Prokofy Neva

Oh, there goes another one. Empty.

I'm not a land baron as it happens, but if I were, that would be more than fine, that's what sustains the world you're in, if you ever log on. Meanwhile, you can't resist saying something nasty in every thread. What poisoned your soul? The Internet?

People who smoke pot would go and smoke pot in RL, not come into a virtual world.

I don't want to sit and stare at a phone game in 2D, though. I would like to sit at my desk and see a 3D world on my desktop with which I can easily interact.

This is always interesting. Hat tip to Daniel Voyager for tweeting that the highest concurrency was 60,000 on April 20. I could note that April 20, Hitler's birthday, and the nearby April 22, Lenin's Birthday, are dates that always attract griefers to get up to some mischief. That might or might not account for that surge. They see a post on 4chan or something and they surge in, even if they haven't come in a long time. As of 21st September 2020 - Max - 46, 000 - Average - 37, 000 - Min - 30, 000 So the estimate I often cite of 30,000 based on only a sense of the past is low, and the average is 37,000, so that's good to know. Some other fun facts on Tyche's Grid Survey from which this is taken: There are 25,000 sims. That's down from the glory days of over 30,000. There are now 6806 Mainland sims, that is contiguous sims that include Linden Homes. This figure was 5000 for a good long time; now it is up to 1806 more, which I think is only attributable to Bellissaria, as the Lindens stopped creating whole new Mainland sims for the auction years ago. I was wondering the other day how many Bellissaria sims there are, and LH sims there are, and got tired trying to count them, and it may be that Patch Linden has given this figure. But if 1806 are Linden Homes, that's now 26% of the Mainland -- no wonder they feel like they are competition. The other funny reminder is that Anshe Chung really still rules the world, even though she is divided into multiple Chungs, and Azure, which used to be owned by Adam Frisby, so she appears under different hats. But she still owns much of the islands, unless those Chungs really represent separate, wholly-owned businesses. 55.5% of Private Estate regions are Full Regions, 43.9% Homesteads & 0.6% Openspaces. I think that's an indication that no untethered homesteads are needed and would glut the land market and of course be owned by no-show owners. As of Jan 2017 36914 Linden Homes are occupied. Well, that's 3 years outdated. I imagine there are at least 60,000 premium accounts with at least 50,000 Linden homes, no? I guess the conclusion I draw from this is that SL is still slowly shrinking but that it has received a significant boost from COVID returnees and newbies and more relevantly, Linden Homes.

Yes, there are other virtual worlds that are cheaper. Didn't I see that Unity just IPO'd? Microsoft has launched a virtual world that will likely overtake everyone at least in size, even if we will see it as far below the quality we expect. Yes, I could have a big "tile" as you describe it, and be able to build very cheaply in another world, either the Open Sim type ones or one like the "shiny new virtual world for developers" made by Adam Frisby, who got his start as a land baron in SL. But it's like the opposite of the funny saying of Yogi Berra, "Nobody goes there anymore, it's too crowded." There are no people. Or very few. You can't get any customers; they aren't made for inworld business. Those that had a flourishing inworld business with even top designers from SL often fell on hard times, they would offer things very cheaply, but had their own heavy expenses and went under. Read the Hypergrid blog. SL has a big advantage at this point is that it is very old, has lots of experience, has had all the major IT companies come through in the form of staff, has very experienced engineers, and has the highest monthly uniques. It just can't compare. I want to be in a world with people, even though some of them make very real the old adage that "hell is other people". What's the point of building something no one can see? I also find some of the other worlds don't have basic things like group land, or even groups, period, which you need for rentals as far as I can tell. It's ridiculous to blame inworld land barons or rentals agents for high prices. The fixed costs of servers originate with Linden Lab's setting of the prices. They do so to make a profit after expenses, which are considerable. I don't have a problem with that; it's normal in a liberal democratic society with free enterprise under the rule of law. You know, not like China or Russia or even Brazil or India. Which is why a lot of entrepreneurs from those countries resettle in the US and don't stay in their homelands. The homestead is $109 for the land dealer. He can rent it at cost or a little above cost, and your entertainment cost for the month is $125 or whatever. What you get for that is pretty extraordinary. Or, if that is too steep, more than restaurants or movies (pre-COVID), well, get a 4096 of your own and pay $24 or rent one and pay even less. You will have 1200 prims. That's plenty. Comparing Second Life to World of Warcraft is apples and oranges. SL is an open-ended virtual world where you build or buy or rent what you choose and make any theme and do anything within the TOS; you are not locked into a "game" where you are "killed"; you don't have to rely only on the game company's content and rigid rules. I don't think you need a full sim to be happy in SL. I've never had a full sim to myself or even a homestead to myself or even a 4096. Mostly I rent out land and perch around like a bird here and there while building. Occasionally I'll make a home on a 512 or a 2048 which is perfectly sufficient.

No, it's not Brown, look at it closely, it has roads and textures nothing like Brown. I have sold some land in Brown now and then because it just doesn't rent, it is G, and it still has those dead palm trees, despite all the improvements Jack Linden made back in the day. I think it is still prized land as "Linden zoned" and land barons still buy and hold there. The problem with G as always is not that the Lindens chase you, they don't have the time. It's that your enemies chase you, entrap you, and AR you. So if you swear, or have a classic artwork in your home with an exposed breast, they can AR you and make your life miserable. There is one particular bad actor on that sim, himself the cause of ARs for legitimate reasons, who has done that to my tenants and they sometimes do it to each other. So it's not worth it. The reason it may have seemed like Brown to you is that one rentals agent made all those roads inside the sim, and hedges.

Well, this is a very old story, and a repeating one. The Lindens can examine your logs and see that you are innocent -- if you are. So somebody merely ARing you doesn't mean anything. I have had griefers whom I have AR'd for crashing sims turn around and then harass me by creating day-old alts with my company name, invading groups and posting racist garbage, and then had hundreds of people AR me, and not that day-old alt, imagine. But the Lindens get it, that day-old is gone soon enough, and I'm still here. While it's always possible that the Green Lantern people were mistaken, and then the Lindens were mistaken or "didn't look," I'm not sure I find that credible. This is an old story of a cat-and-mouse game that is sometimes "taken to the forums". I suppose you lose nothing by ARing the person you believe to have AR'd you falsely to have a record put down, but you could also disengage and leave that hub and stop playing this game. The Green Lantern fights real griefers who indeed are criminals. But there's this: “Beware that, when fighting monsters, you yourself do not become a monster... for when you gaze long into the abyss. The abyss gazes also into you.”

