How Does the Lack of Land (New Sims) Effect the Economy?

[Prokofy Neva]

This is the question some people have asked me to ponder, responding to my other thread about "How's Business".

Where Does the Value of the Linden Come From?

Yes, you can answer "from the totality of the goods and services of the people of that country" or some other classic answer, and in a way that is largely true, but there is more to it of course as it is an artificial toy.

People wonder whether the current good rate for cashouts -- 240 or 241 much of the time -- is due to the suppression of the land glut, i.e. the non-availability of new sims.

And the answer is: no, that rate held LONG before COVID even, and has existed for quite some time -- a year? -- and came rather unexpectedly after for years being at 250 or even 256 sometimes. People think it "fluctuates" and that is "normal" and that you "have to expect ups and downs" like a real currency market.

No, it does not fluctuate; the Lindens control it with "Supply Linden" as he is indeed called. We used to know more about this; now we don't. Does Supply Linden completely stop functioning some times? 

Balancing Merchants' and Customers' Demands

Are payments of taxes on the MP sinks or sources? See, we don't even have the most basic information about this economy, which is not a normal one, but a controlled one like Russia's or China's, which preserves enough elements of a "free" economy to be sort of plausible.

Obviously it's a balance between satisfying merchants, who howl when the rate devalues to 250 or higher (the higher that number is, the lower the value is, because it takes more Linden dollars to make up a US dollar - it's like how people go around with shopping carts of bills in some countries where the market crashed, and why countries like Uzbekistan or Armenia have millions of their currency that equal only thousands of US dollars). 

When the *fee* for cashing out was raised rather drastically, there was indeed complaining, and then eventually this higher value of the Linden then reduced some of that crying. Some people make an entire livelihood out of SL; some make a partial livelihood; some just offset the cost of SL -- and thus there are different economies for different people. In RL, it's rare that someone has the cash and resources to buy an old home, fix it up, offer the rooms for a B&B, and then not worry if it never fills up, and just let people come and go naturally to offset their costs. The reason the B&Bs in Cape Cod I have gone to for years change hands so often now is because no one has that luxury in the inn business.

But then a high-value Linden becomes a problem for the buyer of Linden dollars, the consumer, the non-merchant. So someone has to pay $10 more for their sim. Or their dresses or mesh bodies suddenly seem a lot more expensive, maybe twice as costly. If they now have a premium with $1200 a month because they got a Bellissaria house, perhaps that pain is not so visible. But it's a balance between making people feel like they have a thousand bucks and can buy all these luxury things they can't in RL like a house and a car and a fur coat -- and making them feel like they are in a game where they have to keep spending a real $5 or real $10, as they would buying extra stuff in Fortnite, or with a subscription to World of War Craft. It really is about psychology more than economy.

Land Printing Press

So...when you stay the hand of the Linden money printing press, the value increases, and when the land-printing press, which is really "like" or very closely tied to the value of money is shuttered, that seems to me to be "good" for the economy. No? That is my question. That is, some people complain that they suddenly can't satisfy customers, especially those coming back who want a whole sim or even just 1/8 of a sim. If they are either very big land dealers, i.e. at the 100 sim or greater level, "growth" is important to them. But such land dealers make up a fraction of the land business. And while many like to think, or wish, that content is king, and the taxation of content sales and taxation of LindEx sales is the future for a virtual world platform's business model, I think we are far from that, and sale of land (sims) is the bulk of the revenue and will remain so for some time.

So here there is a harsh reality: the Lindens harm their bottom line when they cannot sell sims -- they need to sell sims. So objectively, what is better for the inworld economy -- less of a land glut -- is not good for them. They can't harm the inworld economy TOO much because if every end user or island dealer goes out of business or quits SL, they lose revenue, too. So it's a balance.

