Ethical Land Dealers

[Theresa Tennyson]

10 hours ago, Prokofy Neva said:

I find it shocking how much unnecessary notecarding landlords are doing these days with a barrage of as many as a dozen cards in people's faces through automatic systems.

People don't -- and in many cases -- can't read them

 

Are you saying that excessive verbage is ineffective in getting one's point across?

[Diablo Lioncourt]

Best place to put most info is on a website. On mainland, its mandatory to have a notecard with your terms and conditions because you can't put it in the "covenant" section, and you want it as close to that in-world payment interface as possible. The standard place to put it is in the meter, so its given to someone who requests info, and upon payment. Spamming people with landmarks, notecards, etc because they entered your land is just going to result in those items being ignored, and if its excessive people will leave just for that.

Feel free to say most people who can access the Internet can't actually read or don't know how to use websites, OP. You're definitely making a point. It may not be the point you're trying to make.

 

 

Edited December 15, 2023 by Diablo Lioncourt

[InnerCity Elf]

In my mind, it could go two ways. Landlords could get hyped - if someone who's good with that, takes that mission upon them - and would be enthusiastic to get involved in the "Chapter One - This is just the Beginning" stage, and contribute their own biases, until we could poetically name The Codex "1001 Rules" and then start to gatekeep it, so we won't need to change the name.

Or, and I fear that's the more probable one, 99% of them wouldn't even want to read through, discuss, amend, etc. 100 rules, or a dozen. It's too many, too much, too conflicting-interests for most people for whom this is just a hobby. And for people who really earn money with this.

But that's just how this scenario would play out in my mind, minus the sub plots with pitchforks, pitch poured down from high castles, bombardments with plywood blocks by rental highstackers, and other fun things; there certainly are discussion or rule worthy (after discussion) points. It just might be an offer with not enough demand.

[Prokofy Neva]

23 hours ago, Theresa Tennyson said:

Are you saying that excessive verbage is ineffective in getting one's point across?

Yes, indeed I am. And feel free not to read my longform posts.

I write as I please. And I write a lot to put it in search, and to reach those who do think, and they can skim.

Carry on.

[Prokofy Neva]

21 hours ago, Diablo Lioncourt said:

Best place to put most info is on a website. On mainland, its mandatory to have a notecard with your terms and conditions because you can't put it in the "covenant" section, and you want it as close to that in-world payment interface as possible. The standard place to put it is in the meter, so its given to someone who requests info, and upon payment. Spamming people with landmarks, notecards, etc because they entered your land is just going to result in those items being ignored, and if its excessive people will leave just for that.

Feel free to say most people who can access the Internet can't actually read or don't know how to use websites, OP. You're definitely making a point. It may not be the point you're trying to make.

 

 

For the record, I don't have any bots in my business; no one gets an automatic invite OR any notecards automatically that they did not request *in that fashion*.

So take it elsewhere.

I have a rental box with a lease in it because you can't put it into the land menu as you can on an island. You click to get info; nothing automatic.

Then after I have manually greeted people and told them to join the group on their own if they didn't, and then I manually upgrade them to a role with more rights, I manually send people a "Quickstart" with the basics which also has a long list of rules and suggestions, because many people don't know how to change their role in a group and need a diagram.

 

[Diablo Lioncourt]

6 hours ago, Prokofy Neva said:

For the record, I don't have any bots in my business; no one gets an automatic invite OR any notecards automatically that they did not request *in that fashion*.

So take it elsewhere.

I have a rental box with a lease in it because you can't put it into the land menu as you can on an island. You click to get info; nothing automatic.

Then after I have manually greeted people and told them to join the group on their own if they didn't, and then I manually upgrade them to a role with more rights, I manually send people a "Quickstart" with the basics which also has a long list of rules and suggestions, because many people don't know how to change their role in a group and need a diagram.

 

"Why I lost to big estate companie who started after me."

You're not the only person here and it's not all about you:)

What you do is quaint, but it doesn't scale. The most successful estates companies use automation to dynamiccally set rental rates in response to market conditions, just like Amazon. This results in units that have been sitting vacant getting reduced, and units that always rent the day ththe ey're available being listed for as much as possible. Object return upon land recall, resetting terrain, and placing staging objects are often automated.

