Prokofy Neva

So you say.

1. The Lindens do not auction 16m parcels on their auction. 2. It's simply not true that "anything below 4L will sell in seconds". Good land might. Bad land might not. All you have to do to disprove these theses is a) open the auctions and watch them all month or ask the Lindens and b) fly around Zindra for even 10 minutes but longer will provide more coverage. Most people have a keyhole view of SL based on their immediate impressions from what is happening on their little piece of the grid.

In RL, reporting bad behaviour and crime helps deter it. If the report is wrong or malicious, other reports can correct them and in a court of law, prosecute them. People don't like their bad behaviour and harassment speech reported because then they look bad. But that's a deterrent and helps the entire society develop norms of good behaviour. In SL, we don't have that, and griefing and harassment escalate, and many people get away with their crimes, misdemeanors, and lies because there is no way to set the record straight within the world. There is no free speech or independent media and on the forums, you cannot name names. People hate, for example, having an apt one-word description of their bad behaviour on the forums said externally so much that for ever more, they are likely to wildly exaggerate any statements about them and call this process of normality "unethical." It's amazing! People take for granted these checks and balances in RL so it's astounding that they pretend they aren't needed in SL or denounce them in SL. Now why do you think that is?

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.

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.

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.

I'm not surprised. But when you don't have ethics, what become superior is not morals. A dictatorship of wallets is a dictatorship.

It has always been possible to fly away from them.

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?

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.

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.

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.

I'm 19+ years old and I got it. I have followed Philip Linden's adventures with interest. I think he was enamored with the creativity of Burning Man because he saw BM from one of those air-conditioned RVs with all the amenities inside and because Burning Man does not last forever; it's a few weeks. This past year due to the hordes of people, bad weather, and poor sanitation management, it became unbearable, go Google it. Philip (may he live forever!) invented Second Life but didn't live inside of it like we do. He lived in a lovely California house somewhere with all the amenities and then some, even with problems like "we can't water our lawns". So he may not have ever considered that one day of a giant spinning multi-coloured dildo is "art" or "funny," but 5 years of it after the creator logs out, never returns, and you have to keep looking at it, is not.

My chief take-away from Snow Crash vis-a-vis Second Life is that in Snow Crash, the characters loved to frequent a club called the "Black Sun" which was a giant black box, when viewed from the outside. I think that's the most popular part of Snow Crash for the denizens of the Mainland in SL. I'm looking at some now just on one sim.