Cost Center

In my view, "growth" and "investing in the business" are really dangerous myths for land dealers. Land is a cost center. It is a sunk cost. It is like paying rent on a shop in real life; it's not like buying a set of tools for a car shop. There are many cautionary tales, including that YouTube I often reference of the happy couple claiming they pull US $2000 out of SL every week and have quit their RL jobs, and sit on their couch with laptops and just make people who want beaches and surfing happy all day with a few clicks. They keep buying more flat pancakes, they keep flipping them and then they go broke when some unforeseen thing happens, like a price change of sims, a reduction of the population, VAT, or increasing the amount of prims per square meter or what-have-you. Then they fail, they go out of business, which is why they are gone from SL, or perhaps they've kept one account to go to clubs now and then.

There is no such thing as "investment" in SL land; it is a cost center -- unless, I suppose, you are a very high-end seller with very refined design or role-play, i.e. a boutique offering. Some of this works, and some of it works quietly. Some of it exists only by cost offset, not by profit. The owners can afford to have a hobby like this. But by and large it's my contention that you cannot really make a living with land in SL and shouldn't try to, and you should not quit that day job. So that's why I'm translating a book by a Belarusian engineer or Navalny's medical bulletins and not buying another island : )

Many, many land dealers live in delusion about this. They need to have imagination about it because it's part of their game, their virtual world, "myself as land baron, myself as landlady". So they can get very angry at this discussion. They get angry at VAT costs -- because they do not run their SL business like a real business -- if they did, they would reclaim the VAT from their governments. But they have it at such a low level they can't possibly start reporting and running their business with spreadsheets, etc.

Stopping the Land Glut

My belief is that by stopping this land glut -- and it is a glut because a lot of it is at *worse than* 80% occupancy needed to stay solvency that the Lindens have HELPED the land business and therefore helped KEEP the 241 value even as they glut the market with Bellissaria offerings and premium with $1200 stipends that flood the currency market. That is, the reason it is so hard to get a Belli home and you have to refresh pages constantly is because the Lindens are not buying new servers until they move to the cloud, apparently. But I mean overall, the growth of Belli in the last few years and 241 even *before* COVID.

I'm going to discount the role of the Mainland auction because it seldom has entire sims for sale. (Remember, it used to be the case that Lindens made shiny new mainland sims and rolled them out on the auction to sell at a furious rate! That era is over, now it's all used land). I see parcels opening at 0.5/m and selling for that -- or going unsold -- because they are in some truly hard-scrabble situations. Occasionally a nice sailing lot will sell for $10/m or $20/m (not Blake which would never be abandoned and hence never available for the auction). I don't watch it that closely so maybe someone else can comment. Maybe the role of the auction *should* be included. But without public records on its results (which we used to have) we can't tell what that role is.

Island Business

So if you are an island rental agents, you have been paying $229 a month in tier per island unless you have a grandfathered island which is $179. That is, unless you are one of those lucky very high-end buyers who get an additional bulk discount about which we don't know publicly, but does exist. But let's say you are one of the many garden-variety dealers.

So that means you divide it up by 16, rent out 15 and have a public square on the 16th, you need to charge US $15.26 per month to break even, or 953L per 4096 per week. Obviously if a person has costs of content purchases, customer service, etc. they have to charge more, so it's $1000-$1200. And since they have 80% occupancy or worse, they do not break even. If this isn't your math, that's fine, there is a great range on these things inworld. I'm just doing the hypothetical to show that while at first it might seem like an island of $229 a month divided into 16 pieces and rented for $1500L a week (US $24) is going to be a great thing, in reality, it isn't for the reason of lack of occupancy -- oh, and tremendous competition and the need to constantly refresh content and pay designers and builders.

Universities Attrition

There may be less sims than there were, but there are as many people fighting for a dwindling set of customers as ever. yes, there are new people coming in due to COVID, or oldbies returning due to COVID but then COVID also reduces membership sometimes in the most tragic way. And sometimes people just find other ways to do this, maybe just on Zoom. I went through to correct my "UK" list of RL sims this week, to take but one example. Two universities that have been on here for years were simply gone. No announcement, nothing. Same on my US list and Germany list. Some very long-term universities GONE. And not *moved* because yes, I'm capable of looking them up in search. Perhaps put on "hidden"? I don't think so. I think they are gone. I would like to know the exact number of universities in SL and know if that number is growing as I see some attrition.