If anyone would like to join a group in which LindEx rates will be regularly posted and records kept, here it is, WeatherReport, paste into search: f3000ef4-f76c-0d49-a6c3-da05a92d57b3

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

Many people don't use that free system because it is crowded with ad farmer sales. It's also annoying to work and try to pick out the parameters you need, the cursor slips, the choice doesn't stick, etc. It's just not used by renters, I find. Whenever I ask people who they found my rental, they say either search/places, classifieds, or word-of-mouth. Occasionally the MP, They never search land sales to find my land for rent, not sale.

So, today, I put some land for sale to leave a sim that I had liked last year, but kinda went downhill. I love following what happens to sims, it's fascinating. Come along with me. So last year was it? I decided I hadn't done enough exploring in other continents, some I haven't hardly been in since they were born, so why don't I buy a few parcels here and there, see what happens. I particularly like the old macadam beach road in this one sim, so I bought the two roadside parcels for sale for $2/m, despite being roadside, after first researching the sim. The biggest problem it had was a large red -- shall we say "clubhouse" -- called something like Candyland -- which actually was an escort service. It had dance poles. It had signs for girls and such. This was in mature. It wasn't a bad build per say, but it was awfully firehouse red, and it had candy canes around it and a billboard on top. That doesn't faze me, I usually rent roadside to stores, and who knows, maybe someone wants a store next to a thing like that, or maybe they can de-render it, as people do, although I don't live my life by the de-render code. I use the bog standard SL Viewer without de-render, and I believe in making Mainland better, so that it doesn't require de-rendering, which means we no longer live in a shared virtual contiguous interactive world, but in silos. So I buy the land and put it to rent for a modest price, and I IM the candy store just to say "Hi, I'm your new neighbour". This serves serveral purposes. For one, if they never answer, I can see they may be abandoning soon and in 30 or 90 days, perhaps I have an opportunity for a land purchase, not a troublesome build next to me. You never know. Much in SL does change in 30 days. Another purpose to such neighbourly exchanges might be, "Hey, can you remove the billboard off your roof? It's kind of an eyesore for my tenants and I don't think many see it". In exchange I might offer...hmm...I don't think I can offer him placement of his ad boards in any of my stores because, well...Or I could put up a giant rock wall that will block the view of his ad board at least on one side, but that takes up prims and itself can be an eyesore of sorts. Hmm. Well, he never answered so I didn't have to come up with anything. Yet he stayed and is still there. Next, I looked around and saw one of the reasons people were abandoning their land nearby. On the next sim over was a corner build that had a huge pile of junk on it. The centerpiece of this junk was an old Ryan Linden cabin of the kind you couldn't live in as it was too cramped, but I used to put geranium pots on it. This guy had left his land on 0 autoreturn and it had a huge collection that sampled people with birthdates going back to 2006 who were no longer in the people list, and himself, not in the people list, making me hopeful it could be declared "abandoned" and then purchased or at least left abandoned. I wasn't going to purchase it; I just wanted the view out back to become better. So I filed a ticket and was told, as I all too often am, that this parcel was "supported" as their phrasing goes. That it can't possibly be supported by someone from 2007 who paid their tier that far in advance doesn't matter. You know I believe that it works this way: they gave out industry freebies or staff freebies years ago (other than the Charter Members' 4096s which are clearly marked accounts) and here we all are, and they aren't. So I asked the Linden who replied that it wsa "supported" if she could consider that the builds on there were like the cutting of a tree trunk with rings dating back to 2006 or earlier, when the Lindens had their freebie board with backpacks and jetskis and the like. So she did the right thing and put it on autoreturn. So that was helpful. Then I saw even the Ryan Linden cabin was gone (I've had them do that before, too). It was just pure "supported land" but at least with no build on it. Progress! Months went by, and then one day I saw that land with a new owner. I don't know how that happened, but it doesn't matter. This sim has a nice Linden dock and coast helpfully marked "Coastal Area" like zillions of others, so I renamed it "Coastal Area Near My Rentals" and put a teleport thingie in the front yard. I had two lots, so on one, I put my little "Palm at the End of the Mind" clubhouse with recordings from Wallace Stevens. I put a phoenix bird out front in a tree, with his fire-fangled feathers dangling down. I then thought better of it and re-named it "Palm NEAR the End of the Mind" -- I don't want to be untruthful about my little rentals now, do I? Soon I had a tenant who was kind of "Surf's Up!" and soon needed prims so I emptied out my "Palm Near the End of the Mind" (which I had picked up in a yellow box from the last sim we had to escape, which was waterfront, truly at world's end, in which someone built a giant -- and I mean truly humongous -- "Wendy's" replica, with a giant parking lot that extended to the beach. It was breathtakingly bad. I once IM'd the person and asked her why she didn't put a nice beach by her "Wendy's" for her customers (I never saw a soul there) instead of blocking the view with a giant macadam box on two sides going up some 20 meters to keep it on level with her burger joint up the hill. I used to have more grit and determination in my youth; now I sell out even from prime waterfront and move on from situations like this, and it was promptly bought by "Wendy" who then extended out her parking lot -- and was rewarded by two other neighbours leaving. Breathtakingly awful, eh? Meanwhile, on my new rentals, life continued along at an even pace, tenants came and went, some had wiccan fairies, some had motorcycles, some had nothing and stayed in the sky (rarely a bad choice in SL on the Mainland). Sometimes I might have to wait a week because new people came in, saw that Candyland hadn't moved, saw the abandoned land around them and worried, and left. To be sure, somebody bought an enormous amount of land on that sim on the waterfront -- lucky! -- and kept growing, and put up ban lines. But since that was across the road, it didn't matter. I could still almost imagine, if I sqeezed my eyes tight a little bit, that Candyland was really just an old-fashioned General Store; that we were on Cape Cod, with the waves crashing, walking on that beat-up road toward Robin Hill Road, that there was Paine's Creek Landing up the road, and nothing but prime beach property and decent people all around. Somebody had a store then in my rentals? I can't remember. I forgot to ask them why they left. Whenever people refund or don't renew, I usually send them an IM and say I saw they refunded, did they face any problems? Sometimes they say, "Yes, there was a giant car crashed on my lawn I couldn't remove". They could have, but didn't realize it. Or they didn't realize they had a group to join to prevent prims returning. Or they didn't realize when a fellow tenant put up a huge over-primming build that encroached on their land, I would remove it under my rules. In other words, fixable. Sometimes they would say, "No, I am moving to Belli". In which case I know they will be back one day. Or, "No, I just bought my own land" -- ditto. Or "My friend offered me a free spot and I couldn't pass that up" -- and again, ditto. In some cases -- they broke up with a boyfriend, they leave SL. Or they lost their job, they cease buying inworld. Again and again -- ditto, much of the time. So comes this month or last month actually, and it has been a while, and I am just at the point of dumping this land. I open my eyes -- there is no General Store. There is no penny candy. There is -- well, pretend this is a Ryan Reynolds ad and hear his voice trail off. I give it one last shot, put it in search, and some nice people move in to the one lot. They put out a nice horse farm and house. Then they need more prims -- the other lot is rented. All is well, they pay on time, they need no reminders. Months go buy and now it's today. And now their grace period has expired, and actually it's been 7 days. I check -- they have not logged in since 9/6. Hope they're ok. I look around, and I see something new, which is the big beach spread has sprouted a big wall right in the view of my tenants -- and with stretched textures that look like hell. They are not going away -- would you, with prime beach land like that selling now for a fortune, I see? I'm kicking myself for not buying more down that channel, merely because someone had a photo-real board. I could have waited 30 days for it to go away like many things -- it did -- and I'd have a nice sailable beach land today worth a bunch. But now I see why my tenants may have left their rentals. Needless to say, the, er "clubhouse" is still there, and next to it now is a giant macadam road of some width, leading from the Linden road back to another man-made road. At first I thought the Candyland was in clover and building out their little empire, although I never saw them -- ever. Or any young ladies. Or anything. Empty. But no, I checked, its owner was a rentals agent. Why a rentals agent would despoil a sim he has to rent to people on just baffles me -- especially when this giant road doesn't seem to lead to anything that he owns on the other side, i.e. the beach -- although I suppose he wanted his tenants to have access to this same old beach road to the Linden pier that was the reason I bought in this sim. Maybe he was building out -- I saw that 4 different people had abandoned their land all around him (if they hadn't before, they had now). They weren't alts -- I mean, it's hard to sound like a Texan on one alt and put another alt all in Japanese, you know? So those were different people and the claim dates were very different. Now he might build more rental lots with macadam road and primmy-looking wooden fence, in which he didn't have a theme, as I saw a Norse longhouse by Nomad parked next to Onsu's suburban house. PS this micro baron will never know who went before him, sacrificing much, braving the Lindens to get them to remove an ugly pile-up, and finally to abandon land that now he likely owns, or has purchased from another. Oh, well. I never mind competition from other Mainland dealers because it truly does help create areas where more people come and want to rent. I was never going to buy any more in this sim -- too risky, if I couldn't get waterfront. So another rentals near me is a plus, actually -- unless their builds are obtrusive. This guy seems to like roads possibly more than he liked tenants? I didn't have to look behind me, of course, and ignore what was on the other side of the candy store. Still, that was daunting -- to the side, the club, the giant road and more fences and roads coming, to another side -- a huge badly textured wall. To be sure, on the other side were some new neighbours, ever hopeful, who put nice, tasteful offices on this road. They are in for the long term. Behind me -- two abandoned lands that had been for rent for less than my rentals, then more than my rentals (think they changed hands) but -- now abandoned. That was risk of course -- the most likely being more macadam made-made roads and fences. To be sure, there was still the Linden pier, helpfully titled "Coastal Waterways" down the road, which my current tenants had indeed enjoyed. Well, as the William Stafford poem goes, "I thought hard for us all" -- and I put this land to sale. With my tenant's things still on it. And with my unpaid rental boxes. This is a practice I dislike and don't indulge in, but now it's going to be an experiment. Will my tenants come back, and live with that wall? Will the rentals micro-baron buy them and put in more road? Will Candyland abandon? Will the nice people with the nice offices buy them? Or maybe someone will rent, despite everything? I will quickly then turn off sale. It's all fascinating. What would you do? PS In the 15 minutes I deliberated this -- actually less -- the icing on the cake. Two pod cars went by. Empty.