You are not morally superior to them for taking longer to get everything done, and it's physically impossible for you to beat their prices or speed of service with the system you use.

Since we have to use groups in mainland, the silliest thing we can do is make them open access and force ourselves to track who's still paying,unless it's a small hobby operation. This is considered a major noob mistake by most. It's virtually guaranteed to enable theft of prims from your paying customers. You are not Superman. There is one of you, and at least hundreds of tenants, if not thousands.Theres only 24 hours in a day.

Your implication that you/your philosophy holds a monopoly on "ethical" is inappropriate.

Money talks. Tenants can choose to subsidize better land and buildings, faster scripts, etc or they can subsidize manual invites and manual spreadsheet type tracking of group members against paying tenants, or free prims for bums. There's no free lunch. Everything you spend their rent money on, especially your time, impacts your prices, competitiveness, and profitability.

Considering what you seem to want as far as land rules, why you don't own an estate company yourself is not clear.

Edited December 16, 2023 by Diablo Lioncourt

[Qie Niangao]

Suddenly I wonder how much effect a land dealer could have on the culture of a social virtual world. How much are we the legacy of Anshe and the FairChangs?

[Love Zhaoying]

3 minutes ago, Qie Niangao said:

Suddenly I wonder how much effect a land dealer could have on the culture of a social virtual world. How much are we the legacy of Anshe and the FairChangs?

If there was a Second Life version of Billy Joel's "We Didn't Start the Fire", it would mention them. 

[Rowan Amore]

The company I rented from for years was always priced lower than the competition and was not automated.  Each time, I was greeted by a rental agent, passed the pertinent notecards, invited to the land group and shown my rental box.  Honestly, I wouldn't rent from a company that was automated.

[Diablo Lioncourt]

Once I hear you believe something is both "not automated" and "priced lower than the competition" I'm good on how you feel.

Emancipation Proclamation would make that highly unlikely. Were these "agents" volunteers? Are you a soup kitchen?

I don't really know what you perceived and didn't consider to be "the competition". Rolls Royce are "not automated" in production. There's no assembly line. Other cars have some automation in the assembly process.:)

 

 

Edited December 17, 2023 by Diablo Lioncourt

[Rowan Amore]

I didn't say there was NO automation.  I'm quite sure there is but what the customer sees is not.  This was all.private estate rentals and the company was consistently less expensive than some of the larger ones.  They've been in business since 2007, I believe.  I've never rented mainland and really would never consider doing so but that's just me.

Edited December 17, 2023 by Rowan Amore

[Alwin Alcott]

I like the discussion it's interesting.
But in the title "ethical land dealers" by the OP a question comes up:

How ethical is it to burn people with their names and quotes, full conversations, on the blog of the "ethical" landlord?
Sorry but i can't take it serious.
 

[Prokofy Neva]

14 hours ago, Diablo Lioncourt said:

"Why I lost to big estate companie who started after me."

You're not the only person here and it's not all about you:)

What you do is quaint, but it doesn't scale. The most successful estates companies use automation to dynamiccally set rental rates in response to market conditions, just like Amazon. This results in units that have been sitting vacant getting reduced, and units that always rent the day ththe ey're available being listed for as much as possible. Object return upon land recall, resetting terrain, and placing staging objects are often automated.

You are not morally superior to them for taking longer to get everything done, and it's physically impossible for you to beat their prices or speed of service with the system you use.

Since we have to use groups in mainland, the silliest thing we can do is make them open access and force ourselves to track who's still paying,unless it's a small hobby operation. This is considered a major noob mistake by most. It's virtually guaranteed to enable theft of prims from your paying customers. You are not Superman. There is one of you, and at least hundreds of tenants, if not thousands.Theres only 24 hours in a day.

Your implication that you/your philosophy holds a monopoly on "ethical" is inappropriate.

Money talks. Tenants can choose to subsidize better land and buildings, faster scripts, etc or they can subsidize manual invites and manual spreadsheet type tracking of group members against paying tenants, or free prims for bums. There's no free lunch. Everything you spend their rent money on, especially your time, impacts your prices, competitiveness, and profitability.

Considering what you seem to want as far as land rules, why you don't own an estate company yourself is not clear.

What are you going on about here? I haven't "lost to big estate companies" because I wasn't in competition with them in the first place. Are you?

