Prokofy Neva

So how is business? The forums are really not such a good place to discuss this as there is too much free-floating hatred of "land barons" or enterprise in general (even by people who claim to be capitalists), and just too much willingness to sneer and snipe and pretend you are up and the other person is down and not tell the truth of the situation. And of course anything I say will draw the usual Flying Monkeys. Let's ignore all that for now. A Crisis or a Seasonal Downturn? My own anecdotal view of the land sales and rentals business, which is what I know best, is that it is heading to a crisis. It is doing badly. Yes, summer is always a drought. September is still a drought. Halloween finally reverses that low ebb and we're still 3 weeks out from that, although of course content sales are already out for that occasion. Is it significant that a leading merchant has Apocalypse for the theme? Not pumpkin lattes, not black and orange witch outfits, but zombies. This is just a disorganized pastiche of thoughts and don't bother to read it if you need something fact-filled and organized, but maybe you will have some thoughts to share. What are the Signs? Now, many people start arguing with this immediately because they want everyone to know they are superior and it is better for them, or they want it not to be true, so they argue. But I do see the signs. There are a lot of move-outs. There are a lot of downsizes. This isn't just for me -- at my level, which is significant and varied but small. I talk to other rentals agents and land sellers and I hear them worried and I see them shrinking or even going out of business, although most who are still here after all these years, or even one year, do tend to stay. There are a lot of quick sales, as in the Recession years. Yes, land sits baking out in the sun for sale for ages and ages and notoriously so in some continents. But that's because the price is too high. Once it is set to prices that are half of what 2006 was, it sells. There are not purchases of abandoned land that should be sought after in some cases -- although sure, I see some of it snapped up. Bellissaria There are Bellissaria lots even available in odd spurts. Generally I am pro-Bellissaria even though in a sense it competes with me because every premium account is a plus for the economy, and it truly is a rising tide that lifts all boats. Bellissaria gets boring after 3 minutes when you are done decorating for some, then they come to my rentals. Or they add my rentals to Belli. So it's all good. But are we reaching a saturation point and over-saturation where there is now so much Belli -- there has to be given all those page refreshers of people who want to kit out their alts with log homes -- that it really is harming the rest of the economy, sucking away from the land dealers and even content dealers whose content needs much larger homes and lots? COVID Now, I personally see a mixture of people moving to bigger rentals and spending a lot more and nesting because COVID quarantine for them is not ending, and they are in work-from-home now for a good long while. So that -- for now -- offsets the move-outs and downsizes for me. From my perspective, a deep, long-term nesting instinct might not lead them to a rental, but to a purchase of a whole island for themselves -- and I see some of that and I can only welcome it in terms of the whole health of SL, even if it is a loss for me. Kenny Linden used to say, "There's always another guy to buy the island" if anyone complained about Linden policies and though they'd get Linden to change by threatening to leave. There is. But at less of a price. And whenever I update my religious sites and my real-life countries sites servers, I'm astounded at how many places are gone. It's a fraction of what it was 10 years ago because there are far less sims and less people. Sites are important. They are the "things to do" for people who may want a private home but after 45 minutes of that, need something else, and not a laggy bar with griefers and creeps. And I feel there are less of them now because people can't sustain the tier and work to keep them going. I don't mean big islands. I mean 1024s by the side of the road where somebody had an interesting art park or shrine or nature walk. Depression Spending Or another phenomenon often discussed, when times are hard, it's the Depression, it's the Recession, people spend on entertainment to forget their troubles, they don't really have $5, but they spend it on a movie or a beer or a magazine or Second Life. And with COVID, they don't go to restaurants or bars but have to stay home so they splurge more in SL. That's all true. Even so, there are other factors at work here. I see in real life mostly my own country, and I see Americans probably more than Europeans and Asians, although I do see a lot of non-Americans because my rentals are discount, and not everyone in the world is as rich as Americans and they also have VAT and so on. (Their countries have done way better with COVID). Back to School/Unemployment Ending So this week there was back to school in New Jersey, not hard hit as New York; in New York City, the Catholic schools opened; some private schools opened on a very limited basis; public schools are still dithering. On my plaza, I see swarms of boys with backpacks that somebody has dressed up and kitted out to go to school, but talking to them, they aren't actually in school and school isn't open -- or it was for an hour to hand out some textbooks or worksheets (which seem archaic, no?) but now closed. Mom and Dad have to work; they are hanging out, and the candy store is closed, the movies are closed, the McDonalds are closed, the basketball courts are filled with grown-ups in quarantine, so there is not room for kids -- but the liquor stores aren't closed, not to mention the nearby needle park, so there's trouble. Thank God these kids have their phones, where Mom and Dad some times appear among their IMs and games. But these are not the denizens of SL. I'm just describing a phenomenon I see in RL and SL, in my actual location and in my business but also among friends and relatives in other states: people are having to go back to semi-normal. Back to school doesn't mean back to work literally; but it feels like it. Back to school for my niece on her first