One of the problems with people fed on Chomsky in college is that they can't grasp any differences in scale or magnitude, and their impugning of ugly profit motives and greed and rapaciousness to people can be wildly wrong. Once again, I'm a minor player and a small businessman in SL. I do not have a grasping and greedy profit motive because I have a RL job, often more than one, so I do not depend on SL for my livelihood. I have no motivation to suggest a policy or criticize a policy other than common sense, logic, and the desire to have a healthy economy and a civil society -- not that this appears possible in this particular form of virtuality, but one can dream, can't one. I've also been in SL long enough to know that people you imagine are old white guys in top hats like the Monopoly game or Soviet propaganda from the 1920s are in fact Black single moms in Michigan and retired gay postal workers in Ohio and wounded war veterans in California who just want to make a living online, and that is their right. To imagine that I have some kind of "competition" is ludicrous. A person who has Mainland rentals doesn't have "competition" -- they have commiseration. The other few Mainland dealers aren't their competition; they are their fellow sufferers. Let me see. There's a race to the bottom to see who can charge the least for a 512 and still make tier? Oh? Really? The island dealers are the big players who might worry about "competition". For me, even Bellissaria can't be a competition, literally, or figuratively, in my interest in observing the system as a whole. People who are *selling land* as distinct from *renting land* aren't my competition, obviously, in anything. In theory, people might not rent if land got cheaper -- but then, that's not logical, as the tier rates remain the same *for everyone*. Tier, not purchase price is the real expense in the business. Phillip Linden used to talk about how he'd like to remove arbitrage from SL; I've never heard any other CEO talk this talk -- and they couldn't, as long as land is the basis for their revenue, and the illusion of a free economy is the basis for anyone other than end users wanting to buy their product. Yes, some people use ANOTHER search which is land for sale in the search system, not the land map. Especially in the land business, who want to price their land looking at low and high prices without flying all over the map, you know? One of the fun things about this thread is that we learn a lot about "BilliJo's" business model and ethics and her understanding of the world in general, and that's useful, I suppose -- and the icing on the cake is that I'm accused of advocating policies to remove my putative "competition" from someone selling micro parcels. Ok, then. I do care about people who *do* make their livelihoods in SL. And I do care about the Mainland not being a cesspool. This idea that removing "freedoms" which are in fact are licentiousness and event criminal acts harms the "free economy" assumes that there really is a free economy (there isn't) or that curbing crime reduces freedom (it doesn't, it makes it possible for more people to have freedom). Blush Bravin suggests "waiting it out". How long? I've waited 4 years for ad farm policies; I waited 7 years for griefing of a particularly nasty form to stop; I recently waited more than 3 years for the Lindens to ban someone sending me RL info and RL death threats. I'm nothing if not a waiter. But how long? I'm not content to see the solution to the Mainland be only "Bellissaria" (which isn't Mainland, thanks for admitting that) and "private islands". I like Mainland and its freedoms. I also think that many of the boons we take for granted today (an end to abandoned land collapsing into 16m purchasable parcels (!!!), an end to blatant ad farming) came about because people didn't become goofy about Mainland freedoms but had some notion of rules that enable freedom for more than 16-m ad farmers, you know? That.