Those with a "code-as-law" and/or nihilistic attitude toward the rule of law often try to disqualify lawmaking as "impossible because it's not 100%" or "impossible because the individual doesn't have full control over their domain." HUMAN BEINGS ARE NOT PERFECTIBLE BUT CAN BE ENABLED AND ENCOURAGED TO BE GOOD Nonsense. Nothing in human life is perfect; humans are not perfectible (that's really the crux of the disagreement here -- humanists, cosmic engineers, effective altruists and other cult and camp followers think humans ARE perfectible, and that in fact they themselves are already perfect). NOT RULE-BY-LAWS BUT RULE OF HIGHER LAW; 87% IS GOOD ENOUGH So your imagined "three laws of legislation" founder because to start with, you don't have a philosophical understanding or acceptance or belief that there is a power higher than yourself. It's not "rule by laws" or "a law-based state" as in the German and Russian concepts of Rechtsstaat. It's rule OF law as "the president is not above the law". So if you can only achieve 87% compliance or 62% compliance with a rule like "no 1024 textures" than of course you do. Some rules might be hard and fast ("no child avatars and don't give me that guff about how you're just a short adult woman"). RULES FOR CREATORS, NOT ONLY RESIDENTS Other norms might be suggestions like "Avoid textures over 1024". You are aiming at the actions of people making stuff, putting stuff out, texturing things themselves, especially in a mall (rental agencies aren't just dealing with residences). So in a mall or a Fantasy Faire, you can insist on only 512s, not 1024s, and enforce it by not letting them rent or participate in the event if they won't play. I don't know why this is hard. Of course you can, and it's all to the good. If you corner-case the suggestion to death and say, "but how can they tell the size of a texture of a house on no-mod," you are losing the opportunity to MITIGATE the textures of those in a MALL which ARE under control -- and that's the use case obviously. AGAIN THE RULE OF LAW, NOT BY LAW The Tsarist and later Soviet and Russian regimes would pass draconian laws that no one obeyed, encouraging bribe-taking because the state always had a case over someone. Russians would develop axioms like "the law is a bridle, it can be turned every which way" the harsher the laws. But not if you have a state under the rule of law which understands it is not above the law and can be arbitrary; and usually that requires a liberal democratic state. So thank you, now you are getting at "why SL doesn't work" because we don't have such a country. We have the "platform providers" who are the semblance of a totalitarian state. Even so, in our rental domains, we can establish the rule of law. And so I do. I don't worry about scofflaws because once people grasp that there's a reason not to put out six breedables, they usually participate. LET'S NOT PRETEND WE DON'T KNOW WHAT AN OBSTRUCTIVE TOWER IS You can go by common sense, or you can go by the ancient maxim, "Although reason is common to all men, most men have their own private understanding." We actually all know what an ugly, laggy, build is and a list of what is de-rendered in a region, if you could collect it from every Firestorm, would confirm that obvious point. It would only be a few impish envelope-pushers who would pretend not to know and be in your face. Re: "any build should not obstruct the view" only becomes a welter of confusion and edge-casing and "never happens" when you avoid common sense and the obvious and aren't operating in good faith. YOU HAVE DISCRETION If someone edge-cases to get over your rule about two storeys by putting up a hut on chicken legs, insisting that legs are not storeys (I have had that happen a few times), you say, no, that doesn't fly, take it down. You know what two storeys are. If someone puts up a castle with turrets that go above two storeys, you look at it and as the enforcement is at your discretion, you call it, yes or no, a small castle may pass; a giant gothic pile will not. Re: scripts. As I noted, I put empty brackets for debatable things. It might be 1 or 2 or 3 -- read the FF guidelines or whatever event you're in. They have no problem figuring out a reasonable limitation and then asking people to stick to it and then booting people who don't. It's done all the time; THAT is the norm, not whiny nit-picking. A script radar reads the scripts and gives you a number, it's not rocket science. It's not the overbroad or vague rule that's the issue here. It's the inability to admit that you can have a regimen where fair rules that make sense can be followed, if you have someone applying them in good will, that creates the chaos. Lots and lots of people get along in SL despite wildly different beliefs and walks of life. It's the tech edge-casers bent on gleefully malevolent boundary-pushing that undermines the rule of law. So when they play that game, they end up expelled from my rentals after enough griefer raids. MOST PEOPLE TRY TO BE GOOD The reality is, most people are decent, most people do the right thing. It's not that humanity is perfectible; it's that most people try to be good. That shocks the cynics. But that is my experience in 20 years of SL. When you have a norm that people should not lag the sim with a slow-loading texture, first you educate