day is Zoom, but it still means out of habit her parents bought her a new knapsack, shoes, pencils, and a lunchbox which means even if the restaurants were open this week, they would not be going to them, and they will not be buying Fortnite stuff, let's say. (I do not know a single person in RL who will come into SL with me other than my son. Not a soul. And I know many artists, photographers, women of a certain age interested in wiccan and book clubs -- and forget about it. They run screaming.) Move-outs When I talk to tenants to have to move out, or have to downsize, generally they say one of two things: they have a new job even more demanding than their old or they have to go back to actual physical work OR they are losing their job now for good OR the unemployment is running out now (as it is in many states around me -- there are some very hard times coming up). Why would someone end a US $2.50/month rental if they lose a job? Because when you are suddenly deprived of income and even unemployment, that's what you do. $2.50 is half your family meal for one day, let's say, or even 2 days depending on your location. So you don't dare spend it on frivolous things. People tend to view the SL population as hedonistic or spendthrift because my God, they are buying invisible stuff to play with anonymous people. But most people in the world have the "Protestant work ethic" even if they are Japanese or Italian. They feel they have to cut back and be sensible; not spend beyond their means. They need at least to cut out their 3 rentals out of 5, and take down that alt. Content Sales I wonder how content sales are doing. I have to assume, unless the Lindens decided on a massive bailout plan for the LinDex, which they might have done, that because content sales are higher, even the inflationary pressure of the stipends from Bellissaria has not undermine the new normal for the LindEx which is a robust 241 -- and please don't tell me that was always like that, because some of us keep records. It was 251 for most of the year before this latest COVID-era improvement. Merchants may have privately demanded this of the Lindens. And maybe they realize that they can't keep devaluing the Linden and hope for merchants to keep staying and making things and having their own expenses, if not tier, then their own uploads and events fees and such. 25-30-50-60-69 Days The enormous plethora of discount weekend events -- there are now too many to physically get through in 3 days -- tells me that merchants are not selling things at regular prices and have to dump to discount to make ends meet. It's not just generosity during COVID; it's necessity. I personally find I have tamped my content purchases way down because I tell myself I need to save money. I need to save it for the Fantasy Faire blowout next year, if nothing else! But I also just personally am at a point where a lot of stuff seems identical and I don't want it. And arguably with an inventory of 144,000, I can't argue I need it. You do indeed have to refresh your housing and furniture constantly to keep tenants and they themselves will demand the latest thing. But it is possible now to get that latest thing for $65 out of a gatcha, and not spend $650 as you used to have to do as a minimum to get a decent prefab. Food Basket The "food basket" of SL, if you will -- the minimum purchases people make to live in the world comfortably -- really has changed in that regard. I used to map out a typical newbies "budget" for clothing, a prefab, a vehicle, to see, would he have any left over for a rental, or so much left over he would buy and not rent, given the figures of spending $25 US every month that were once floating across the screen. The average log-on was 4 hours; that might bring $1-5 in purchases. What is the minimum SL food basket today, with the advent of gatchas and 30L Saturdays and Belli? It is no longer the $2000 Lindens used to start you with; it's not $2500 as it was 10 years ago; let's not pretend everyone buys a $10000 mesh body etc.; this is *the minimum* and I believe it is no longer $2000. It might be $1000. I don't know how the Lindens judge the health of the inworld economy; I don't know if they even think that is important any more; I don't know if they still have a staff person whose job is only to sit and fiddle with the sinks and sources and plan the economy (they used to); I don't know anything, and neither do you, because they don't tell us. The question then is: do they tell themselves? They may be telling themselves that increased Belli sales or less island dumping means the economy is healthy. But unless they can show that big hill that has the middle class at the largest group with spending of $25 per month; the working class, figuratively speaking, that spends $1-5, and those high-net-worth individuals in the US $500 class, and what its trends are, they can't persuade me they have a good thing. They would judge this sometimes by looking at cash-outs, beyond the payment of tier. That would be one way of trying to see if their customers could make money, any kind of money, let alone a living, from the world. They could pride themselves that this figure was US $450 million per year. That's a ton of money. Facebook doesn't have figures like that, even for app engineers. Instagram doesn't have figures like that. LL does. That is its special sauce. But do they nurture this? The lack of curiosity and even belligerence around discussing this topic lets me know that the situation is likely this: the few who can pull serious money out of SL do so quietly, and they don't care if the rest of the world can, in any amount. Nor do the Lindens. And I suppose that is acceptable, because the purpose of this company is to make money for themselves, not for you or me. They want a Better World, but they want it to become Better by someone visiting an inworld museum or reading a book in a virtual book club and becoming woke; they don't actually want a poor American or Brazilian to earn a living with their platform. If they did, we would see an astoundingly different place, unrecognizable from what we see now. It's sad because if they took on this social mission, which I think can be done with an entrepreneurial mission and not as philanthropy, they could really change the world. Instead, Microsoft will do this, and while I'm not a