Supply Linden

On the other hand, if there are suddenly lots of happy island dealers able to fill up all their islands and all the parcels on them -- because there is nothing new and no one new to compete with them -- and many happy merchants making lots of cash from gatchas in particular, then all of them cashing out at once, in large bundles, that would seem to lower the value of the Linden, no?

Hence the role of Supply -- or perhaps even Demand Linden, if there is such a creature -- becomes more important. We have all been on the LindEx, trying to decide whether to sell right away or put it at 240 and wait, and dithered, and suddenly see a million come and go instantly. Yes, there are merchants who have a million Lindens to cash out. But the fact that I see this happening more than the number of merchants I believe have that million lets me know that Supply becomes Demand and buys or removes Lindens to keep equilibrium in the system. Or maybe Marketplace Linden takes all his cash every day, and it's not a sink, i.e. removal and burnt cash, but is then sold on the LindEx to give LL revenue. That would be reasonable. No one really knows what those fast appearing millions are all about. If they were 100,000, they would be more understandable as business people cashing out. But they are in the millions.

Sinks or Sources for Linden Transactions?

I am talking only about the known unknowns here, and I don't know the unknown unknowns. The unknown unknowns are:

o Where do the Lindens taken in tax from the Marketplace go, are they sinks or sources?

o Where do the Lindens made from the sale of abandoned land go, are they sinks or sources? I don't *think* they go to that individual customer service Linden, because if they did, Guy would have had a new suit of clothes years ago LOL. I think they are just vacuumed out of those accounts by supervisors perhaps even by a script -- but are they sinks or sources?

o Where do the Lindens spent on Classifieds go? Are they sinks or sources?

Long ago we were told that texture and sound uploads were sinks, and group fees were sinks. What about all this other stuff? It matters.

Merchant Revenue

Some people with more Lindens than usual might spend them on content for their business or themselves; again, the enormous plethora of 30-50-60 Linden sales all weekend let me know that merchants cannot sell their merchandise at regular prices and even those hitting their gatchas 20 times as if they had sold an offering at a "regular" price isn't cutting it for them. Either the competition is too great or people don't have as much cash (the money market is tighter and it costs them more). 

I have no idea really what to think about this, there isn't enough information. I can post on the forums and hope that maybe a few more people will  say something privately or publicly to try to glean what is happening. I can fly around and hear one person say they fear the economy is going to crash; I can hear another say their sales are sluggish; I can see a third move out of my store rentals because they aren't sell anything. But the next day I can find a landlord crowing about their new COVID customers; I can have a customer ask to expand with another store; I can see somebody is brave enough to open a new mall and start to fill it -- which is truly brave as malls just aren't a business model anymore in SL (although I continue to run 2 of them with very old and some new customers just because I think not everybody wants to brave laggy events and cam-shopping and pay the prices of top merchants, and I think there should always be cheaper options for both merchants to display wares and for shoppers to get cheaper stuff). 

And whenever anybody buys anything I've made, it is a triumph of faith and vision that is the joy of Second Life. Thank God there are still events where you can still buy home-made prim stuff that is delightful if not as skilled and polished as the latest mesh item at a big event.

What do you think? 

Because soon, the Lindens will start printing sims again. If someone was somehow pent up and outside of SL and not shopping because they had no sim, that is good for the economy, I guess. But it does likely mean greater vacancy rates for everyone. If we are only talking about the niche market of universities and NGOs that really don't come into the rest of SL, I suppose that's a separate discussion but I think such sims are really more integrated than you might think. They all have to buy chairs and tables and coffee makers; the devs they hire are not going to make all those from scratch.

 

 

 

[Blank Slate]

I love reading your posts. The new investor group should take you on as a consultant!