people and they realize that's "a thing". Second, they can try to mitigate their own textures. DO UNTO OTHERS If someone is angered at the law regarding orbs on the ground, they can find another rental. It's my belief that this is a good rule, leads to the maximum number of people being happy, and is good for business. There is nothing stupid about "Do unto others..." -- and have a rule against bouncing other people around when you know yourself it is unpleasant to be bounced around when all you are trying to do is get home, or sail, or simply fly over a place. I put a simple phrase in my notecards to make it clear if someone doesn't want to read a lot of text: YOU ARE IN THE VIEW/MAKE THE VIEW OF YOU NICE, TOO I'm the only one managing my rentals, with very occasional help from my RL son now who has a family, and a few good-citizen long-term tenants who I have empowered to remove group-set prims. I sleep, and I even go in the hospital for 2-3 days at a time, imagine that. If you have self-service rentals -- isn't that what you have with all your claims? -- then people serve themselves, and if at any time they are unhappy with the service they are giving themselves, they can fire themselves and click "refund". I'm there to settle disputes BETWEEN self-servers or keep the whole system moving along smoothly. To claim "but I need eight hours of sleep" when there are 16 other hours in the day, at least a few of which you could be devoting to customer service in your rentals, even if you have had a RL day job (I have always had them) is to admit that you don't think virtual customers in a virtual world are real, and therefore you can be virtual about your service. Once again, as I am not limiting two storeys to a fixed 10 m x 2 out of pre-64 m mesh, I don't know if it makes sense to have a number and I arbitrarily put "30". I think most people get what "two storeys" are and it's pretty obvious, and most buildings in SL are roughly similar in height when they make them. THE SPIRIT OF THE RULE, NOT THE EXCEPTIONS Of course there are exceptions to every rule. But you make the rule your center of gravity, not the exceptions, which, of course, is a certain geek keyhole view of the world in which only "code-as-law" can prevail. I don't want to live in an entirely automated world. I'm human, not a robot, and so are my customers. The viewpoint you are espousing is not common to you; it's common to many people who code for a living and trained themselves to adjust to computers. And now we all have to, even if by and large humans aren't robots but more complex and nuanced and varieagated. CONSIDERATION OF YOUR NEIGHBOUR Do you have a bad cold? Sounds like a nasty cough. I'm happy to claim ownership of, AND endorse "build 16 or 32 m from the parcel boundary" because it is doable, the 256 m parcel where that becomes the rule is not the norm, but the exception, and because when you do, you create easements and less feeling of claustrophobia. In my rentals I have the simple basic rules that are not negotiable, like "no security orbs on the ground," and then I have suggestions in a notecard, not a lease card, which suggests. In human societies, "personal space" can be defined differently in, say, Western or Eastern societies, but THAT there is SOME kind of space is universally understood. CHOICE AND CODES OF ETHICS You're forgetting that as owner of your property, you can set a rule and enforce it. It's best to make it reasonable if you want customers -- and I've rarely had people complain my simple rules are unreasonable because they have freely chosen to live there after reading the info card. People who didn't read it and keep arguing about why they need security orbs on the ground can find another rental. They will be paying more for it. @diamon Marchant I made it clear that my Rules for Live are not a laundry list for the Lindens to code and impose, not a demand for everyone to implement, but something else: a code of ethics. By and large, the computer professions do not have codes of ethics as doctors and lawyers do. Now why is that? There is an AMA or an ABA that licenses or establishes norms, but there isn't an ACPA. (There is an ACPCA, and you wish we had at least THAT much of a set of norms from coders.) That's because of code-as-law and not rule of law, and I would suggest that goes to the heart of much of our modern misery This is about a group of landlords to discuss to see if they wish to make a set of ethics and norms to establish themselves as "Good". If you think "Good" is another thing, then you'll make your rules on your island or sim. I certainly don't expect this from the Lindens, as I made clear: they are on an entirely different trajectory, fiddling with avatar foot shadows, colours in the sky, and now shiny things. None of this is relevant to me nor most of my customers, who just want to shop and do the other popular activities. @BilliJo Aldrin I can certainly do "me" in Belli and until recently had a half dozen Belli houses, mainly public venues with various activities which I had a lot of fun creating and which got a lot of visitors in the stamp game. I think the Lindens shouldn't have their products compete viciously, as they have enabled the platform to do, chiefly by refusing to stop ad farming and land cutting and ugly towers on the Mainland. This may be deliberate.

