AyelaNewLife

Regardless of the rights and wrongs of the whole Tilia situation, Linden Lab need to seriously reflect on why they bother paying their PR team anything. The vast majority (but not all) of the complaints raised have been down to their poor wording of their initial announcement; and overzealous moderation at a time like this is akin to pouring petrol on the flames of outrage. It's been amateur hour around here, and the damage is almost entirely self-inflicted.

There's a variation of Hanlon's Razor that reads "never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by laziness". Second Life is weird. Attitudes towards intimacy and dating on this platform are extremely weird. Trying to explain all of that to someone with no experience of these things makes you sound borderline insane; or even worse, can sound like a breach of trust that could destroy a relationship. Especially when such an explanation is framed with a "oh, and I've been doing this for the last three years of our marriage". I don't necessarily agree with it, but I can certainly understand anyone who decides to avoid the potential conflict by simply keeping things quiet.

You've made a lot of posts in this thread; point out the one you're on about. I skimread what you'd said, and you'd jumped from nonsense about Tilia not registering as a bank (utterly meaningless) to some incorrect assumptions about GDPR; so I corrected those.

California has adopted the Uniform Foreign Money Judgments Recognition Act. So yes, they can indeed successfully sue for the value of the fines if you're hiding in the US... it's just a fairly long court process. (It's not a free-for-all, the US court system won't just sign over any banana republic judgement, but the restrictions aren't at all relevant to a GDPR ruling.)

Let's clear up some misconceptions around GDPR; Legal obligation wherever the organisation is based is grounds to process your information. If US Federal or California State law requires Tilia/Linden Lab to keep hold of any identifying information for any particular customers - which is the case, for anyone receiving a payout - then you do not have a right to be forgotten through GDPR. You of course can refuse to partake in the service offered if you do not wish to provide this information. The specific case of requiring a copy of identity documents as a condition of concluding a service contract has been directly addressed. Making and keeping copies of proof of identity documents is allowed, just restricted to situations where the data is "adequate, relevant and limited to what is necessary to the purposes for which they are processed." That purpose being the satisfaction of US Federal and California State law, so yes asking for a scanned copy of your passport is allowed. This also applies to how long the data is kept; if local law says "keep it forever", GDPR is fine with that. The idea that these Tilia terms are somehow incompatible with GDPR is factually incorrect, and based on an oversimplistic dumbing down of the law.

Edit: hit send too early, and this archaic forum system neither lets you delete your own posts nor multiquote into an edit

Which one is it? Is Tilia exempt from GDPR because it's not a "registered bank" (whatever that means) in the EU? Or are their EU customers still covered by GDPR by law? You can't have it both ways.

If you can't see the posts that point out where you're wrong... are you really wrong?

I just wish the mods would quarantine each new wave of madposting to a single thread. The vast majority of complaints from each of these recent waves has been utter drivel. The poster in question doesn't understand the terms used and so jumps to a conclusion that's disconnected with reality. Someone with more brain cells than fingers will come along and explain the situation, the angry person is now both enlightened and no longer angry... and then two minutes later that garbage gets posted again by someone new. It really doesn't take long for my attitude to shift from "I'm afraid that you're mistaken; here's what is actually going on" to "you're wrong and your opinion license has been revoked, please be quiet". At least if they have their own cesspit then it's all contained, and the rest of us don't have to drown in Alex Jones-tier posting about how the evil gubmit is gonna make brainwashed clones of us all because 1 in 10,000 of them had to fill in a mandatory tax form.

If this was in MASSIVE BOLD LETTERS in the article then this thread would be all of two pages long

No... but there's very little reason to refuse. First off, if all you are doing is buying Lindens and paying for premium/tier, then you don't need the extra ID. Secondly, the inactivity fees are only taken from the existing USD balance on your SL/Tilia account, and they will never take money from your bank account or anything like that. Remember, the only way to have a USD balance on your account is if you sell Lindens. For 99.9% of users, nothing will change. It's only those that make a real life income from SL who are affected. Don't worry

Yes. and it's fine. It wasn't called "Tilia" or anything like that, it was just called "Second Life", and was covered by the general purpose Second Life ToS/policies. Think of it this way: LL has just carved off a chunk of itself Second Life and slapped a sticker saying "Tilia" on the side. That's it. It's the same backend stuff that we've been using, but a few names and logos have changed to keep the beancounters and paperpushers happy.

Emphasis mine. "Processing credit" refers to withdrawing a USD balance from your Second Life account to a real bank. Only that one type of transaction. Buying Lindens with real money is a transaction that will be handled by Tilia, but buying Lindens is NOT processing credit. (See also; the recent increases in the credit processing fee.)

Short answer - because Tilia will handle the backend of you buying Lindens. Longer answer - you won't need to hand over all of this personal identification to have a Tilia account. That's only needed if you want to cash out USD credit from Second Life. There will effectively be a two-tier system; 'Normal' Tilia accounts for almost all residents, that don't require any extra information or effort at all. From the user's point of view, these accounts exist on paper alone, to handle the backend of all Lindens-related transactions. You might need to tick an "I agree" box once when you log in... but that's about it. There will also be a 'plus' Tilia account for anyone who wishes to withdraw money from the Second Life economy, and this is what will require the ID. (If you sell Lindens and use the resulting balance to subsidise/pay for your tier/premium accounts, then you also will not need to provide this ID.)