Again, my ideas here have not been submitted to impose on anyone, to get the Lindens to impose anything, or to imagine "everything is about me." Is it about you?

It's a different task, which is to discuss what is ethical, what a minimal list of rules could look like; what the elements of a list would be, etc.  There might be a deck of norms from which some people chose one set and others another set.

I don't need anything to "scale" (the mantra of all techies). But you would have to wonder what kind of world we will live in (when we are all in virtuality always) if it doesn't "scale". What scales and what doesn't out of the milk of human kindness?

I don't think a rule not to bounce your fellow avatar to kingdom come because he wants to fly over your house to his own or to a river is "quaint" but good business.

I don't need to "beat their prices or speed"; the real competitors are not other Mainland land lords or island landlords but the Lindens, who decided to make their various products compete with each other, to their detriment.

Advocating lists of ethical norms and debating them (you haven't really done that yet) isn't about being morally superior but it speaks volumes that you think it does. 

I get it that many people believe that they can't trust others, that they must lock up and bar and ban others, etc. In fact, if you don't do that, you find things work better than you imagined

You don't have to make manual spreadsheets when My Accounts has land groups with the lists of parcels and their names created automatically. You can also look at each land group and see an automatically formed list of all the parcels and their names, and teleport to them. You may want to make spreadsheets or do more labeling, etc. to determine vacancy, but you can also tell if you have too much vacancy an easy way: you can't pay the tier with the proceeds of your rentals. 

You don't have to track paying members versus non-paying -- why? I haven't heard an answer here to my question as to why you can't just label each unit with the sim name and a number so that you know where a person is when they IM you, without flying there.

I don't know what you mean by "owning an estate company" -- if you mean estate as in islands, I don't find islands interesting, and they aren't contiguous and you reach a hard stop when you try to fly out of them. I just have one island and one homestead; I have a small rental company with mostly Mainland rentals. 

What I'm not getting here is any kind of sense of your own list of rules. Are you one of those landlords who says "No Rules"? How can you solve the problem of how people are to get along on the grid when they are in each other's view?

Apparently all one has to do to get another Mainland landlord's feathers ruffled is to advocate a rule that people get out of the view with their skyboxes. I don't care. I think skyboxes should go in the sky, out of the view; just above two storeys is not out of the view.
 

[Prokofy Neva]

1 hour ago, Alwin Alcott said:

I like the discussion it's interesting.
But in the title "ethical land dealers" by the OP a question comes up:

How ethical is it to burn people with their names and quotes, full conversations, on the blog of the "ethical" landlord?
Sorry but i can't take it serious.
 

Oh, it's fine. Outside of Second Life's jurisdiction and servers, such as they are, it's a free country. 

I live in one-party consent New York state. You?

[Alwin Alcott]

1 hour ago, Prokofy Neva said:

Oh, it's fine. Outside of Second Life's jurisdiction and servers, such as they are, it's a free country. 

the topic is ETHICAL, thats a whole different level as what's allowed or not.. it's a hypocritical approach you show here.

[Diablo Lioncourt]

The word "ethical" and the associated implication of moral superiority is what annoys me here.

I'm a big fan of letting the tenants dictate everything with their wallets.

 

Edited December 17, 2023 by Diablo Lioncourt

[Prokofy Neva]

Just now, Diablo Lioncourt said:

The word "ethical" and the associated implication of moral superiority is what annoys me here.

I'm a big fan of letting the tenants dictate everything with their wallets.

I'm not surprised.

But when you don't have ethics, what become superior is not morals.

A dictatorship of wallets is a dictatorship.

 

[Diablo Lioncourt]

43 minutes ago, Prokofy Neva said:

A dictatorship of wallets is a dictatorship.

 

Sir, an economic "dictatorship" would involve control of the market by one single wallet that sets prices (such as "single payer" universal healthcare), or more commonly, regulation and control of the market and its players by the state, such as in North Korea. Characteristics can include price floors, price ceilings, excessive taxes and subsidies, and excessive regulations, often created to favor established local businesses and industries and stifle competition. This can result in a limited number of products and services, waste, arbitrage, and supply issues caused by artificially set prices.

