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Israel Schnute

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Blog Comments posted by Israel Schnute

  1. As far as beautiful builds go, LL needs to keep these to keep or attract people to SL's possibilities.

    But you cannot really quantify or qualify such things easily.  Takes cities or suburbs.  What is new and nice, can be cold and detached.  What is ugly can be homely and appealing in it's organic feel.

    I'm not an A+ builder yet.  I like places where it seems to take a few trips to look around like real travels do.  Maybe one day I'll get to that point.  But you can be a C or B builder and achieve something very enjoyable to visitors with the effort.

  2. The sky is falling...i repeat the sky is falling.  Average economic participants is down a full 1%.

    To the person who posted that proposed tier structure.  That looks really good.  Of course I'd buy the full sim if it were waaayyyyyyyy cheaper.  But if that were the case, we'd have millions of servers for half finished builds that no one has gone to for years.  Like the old geocities websites.  Price should at least motivate a viable sim and not one just for existing costing money on the infrastructure.  Go to 100 half finished cheap sims that no one is around or updated for six months, this will turn off explorers too in frustration.  So price points have to be affordable while not so cheap it's a negative for consumers.

    Secondly, dollar/linden dollars volume down.

    Occur to anyone that the biggest sales in SL is probably in land.  I spent more for parcels of land than really nice vehicles, buildings or goofy stuff.  Never spent a 100 US Dollars on an item, but had spent too much on land.  When land was 7/meter, and if it takes 0.3 - .5/meter to sell a plot of land, obviously linden dollar volume will go down.    this has a greater effect than say glasses went from the average of 200 to 150 linden at retailers.

    Now, I don't believe that to be a bad thing.  Yea we get press, someone made a million selling land.  The island resellers have their place obviously too.  But cheap land is good.  The barriers to entry for first time builders and others to put down a condo or create something is there.  Once you start, you can't stop.  And you move up from there.  Tier however, is a killer.  The prices are as high as cable tv or car insurance.

    Flat doesn't seem horrible.  I wonder if Mesh will do anything.

     

    Frankly, if SL is a user created universe, as it was supposed to be, and people are spending the serious amount of money they are on these sims, maybe as a user 'defined' place(as it was supposed to be imo), maybe they should also be the ones advertising.  IE a fan website.   I am surprised at the number of cities and RP games there are here.  Why should I find it by chance and so happen to be interested?  Shouldn't people who like war, sci-fi, victorian things find out that it all exists here, and sign up for that purpose?  Yes, SL almost has everything, but no one has a clue that's the case until they spend a lot of time here!

     

    Also I would have considered myself a heavy user, but 300 hours, I'm trying to do the math and I dont' know how you get to that level.  I thought spending every waking hour but the necessities barely made 200.

  3. Mar 4, 2010 ... AUSTIN – University of Texas System regents Wednesday voted to increase tuition at their flagship Austin campus by 5.4 percent next fall...The approved tuition and  mandatory academic fee increases for full-time  resident undergraduate students  at the nine academic institutions  amounted to 3.95 percent...Five academic institution proposals  also included student-initiated  fees – such as fees to fund new student  services and recreational  facilities – which were proposed by the students  themselves and have  been approved through student referenda, thus increasing  the total  costs at those institutions....

    So when the University Unions had to find $122,000 in its budget for merit-based pay raises, tough choices had to be made.

    "That $122,000 is not a one time number. That will be every year on," said the Unions' executive director....

    Options included cutting hours at the Texas Union -- which meant laying  off staff -- or cutting funding to student events or cultural  committees.  Instead, they turned to the informal classes program.

    ...

     

    From 4459/semester plus fees to 4900 in 2 years.  Inflation is still at near 0% as social security is having no increase for 2011.

    These are the priorities you people defend?  No wonder so many people alledge SL is some fringe thing, no one in the mainstream would defend defending what is alledged here.

  4. SL is a ghost world, and opensim is so packed and fun?  Are you referring to the 100 people online and only in one spot?  Good luck, bye.