hater of MSFT like all the Apple fanboyz, I don't think they will do it as well by any stretch. Spending Chart So, again, we used to have a chart showing all the people in SL and how much they spent every week. A huge hill of them spent no more than US $1 or $5. You had a middle class target of 50,000 that everyone had to chase who spent the $25. You had a much smaller group of 5000 that spend US $100-500 that high-end island dealers could reach, along with weapons and vehicles creators. Today, I have no idea whatsoever what that chart looks at. I wish the Lindens would release it so we could have some notion of what the economy looks like. If I knew there were 100,000 people with $25 a week, I would put out more rentals and do more ads. But I don't think so. I think there are 30,000, or less now. It's the number of premiums at one level, but not only; don't forget you don't need a premium to buy an island or rent an island. If the economy is really shrinking -- and I do believe it is starting to -- and the Lindens are realizing with Belli they may have competed too much with their own merchant class (of which land dealers make up the bulk and who pay the lion's share of their own earnings), they may pull back. Due to COVID they are not buying new sims in general, something I don't completely understand as being only COVID related or only related to waiting for the regulator to clear their sale. Linden Actions SO, assuming the sale will go through (and it may not unless Biden comes in, so I hope they stretch that out; there is so much hostility to tech due to Facebook and Google predations that it could spill over to Linden), the Lindens could: o Offer the homesteads without restrictions. I don't think they will for the same reasons they stopped them -- the reasons didn't change as I have copiously explained in other threads. One person wanting them on the forums or 20 people wanting them in a Wednesday Concierge meeting will not sway them. It's laughable to think that the Lindens don't do everything with restrictions and therefore proving they are capitalist is somehow proved by this "gesture" of removing what is not really a restriction but an anchor of responsibility and guarantee that Linden, not residents, make the cash around here. Every single thing in the world is restricted. You cannot buy Linden land. You cannot buy your Bellissaria land. You cannot sail on water between continents -- it's not there. And so on. Not to mention no free press or independent judiciary but that's another conversation. If anything, new fancy premiums might bring more restrictions we haven't dreamt up for arcane reasons we can't understand. o So -- Offer a shinier premium -- the new premium is being so anticipated that when it comes inevitably it will be a disappointment. I'd be happy if all they did is offer me a higher price premium that might actually discount my zillions of texture of uploads. What could LL honestly offer in a fancier premium that would *help the economy*. The answer is: nothing. Because anything they offer that makes it a better and more attractive offer -- better content, more Belli houses, more perks for content creators -- *harms the inworld economy*. I want you to think about that for a minute. It is the Zen Koan that lies at the heart of SL since its beginning. The Lindens constantly step into the same stream twice with this Zen Koan. But I think we are about to see, especially with new owners, that the balance will tip toward harm or even deliberate eradication of an inworld economy; driving all content to the Marketplace where tax can be skimmed off; and more policing of adult content. And the reason is that enabling a virtual, organic resident economy with the trade of goods and services and lands is an exoticism; it's hard, it's expensive. It's like making a Space Dome. And if the experiment hasn't been particularly attractive, and the people are fighting and the plants dying, they will pull the Space Dome. o Try to promote all kinds of inworld events like book clubs to get people to spend their COVID time and dollars here. And here, I have to mention an enormous competition that is finally coming to SL that has got to be making them tremble, as it makes Facebook tremble, and which, if the buyers didn't know about before, could cause them to withdraw. And that is the big foot of Microsoft coming into the virtual world space with their AltSpace which recently put on Burning Man. Note that Scoble calls this social VR (and not only he). He has a whole book out on this now about "spatial computing" which is really quite brilliant and comprehensive. "Virtual world" is going to come to be seen as archaic like MUDs or MUCKs or There - or Second Life -- because this other thing is going to be so light and portable and ubiquitous. Why run 30,000 heavy expensive sims with cantankerous customers that keep you one step ahead of the police in some countries with content theft, griefing, and adult materials when you can run platforms accessed by people and shift the burden on them? Cartoons You will laugh at the cartoons. You will say, silly Scoble, he thinks hurling a car and chatting with a friend is immersive, and SL isn't immersive (we debated this on Facebook, where else). But he's right. The average Joe doesn't need the sheer crueltry of the on-ramping of SL. I personally don't think concerts and chatting are compelling enough. But they are to the billions on YouTube. And that's what this is about, taking YouTube from Google and putting it on Microsoft in VR social form. Can't Keep Them Down on the Farm I recently had to get my RL son to do some land operations -- he was on the Teen Grid and once had the number one mall there in his day. He has helped me inworld now and then on the rentals and taken responsibility for a few spots. He has dabbled in some creations. But he has a RL business with RL money from RL photography and video work so he just isn't interested in coming on SL more than he has to. SL just makes him wince and shriek with its complications and errors and bugs. In his bios, he credits Second Life with teaching him business skills at the age of 13 and giving him confidence; he puts it on his resume. SL was for him like 4-H club or AV club was for us in the old days. But nothing more. I can't keep the kid down on the farm. It makes me sad.