Let's see now. February 17, before COVID, was *seven months ago*. I don't know about you, but I feel like time flies with COVID. Or maybe it doesn't for you. But seven months is only part of a year, yes. It's 7/12ths of a year. So gosh, that is really a falsehood then, to say something was "quite some time -- a year?" and find out that wow, it was "only" seven months. So, this is a...gotcha...then? The difference between "7 months" and "a year"? If anything, it's proof of my point -- that indeed there was wailing and gnashing of teeth from merchants first clubbed by higher cashout fees, then clubbed by a devaluating Linden. So the Lindens fixed it and made it better? Or? You tell me. The fact is, you don't know, because no one has sufficient information. Public information. That is, maybe there are some insiders who have this information, but something tells me it is not Theresa Tennyson, who merely contradicts for the sake of contradiction. Fortunately, you don't need to hear this from me or from this dreadful person I rightfully keep blocked. You can just look at the chart. Here you can see it seems to have systematic dips -- almost as if -- hey -- it's not a natural fluctuation but artificially maintained. What could account for those dips? Stipend day? Tier dates that are all uniform? But they aren't uniform. And people don't cash out their stipends, do they? They spend them in world. Look at it over 90 days. There you see a steady decline since June -- three months ago -- and remember that a decline means an INCREASE in value, because it takes less Lindens to make up a dollar. And indeed, the last time I cashed out yesterday it was 240, even, not 241. PS we don't have *detailed* charts past 90 days. That is if you want to get out your forceps and jeweler's loup and parse the year chart, which I think does not qualify for the title "market data" but qualifies for the label "obfuscation", you can do that. What I will try to do is cut and paste them more often and revive my group "Weather Report" and post the information weekly. So again, I can only reiterate the truth as I have seen it for 15 years, and know from the press conferences or office hours of long-ago Lindens (Lawrence Linden, T-Bone Linden and others) who discussed the LindEx openly -- and from long-ago information publicized by the Lindens back when they publicized it. (The only reason they stopped publicizing it seems to be that it reveals too much about the decline of 30-day unique log-ons and premium membership, which isn't good for their product sales, I guess, or their image in the community). o The LindEx does not fluctuate naturally. This should not be so hard to prove, and I shouldn't have to hark back to actual statements about Supply Linden from yesteryear. It's obvious to anyone who uses it regularly either to buy or sell Lindens. Theresa likely does neither at any scale or she wouldn't attempt to play gotcha in this odd way. o The Lindens try to keep the LindEx in a balance, between having a purchase of Lindens that feels "cheap" and "good" to buyers and end users who consume, and having a cashout that feels "high" and "good" to merchants, some of whom try to make a living or part of a living in SL. o But for reasons we can only guess, occasionally the Lindens do NOT -- repeat DO NOT -- keep any balance, and the Linden values slides quite deeply, or even rises quite steeply, and sometimes for significant periods. Anyone with any sense, even without any economic training (I'm certainly not an economist) can see this truth. They can find it in the charts themselves, and in written records going back years. Because we are living in a closed society, a black box, what I try to do is make a hypothesis, discuss it, and see if it is true, and if enough data is gathered to show it is not, try another one. Like Qie, in this thread, who is of like mind at least in terms of the value of open debate and logic and common sense, says he observed the LindEx and Linden devaluing, and theorized that people would rush to the exist to cash out when they saw the Sansar layoffs. Well, I personally would not have made that assumption, after years of hearty propaganda from the Lindens that Sansar is a different product entirely than SL, and that they don't make global decisions affecting both of them, a propaganda I tend to believe, perhaps wrongly. I would also add that when you posit theories of "rushing to the exits," you're positing it about a very, very few players with millions capable of moving the market. And those very few players themselves grasp that they cut off the tree they are sitting on if they "rush to the exits" and therefore they exercise self-restraint. Hard to believe in the FU Hedonism culture of SL, but possibly it's the case. I don't know. Qie asks other hard questions about the spread and the arbitrage I have no idea about. I marvel that many people don't understand about Limited Buy and buy automatically without even waiting 10 minutes or perhaps a few weeks to get a better buy. Of course if more people grasped this, the LindEx might be affected, and perhaps for the worst, so perhaps the big players have a vested interest in hiding this information -- but it's not as if the Lindens hide it, it is plainly marked on the LindEx page. One of the chief problems of evaluating the LindEx is that unlike Wall Street, where there is the Wall Street Journal and of course many other records, you can't determine the proof of your recollection by pointing to a record. For example, Lindal Kidd say: 270 is not unheard-of. When I joined back in 2007, and up until some time in 2008-9, the exchange rate was pretty constant at about 270-275:1. Then it went down to around 250:1 and remained there until last fall, when it started creeping back up again. That sort of tracks with what I recall, but I do keep at least spot check records, so I go and look. And it's not always the case because significant periods can have a different rate. In that thread, animats asks: Somebody has a sell order pending for L$129,639,049 at L$259 / US$1.00. Wonder who wants to cash out nearly half a million US dollars? Is that unusually large? Or just a big landlord cashing out the rent payments? Well, that could be Supply Linden; that could be somebody playing the LindEx (there are actually some who do who have patience and lots of Lindens) or in fact that land baron envisioned. Or it could be fraud. The fact is, YOU DON"T KNOW. Then Molly Mews posts her actual buying record on spot and it shows that yes, the Linden dollar has become more expensive, it has risen in value. Then Theresa posts this: 2) Someone was trying to increase the exchange rate on a market buy. It's interesting that it was placed before anyone from Linden Lab would have been awake. There is apparently quite a bit of financial funny business involving rare gacha items on the Marketplace bought with stolen credit card numbers right now - there might have been an attempt to launder Lindens by using market buys. Well, the concept of "before Linden Lab would have been awake" is meaningless. There are remote working Lindens all over the world. Perhaps a Linden in London is responsible for serving as "Supply Linden" for all we know. My best guess is that an incident like that is Supply Linden, not a big landlord and not fraud. Yes, it could be laundering. And you do realize, that there is a Linden named Emily Stonehouse whose entire job appears to be about watching for things like that and nip it well in the bud before it reaches the LindEx, surely. And while we tend to think of fraud as being related to the LindEx, it can also be related to person-to-person transactions we can't see, or even merely verbal communications between parties using Second Life as a virtual safe house or cut-out. That is relatively new -- there wasn't a "compliance officer" of that nature 10 years ago, and that's a very good thing. I don't know if that person has enough to do all day. I hope she isn't insanely busy. That is she is *now* when they are selling Linden Lab. But I hope on a good day, she can safely take lunch and coffee breaks. That is, it's hard for me, as just a norm with no inside information, to believe that people interested in money-laundering, or financing terrorism, or violating the Magnitsky Act by putting their race horse into the Kentucky Downs despite their responsibility for massacres in Chechnya (to name just one thing the State Department has caught and prevented using the Magnitsky Act) -- would use the relatively small pond of Second Life to perpetrate any of their misdeeds. That seems ludicrous. But then, maybe that's because I have covered Russian oligarchs for whom Second Life couldn't even be a doll house. For one, each person who applies to use the LindEx through the automatic interface and have the full options of it has a limit assigned to them based on their typical activity. So there is a brake on my ability to try to cash out more than X amount. This is called Economic Limits. Recently while contacting the live chat, I had a notice about Economic Limits thrust at me and I was surprised because at first I didn't know what it was (having forgotten that this brake on the LindEx was called that). I studied it curiously and began at first to wonder mistakenly why this system would prevent me from cashing out to pay tier -- before I realized in fact it's what I have used for years which is more than plenty to pay for tier in my case. Sometimes these Linden pages can be confusing even to those of us who have stared at them for 16 years (yes, wish me Happy Rez Day on September 28, 2004). I'm at "Business Level 2" which means I can't cash out more than $14,000 in 24 hours or the same amount in 30 days. That actually seems excessive to me and I don't understand why the amounts are the same for both 24 hours and 30 days but it doesn't matter, I am unlikely ever to cash out at that end limit. I'm a minor player in SL so I have to imagine that the big boys then have much higher limits, but still, they have limits that I would think would prevent anybody from becoming the kind of serious player that FinCEN or ESMA would watch and catch, but then, look at the latest Buzzfeed article on this topic and the Wirecard disaster. So if there are brakes like that, even if they seem kind of stretched, then how could any self-respecting money-launderer ever want to use SL to do anything? And the answer is, there are money-launderers, and they don't have self-respect, or they are desperate, or very patient, or who knows what, but they do exist. A lot of nickel and dime crooks can add up. We all know there are gatcha content thieves in particular who try to sell at actually low prices for what normally are high-priced gatchas, and then sell in high volume, and then disappear. In my entire time in SL, I only personally saw a strange thing like this (if we discount the antics of the "stock market" and "banks"), when an unknown avatar with no description tried to pass me $100,000. Since there is never anything I do in SL that would instantly yield such a large amount (that one time I was able to sell a Starax statue for US $300 (at that time about 75,000L because we still had Gaming Open Market which had the rate of $4.00/1000 [which BTW we have currently but haven't for a long time]) -- I instantly reported it to the Lindens. No one would "tip" me that fantastic sum. What were they thinking? The Lindens took my account offline for a day, it was put back, that avatar was deleted from the system, and who knows what that was about. Perhaps an attempt to frame me by a griefer? But that's stupid, the Lindens can track someone's typical activity, and unlike these griefers, not only do I have a payment information online, they can look me up in the book unlike so many of you. So I came along in that thread, and said this, about the devaluing Linden last year, if you don't like to click on necro-threads: Yes, that's evidently a sign that there are more and more Premium accounts being purchased and their stipends and sign-up bonuses then flooding the market -- it's like Yeltsin printing rubles. Evidently the Lindens are not intervening (of course they intervene all the time with Supply Linden) because the want the new Bellissarians to feel like they have a lot of cheap, ready cash to buy all those house add-ons and furnis from the Lindens' friends. Eventually I think even they will tire of this, however, as the house add-on manufacturers realize more and more than cashing out their Lindens is worth less and less, especially with the new fee, double the old. And really, that's what this is all about. Call me cynical, or call me a very old avatar, but that is indeed what it is about. The Lindens try to keep a balance. That they sometimes seem to have fallen asleep at the switch and don't do this "in time" could be an illusion, because there could be other factors we can't know. And in that thread, when Tennyson claimed the Linden has "always" been more or less at 250 (and we have "always" been at war with Eurasia), I said this: That's not true whatsoever. I have InfoNut issues and blogs going back for years and I just ran across one from 2008 lamenting how the Linden stood at 325. Then Tennyson said that was a freak spike and the long-term history shows it has always been at 250, to which I said: I'm glad to see that you admit now that your claim "The exchange rate has been a few Lindens either side of 250 for most of Second Life's history" is wrong. The graph illustrates this. It doesn't matter if 325 is a "freak spike" because there are other bad patches that last along time and have a terrible effect. It's also obvious that when you have that compressed of a graph over 15 years that you can't tell how long the peaks and troughs are, really. But don't let the facts get in the way of your usual desire to say something to counter me, even if the sky is blue. I'm going to try to figure out the "block" on here again. So then she says: So, what you're saying is we can't tell if the brief period of 325 is longer than the plateaus on either side? To which Lewis Luminos reasonably says: I remember it sticking at 270 to 275 for a very long time, since I started in 2006 and possibly as late as 2009. I was gutted when it dropped to 250 (because I only ever buy L$, I have never earned enough to sell). And that's the point. You can't tell really what that graph says when it is so compressed. Maybe you can tell if one spike of 325 is only one spike but that is NOT the point. The point is that it is not "always" 250 and the periods when it is another figure are not "always" spikes. Hello! You *do* have the memories of people who were here in 2006 or earlier, and while you might claim those are subjective, some of us actually recorded this in blogs and newsletters. And while you might claim those are tampered with, if you are a nerdy internet troll, well, most normal people grasp that the LindEx has never "always" been at 250. Qie found Tyche's Grid Survey chart that shows "the long reign" of 250, but quite significant periods at 270 So the debate here is not "that" it happens, because there is ample proof it does. It was at 250; now it's at 240; in fact it was at 270 for good long periods; and we all remember the day Ryan Linden crashed the auction by putting all low opening bids. The question is how do the Lindens determine this, and do they act in any kind of deliberate and rational manner, or not and what we can expect. So yes, it was at 270 and worse in the past, for various objective and subjective reasons; it was at 250 for a long time; then indeed it went to 240 for a long time during COVID. If you want to Fisk my posts and pretend that "7 months is not like a year" or even that "3 months is not significant" if that's the case, it's not important. The fact is, I believe conscious decisions were made to make this rate better, after complaints, and in part to prevent leading land merchants and content creators from leaving. The myth that COVID is good for online business only exclusively, and never bad, neglects that real people are the ones who log on and several things can happen to them besides going inside and living in their pajamas and ordering from Balducci's and playing SL. For one, they can get very sick or even die. For two, they can lose their jobs, or have to take extra jobs when the going is good to even have them. They can get new jobs which are harder and take more hours. Then they don't play SL or if they do, they spend less. Second Life is not made up of people like you. And very soon you will admit it that it is no longer at 240. Because I guess we are due for a course correction.