Multiple wallets competing for products and services, and multiple products and services competing for consumer dollars, resulting in supply and demand "DICTATATING" the prices and offerings is commonly referred to as "capitalism" or a "free economy". It generally results in more options for consumers, lower prices, and higher consumer satisfaction than a "one size fits all" approach. The creators of SL were wise to recognize this.

You do compete with estates, because in the economy you're a "substitute". Your offerings can meet the same needs as theirs, in consumer perceptions.

You're welcome.

Edited December 17, 2023 by Diablo Lioncourt

[Prokofy Neva]

14 hours ago, Diablo Lioncourt said:

Sir, an economic "dictatorship" would involve control of the market by one single wallet that sets prices (such as "single payer" universal healthcare), or more commonly, regulation and control of the market and its players by the state, such as in North Korea. Characteristics can include price floors, price ceilings, excessive taxes and subsidies, and excessive regulations, often created to favor established local businesses and industries and stifle competition. This can result in a limited number of products and services, waste, arbitrage, and supply issues caused by artificially set prices.

Multiple wallets competing for products and services, and multiple products and services competing for consumer dollars, resulting in supply and demand "DICTATATING" the prices and offerings is commonly referred to as "capitalism" or a "free economy". It generally results in more options for consumers, lower prices, and higher consumer satisfaction than a "one size fits all" approach. The creators of SL were wise to recognize this.

You do compete with estates, because in the economy you're a "substitute". Your offerings can meet the same needs as theirs, in consumer perceptions.

You're welcome.

We all get what a parliamentary democracy and a mixed economy might look like, or a country such as our own in the US which has a two-party Congress and social programs democratically decided -- not socialism -- and a free market system -- but one that is regulated by law in a liberal democratic society.

So in that sort of RL context, the "dictatorship of the wallet" or "where people spend freely" would have some meaning and weight and legitimacy. We get all that.

PLATFORMIST AUTOCRACY

But that's not what we have in SL. You aren't looking at the larger picture here. We live in a platformist autocracy in which essentially we have the "rights" of share-croppers or subsistence farmers, paying an overload who actually owns all the land a fee to work our little patch, which we may subdivide into further little patches, but which we don't really own.

Capitalism isn't just what you get to do on your sim; it's the entire grid and how it functions.

I don't need a lecture on what the DICTATORSHIP of capitalism is -- but that's not what we have here. You don't have capitalism of the sort that flourishes with a real open society; what we have are systems of oligarchy; state capitalism; even communism in games and virtual worlds. Capitalism works when you have an independent judiciary and regulation of business in fact to protect not only consumers from takings by the government and frauds from the government, but businesses from other businesses more rapacious and less ethical than they; when you have a free press to cover business both favourably and unfavourably; when you have a system where feedback and consumer opinion is freely expressed.

We don't have that. 

NO RULE OF LAW OR JUST LAW

The platform providers may expel you and seize your property without compensation "for any reason or no reason," a TOS which is called "unconscionable" by at least one judge in the land.

NO RIGHT OF CONSUMER INFO AND FEEDBACK

You are not allowed to comment on any product you have purchased inworld and not on the marketplace -- your purchase is not reflected and you are deprived of a voice by the technology and ideology, where Lindens caved on the presence of critical comments because their favourite merchants complained that people were mean to them and hurt their feelings. You don't have the right to post questions about products, or, as a landlord knowledgeable about house construction, to post a question on behalf of a customer who is not -- none of that. 

CONTROLLED MONETARY SYSTEM

The monetary system is completely controlled; the platform government prints money and causes inflation; it decides to devalue its own currency; it alternatively burns currency and injects it into the LindEx without any transparency. It has fixed currency exchange rates.

All the most valuable information -- what genuine traffic is and not manipulated traffic; where people really do spend their money and where they live -- is not available, and hidden on servers only the Lindens can see. This was not only the case; in the early years, we had a full page of every kind of economic statistic -- how many premium accounts were paid, how many people logged on daily and monthly; what number spent US $1 or more; $25 or more; even $5000 or more per month. Therefore you could launch a product for the median of people who had the $25 or more, let's say, pricing it to fit the average Linden purchase package. All of that was removed in about 2008 when the number of premiums went down and the concurrency went down and the Virtual World Winter began when the brands lost interest after very disappointing sortees into various places like SL, There and Google's Lively -- which is in the Google graveyard now. \

