) and a special charge for fat people.
Makes you wonder which other opportunities to charge could be implemented, perhaps one for people wearing too much perfume, people using the steps to get on and off the plane, use of the reading lights, maybe a surcharge based on the beauty of the air hostess could be suggested judging by miss April from the Ryan Air employee calendar.
Yet another Irish contribution to society, other than Guinness and The Corrs.
Any other ideas come to mind??