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. They barely read one line of an IM, let along a notecard, although sure, you have to give them a card so you say you did when they claim not to know orbs weren't allowed. It's like the Linden Lab TOS when you sign in to SL. Triadic repetition of the narrative, as in a Russian folk tale. Go there I know not where Fetch that I know not what You don't need to make people tell you where they are when: a) you see their payment event on "My Accounts" with the name of the sim, the name of the housing development and the unit number on the rental box itself and you know your rentals and have them in spread sheets or merely look at the groups in My Accounts. b) you see the tenant touch a group joiner which reports the sim it is on and the name of the group in an IM to you -- better to send messages to you, which you can act upon, then barrage them on people who may not even speak English. c) you walk/fly your properties and pay attention to what is going on. The advantage of rez-on-demand upon join-on-demand is that you don't have to fly anywhere or be online to issue permissions like a medieval lord. They just move in and decorate. Most people are decent. Griefers occur far less regularly than people imagine. A 1L fee to join a group dispels day-old alts. You then add the granulated powers of media, etc. after you confirm payment. People don't have to send me IMs because I see the information without them telling me. Many people do not have English as a first language, and will not type in their language on a notecard or in an IM, but prefer to have you in room chat where their translators work. And they have easy-to-understand ways of taking charge in their self-service rental immediately. Only unnecessary fear and imagination prevents the use of this system -- which works.