[Theresa Tennyson]

14 hours ago, Prokofy Neva said:

People wonder whether the current good rate for cashouts -- 240 or 241 much of the time -- is due to the suppression of the land glut, i.e. the non-availability of new sims.

And the answer is: no, that rate held LONG before COVID even, and has existed for quite some time -- a year? -- and came rather unexpectedly after for years being at 250 or even 256 sometimes. People think it "fluctuates" and that is "normal" and that you "have to expect ups and downs" like a real currency market.

No, it does not fluctuate; the Lindens control it with "Supply Linden" as he is indeed called. We used to know more about this; now we don't. Does Supply Linden completely stop functioning some times? 

 

Here's a thread from February of this year where there was wailing and gnashing of teeth when the exchange rate was in the neighborhood of 260 for an extended period of time, and which Mr. Neva posted in. I'm referring to him in the third person because I'm reasonably sure he has me blocked on the forum

 

[Prokofy Neva]

Let's see now. February 17, before COVID, was *seven months ago*. I don't know about you, but I feel like time flies with COVID. Or maybe it doesn't for you. But seven months is only part of a year, yes. It's 7/12ths of a year. So gosh, that is really a falsehood then, to say something was "quite some time -- a year?" and find out that wow, it was "only" seven months.

So, this is a...gotcha...then? The difference between "7 months" and "a year"?

If anything, it's proof of my point -- that indeed there was wailing and gnashing of teeth from merchants first clubbed by higher cashout fees, then clubbed by a devaluating Linden. So the Lindens fixed it and made it better? Or? You tell me. The fact is, you don't know, because no one has sufficient information. Public information. That is, maybe there are some insiders who have this information, but something tells me it is not Theresa Tennyson, who merely contradicts for the sake of contradiction.

Fortunately, you don't need to hear this from me or from this dreadful person I rightfully keep blocked.

You can just look at the chart.

Here you can see it seems to have systematic dips -- almost as if -- hey -- it's not a natural fluctuation but artificially maintained. What could account for those dips? Stipend day? Tier dates that are all uniform? But they aren't uniform. And people don't cash out their stipends, do they? They spend them in world.

Look at it over 90 days. There you see a steady decline since June -- three months ago -- and remember that a decline means an INCREASE in value, because it takes less Lindens to make up a dollar. And indeed, the last time I cashed out yesterday it was 240, even, not 241. PS we don't have *detailed* charts past 90 days. That is if you want to get out your forceps and jeweler's loup and parse the year chart, which I think does not qualify for the title "market data" but qualifies for the label "obfuscation", you can do that. What I will try to do is cut and paste them more often and revive my group "Weather Report" and post the information weekly.

So again, I can only reiterate the truth as I have seen it for 15 years, and know from the press conferences or office hours of long-ago Lindens (Lawrence Linden, T-Bone Linden and others) who discussed the LindEx openly -- and from long-ago information publicized by the Lindens back when they publicized it. (The only reason they stopped publicizing it seems to be that it reveals too much about the decline of 30-day unique log-ons and premium membership, which isn't good for their product sales, I guess, or their image in the community).

o The LindEx does not fluctuate naturally. This should not be so hard to prove, and I shouldn't have to hark back to actual statements about Supply Linden from yesteryear. It's obvious to anyone who uses it regularly either to buy or sell Lindens. Theresa likely does neither at any scale or she wouldn't attempt to play gotcha in this odd way.

o The Lindens try to keep the LindEx in a balance, between having a purchase of Lindens that feels "cheap" and "good" to buyers and end users who consume, and having a cashout that feels "high" and "good" to merchants, some of whom try to make a living or part of a living in SL.

o But for reasons we can only guess, occasionally the Lindens do NOT -- repeat DO NOT -- keep any balance, and the Linden values slides quite deeply, or even rises quite steeply, and sometimes for significant periods.

Anyone with any sense, even without any economic training (I'm certainly not an economist) can see this truth. They can find it in the charts themselves, and in written records going back years.