     

    and for someone else who visited the Texas sims, thanks for the report.  A normal person(person not gov't entity) would say my price doubled, and I have 50 empty sims, maybe I should have 25 sims for the same price designed more efficiently for people.

  5. Yea they're really hurting.

     

    NECN - 1 day ago

    HONOLULU (AP) — The University of Hawaii at Manoa has announced it will soon begin construction of the new Cancer Research Center of Hawaii in the Kakaako ...
    According to the university, the $120 million project will usher in a new era for cancer care in the state.
    Maui News - 1 day ago
    KAHULUI - University of Hawaii Maui College will expand academic programs for Native Hawaiian students through a grant from the US Department of Education ...
    U.S. Sen. Daniel Inouye notified UH-Maui College of the grant award last  week. For the initial year, the award provides $799,990, with the  program expected to provide $4 million over five years.

    BusinessWeek - Oct 1, 2010
    Economists at the University of Hawaii are predicting a continued uptick in the state's tourism industry in the short term but restrained growth later next ...
    Mystery donor gives UH med school $1M
    UH System Current News - Sep 22, 2010
    On September 21, the University of Hawaiʻi System sold $293.425 million of University Revenue Bonds, Series 2010A&B, which included both traditional ...
    increased at the nine other UH campuses, pushing overall fall enrollment  to a record high of 60,231 students, for a 3.6 percent increase over  last year's previous record.

    As part of an effort to boost tuition revenues, the  University of Hawaii is looking to increase the number of  undergraduates at its four-year campuses who are nonresidents.

    The UH wants to allow up to 35 percent of  undergraduates at UH-Manoa and UH-Hilo to be nonresidents. The current  cap is 30 percent.

     

    Nonresident undergraduates attending UH-Manoa full time pay $10,512 a semester, compared with $3,792 for residents.

    **

    I could do the math for the increase in revenue.

     

    Doom and gloom, doom and gloom.  These forums remind me of the old pump and dump penny stock days.  If we all complain enough about a user driven libertarian virtual world and not do anything with it, we can make everyone else think the sky is fallen and hasten the end ourselves.

    In fear and greed, fear is more contageous.

  6. Wow, "murdered".  Such drama proving the incompetance of big lumbering bureaucracies.

    Linden Labs is a small company.  They don't have years to plan budgets as far as I know.  They're based in California. Governments don't give any of us any more advanced notice of tax incrases and laws that are making these sims more expensive to run to pass it onto billion dollar universities.

    No one in the USA has even gotten the tax tables for 2011 yet!  No one is going to get it until at least December.  Congress didn't set a budget.  But Universities "got murdered" with their 15% tuitions hikes every year for the last 20 years.

    What is the increase in terms of their budget?  0.000001%?

    These organizations are so incompetant, that just TODAY I got a letter about a student loan.  Confirmed to me that it has been paid and moved to where it was supposed to be.  It has been OVER TEN YEARS these people have been messing around.

     

    They can cut themselves off and use some obsolete software with no updates.  5-10 years from now when we're working on cloud software with Havok20, Mesh, and people are intrested again in free roleplay sims that no one knows about because no one advertises SL at all, good luck.

    And frankly, some of these university builds, instead of being great and drawing people into the school, seem like disinterested homework builds.  There's so much potential for virtual musuems and exhibits.  SL is limitless and it's being limited by negativity.

     

    The only thing murdered is millions of peoples budgets at the rediculous public university monopoly.

  7. This is brilliant.

     

    I'm not sure I get point 3.  Do you mean on the mainland have islands for ppl to buy 512m parcels and then open water around it type of thing?

    That is good.  Mainland buying is the most worrying experience because you dont' know what is going to be built against your property.

     

    Great idea for the G continent too.  The public works department hsould make sure it has ample roads and railroads and protected water.

  8. So much talk about educational sims leaving because of a price increase.  Last I checked, tuition is still going up by double digit percentages everyyear, more than inflation, doubling every few years, and raises are still being passed around.  And I still get letters asking for donations on top of my federal bill that you can't get out of.

    I think with the large endowments, and student labor, they can afford it.