The great thing about my post is that when people answer it, the general public can see some of the basic problems here, and I don't have to keep talking. Maybe I'll find time to answer them this week; maybe not. I will note that messages don't cap at all unless: 1) You don't log in every day 2) You don't tie your SL account to an email and check that email; 3) You don't provide multiple ways for people to get the same information so that they solve their own problems and therefore don't write you; 4) You use automated systems that send numerous unnecessary messages; 5) You needlessly subscribe to various merchants because you don't have enough groups because you didn't get Premium Plus or restrain yourself. And on and on and on. "My messages cap" is the biggest lie in SL; it's a dodge and a scam; it's a way for merchants or service providers to dodge responsibility and not take care of their customers, even as they posture and strut and pretend they are so busy and so important that "their messages cap." Mine don't. Anyone is welcome to walk my properties as I do in person with script meters and tell me where they see a laggy script. Do you walk your properties? I do, and I remove scripts and watch the numbers on the region. A certain popular rental device is far laggier than my open-source rental script, which was worked on over the years by a dozen people and open to anyone to use. With some rental boxes, they have so many scripts and so much lag that you have to wonder where they are phoning home and why. A problem with having web-based rental boxes is that they are laggier and you force people to de-immerse and deal with the laggy web. People's web pages are sometimes atrocious. The idea that devices that only secure the house itself are not disruptive is ludicrous. Many of them bark and shout and repeat insanities endlessly which is as disruptive as being bounced. Just as you can use the sit hack on doors, you can sit-hack through some of these house watchdogs. If you worry about someone coming in your e-house and getting their AIDS on your e-furniture, you have more problems than I can help you with.

No, Qie. The rule is NOT to use textures more than 512 because they lag the sim more. That's everywhere. And I said that. I get it that there is more than just one layer nowadays in many places. Recently you encounter some events (Fantasy Faire) where they have come up with this 768 notion. I personally find it to be the birds, when I look at the time it takes something to rez when I test it, without even getting into sim performance.

No one needs to read my posts if they are pressed for time. But since you didn't read it all the way through, you don't realize I addressed these two concerns of yours within the text already. I put them for debate and put empty brackets on some issues because -- guess what -- they're debatable. So to reiterate: As I said in my post, there should be zoned, separate sims, where people can put tall buildings who have such a yen for them. I don't have such a yen. I get enough of them in SL, living in a 34-storey tower among towers even higher, including the Empire State Building a few blocks away. But I realize some people live in Texas which is as flat as a pancake, or what a Russian author called "one-storey America" in the west. That's fine. Each to his own. I think just as in RL, there should be zoning rules. The Lindens don't, because they don't have the staff, the time, the will, or the concern now that they have Bellisseria, where they tried to make up for past mistakes on the wild, legacy Mainland. Even so, as I prefer the Mainland, I suggest various things.