Because we are living in a closed society, a black box, what I try to do is make a hypothesis, discuss it, and see if it is true, and if enough data is gathered to show it is not, try another one. Like Qie, in this thread, who is of like mind at least in terms of the value of open debate and logic and common sense, says he observed the LindEx and Linden devaluing, and theorized that people would rush to the exist to cash out when they saw the Sansar layoffs.

Well, I personally would not have made that assumption, after years of hearty propaganda from the Lindens that Sansar is a different product entirely than SL, and that they don't make global decisions affecting both of them, a propaganda I tend to believe, perhaps wrongly. I would also add that when you posit theories of "rushing to the exits," you're positing it about a very, very few players with millions capable of moving the market. And those very few players themselves grasp that they cut off the tree they are sitting on if they "rush to the exits" and therefore they exercise self-restraint. Hard to believe in the FU Hedonism culture of SL, but possibly it's the case. I don't know. Qie asks other hard questions about the spread and the arbitrage I have no idea about.

I marvel that many people don't understand about Limited Buy and buy automatically without even waiting 10 minutes or perhaps a few weeks to get a better buy. Of course if more people grasped this, the LindEx might be affected, and perhaps for the worst, so perhaps the big players have a vested interest in hiding this information -- but it's not as if the Lindens hide it, it is plainly marked on the LindEx page.

One of the chief problems of evaluating the LindEx is that unlike Wall Street, where there is the Wall Street Journal and of course many other records, you can't determine the proof of your recollection by pointing to a record. For example, Lindal Kidd say:

270 is not unheard-of.  When I joined back in 2007, and up until some time in 2008-9, the exchange rate was pretty constant at about 270-275:1.  Then it went down to around 250:1 and remained there until last fall, when it started creeping back up again.

That sort of tracks with what I recall, but I do keep at least spot check records, so I go and look. And it's not always the case because significant periods can have a different rate.

In that thread, animats asks:

Somebody has a sell order pending for L$129,639,049 at L$259 / US$1.00.

Wonder who wants to cash out nearly half a million US dollars? Is that unusually large? Or just a big landlord cashing out the rent payments?

Well, that could be Supply Linden; that could be somebody playing the LindEx (there are actually some who do who have patience and lots of Lindens) or in fact that land baron envisioned. Or it could be fraud.

The fact is, YOU DON"T KNOW.

Then Molly Mews posts her actual buying record on spot and it shows that yes, the Linden dollar has become more expensive, it has risen in value.

Then Theresa posts this:

2) Someone was trying to increase the exchange rate on a market buy. It's interesting that it was placed before anyone from Linden Lab would have been awake. There is apparently quite a bit of financial funny business involving rare gacha items on the Marketplace bought with stolen credit card numbers right now - there might have been an attempt to launder Lindens by using market buys.

Well, the concept of "before Linden Lab would have been awake" is meaningless. There are remote working Lindens all over the world. Perhaps a Linden in London is responsible for serving as "Supply Linden" for all we know. My best guess is that an incident like that is Supply Linden, not a big landlord and not fraud.

Yes, it could be laundering. And you do realize, that there is a Linden named Emily Stonehouse whose entire job appears to be about watching for things like that and nip it well in the bud before it reaches the LindEx, surely. And while we tend to think of fraud as being related to the LindEx, it can also be related to person-to-person transactions we can't see, or even merely verbal communications between parties using Second Life as a virtual safe house or cut-out.

That is relatively new -- there wasn't a "compliance officer" of that nature 10 years ago, and that's a very good thing. I don't know if that person has enough to do all day.  I hope she isn't insanely busy. That is she is *now* when they are selling Linden Lab. But I hope on a good day, she can safely take lunch and coffee breaks.

That is, it's hard for me, as just a norm with no inside information, to believe that people interested in money-laundering, or financing terrorism, or violating the Magnitsky Act by putting their race horse into the Kentucky Downs despite their responsibility for massacres in Chechnya (to name just one thing the State Department has caught and prevented using the Magnitsky Act) -- would use the relatively small pond of Second Life to perpetrate any of their misdeeds. That seems ludicrous. But then, maybe that's because I have covered Russian oligarchs for whom Second Life couldn't even be a doll house. For one, each person who applies to use the LindEx through the automatic interface and have the full options of it has a limit assigned to them based on their typical activity. So there is a brake on my ability to try to cash out more than X amount. 