That's an interesting insight and you may be right about this. I haven't seen it work that way, but I do believe it could work that way. Here's what I see: 1. A neighbour abandons land. It sits there. Years and years. I'm not kidding when I say 5 years is not uncommon. 2. No one ever asks to buy it, even now when that is an easier and speedier process. Because it's flat nothing in the middle of nowhere surrounded by some questionable builds. 3. Seeing there is never any attention to this sim, ever, except by griefers, and how the owner of the other half of the sim sold out, and then various other owners abandoned, I decide that if I need to trim my tier in order to get some prim land on another sim, nothing terrible will happen if I let a 512 go roadside. It will not be missed and while roadside, there are so many better places, no one will ask to get it. It's safe, like it's become "protected". 4. Suddenly, within a few days -- I've seen this happen a number of times now -- that land I abandoned turns purple. It's now on the auction. Someone will now buy it, and I will now have some unknown quantity right next to all my rentals. 5. Do the Lindens do this deliberately? Stick it to me when they notice I abandon land? Do they hope to discourage landowners from abandoning by keeping this risk alive for them? Or, to put a charitable spin on it, do they hope that someone will find this land more valuable because being next to my land, which has been there for 15 years relatively unchanged, will be like "protected"? I have sometimes seen land sellers write copy about how this desirable property is next to "protected" SL Public Land Preserve. Of course it isn't protected. But own it long enough, people see it that way. 6. Do I then bid for my own land back, competing with other casual land barons who just go along and bid on everything to keep prices high? Do I bid perhaps up to $5/m and let it go, hoping that someone who pays that much for it will not put junk on it? That assumption can be very wrong. 7. So having been jabbed like that a few times, I look around, and I go back and buy my own abandoned land back because I may get skewered. Some time goes by, I then see the Lindens put to auction that piece that literally lay in the sun for more than 5 years. Is this conscious? There is so little we know for sure. The moral of the story is: never assume you can create some tier-free buffers for yourself by abandoning land around the edges of your main property.