DISTORTED, NOT FREE WALLET

That's not a free wallet; that's a distorted wallet; it is not a plurality of wallets speaking with a robust chorus of voices; it's a black box. That is, at your individual level, you might put up a tall tower with rentals for $100 a unit, or put up little cabins on 256 m2 for $50 a unit, and then observe "where did people dictate with their wallets what they wanted" -- and not build any towers and add more cabins if people turned out to have only $50 to spend, at least with you. You might fancy you could educate their tastes and upsell them; maybe you couldn't. But that's only your little corner of SL -- it's not an accurate and transparent picture of the economy with real visible and actionable signals in it.

SKEWED NOT FREE DISTRIBUTION OF WEALTH

Also in this setting the "wallet" itself is determined by who can access a credit or debit card in RL and purchase Lindens -- not every country has those affordances. That in fact was the ideal of SL -- that people could come to this virtual world and make Linden dollars with their skills and entrepreneurial zeal, regardless if they lived in a country that wouldn't let ordinary people, or women, or poor folks in general access the credit or even debit system.

So one would like to believe that people "vote with their feet" -- and we're lucky to have feet in SL -- but those feet are difficult to direct because people cannot find information easily; they face enormous amounts of spam and disinformation and fly-by-night operations that pull islands out from under them after they've paid. 

A WILLING BUYER CAN'T FIND A WILLING SELLER

What is the classic definition of a free market economy? Where a willing buyer meets a willing seller. Too many buyers can't become willing through lack of money or lack of information or the oversaturation of weekend sales causing confusion and cynicism -- or even events with sales with overcrowded sims. Too many people have to firesale their land and are unwilling sellers.

I often encounter a weary tenant who tells me they have looked all over SL, in search, on the map, and been unable to find anything, or find anything in their budget range, and they collapse in exhaustion in their rental and log off. That's because search doesn't work; the land store is wacky; enormous sums are required to purchase the ads in the view, etc. There isn't advertising capacity. There is no mass media; the splash screen space is not sold (it used to be long ago); the billboards at info hubs (the old telehubs) are no longer for sale on rotation. They once were and this helped newbies find activities and housing.

LL'S PRODUCTS COMPETE WITH EACH OTHER 

If you wish to sneer and say "Oh, you just aren't getting business because you are incompetent or your ads are lousy," let me suggest YOU are the person who started the "Land Crash" thread -- not me -- and this is not my first rodeo. SL constantly has its booms and busts and fallow seasons and barren seasons tied to RL weather and when people have vacations -- or a pandemic to keep them inside. But now there is more going on -- Bellisseria and homesteads not requiring tethering with island ownership. So it's a different ball game -- the authoritarian platform provider is pitting its products against each other.

An axiom of capitalism is that you regulate it so that it doesn't kill off its own customers, enabling customers to come back and keep buying. If you poison all of them with toxic ingredients, they aren't available to come and buy your soda pop or your detergent again. So you don't.

The creators of SL didn't give us a "one size fits all" whatsoever. I'm old enough to remember when there were NO granulated group tools and roles, and all the money in the group circulated equally to everyone like a hippie commune, with the ability of any one member, even if he had not paid tier or the upfront land price, could vote you out of your own group with "officer recall" -- and did, until the Lindens -- after some years -- closed off that griefing loophole.

Today, we do not have banks, stock markets or credit unions -- those were outlawed and rightly so given how they were illegally run. To pretend that there's some free and robust economy that you've accessed and that others haven't is absurd. It ALL tends toward entropy; it ALL faces natural extinction because of other forces at work, either the Silicon Valley "hype cycle," or the oversaturation of goods in a virtual economy; or factors like lag or server overcrowding and lack of zoning which might as well be rain in Rochester.

WE HAVE A CONTROLLED, NOT A FREE ECONOMY

Indeed, this is EXACTLY what we have in fact in Second Life: "Characteristics can include price floors, price ceilings, excessive taxes and subsidies, and excessive regulations, often created to favor established local businesses and industries and stifle competition."