     

    People can host all the opensource sims they want, but if I can't be my avi anywhere else, I can't go.  I'm sorry.

    Also, I wish I could've done something educational and got a non-profit discount.  I don't make my own shops or anything in SL as it is.

  9. Then there's no real economy to speak of if all money flows in and back out swiftly.  SL becomes just a money transfer service like ebay or paypal.  I buy something at auction, that money goes to the person with a cut to ebay.  That's not an economy to do economic data on quarterly.

    SL exists in our reality, so I accept that a percentage will always have to come back out to keep it running and so on.  But for an economy, I would love it if someone came to my town and bought something from one of the affliates.  I in turn buy a boat and a captains outfit.  They buy new textures.  Portions of this goes to rent and tier utnil the money runs out of course.  But at least that's an economy.

    And of course rental businesses, services, advertising in world is all diffferent models.  But even rentals should be buying buildings and textures and landscaping with the income with some left over for...a helicopter?

    If all the money put in gets withdrawn immediately, it makes SL a pit for recreational dollars.  If all the things I buy I have to upload the cash right away, without making a little bit of income to buy the stuff, then SL's 'economy' would majorly suffer anything that is happening offline with no lag time. Which is the beauty of stipends.  Every week I get some funny money for the stuff I really want to buy, but without having to fork over the 2 dollars to do it.  Imagine the loss w/o those stipends.

  10. I disagree with this on an simple economic principle. You are almost claiming that economic leakage is a good thing.

    In Economic terms you WANT money to stay in the system and changing hands many times over before it leaves somewhere else.  This shows a very healthy economy.  If money flies through from one party to another, coming and going from out of town, and does nothing in it's community, then that economy is in shambles.

    It is a good thing on one level that people can make money, and withdrawl it for their own needs.  It draws people to SL.  However in an economic sense, it is also a problem as the money is taken out of SL too.  I do not know what the average income from a business is here after tier, but I would suspect economically there might be a problem with a high percentage of costs going to tier and therefore leaking out of the economy in taxes.  higher taxes is less spending.

    You want to spread the wealth around IMO.  I'm just happy the lights are on.  I'd like some percentage of what LL takes in tier and surcharges versus all other transactions, but I don't know if tier vs what is taken out of the world is a good metric.  They both equal money taken out of the system/economy.

  11. We'll go off topic, but the Mainland is what holds SL together.  Even at a, surprising to me, 19% of the total landmass.  Even if one never touches the mainland for weeks or a month and just goes to estates, it's what keeps any type of cohesion together for the virtual world.  Else what is SL but a very hard to use google to random non-connected sims?  Having the community of roads, trains, and randomness is vital to me at some percentage of the system. I like my mainland plots.

  12. A one day spike in the price of anything which then settles down is not worth a forum discussion other than a root cause analysis if there was a computer breakdown.  As a trader in commodities or stocks, or even in statistics it is considered an outlier.

    secondly, it states the land mass has gone up, but mostly estates.  Frankly, I am surprised that the mainland is only 19% of the total system.  The mainland is massive.  So if private estates have risen, you would have to assume total land tax collection has risen.  I do not know if you can abandon an estate and it just sits there being counted like mainland can be.  But in all business, you should not only make a profit or break even if you have 100%, the percents usually lower.  I do not know what the break even percent would be, however, just having estates and homesteads negates empty openspace on the mainland, which frankly IMO, is not a total bad thing scattered as it helps with lag and load whilst traveling.

    thirdly, like some of the so called politicans in the world we have now who has this view, they would ask what is wrong with a flat economy?  People are still here, and they are spending just as much as they always do.  I personally am old school.  I like booms and bubbles. You need to see when the bubble peaks.  But as long as there's no contraction we are ok.

     

    And there doesn't seem to be a metric if old timers are dropping off and being replaced by newcomers.  If there was a one to one exchange, there would be new people here, just not total population growth.  Just like real world statistics of newborns replacing seniors at a break even repopulation level.

     

    Seems ok to me. I'd like to be an in world bill gates and all, but I'm happy SL exists and the people in world with it.

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