I don't know if this is automatic. I do know that if you inadvertently (or deliberately, it doesn't matter) leave a group with land insufficiently tiered, a Linden will come in and tell you to cover that tier immediately, or your land will be seized. Yes, it seems like the window is 72 hours. But if you have a lot of tier involved, they may appear sooner, within 24 hours. Either they spot check, or a panel comes up for them with an alert. If you are the owner of the group, you will see the red alert if you check your land menu They want to discourage people from buying land by undertiering one group and then keeping it in a land sales group that they flip land with quickly after a purchase. They discourage this practice by now requiring that you cannot bid on the auctions without sufficient cash immediately on hand, and they automatically tier you up if you win -- you don't get to wait or choose if you will tier up and abandon the auction. But here is what the OP has to be careful with -- people who seemed like your friends or your good customers with whom you were in good communication, who suddenly dump their tier and disappear. This can happen accidentally -- they didn't realize that happened when they didn't pay their bill after two months. If they are an individual owner, the land is automatically seized. In a group this process is not automatic but it still will occur. Or perhaps they had a crisis in RL and couldn't attend to their bills -- anything is possible. Now you as the group owner are responsible. So once someone does that to your group, you are vulnerable. If you don't make a habit of checking your group menu frequently, someone could pull tier, and the next thing you know, a Linden is notifying you, or worse, if you weren't online to get their notice, your land is simply seized. So you have a 1536 group land and one 512 pulls out, a 512 will be arbitrarily taken -- unless you hurry to the website and buy the additional land to cover it. Or, if you are in a community situation, you are faced then with having to evict that deadbeat and look for a new tier donor. There is that risk and you have to stay on top of it because no one else will for you. This discussion seems not to contain the other information that you do get a 10% bonus of tier on group land. So for 1536 you will automatically get 153 extra tier; for 4096, 409 extra tier etc. And that creates a buffer that -- if you have enough land -- will give you a safety valve in case someone pulls 512. Or you can use it to buy extra prim land.

I'm not understanding what you could have a personal ethics battle with Tilia *for*. It seems like just a service, like PayPal. People often want to pay months and months ahead in my rentals, but one drawback to that is that if the Lindens set a sim back in time not exactly what it was in the rolling re-start, it can make the rental script refund only a month and not 3 months. At least the open source script that I have, Hank Ramos' script which has been revised a dozen times at this point. Perhaps Casper has solved this problem, I don't know. This behavior is not consistent enough to define as a bug and fix it; it doesn't always do that. Fortunately people have the record of payments in "my accounts" as I do, and they can get a manual refund.

It's such a delight to me to see "Magnitsky Act" as something that is like a household word now, and not only passed as law in the US, but passed as law in many other countries and not just the EU, with that or a similar name. I worked on that for years and years when it was an exoticism and when we had to teach congressional aides about international human rights law and all the rest. John Kerry was a real brake on progress, as was Obama, both of whom tried to stop it, and Kerry literally was the last vote "yea".

Well, with a correction here. Now that the Linden has been at 241 for cashout for a very long time, if you sell your Lindens ($300 per week or $1200 per month) and annualize your account, you will then get US $4.80 for your stipend which goes to paying what costs $8.25 a month annualized (disregarding VAT), your best rate. So it's not true your account "pays for itself". It pays what it pays -- $4.80 -- still leaving you with US $3.20 per month to come up with, or $38.40 per year. The phrase that "the premium pays for itself" came about when the stipend was $500L per week and $2000 per month, not $1200.

Is that rug from their set, too?