It's true that the paywall system in SL is VERY VERY VERY VERY VERY VERY rare, but you do VERY VERY VERY VERY RARELY come across it. That's because avatars are avian creatures. They like to fly freely everywhere, and if you turn off "fly," you are also asking for people to leave your venue before it even rezzes. Don't turn off fly. If you can't control griefing, don't have a venue. Once avatars can fly in and settle their easily-ruffled feathers on a perch somewhere, they may reach into their feathery breast pockets and bring out 100L to put in your tip jar, if you have made them very easily viewed, quick-rezzing, and not complicated and not undercut yourself by leaving them at 5-10-15 but put in reasonable increments like 50-100-250-500. If you have free content or content for 1L or 10L you can also encourage stays by birds and offset your costs. SL is for the birds. Plan accordingly.

There's a phrase in journalism: "self-reported". It's good with a story like this, and quote like this, to get as we say "a second source." Maybe a third, a fourth. You know, triangulate. Is RL Burning Man really like that? Does everybody feel quite the same way about these things? Then you'd want to do some foot-padding around the grid to see if these circumstances/ideals/things/stuff pertain. There is a Burning Life facsimile in SL as others have noted which is not like the RL BM in a number of key ways, chiefly, you don't need to go to the bathroom in SL. It's not the Sims.

See page 110 You are not first with this airplane analogy https://tigerprints.clemson.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1183&context=cheer This document is actually an abomination from start to finish, but that's a horse of a different colour. You can remember this law suit of 1946 because one of the plaintiffs names was Tinie Causby, because her cause was tiny, you see. https://www.publicationcoach.com/common-sense-revolts-at-the-idea/ Lessig actually extrapolates an abomination from this about letting big IT platforms schooled in the California Ideology slurp up content for free to draw eyeballs, a phenom Lessig has facilitated with Creative Communism, but that's a different -- though related -- topic. So... RL airports are not built up in the view of the sky, with planes taking off from sky platforms. RL planes are not allowed to swoop down and graze the roof-tops of houses, nor are police helicopters; there are regulations, bylaws, and fines related to these behaviours. But they can, you know, fly over your house because how else can they get to the airport? RL doesn't have teleportation -- yet. There is a limit, however, to scaring the chickens, even if they are pixelated Sionchickens (who were allowed to die off completely their creator sadly not long ago). Various communities get local ordinances against airplane takeoff noise and sonic booms all the time. I think it would be great if the Lindens -- since they love "code as law" and not the rule of law and adjudication of policies (and in a way, who can blame them in the Customer Service State) -- simply made it impossible by hard code to ban anybody for any reason with any tool in the viewer or out in the 32 m2 perimeter around a waterfront parcel. That is, any ban deployed via the land menu or with a device would simply not take effect in a 32 m margin by Linden water. That way no one could ever interfere with sailing, but would have much ballyhooed "privacy". You could think about making this true of ANY parcel but the resulting "tunnels" might become grief zones and conflict generators in unintended ways. You could start with waterways.