I see this more often than I should. I kept falling through floors last night that weren't on phantom. I kept checking linked items, because anything phantom linked will infect the next thing and make it phantom, but nope. And I see another thing, related or not, where half a room disappears. This is not because it's straddling a sim (that is one reason that phenomenon happens). This is not because it has old alpha textures from 2005. It's something else. It's not -- please God do not tell me this advice one more time or I will scream -- the Render Volume not being at 4. It's something different. Yes, re-sets cure it. But never permanently. Some sims I have to ask to be reset once a week to cure these ghosty things.

You keep not getting it simply because you were not here in SL when this ALREADY HAPPENED. When you could ALREADY BUY THEM without the hobble of having to buy a full sim. So that you didn't face a) the much higher set-up fee then for full prim islands b) the tier then every month for that island. All costs that the baron who can "buy as much of them he wants now" has to face, and which is a deterrent. In fact, you're in such a kneejerk reaction to what I write that you can't see the obvious: that if you think *I'm* advocating people "buy through me not from LL" THAT IS WHAT WE HAD. THAT IS THE POINT. (They didn't rent/buy them through me as I didn't get into that business; I have only one. I am a tiny landlord compared to these people, which you may not grasp through your seething hatred of capitalism/landlords/"rent-seekers" blah blah.). The people who want this system back speaking on the forums are end-users who want one, or maybe 6, but not 100. The land barons would love a pancake flipping farm like this are staying out of the conversation because they know either the Lindens will never do this, or they will pressure the Lindens, but not look like they caused it. Because what happened when there was no restriction and no penalty cost, landlords bout up zillions, flipped them to renters who had estate manage powers -- again, read what is written -- who had estate manager powers as if they were owners -- but then didn't do any customer service, leaving it to the Lindens to fix griefers, crashes, etc. The glut on the market also made it impossible for some to get even 80% occupancy, they couldn't make tier, they went bankrupt, leaving people who had paid a lot of money to "buy" a thing that wasn't there holding a big bag. You're just not hearing is that WE ALREADY HAD ALL THIS and THAT IS WHY WE DON'T ANY MORE -- it was too great a burden on the Lindens. This has nothing whatsoever to do with me as I RENT MAINLAND. I do not "sell" islands. It's hard to see where your seething hatred of landlords and capitalism -- especially on the Mainland where it is more like share-cropping that baronry -- such that you would wish to cripple this normal business that provides many people a low-cost alternative to islands and Bellissaria, and for very little remuneration. In fact, land bars were already cut off at the knees because -- WAIT FOR IT! -- land already sells for $1 a meter to anyone, i.e. as abandoned, and if there were more of it, the Lindens might even mark it down to $1 per 1024. Land barons were at their peak when the auction had NEW sims that were a different texture and landscaping every time so it was thrilling. Land barons could make money when abandoned land for $1 and Bellissaria didn't compete. Now it does, so there are less of them. But the Lindens won't mark it down because it doesn't sell, ikeeps losing value, and even at that price, it wouldn't because purchase price isn't the issue; tier recurring is. It's hard to have these conversations with people so ideologically hide-bound, so blinded by hatreds, that they can't see the facts on the ground here. So I'll leave you to have the last word and hope all the high-fives of your friends will give you a feeling of accomplishment. Meanwhile, it's all barking nonsense.

Well, remember what happened. They used to be for sale like that. And barons bought up hundreds -- thousands. Some were flipped to one person who had Estate Manager. Some were chopped up to 16 and rented and functioned horribly. I already wrote above about how this led to flooding Linden CS with the customers of absentee landlords, but more to the point, enabled land barons to make money from these hotcakes that Linden did not get. Those customers were not theirs. Making it for premium only (although islands have never required premium and that will be a problem for them), making it more expensive -- the analogy is making 4096 or 8192 cost more for a single end user at that level than it does for a land baron who already has at least one sim, so that he begins to get a discount. I just think if they keep within the model of their own system, they can't make this a premium perk, they can't just make it a higher fee; they have to have a throttle on it. So they do, requirement you buy one full sim.

You're leaving out the fact that the reason Europeans howled over VAT is that it doesn't exactly work as you say. It's not that only Lindens pay VAT, or there would have been no VAT. It's that businesses are expected to pay VAT, even if not registered. There is more scrutiny and less "creative accounting" in Europe given the heavy taxation and socialist nature of the societies. Registering a business is not the easy thing it is to do in Delaware. Incorporating a business and getting it the best tax set-up is very hard in Europe by contrast to say, New Jersey. You can make an unincorporated business in New York City and pay the cost for that status and the taxes from that businesses revenue rather easily even by yourself; you can't in Europe, as I know from having many European friends and clients over the years and doing business in Europe. There are times when the answer to doing business in Europe is -- you don't. Yes, if they are registered and sophisticated enough to run books properly and write off expenses and file taxes showing income and business-related expenses, yes, they can get VAT returned or get exemptions. That would seem the obvious thing to do. But the land barons of SL are not sophisticates. They are retired mail carriers in Cleveland and single moms in Michigan. They are not the people you imagine, some of whom have been covered in the media to create the sense that sophisticated biz dudes in Florida with expensive watches and yachts are doing this job in SL. They aren't. Any real rich person or eager entrepreneur would not choose a fiddly, crashy, labor-intensive virtual world as a place to run a business. There is a video on YouTube watched many times from 10 years ago, of a couple sitting on their couch with laptops telling us how they make $2000 a week in income from Second Life and have quit their bank or PR jobs. That was true for a brief period of time, and might have stayed true if they avoided the temptation of every non-sophisticated biz diva in SL and didn't "invest in the business". Money spent in SL is not investment; it is a cost center. Like a boat, it is a hole in the Internet into which you pour money. Fast forward to "where are they now," and the answer is, their business failed, unexpected Linden policies here and there helped kill it, the world didn't keep growing, and today, I'm not sure that couple is together in RL or SL. I see the husband is an inactive account who only goes to clubs and the wife no longer is in SL at least by that name. I cite this to explain that things like keeping records, keeping books, sitting with spread sheets, calculating costs, planning sensibly -- these are not things people do in SL as the norm in their businesses. Some do; most don't. Very top drawer creators with huge revenue are forced to do this and probably resent it because the margins are so slim. They don't want to sit with accountants and tortuously explain how SL works and show them all their records and try to extract this to an IRS return as I and others have done. Since I have had to do this in RL jobs, I can transfer some of that skill to SL, but even I don't want to be sitting late at night with Excel over what is supposed to be fun (which is why I never expanded). So the reality is, there are masses of people in the land business who have absolutely nothing recorded in RL at all. So they cannot get that VAT back or exempted; they cannot even work an American tax return which is far less restrictive than a European one. So they howl when Linden adds VAT and say they are discriminated again compared to Americans.