Luckily you (and me and the vast majority of the SL playerbase) won't need to hand over such personal details. It's only the 1% of the 1% that make real money off of SL that will need to do all this. Remember, if all you do is use your SL income to subsidise your SL expenses, then you're not taking $ out of the ecosystem and thus are not affected.

It might be 2019 but many people still refuse to use push-to-talk keys, and I have no interest in being part of the domestic feud currently going on in Hickville, Alabama. Even those people that do have a basic grasp of technology still tend to think sitting 4ft from an active television is a good idea, and/or have screaming toddlers running around. People! Control your offspring!

And that's without even beginning to touch on how utterly soul-destroying it is to be seen as the 'diversity hire', regardless of how I got the job.

I couldn't disagree more. It's a matter of basic statistics, in almost all of these cases - although admittedly it does depend on the specific field. Easy example; my STEM field is churning out 2 male graduates for every 1 female graduate. Across the relevant employment sector, that turns to a 3 to 1 ratio (due to the historically larger gender imbalance in graduates). If you have a gender-blind recruitment process for an entry-level position (and assuming an even competency distribution for both genders), then you'll be hiring 2.x men for every woman. Hiring at a 1:1 ratio means that, statistically speaking, you are overlooking superior male candidates in favour of less qualified female candidates to meet your quota. That is not a good thing. Let's take this example one step further. The gender ratio for the relevant A-level for this field is slightly in favour of men, but near enough equal (and balanced by the slight edge women have in grades in this field); therefore the schooling system is producing qualified candidates for this degree at a 1:1 ratio. 1:1 ratio at the end of this step in their development pathway, 2:1 at the start of the next. We have our problem! If we can 'fix' the reasons why women who study this field until 18 are half as likely to study that field at university, then we'll have a roughly equal ratio of people graduating in this field and therefore applying for these jobs. Yay for equality! ...except that's discounting the existing population of people employed in this field (3:1 ratio) and those graduating now (2:1 ratio). So you'd need to reach a perfect 1:1 ratio of graduates, and then wait 45 years for the existing employees to retire off, before you'd reach a perfect gender balance in the workplace. ...except of course that girls both outperform boys at every level of education and are more likely to study in higher education, so if you make men and women equally likely to study a degree in this field then you end up with more-and-better-qualified women applying for these jobs, so then you'd need to start setting male quotas to ensure equal representation in the lab. In an engineering-based STEM field. ...except then you also have to factor in the fact that, even if we had compulsorily equal paternity and maternity leave by law, women are more likely to take unpaid sabbaticals from their career to raise their children than men. So this smaller number of less qualified men would end up having more seniority on average than the larger number of women with better qualifications, which might balance out? We're into "who the heck knows" territory here. ...except all this relies on the core assumption that, if you remove all hard and soft barriers that prevent or discourage women from entering this field, that we'd end up with a perfect 1:1 ratio of interest. Which is nothing more than a theory, one backed up by "there's no real evidence for this, and no way of knowing until we try". The evidence we do have points to legitimate differences in life choices being in part down to biological factors, and not 100% societal problems that can be 'fixed'. I've started waffling, but you get my point. In short: Almost all high-paid careers are pyramid-based. If you don't have equal representation at the bottom of the pyramid, you probably can't have equal representation at the top without intentionally choosing inferior candidates because they tick diversity boxes. Fix the bottom first. It takes decades, if not longer, for equality to work its way up the chain. Patience is required. Perfect equality of outcome is still unlikely, due to basic differences in the choices men and women make, statistically speaking. We've still got progress to make in terms of equality of opportunity due to soft pressures, of course. Here endeth the sermon.

Infowars called, they want their scriptwriter back

The last like page or so has only caused problems because people (intentionally or unintentionally) have tried to sweep everything from vicious assault and sexual harassment to perfectly innocent games like tag or bulldog under the same umbrella. Don't. Such a broad definition is effectively useless. I don't think anyone has legitimately tried to claim that boys or men should be able to seriously injure or sexually assault/harass anyone else. But trying to conflate that with rough-play between children (mutually consensual by definition) is ludicrous.

What do you define as creativity? Mesh outfits and home decor are truly gorgeous these days, and far beyond anything I've ever seen from the Golden Era/Dark Age of prims and layers. But there's also far, far less people downloading an open source t-shirt design and painting a smiley face on the front. On the other hand, I do wonder what would have happened if BoM had been a Day One feature with mesh. It's quite possible that we'd still have those people creating their own smiley face t-shirts; while still having the truly gorgeous upper end of the industry.

It still tickles me that people are so mad about a processing fee increase roughly equivalent to annual inflation.

While I see your point, and agree with it to an extent, I'd say that LL aren't just saying "Ebbe needs a new yacht, lets raise some fees". They're all balancing out tier reductions, as a way of shifting the balance of their own income, not just increasing it. That factor both provides a soft cap to the fee increases they'll consider, and ensures that every increase comes with a semi-related decrease which will impact the budget of many (but certainly not all) creators. And yeah, a 30% processing fee is not really justifiable.

If they're cashing out a hundred or so a month/year, then they're losing out on a sandwich per cashout with this change. They'll manage.

Posting on the ground floor of another Prok megathread