This phrase may sound like an oxymoron, but hear me out. "Blood Diamonds" So there's a concept in the international human rights field, that you don't try to stop massive human rights violators you can't stop anyway, but you try to applaud, reward, encourage those who don't violate human rights despite being in the same tough conditions. So, for example, in tackling the "blood diamonds" issue -- diamonds extracted under conditions of civil war, oppression, state corruption etc. because you'll never be able to (although naturally nowadays there's some geek who believes it can be achieved with chatGPT and so on) -- you give a certificate of approval or at least appreciation to the good guys whom you have found do not export "blood diamonds". Bad Faith I would always point out that in working with the societies of the former Soviet Union, this was really impossible because these states were schooled in lying, concealing, distracting, etc. as a way of life and a methodology honed to perfection by the KGB with years of disinformation expertise. These countries would sign any treaty or pledge or make any declaration ("We pledge to cut fossil fuels 50%") just to look good, just to make it seem like they played by the rules and were the good guys, and they would use this method to needlessly hammer Western states with a fraction of the state-sanctioned murders or carbon emissions of a Western democracy. The US, which would take this treaty or pledge seriously, would say "We can't sign this because we can't put a carton of milk in every refrigerator" and Americans won't mind this because many will say "We don't want Hillary looking into our refrigerators." Even so, I think it would be good to work out a set of ethical principles for land dealing. I'm fully aware that the vision of a smoke-pixel-filled back room with greedy land barons wedged in among their big money bags like the Monopoly guy working out "ethics" is like -- oh, never mind. Still. Ineffective Altruism and Edge-Casing A problem with these sorts of exercises in SL (I can remember an ill-fated Better Business Bureau and also an ineffective altruist recycling abandoned land with a pledge you could join to help sell *their* land LOL) is that some people grab on to such "Good Houskeeping" rules as a flag to burnish their reputation and appear "better" when they are not. Some use it as a stick to beat enemies or competitors. There's an ugly sculpty kiosk with principles on it which is used more to despoil the view and simply spite other land-holders and sometimes extort a sales price out of them (I'm looking at one rn that is a 64 on sale for $11,000L "near me") than it is to inspire. No to BBBs of Any Kind That's why I'm not for creating any organization around this. They have their place, but I am not interested in joining somebody else's lead-gen rep-enhancer or even rep-launderer. I'm not for making kiosks that are just "one more thing" like a man-child's totem pole from some long ago teen-grid game. I'm not for doing anything with these concepts except debating them in good will and those that opt to do them can do them and I think their customers will only appreciate them. Land dealers who write "Landlords Hate Us Cuz DO WE HAVE THE DEALZ 4 U!" and engage in lousy manipulations even as they chortle with glee at their rivals' imagined misfortunes are always going to laugh at/game/not do these things and pretend they're crazy or that if someone expresses them as an ideal, why, they must want to impose them on everybody, like an evangelist who gets up in your grill, asking you if you have accepted Sam Altman as your personal Lord and Saviour yet. SO. Here is my beginnings of a proposed list: o All rentals should be refundable for a small cancelation fee. o No sale, rent, builds, or content on any parcel less than 512 m2 unless part of a contiguous residential, rentals, or commercial area you manage. o No offering of land simultaneously for sale AND rent. o No skyboxes below 500 m2. o No security orbs on the ground or below 500 m2, and there, with a range only of the perimeter of the skybox or sky platform. o No spinning anything, for any reason. o No builds over two storeys or [X m] high. o Towers of any kind should only be placed on sims zoned for this type of structure over and only by owners who own at least 50% of a region. o If over 6 in number, breedables must be placed in "sleep" or "off" mode at all times except when feeding or riding. o Airports must be placed on the ground only and not in the sky and may only be two storeys (30 m2) in height. o Any build of any kind should not obstruct the view, encroach on any other owner's land or Linden land. o Do not rez large domes in the view but go up at least 500 m2, and if you must stack them, keep them 20 m2 apart so that chat is not easily read/heard. o Avoid temp-rez plants, vendors, or temp-rez of any kind as it does indeed take from a region's land impact buffers and can confuse the remaining count. o Don't use textures over 512; 1024 already lags the region that much more; 768, your urban legend neat trick isn't so viable when everyone does it. o Script usage should be kept to [x] and monitored often. o Do not enable any of your properties or tenants to take up all 42 avatar slots on a sim; be considerate of your neighbours. o Avoid the use of any bots, registered or not; if you believe you need a bot to send a group invitation that takes up one avatar slot on a region, then perhaps you should consider why you don't log into SL to take care of your customers OR why you can't have join on demand with a simple scripted prim for immediate rezzing, with other powers like ban, media, etc. added as another group role later at the manager's convenience but ideally within 24 hours. o Do not tell your customers that your messages cap; they need not cap when you tie your account to any email; it need not be your RL work email which can be inadvertently revealed; it can be a gmail address made just for the purpose of customer support. So usually when people hear you are cooking up "Rules for Life" they get mad, they think you're going to impose such rules on THEM, they think you are going to "get to the Lindens" or to some levers of power to change things (you know, like they do, when they keep the levers of power paralyzed to suit their own bottom-feeding agenda). There, I can only answer: by what authority could I impose any rules on you? I can only impose rules on the region I own or parcel I own unless I BUY THE VIEW. As a BUYER OF THE VIEW over 19 years in ways you cannot begin to imagine, I shrug off such whining because I do believe you don't even have to BUY THE VIEW (and you'll never afford it on 4-8-12ff sims anyways] to try to make things nicer for you and your neighbours. Skybox Height Obviously, everybody has an opinion about the height of skyboxes. The Lindens say 2000 meters in Bellisseria and another prominent suck-up says 2000 meters to which again, I shrug. Lindens control the entire region, create the easements and tier them, and deploy perhaps 12-20 houses per sim (go and count them) which often remain half or more empty. Same with boutique abandoned-land-planners. They don't have to live in the "real virtual world" which is more than 20 units on a sim or even 40, sometimes smaller than 512, because you offer affordable housing, NOT because you are a scumlord, scamlord, or slumlord (I shouldn't have to define these terms for you). Fortunately So you settle for 500, with 20 m2 space-out beyond which convos can't be seen; you turn on "avatars are invisible" and you try to make it work. It doesn't sometimes. But 2000 is an impossible dream given the limit of up to only 4096 m2, beyond which you cannot place a prim. Microparcels Obviously, there are edge-casers galore who can do all kinds of nip-ups and tricks around the micro-parcel and make all kinds of silly claims around them. But the reality was never better articulated there by the Linden who was once VP of Product years ago, when she confronted one of these annoying edge-casers operating in entirely bad faith: "What are you doing on that 16 m2, your knitting?" Because there isn't anything you are doing there that isn't a) advertising b) data scraping with bots or scripts c) annoying other people d) extorting a sale to "buy the view". There really is never any legitimacy about the claims of their "necessity" although I realize there will be someone who says they need it to deploy their virtual 3D printer that is going to print a tiny, needed plastic part that goes in a piece of equipment that will save a little child's lung, somewhere. Truly I do. Airports And on and on. I never understand the fascination of airports at all in a world where we can fly; I never understand why they need to be up in the sky when they can fly from the ground up to the sky and keep the view whole. Salentals Yes, I get it that search is broken and that's why people invade the map with "salentals", and yes, no doubt somewhere I even have one lot like that for sale although in general, I avoid the practice because I really don't like the feeling of leaving land out for sale, logging off, and risking a tenant coming in, paying the rental box, and then having someone else snipe it out from under them in a sale. Sure, I can refund them. But they may have an unpleasant 4-8-12 hours waiting until I get onliine again. No revolution is worth it if even one child's tear has to be shed, eh, comrade? Script Time On script usage, Fantasy Faire has one number; Stop 'n Shop has another (I hope); somebody else's event has yet another -- we get all that. A number can be developed. Height Again, these are not rules anyone can impose grid-wide; the Lindens will never impose them except in part in Bellisseria -- they already do in some areas. Not sure there's a rule against putting up giant spires 64 m or higher in Belli, but I think there must be, because I never see them. And so on. These would only be a set of rules that some group of land dealers would evolve and implement. It wouldn't necessarily even be good for business. Some people want to ban the heck out of everyone on a sim except their immediate sexual partner from the ground to 4096 and in all four directions of the compass. Even so, not everyone wants this and I think the majority can live in peace if the height is 500, and the orb is 20-40 m in range for the perimeter of the skybox, only. I do these things. So can you.

*Blinks*. That *is* extraordinary, and I've seen a LOT in my time in SL the last 19 years!!! I can't help wondering, too, about the land impact when I see something that looks like "a tortured prim". In fact this looks to me more and more not like an art installation or a thematic build, but a sandbox for griefer testing. But hey, I can do WTF I want on my land, sacred SL motto.