Each account has a ceiling for the amount of Lindens they can purchase or exchange -- many people never look at theirs but those limits are there. A tax of 10% of all virtual goods on the Market Place is quite the chunk -- it was doubled in 2019. Even in the Vampire State, where I live, sales tax is only 0.825% -- and we can flock over to New Jersey where there isn't sales tax on many goods or it's half as much. There is no other, independent marketplace; the SL MP was purchased from a resident ages ago and is the only game in town, in many cases helping to close down inworld stores, where there isn't any tax, because the cost of tier for land for a "bricks and mortar" store as well as management of inventory is just too great.

Indeed there are subsidies; some creators get their content in the very Library itself; some get a coveted spot at the mall near the Bellisseria Welcome Area attracting a lot of traffic; participation in the Shop 'n Hops are discretionary by the platform provider, not open to all for a few. Indeed, the innovation that Anshe Chung brought to SL was to allow anyone who could pony up her higher prices to have a store at her mall -- even another rental company. That's how I got my start before I owned enough land for a separate office. Before that, various oldbies had the most sought-after sims like Brown or Boardman or Blue, and might reluctantly give a corner of their boutique operation to a newbie to sell if they socially met the grade. It's not like Busy Ben's was a marvel of free market capitalism lol.

NOT A MARKET ECONOMY BUT A RENAISSANCE FAIRE

Indeed local businesses HAVE been favoured, and that is exactly what my nearly 20-year critique of the "Feted Inner Core" has been all about. The Lindens fronted their friends to outside contractors; they fronted their friends to media. They get to do that as a business that gets to pick their prosumers. It's more like a society of skilled guilds favoured by the king who get the booth in the controlled marketplace, where everyone else has to become a consumer at the rates dictated because not everyone can get in the guild or get the booth if they aren't in the lord's favour.

So let's not pretend that's now a robust market economy and a liberal democracy. It's not. It's oligarchy and state capitalism.

 

Edited December 18, 2023 by Prokofy Neva

[Persephone Emerald]

^ @Prokofy Neva

Nobody has to work to survive in SL.

Nobody is going to starve, freeze to death, be beaten or killed or imprisioned, have their home destroyed by a fire or storm or warfare, or even have their car damaged by a fallen tree branch or collision in SL. Nobody is going to rob our house or steal parts off our car. Nobody is forced to live with the sound of bombs, gunfire, fighting neighbors, police sirens or helicopters, or crazy people yelling outside.

We can get free clothes and unpack them in a sandbox. We can dress on a sky platform or underwater. We can fly and teleport all over. We can change our appearance with a few clicks of our mouse. We can have an Inventory closet that's almost as big inside as a TARDIS and we can carry it with us everywhere.

I think it's silly to complain that SL is not a democracy when we aren't forced to pay taxes to support its infrastructure and services. I don't see anyone dumping crates of tea into a harbor or protesting Linden Lab's involvement in unjust wars or trade practices. Yes, there are fees, but it's our choice to pay them or not. It's not an entirely free market, but participation in it is optional. We don't even have to use our real names or be forced to see directed ads.

[Diablo Lioncourt]

One way to handle a downturn in business is to abandon land and blame everyone else, especially the deep state and those pesky oligarchs, right?

This is sounding more and more like something we've all heard, and seen in history.

There's always people looking for scapegoats because they aren't doing well.

Once you're comfortably morally superior, and  an entitled victim of the "dirty", "savage" people who have whatever it is you want, its just easier to forget the rights of others and impose your will on the minority as some sort of moral edict,  the one straight and narrow path to the promised land, the ultimate solution to all social ills, etc.

This is not new. It doesn't usually end well when these prophets are followed.

Edited December 18, 2023 by Diablo Lioncourt

[Prokofy Neva]

18 hours ago, Persephone Emerald said:

^ @Prokofy Neva

Nobody has to work to survive in SL.

Nobody is going to starve, freeze to death, be beaten or killed or imprisioned, have their home destroyed by a fire or storm or warfare, or even have their car damaged by a fallen tree branch or collision in SL. Nobody is going to rob our house or steal parts off our car. Nobody is forced to live with the sound of bombs, gunfire, fighting neighbors, police sirens or helicopters, or crazy people yelling outside.

We can get free clothes and unpack them in a sandbox. We can dress on a sky platform or underwater. We can fly and teleport all over. We can change our appearance with a few clicks of our mouse. We can have an Inventory closet that's almost as big inside as a TARDIS and we can carry it with us everywhere.