This is called Economic Limits. Recently while contacting the live chat, I had a notice about Economic Limits thrust at me and I was surprised because at first I didn't know what it was (having forgotten that this brake on the LindEx was called that). I studied it curiously and began at first to wonder mistakenly why this system would prevent me from cashing out to pay tier -- before I realized in fact it's what I have used for years which is more than plenty to pay for tier in my case. Sometimes these Linden pages can be confusing even to those of us who have stared at them for 16 years (yes, wish me Happy Rez Day on September 28, 2004).

I'm at "Business Level 2" which means I can't cash out more than $14,000 in 24 hours or the same amount in 30 days. That actually seems excessive to me and I don't understand why the amounts are the same for both 24 hours and 30 days but it doesn't matter, I am unlikely ever to cash out at that end limit. I'm a minor player in SL so I have to imagine that the big boys then have much higher limits, but still, they have limits that I would think would prevent anybody from becoming the kind of serious player that FinCEN or ESMA would watch and catch, but then, look at the latest Buzzfeed article on this topic and the Wirecard disaster.

So if there are brakes like that, even if they seem kind of stretched, then how could any self-respecting money-launderer ever want to use SL to do anything? And the answer is, there are money-launderers, and they don't have self-respect, or they are desperate, or very patient, or who knows what, but they do exist. A lot of nickel and dime crooks can add up. We all know there are gatcha content thieves in particular who try to sell at actually low prices for what normally are high-priced gatchas, and then sell in high volume, and then disappear. In my entire time in SL, I only personally saw a strange thing like this (if we discount the antics of the "stock market" and "banks"), when an unknown avatar with no description tried to pass me $100,000. Since there is never anything I do in SL that would instantly yield such a large amount (that one time I was able to sell a Starax statue for US $300 (at that time about 75,000L because we still had Gaming Open Market which had the rate of $4.00/1000 [which BTW we have currently but haven't for a long time]) -- I instantly reported it to the Lindens. No one would "tip" me that fantastic sum. What were they thinking? The Lindens took my account offline for a day, it was put back, that avatar was deleted from the system, and who knows what that was about. Perhaps an attempt to frame me by a griefer? But that's stupid, the Lindens can track someone's typical activity, and unlike these griefers, not only do I have a payment information online, they can look me up in the book unlike so many of you.

So I came along in that thread, and said this, about the devaluing Linden last year, if you don't like to click on necro-threads:

Yes, that's evidently a sign that there are more and more Premium accounts being purchased and their stipends and sign-up bonuses then flooding the market -- it's like Yeltsin printing rubles.

Evidently the Lindens are not intervening (of course they intervene all the time with Supply Linden) because the want the new Bellissarians to feel like they have a lot of cheap, ready cash to buy all those house add-ons and furnis from the Lindens' friends.

Eventually I think even they will tire of this, however, as the house add-on manufacturers realize more and more than cashing out their Lindens is worth less and less, especially with the new fee, double the old.

And really, that's what this is all about. Call me cynical, or call me a very old avatar, but that is indeed what it is about. The Lindens try to keep a balance. That they sometimes seem to have fallen asleep at the switch and don't do this "in time" could be an illusion, because there could be other factors we can't know.

And in that thread, when Tennyson claimed the Linden has "always" been more or less at 250 (and we have "always" been at war with Eurasia), I said this:

That's not true whatsoever. I have InfoNut issues and blogs going back for years and I just ran across one from 2008 lamenting how the Linden stood at 325. 

Then Tennyson said that was a freak spike and the long-term history shows it has always been at 250, to which I said:

I'm glad to see that you admit now that your claim "The exchange rate has been a few Lindens either side of 250 for most of Second Life's history" is wrong. The graph illustrates this. It doesn't matter if 325 is a "freak spike" because there are other bad patches that last along time and have a terrible effect.