The point is that the land baron indeed books the homestead as a "sale" (in fact a rental) and the "new owner" then has almost all permissions on it (except for re-sale, really), but then he is secondary in the Lindens' eye because he is not the owner of record paying tier. The original owner then does no CS and dumps it on the Lindens. I don't know what you mean about Linden loyalty. But I think they are not motivated to let land baronry ever get larger than it is just to pay their bills. They want to move away from this model as I keep explaining. The sale of homesteads makes land barons able to make money on a product and not the Lindens. The barons buy 100 of them for $99; they resell them for $125 and $150 and do no customer service; the Lindens get none of that except the cashout fee. It's not enough for them to allow this pancake baking where they have to put on the maple syrup all the time. If the Lindens made homsteads sellable to end users without private islands, they'd have to have the sale price high enough to discourage land baronry. Let's say they make it $200. People would buy them. And private islands then are marked down -- land barons will howl because they have just faced a massive betrayal. They had to pay a huge entry cost to enter their game; they suffered content and staff costs and market woes and CS; now the Lindens devalue that product and allow a new class of people to come in and step on them. This happened with the grandfathering issue, which the Lindens brought on themselves by first trying to sell grandfathers only to their insider friends, and then getting caught at it (I was the one to break the story). You can't do things like that and expect the mass of customers to remain happy and content. So reluctantly they let anybody buy a grandfather and ate that cost, then retaliated later in other ways (like allowing me to be griefed for the rest of my life with inaction, but more widely, forcing Linden Homes and other competitive products on the market to undercut their land baron customers). Qie, when you rent a homestead, you *are* the Estate Manager. You are made Estate Manager. You can do everything with that sim except re-sell it. In my system which is rentals not sales, you can't do that, but you can still control the land on everything but sales, banlines, and re-sets. Griefing is a real problem for some estates as banning doesn't work or runs out of space. So the secondary "Estate Manager" wants that ability in his hands. This is why I was forced to violate my own system-wide policy of no ban lines or "group only" and closed groups on my homesteads, because otherwise, griefing couldn't be controlled. I still think the answer to the desire for a homestead is to rent one rather than creating market and service problems for Lindens and enriching a class of no-show slumlords. There are enough options out there to satisfy even a brisk demand. I have 1/3 of a homestead for example available again.

1) Transferring objects for sale was an idea I believe Philip Linden or another earlier Linden had for the idea of "adding value" to land. It was part of their ideology that is rooted in a hatred of land, and a deep resentment of the re-renting/sale of their server space which they allowed only because they saw from "emergent behaviour" that this was the only way that anyone besides top scripters or graphic artists could enter the economy (outside of sex services or club staff) and became very popular and a reason for users to buy servers. They hate hate hate land in the way urban ideologues have always hated land and peasants, whom they view as backward and a brake on progress to the glorious future. Their goal for the glorious future is to become free of land as intrinsic value; they want their income to come from taxing content sales and taxing LindEx currency sales, and ultimately only sim hookups, not sims themselves. And that's in part practical and not ideological; land is a huge cost center for them as servers need to be kept on a "farm," they need electricity, cooling, maintenance, staff, configuration etc. etc. and it would be better if "the Lab" did not have this burden, the same burden that power groupings in history from the Bolsheviks to the railroad tycoons have faced. Philip at one point wanted to have all land set to sale only for $5/meter. That is, he wanted no value that accrued from location or landscaping or any other factor, and make it like toilet paper per yard. Fortunately other Lindens, including the ones with PhDs in economics who were regulating the economy, convinced him that this would crash the market possibly irrevocably. In a sense, Lindens still live their dream with their auctions and their opening prices, which can be curious, and auctions that sell without even any other bids. They live their dream with the price of abandoned land, which is $1 whether roadside or waterfront or mountaintop, G, M or A. But that's only a fraction of the economy, and they have never tried to implement Philip's dream. So the idea of having the build sell was supposed to create that content value *on* land yet not land that they so crave. They thought it would encourage builders to make houses and then sell them together with the land -- that land would become secondary to content. Oh, and with this trend, they would undermine the equity and power of the land barons, who constituted a considerable opposition to many of their dreams and ideas, even as they made them possible, and reward the small class of builders who were their friends and alts. But it didn't work. No significant percentage of people ever used it. I know because I spent years commissioning builders and selling land under it, or renting it, as did others in earlier years. And the reason is simple: the first thing people did when they bought the land is take off the house, even if an expensive high-end designer's work. It's not how human nature works in the virtual world; it's not like real life. In RL, you have an extraordinary burden and expense to take a house off a piece of land and move it. That's why most people who aren't Trump's Russian oligarch buyers don't demolish houses and rebuild on the space. Most people shop until they find a house they live in, and remodel it, but don't remove it. In SL, you can easily remove it and put anything, so people do. They could care less about top designers. They care about middle-brow and low-brow designers, and those people didn't want to be in the land business, they wanted only to be in the prefab business. So it is not worth devising policy for a tiny fraction of people who buy houses on land they have bought. Raise your hand if you have ever bought land with the transfering house with it and kept that house out on the land. I did that...once? In the last year, and I think perhaps once in the 10 years before that. It is an edge case. Policy should not be devised around edge cases. Raise your hand if you have ever bought a build that *didn't* transfer that you kept. I have done that perhaps 3 times in my history of SL? And have to walk on pins and needles on those builds ever since so they don't return -- to builders who no longer exist or aren't in world. You may have seen it. But it's a tiny edge case and policy should not be built around tiny edge cases. If you want to sell a house with land, take a picture of it while it is on the land, put that in the "about land" menu, write a description of it saying buyers get a house, and if someone wants it, you ship it to them. If you defraud them, word will spread rapidly not to buy from you so you will not be motivated to do that. Meanwhile, the build doesn't have to be on that land. Because everyone in search will see a picture and that's enough; the tiny fraction of fly-bys who see it without the house are also an edge case around which policy should not be built. 2) If your land is taking a long time to sell, then your price is too high for the market. I think the problem of the extortion to "buy back the view" and the invasion of the map with rentals, not sales is such a big problem that it should be dealt with by this method, even if a few people who can't sell their house for weeks or months are inconvenienced. If you are selling your land, you want the end of that cost of tier, or you want to move. So move. Rent, while you wait for the land to sell if you think waiting for weeks will get you that price (and of course not end users, but some big-name land dealers, can wait a very long time because their sale prices are forced to be high in high value areas like waterfront and adult. But again, I don't think policy should be built around them. 3) I realize that certain big-name dealers believe that builds help their sales, and they sometimes put extremely elaborate builds out (that are cookie cutters but you don't realize it at first) thinking that helps. When I have bought from them, I ditch their ridiculously complicated and kitschy builds. They are builds that real people do not put out on their land. Look around at real people living on real land they owned, and you don't see this embellished nonsense. Again, put in a picture as an ad, put a description, put a link to a website in the description, but create the giant loophole through which invaders of the rental space and extortionists then drive through. Since the overwhelming majority of people who buy your land will not put out your build, which will either be simple and low prim and out of date, or overly kitschy, it's not a real sacrifice to have this function of builds dumping and land locking if put to sale. 4) I refuse to make policy around "de-render" when it is not in the SL Viewers. I will not use third-party viewers. And actually, there is a sizable number of others who won't. De-render is not a solution for your visitors who have to put it into effect as you can't regulate their world with your de-render. Let the Lindens manage the world they have made without de-render as if it didn't exist in a third-party viewer if they can't or won't add de-render to their own viewer. I don't think the Lindens will ever entertain this proposal. That's because their beliefs in forums' regs and content queens and content as king are so deep-rooted and so crippling that they will not be able to see the value of not scaring away customers who have given up on land buying or even SL in general because of blight on land. If it is true what is being said here and there in Concierge group, that the Lindens will bar political signage and it can be AR'd, well, let's see it work then. I have not yet seen any AR of that nature work.