Of all things, I had a tenant just now who wanted to replicate this situation on this very land (which is in my group rentals) and with this very house, which they owned. So...then it didn't seem to fit. Did you shrink the house? Or -- what I think is more likely -- you put the front porch so that it hung over on to the next parcel. Which was perfectly fine because it was a "prims" parcel in our group. It meant that you couldn't have the same radio stream perhaps. But you added those stone cliffs, right? They were not there from me, anyway. The other possibility is you rooted this and hung it over Linden land. But I don't recall that you did this. And again, it becomes a problem with placement of things, radio etc if you do that.

I wish there was that AND another thing: alert that land was abandoned. I try to stay awake and alert but I do have to sleep sometimes in RL and do my RL jobs. So I miss the abandoned waterfront on a sim where I own most of the land even though I literally check daily. And it flips to a land baron and I pay a painful price : ( I really don't think the Lindens are consistent with these tickets. It used to be you had to have contiguous land to abandoned land to put in a request for it. Or at least own land in that sim. Now that's all gone. Except sometimes it *is* invoked. All those oldbies with all those land scraping scripts and all their 16m plots which many still own -- and they can't make available a product that does this by script to alert you? I can't expect the Lindens to code and add this. To be sure, there is the purple of the auction. But the purple of the auction comes sometimes years after land was abandoned. And the criteria for how they do that remains opaque.