It's also obvious that when you have that compressed of a graph over 15 years that you can't tell how long the peaks and troughs are, really. But don't let the facts get in the way of your usual desire to say something to counter me, even if the sky is blue. I'm going to try to figure out the "block" on here again.

So then she says:

So, what you're saying is we can't tell if the brief period of 325 is longer than the plateaus on either side?

To which Lewis Luminos reasonably says:

I remember it sticking at 270 to 275 for a very long time, since I started in 2006 and possibly as late as 2009. I was gutted when it dropped to 250 (because I only ever buy L$, I have never earned enough to sell).

And that's the point. You can't tell really what that graph says when it is so compressed. Maybe you can tell if one spike of 325 is only one spike but that is NOT the point. The point is that it is not "always" 250 and the periods when it is another figure are not "always" spikes. Hello! You *do* have the memories of people who were here in 2006 or earlier, and while you might claim those are subjective, some of us actually recorded this in blogs and newsletters. And while you might claim those are tampered with, if you are a nerdy internet troll, well, most normal people grasp that the LindEx has never "always" been at 250.

Qie found Tyche's Grid Survey chart that shows "the long reign" of 250, but quite significant periods at 270

So the debate here is not "that" it happens, because there is ample proof it does. It was at 250; now it's at 240; in fact it was at 270 for good long periods; and we all remember the day Ryan Linden crashed the auction by putting all low opening bids.

The question is how do the Lindens determine this, and do they act in any kind of deliberate and rational manner, or not and what we can expect.

So yes, it was at 270 and worse in the past, for various objective and subjective reasons; it was at 250 for a long time; then indeed it went to 240 for a long time during COVID. If you want to Fisk my posts and pretend that "7 months is not like a year" or even that "3 months is not significant" if that's the case, it's not important. The fact is, I believe conscious decisions were made to make this rate better, after complaints, and in part to prevent leading land merchants and content creators from leaving.

The myth that COVID is good for online business only exclusively, and never bad, neglects that real people are the ones who log on and several things can happen to them besides going inside and living in their pajamas and ordering from Balducci's and playing SL. For one, they can get very sick or even die. For two, they can lose their jobs, or have to take extra jobs when the going is good to even have them. They can get new jobs which are harder and take more hours. Then they don't play SL or if they do, they spend less. Second Life is not made up of people like you.

And very soon you will admit it that it is no longer at 240.

Because I guess we are due for a course correction.

 

 

 

 

Edited September 20, 2020 by Prokofy Neva
Adding info about illegibility of year-long market data

[Theresa Tennyson]

2 hours ago, Prokofy Neva said:

Then Theresa posts this:

2) Someone was trying to increase the exchange rate on a market buy. It's interesting that it was placed before anyone from Linden Lab would have been awake. There is apparently quite a bit of financial funny business involving rare gacha items on the Marketplace bought with stolen credit card numbers right now - there might have been an attempt to launder Lindens by using market buys.

Well, the concept of "before Linden Lab would have been awake" is meaningless. There are remote working Lindens all over the world. Perhaps a Linden in London is responsible for serving as "Supply Linden" for all we know. My best guess is that an incident like that is Supply Linden, not a big landlord and not fraud.

 

Tip: When quoting someone out of context, it's usually more effective to edit out things like numbers which suggest what you were quoting was originally part of a list.

[Prokofy Neva]

5 hours ago, Theresa Tennyson said:

Tip: When quoting someone out of context, it's usually more effective to edit out things like numbers which suggest what you were quoting was originally part of a list.

Well, I don't think of that as a "tip" but merely your preference which I don't agree with when making a direct quote. For one, someone can then see there is context and go back and see the list in the thread referenced above. 

[Prokofy Neva]

If anyone would like to join a group in which LindEx rates will be regularly posted and records kept, here it is, WeatherReport, paste into search:

f3000ef4-f76c-0d49-a6c3-da05a92d57b3