Good! Your interventions on the forums are seldom positive and helpful, and the problem is not limited only to me. As for your free object that others easily found, the problem is, it really wasn't easily found, or it would have been? Finding things on 60L weekend sales isn't exactly something I have no experience in. Indeed, you had it strangely set up, and you can't know about the others who came and left without finding it because they didn't contact you. PS If you'd like to block me from being able to purchase your products, too, that is helpful in identifying your true nature, so feel free to do so.

Because you are immersed in the "science" of this and view yourself as an expert, legitimately so, with your knowledge and experience, you can't see the obvious. Images do indeed "sharpen up" when you change from Normal to Multiple. I have now re-done a number of things I made and it's obvious to see inworld. Photos may not always capture it. But with the 3D setting and normal day light in SL, you see the image sharpened. It is indeed crisper after not having white patches or shadows over it. This may not be your meaning of "sharpen". But it's a normal meaning of sharpen when an image becomes clearer to see. A second phenomenon is the blurriness or bagginess you see when 512 gets stretched to 1024. That indeed seems unfixable for reasons of "science" -- it's hard reality that if you put more space between the pixels they don't look as good. But you haven't understood my point about seamless textures. I'm not taking a seamless texture and enlarging it. I'm taking a 512 texture and simply doubling it across a 1024 AO to keep the crispness of the texture. And yes, depending on the "holes" in the AO -- the black parts -- depending on the item, the texture itself, it might or might not show lines even if seamless, but the point of seamless is often merely to have a pattern that can repeat without obvious lines even when multiplied in the sense of making more in number and smaller I will try the idea of the four corners. But I don't see any advantage to having a pattern end up half its original size. That is indeed what creates big black spots and black lines on an object that needed a straight-up 1024 texture put on the 1024 AO. If you put 512s in corners (or do you mean 256s?) and that results in the pattern halving, you are not ahead on most objects. Really, I have found no better solution that making quilt squares, i.e. shipping out of the 512 pieces to go repeatedly directly over the 1024 AO. Sometimes this means a new texture that you will have to go through 3-4 stages to produce, each time losing quality of resolution. I do wonder why, if you re-size an AO to 512 to fit your texture, and put it into the window on the object menu, the system doesn't immediately stretch all sides automatically and make it look normal. But I guess it is not programmed to do that.

Thanks very much. That's extremely helpful. The tutorials I read online about using lawyer properties didn't mention the importance of the setting "multiply". I read through Paint, but I didn't see this bit. The default of that setting -- about whose importance I didn't know -- is "normal". And while the slider for opacity can "make it work," combined with the effects "contrast", it's not ideal. Like a lot of things, the problem with this term "multiply" is that it sounds like "copy". It sounds like something you don't need to do that moment. But I look forward to trying this now with AOs. I should point out that almost no merchant selling models with AOs puts any of this information in their package. Not even the most basic form. They hector you about copyright, understandably; they tell you irrelevant things about LOD settings meant for sculpty, not mesh viewing; that's it. And that's because I think there is a culture of hoarding knowledge in SL in the belief that if more people get it, it will make competition in the marketplace. I found this in making sound file products, for example. People will literally not tell you the tricks on Audacity so that you will not compete with them and others in the market. And there's this superior Renaissance guild sort of attitude -- if you don't know this, you're a loser. If you haven't trained yourself properly or gone to Builders' Brewery or whatever builders' club there is to control teaching, then you are a loser. The hell with you. It's not an attitude I have about, say, how you run rentals and the land business where I am happy to share anything I know. But I find it everywhere among creators. There are a few exceptions with YouTubes. And there is you, who was nice enough just to paste what is "out there," but SHOWING THE EMPHASIS for the SL usage. Thank you for being a decent human being. I once innocently posted a tweet showing that I was frustrated trying to get an AO to work because there was nothing to explain it and I was dumb. It was a tweet not about that merchant, from whom I really didn't except any help because I'm not supposed to be her customer, only skilled people are supposed to be her customer. And while there was nothing bad said about her, she reacted by *blocking me from making purchases from her on the MP and inworld in vendors*. Because you can do that in SL. And some do, out of spite, not to those who are copybotters, but anyone they don't like. I finally did get her to see reason on this, but she kept her MP blocked and her inworld unblocked then, which showed she still didn't really think I should get to express any exasperation about having an AO with no instructions. Some merchants even write nasty notes on the MP that they expect you to know how to use their product and simply will not help you with CS on how to build. Your problem. At least one or two handle this problem by directing you to mammoth PDFs or websites written as obscurely as possible. That's why after a year of this, I finally thought to ask on this section of the forums, even knowing that I would get a withering lecture from Chic Aeon about how a 512 is different than a 1024. Duh. What I had hoped is that there was some trick, some slider, some function, some program that could restore crispness to a 1024 made out of a 512. I can see multiply in part can do that for some things. Doubling a seamless texture might do it. It's not really doable, which is a shame.