I think it's silly to complain that SL is not a democracy when we aren't forced to pay taxes to support its infrastructure and services. I don't see anyone dumping crates of tea into a harbor or protesting Linden Lab's involvement in unjust wars or trade practices. Yes, there are fees, but it's our choice to pay them or not. It's not an entirely free market, but participation in it is optional. We don't even have to use our real names or be forced to see directed ads.

I'm sorry you don't get the fact that this is a prototype -- I'd like to think THE prototype but there are many now -- for how we will in fact all live some day and indeed earn money and indeed pay taxes and everything else.

I guarantee you when we get to that point you will definitely want the world to be a liberal democracy and will rue the day you scorned it.

You might especially appreciate it if you can't even buy a loaf of bread, let alone a jug of water, because some git put you on block in his vendor in SL because he didn't like your blog, and it replicated. Like Wikipedia is now horrendously replicating through chatGPT and will only get worse.

That's why I'm not for blocking people from vendors if you don't like their blog. It's not a good principle. And so on.

Principles and precedents and prototypes matter.

 

[Prokofy Neva]

16 hours ago, Diablo Lioncourt said:

One way to handle a downturn in business is to abandon land and blame everyone else, especially the deep state and those pesky oligarchs, right?

This is sounding more and more like something we've all heard, and seen in history.

There's always people looking for scapegoats because they aren't doing well.

Once you're comfortably morally superior, and  an entitled victim of the "dirty", "savage" people who have whatever it is you want, its just easier to forget the rights of others and impose your will on the minority as some sort of moral edict,  the one straight and narrow path to the promised land, the ultimate solution to all social ills, etc.

This is not new. It doesn't usually end well when these prophets are followed.

Hmmm. Where have I seen some abandoned land recently where just the other day, there were 10L skyboxes stacked all the way up, like turtles that go all the way down?

I can't imagine.

I do have a view of it from the land I just abandoned because I didn't manage to find anyone I know online (I hate selling land these days as it gets chopped; I hate abandoning it, too, because the Lindens sell it to choppers.) I was happy to finish cutting yet another 1/4 sim as I have been doing for months so that I am not feeding the Lindens' ad farm training range.

And...I'm very, very familiar with the silly forums trope, whereby people try to rally against a perspective they dislike and can't find arguments again by claiming the holder of that perspective wants to "impose their views."

Where? How? By what means? 

On my own sim or half a sim? That's always hard if somebody else's tower is in the view.

But here, have a little more abandoned land, comrade. If you don't have the tier, understood. You'll have to hope nobody gets it and chops it up to dogfood, thus devaluing your rentals. And so on.

"Do unto others as you would do unto them." That is all the law and the prophets as Jesus, to whom it was attributed said at the time.

"An ye harm none, do what ye will" is a pretend ancient saying dreamed up by a drug and sex addict to do what he felt like doing by claiming it didn't hurt anybody. Maybe it hurt himself most of all.

I don't need to create scapegoats; the goats scape themselves.

Edited December 19, 2023 by Prokofy Neva

[Theresa Tennyson]

On 12/17/2023 at 3:19 AM, Alwin Alcott said:

How ethical is it to burn people with their names and quotes, full conversations, on the blog of the "ethical" landlord?
Sorry but i can't take it serious.
 

 

On 12/17/2023 at 4:39 AM, Prokofy Neva said:

Oh, it's fine. Outside of Second Life's jurisdiction and servers, such as they are, it's a free country. 

I live in one-party consent New York state. You?

 

6 hours ago, Prokofy Neva said:

I guarantee you when we get to that point you will definitely want the world to be a liberal democracy and will rue the day you scorned it.

You might especially appreciate it if you can't even buy a loaf of bread, let alone a jug of water, because some git put you on block in his vendor in SL because he didn't like your blog, and it replicated. Like Wikipedia is now horrendously replicating through chatGPT and will only get worse.

That's why I'm not for blocking people from vendors if you don't like their blog. It's not a good principle. And so on.

 

Mmm hmm...

[BilliJo Aldrin]

I need to find some abandoned I can buy so that I can put up another tower. The nice thing about living in a tower is that you can look down on everyone else, and generally you will have a 360 unobstructed view. 😂