This is the question some people have asked me to ponder, responding to my other thread about "How's Business". Where Does the Value of the Linden Come From? Yes, you can answer "from the totality of the goods and services of the people of that country" or some other classic answer, and in a way that is largely true, but there is more to it of course as it is an artificial toy. People wonder whether the current good rate for cashouts -- 240 or 241 much of the time -- is due to the suppression of the land glut, i.e. the non-availability of new sims. And the answer is: no, that rate held LONG before COVID even, and has existed for quite some time -- a year? -- and came rather unexpectedly after for years being at 250 or even 256 sometimes. People think it "fluctuates" and that is "normal" and that you "have to expect ups and downs" like a real currency market. No, it does not fluctuate; the Lindens control it with "Supply Linden" as he is indeed called. We used to know more about this; now we don't. Does Supply Linden completely stop functioning some times? Balancing Merchants' and Customers' Demands Are payments of taxes on the MP sinks or sources? See, we don't even have the most basic information about this economy, which is not a normal one, but a controlled one like Russia's or China's, which preserves enough elements of a "free" economy to be sort of plausible. Obviously it's a balance between satisfying merchants, who howl when the rate devalues to 250 or higher (the higher that number is, the lower the value is, because it takes more Linden dollars to make up a US dollar - it's like how people go around with shopping carts of bills in some countries where the market crashed, and why countries like Uzbekistan or Armenia have millions of their currency that equal only thousands of US dollars). When the *fee* for cashing out was raised rather drastically, there was indeed complaining, and then eventually this higher value of the Linden then reduced some of that crying. Some people make an entire livelihood out of SL; some make a partial livelihood; some just offset the cost of SL -- and thus there are different economies for different people. In RL, it's rare that someone has the cash and resources to buy an old home, fix it up, offer the rooms for a B&B, and then not worry if it never fills up, and just let people come and go naturally to offset their costs. The reason the B&Bs in Cape Cod I have gone to for years change hands so often now is because no one has that luxury in the inn business. But then a high-value Linden becomes a problem for the buyer of Linden dollars, the consumer, the non-merchant. So someone has to pay $10 more for their sim. Or their dresses or mesh bodies suddenly seem a lot more expensive, maybe twice as costly. If they now have a premium with $1200 a month because they got a Bellissaria house, perhaps that pain is not so visible. But it's a balance between making people feel like they have a thousand bucks and can buy all these luxury things they can't in RL like a house and a car and a fur coat -- and making them feel like they are in a game where they have to keep spending a real $5 or real $10, as they would buying extra stuff in Fortnite, or with a subscription to World of War Craft. It really is about psychology more than economy. Land Printing Press So...when you stay the hand of the Linden money printing press, the value increases, and when the land-printing press, which is really "like" or very closely tied to the value of money is shuttered, that seems to me to be "good" for the economy. No? That is my question. That is, some people complain that they suddenly can't satisfy customers, especially those coming back who want a whole sim or even just 1/8 of a sim. If they are either very big land dealers, i.e. at the 100 sim or greater level, "growth" is important to them. But such land dealers make up a fraction of the land business. And while many like to think, or wish, that content is king, and the taxation of content sales and taxation of LindEx sales is the future for a virtual world platform's business model, I think we are far from that, and sale of land (sims) is the bulk of the revenue and will remain so for some time. So here there is a harsh reality: the Lindens harm their bottom line when they cannot sell sims -- they need to sell sims. So objectively, what is better for the inworld economy -- less of a land glut -- is not good for them. They can't harm the inworld economy TOO much because if every end user or island dealer goes out of business or quits SL, they lose revenue, too. So it's a balance. Cost Center In my view, "growth" and "investing in the business" are really dangerous myths for land dealers. Land is a cost center. It is a sunk cost. It is like paying rent on a shop in real life; it's not like buying a set of tools for a car shop. There are many cautionary tales, including that YouTube I often reference of the happy couple claiming they pull US $2000 out of SL every week and have quit their RL jobs, and sit on their couch with laptops and just make people who want beaches and surfing happy all day with a few clicks. They keep buying more flat pancakes, they keep flipping them and then they go broke when some unforeseen thing happens, like a price change of sims, a reduction of the population, VAT, or increasing the amount of prims per square meter or what-have-you. Then they fail, they go out of business, which is why they are gone from SL, or perhaps they've kept one account to go to clubs now and then. There is no such thing as "investment" in SL land; it is a cost center -- unless, I suppose, you are a very high-end seller with very refined design or role-play, i.e. a boutique offering. Some of this works, and some of it works quietly. Some of it exists only by cost offset, not by profit. The owners can afford to have a hobby like this. But by and large it's my contention that you cannot really make a living with land in SL and shouldn't try to, and you should not quit that day job. So that's why I'm translating a book by a Belarusian engineer or Navalny's medical bulletins and not buying another island : ) Many, many land dealers live in delusion about this. They need to have imagination about it because it's part of their game, their virtual world, "myself as land baron, myself as landlady". So they can get very angry at this discussion. They get angry at VAT costs -- because they do not run their SL business like a real business -- if they did, they would reclaim the VAT from their governments. But they have it at such a low level they can't possibly start reporting and running their business with spreadsheets, etc. Stopping the Land Glut My belief is that by stopping this land glut -- and it is a glut because a lot of it is at *worse than* 80% occupancy needed to stay solvency that the Lindens have HELPED the land business and therefore helped KEEP the 241 value even as they glut the market with Bellissaria offerings and premium with $1200 stipends that flood the currency market. That is, the reason it is so hard to get a Belli home and you have to refresh pages constantly is because the Lindens are not buying new servers until they move to the cloud, apparently. But I mean overall, the growth of Belli in the last few years and 241 even *before* COVID. I'm going to discount the role of the Mainland auction because it seldom has entire sims for sale. (Remember, it used to be the case that Lindens made shiny new mainland sims and rolled them out on the auction to sell at a furious rate! That era is over, now it's all used land). I see parcels opening at 0.5/m and selling for that -- or going unsold -- because they are in some truly hard-scrabble situations. Occasionally a nice sailing lot will sell for $10/m or $20/m (not Blake which would never be abandoned and hence never available for the auction). I don't watch it that closely so maybe someone else can comment. Maybe the role of the auction *should* be included. But without public records on its results (which we used to have) we can't tell what that role is. Island Business So if you are an island rental agents, you have been paying $229 a month in tier per island unless you have a grandfathered island which is $179. That is, unless you are one of those lucky very high-end buyers who get an additional bulk discount about which we don't know publicly, but does exist. But let's say you are one of the many garden-variety dealers. So that means you divide it up by 16, rent out 15 and have a public square on the 16th, you need to charge US $15.26 per month to break even, or 953L per 4096 per week. Obviously if a person has costs of content purchases, customer service, etc. they have to charge more, so it's $1000-$1200. And since they have 80% occupancy or worse, they do not break even. If this isn't your math, that's fine, there is a great range on these things inworld. I'm just doing the hypothetical to show that while at first it might seem like an island of $229 a month divided into 16 pieces and rented for $1500L a week (US $24) is going to be a great thing, in reality, it isn't for the reason of lack of occupancy -- oh, and tremendous competition and the need to constantly refresh content and pay designers and builders. Universities Attrition There may be less sims than there were, but there are as many people fighting for a dwindling set of customers as ever. yes, there are new people coming in due to COVID, or oldbies returning due to COVID but then COVID also reduces membership sometimes in the most tragic way. And sometimes people just find other ways to do this, maybe just on Zoom. I went through to correct my "UK" list of RL sims this week, to take but one example. Two universities that have been on here for years were simply gone. No announcement, nothing. Same on my US list and Germany list. Some very long-term universities GONE. And not *moved* because yes, I'm capable of looking them up in search. Perhaps put on "hidden"? I don't think so. I think they are gone. I would like to know the exact number of universities in SL and know if that number is growing as I see some attrition. Supply Linden On the other hand, if there are suddenly lots of happy island dealers able to fill up all their islands and all the parcels on them -- because there is nothing new and no one new to compete with them -- and many happy merchants making lots of cash from gatchas in particular, then all of them cashing out at once, in large bundles, that would seem to lower the value of the Linden, no? Hence the role of Supply -- or perhaps even Demand Linden, if there is such a creature -- becomes more important. We have all been on the LindEx, trying to decide whether to sell right away or put it at 240 and wait, and dithered, and suddenly see a million come and go instantly. Yes, there are merchants who have a million Lindens to cash out. But the fact that I see this happening more than the number of merchants I believe have that million lets me know that Supply becomes Demand and buys or removes Lindens to keep equilibrium in the system. Or maybe Marketplace Linden takes all his cash every day, and it's not a sink, i.e. removal and burnt cash, but is then sold on the LindEx to give LL revenue. That would be reasonable. No one really knows what those fast appearing millions are all about. If they were 100,000, they would be more understandable as business people cashing out. But they are in the millions. Sinks or Sources for Linden Transactions? I am talking only about the known unknowns here, and I don't know the unknown unknowns. The unknown unknowns are: o Where do the Lindens taken in tax from the Marketplace go, are they sinks or sources? o Where do the Lindens made from the sale of abandoned land go, are they sinks or sources? I don't *think* they go to that individual customer service Linden, because if they did, Guy would have had a new suit of clothes years ago LOL. I think they are just vacuumed out of those accounts by supervisors perhaps even by a script -- but are they sinks or sources? o Where do the Lindens spent on Classifieds go? Are they sinks or sources? Long ago we were told that texture and sound uploads were sinks, and group fees were sinks. What about all this other stuff? It matters. Merchant Revenue Some people with more Lindens than usual might spend them on content for their business or themselves; again, the enormous plethora of 30-50-60 Linden sales all weekend let me know that merchants cannot sell their merchandise at regular prices and even those hitting their gatchas 20 times as if they had sold an offering at a "regular" price isn't cutting it for them. Either the competition is too great or people don't have as much cash (the money market is tighter and it costs them more). I have no idea really what to think about this, there isn't enough information. I can post on the forums and hope that maybe a few more people will say something privately or publicly to try to glean what is happening. I can fly around and hear one person say they fear the economy is going to crash; I can hear another say their sales are sluggish; I can see a third move out of my store rentals because they aren't sell anything. But the next day I can find a landlord crowing about their new COVID customers; I can have a customer ask to expand with another store; I can see somebody is brave enough to open a new mall and start to fill it -- which is truly brave as malls just aren't a business model anymore in SL (although I continue to run 2 of them with very old and some new customers just because I think not everybody wants to brave laggy events and cam-shopping and pay the prices of top merchants, and I think there should always be cheaper options for both merchants to display wares and for shoppers to get cheaper stuff). And whenever anybody buys anything I've made, it is a triumph of faith and vision that is the joy of Second Life. Thank God there are still events where you can still buy home-made prim stuff that is delightful if not as skilled and polished as the latest mesh item at a big event. What do you think? Because soon, the Lindens will start printing sims again. If someone was somehow pent up and outside of SL and not shopping because they had no sim, that is good for the economy, I guess. But it does likely mean greater vacancy rates for everyone. If we are only talking about the niche market of universities and NGOs that really don't come into the rest of SL, I suppose that's a separate discussion but I think such sims are really more integrated than you might think. They all have to buy chairs and tables and coffee makers; the devs they hire are not going to make all those from scratch.

I don't see a downside to charging people $30 a week to keep their land for sale. Just like a search/places ad. Completely reasonable. That will curb the abuse.

AR all you like. Networked advertising in 16 m squares roadside might not be a problem, if done with some sense, if regulated, if done in partnership with residents on a sim, but that never happens. It is a blight and a devaluation, done to landowners first and foremost and ruins their view. The clicks on it are so low that it can't be justified even. It really is a scourge, and is essentially a selfish get-rich-quick scheme that doesn't even achieve that goal.