It's not just that Lindens greedily wanted to make money -- and PS it's ok for them as a company to make a profit. It's that their original "open space" product was, as Jack Linden said, "a stretch of water or a stretch of hills with a few trees". It was not meant for people. It was meant to be a pretty filler in between islands that people could have as a kind of picnic area. It was not meant to re-rent out to 16 customers, which is what land barons immediately did with it. So this "stretch of water" (this is what the Lindens used to fill in between continents and I don't believe it's a product any more) would then fill up with 4 or 16 even customers, which it was not intended for, it put a burden on a sim not configured for that use. Anshe used to have them in between sims; she began renting them; I believe it was the fellow known as Philip's own beloved son with a vast rentals empire (and now another world which some think is better than SL) who began snapping them up and putting lots of customers on it -- people didn't mind lagging on 1/16 of a board of sand if they were in their skybox cybering. So Jack put an end to this unintended use, created the homestead product, which was intended for end users or, if re-rented, not to fill up the world because the owner would have to have first purchased a full-sized sim. And see above for my point about how it created a class of fake owners who were not the ones contracted to SL and paying tier and whom Linden did not feel they should be waiting on, when the land barons had brought all those customers to these faulty offerings.

Please don't. There are very good reasons for this, and it is not merely about how much Linden servers can handle. It's about how land dealers grabbed this product in the past, when it was possible, and drove both tenants and Lindens insane. What would happen is that a land baron would buy 100 homesteads, let's say, as they would be cheap, not the price of a full-fledged sim. I think they were $100 in the past. So you then had 100 sims you could simply turnkey over to a tenant and not do any work. He would do all the work AND have all the permissions because unlike Mainland, you could set him as a sub-owner, so to speak. THAT is the function that made it crazy for the Lindens. Because it was permissions up to a point, but not fully. So when things went wrong -- lag, crashes, scripts not executing not fixable by re-sets -- oh, and griefing of course -- those tenant "owners" would go to the Lindens for help. But they weren't the owners of record. It's like having an absentee landlord in RL. They were forced to go to Lindens, because the primary owner was MIA on his yacht somewhere. And Lindens felt put upon by that, and they were right to feel that way. The pancake sellers would flatten 100 of these things, put out white sand or boards of white sand on them, and flip them for a huge price, then disappear and not do customer service, having "sold" them to "owners" who in fact were secondary owners. The price point is of course the issue. Go to alternative worlds and there are sims for $20 even. Of course, not with all the infrastructure SL has. But if you have $100 a month to spend yourself, you can rent a homestead, although the market is tight I suppose with the freeze on new sales. But I do see them out there -- a few people do rent them at cost (I have one I rent the thirds out at cost). Of maybe you'd pay $150. But I don't think the space should be created for you to become a buyer, because of the risk that unlike you, as an end user, land barons will rush in and fill the world with hotcakes that create a burden for Linden servers and Linden humans, and also a gulf of zero customer service.

The problem is that mainland terraforming only goes up and down about 4+/- on most sims. Some of them have hills and you can do a lot more digging. But your basement just may not fit. There's a house sold with a basement I would like to get, but after fiddling with the dimensions, I can't see where it will fit except my one exceptional sim with 40+/- (a very few old Mainland sims have this). You would think a hill might work as it looks hollow underneath. Except when you try to push a build down into that space AND then try to sit down in it and put furniture in it, oops, it won't let you. In any event, depending on your dimensions, on Mainland you will have to dig and see what you get on that particular sim. It may not work. Then you might have to put a foundation with a hollow in the middle as a way to create a "basement".

So normally, I'm not for adding draconian unfreedoms to Second Life where there are already some of those, but it's also the case that the FU Hedonism that prevails in SL and its corollary, "I can do WTF I want on my land" -- in fact takes away or limits the freedom of others. It "interferes with the enjoyment of Second Life", as the aptly-named Art. 2C used to say -- which was removed from the TOS long ago likely because it was overbroad. Right now we are increasingly dealing with people who sell their land or ads for their goods or ad space by putting Trump or other political kiosks on their land, by putting up signs supporting BLM, or similar causes. I'm a Biden voter and I support BLM generally, but I'm against the use of signage in blackmail to get people to "buy back the view". So here's my proposal, see what you think: 1. Once you set a land to sale, all the builds fly off it automatically and it is locked and you cannot build on it again unless you take it off sale. That means no signs at all, not even a modest for sale sign That means no sky signs saying BUY ME Nothing. It shows up on the map as yellow and as yellow if you fly around in world, that's enough. It's on search. 2. This also gets rid of people who abuse the "for sale" function to in fact rent houses. They figure that way, they get on the map fly-around view. Currently, you cannot see that a land is "for rent", as distinct from "for sale" by flying around -- only through listings in search. So people set their land to a ridiculous price, then put it for rent. Or they put it for a normal price for sale and for rent, getting more look-sees that way. I almost never do this, because I find it an unscrupulous practice. You are invading the product of rentals into the space of the product of sales, and for free. It's confusing to customers because they aren't sure if they rent it, will it be sold out from under them. If you aren't quick indeed it may be, after they have paid rent, and that's also unscrupulous. It does work to bring in more rental customers, no question about it. But I think it's wrong, and I personally, using self-service, do not want people to rent something, then have it bought while they weren't looking, and me not there to even refund them right away. It's wrong. 3. There is also a set of people who think it's fine to put a piece of land, say a rocky little 512 in what the Herald used to call "working class neighborhoods" of Second Life like Athabasca or pick a blighted Mainland sim, at like $10,000 or even $100,000, and even say openly, maybe a newbie will click on it and buy it not realizing. Maybe a Japanese or an Uzbek person, say, who has currency in the millions that only equal thousands in dollars, will buy it and not realize, hahaha. And that is criminal in my view. Wrong, wrong. The Lindens can't do anything about this, it's a resident-to-resident dispute. It is impossible to get to every newbie and education them on this idiotic criminal practice. I hope few are scammed by it, but a few are now and then so I'm for getting rid of it. That is, you will still be able to put your land for sale for that unsuspecting newb, but you can't also build on it, rent it, whatever. You put it to sale, you're done, no more. My proposal would reduce the number of people who do this evil thing because they can't do that AND go on living or using that land, too. 4. Clubs also put their land to sale to get in the flyby view. There is no colour for the map that says "club". So they hope, gosh, maybe bright yellow land for sale will attract more customers. All of these dysfunctional and criminal behaviours are the product of not just human nature but one particular thing: the lack of advertising space in SL. That may seem counterintuitive, given the plethora of ugly ads in SL, but read what I said. Because of the lack of advertising space that is normal, regulated, visible, like RL -- which we used to have in SL at the telehubs -- we have a proliferation of many ugly things trying to get in the view. If the Lindens sold the splash page (they used to); if the Lindens brought back infohub ad boards; if they also had roadside signs that were tasteful and non-laggy, it would partly cure the ugly ads and help the economy. Just think of the improvement to the map and the world if you could no longer put land to sale and keep builds and signs on it. You don't need a spinning for sale sign; the map shows it for sale, and the only people to see the spinning monstrosity are those who live next to it, not potential buyers, except for a tiny number of fly-bys. Every time I spend $1000 for a search/places ad, which I've found is the bare minimum to get looked at, or better yet $10,000, that land will rent. The number of people who tell me they have been looking all night and finally found my offering lets me know just how dysfunctional ads are. I can't spend zillions each week to put my land into classifieds; I already spend thousands for it at least to be in search/places, which works, but not as well as higher-priced classifieds. The big SL companies that have thousands of RL dollars to spend on advertising win, and that's fair in one sense, but not in a world with a controlled economy where there isn't anything between that and a 30/wk search/places but random classifieds of $1000 or $10,000. Again, it's crippled, and it's because the Lindens do not care that you sell or rent your land and if anything, are happy to hinder that function because they want people to buy their land. Understood. I think with a scripting by Lindens that forces all builds to dump and never deploy, the Lindens have removed their problem of endlessly chasing ARs for political signs, or any kind of illegal sign or activity (you can still AR ad farms with some restrictions). 3. There is absolutely no good argument to keep the status quo. If someone thinks, oh, I should get to keep my build until I sell, well, no, you shouldn't if you are selling it because that's the loophole for abuse by people a) snagging clueless newbs b) invading the sales space with rentals -- when they already have 3 kinds of ways of advertising rentals: 1) search/places 2) classifieds 3) the rentals category in search. Oh, and it cleans up the sky to some extent. I really cannot think of anything good about leaving things as they are, but knowing the forums regs, they will probably have some edge case that they would like to warp the entire world around.

It supports at least two layers, however. If you go into "Layers," with your original texture, you can then use "import" to bring in the AO, or vice versa. It doesn't look that great if you are forced to make it too pale but I compensate.

I am fairly new to building things and a very slow learner, but I persist because it's fun and you have a sense of accomplishment. It took me way too long to figure out how to take those AO things that model creators put in their packages and do anything with them. If I couldn't slam a texture on whatever prim or sculpty they sold, well, I just didn't make anything or left it with their default. But I became avid to have a different texture go on a thing and look right, and of course it didn't without an AO. BTW I'm rather hazy on the differences between AO, UV, etc although I did figure out that the thing called "normal" is not what I *think* as normal in the conventional sense; it is not the normal-looking texture as is. It's a thing that determines whether an item will be bumpy or have features of depth in some way, and it is light purple. It goes in the "bumpiness" window on the object menu. Sometimes even when using the creator's AO, and putting it with my own texture, it doesn't come out right. Sometimes this is caused by the sizes being off, or my hand not being level enough lining up little bits - my children are appalled when they see me struggling with Paint. I don't know how they managed to get such eye-hand coordination that they are able to do actual art in their jobs and work Photoshop and such, they didn't get their genes from me. I do think the next generation now is a form of visibly evolved human, such as to thumbs, information management and such. Whereas my generation and several dozen before me were content just to have opposable thumbs unlike the apes, and enjoy our spot on the evolutionary highway, our children are able to type with their thumbs on cell phones, and copying them, many adults can do this, too, but kids do it better. For hours. I can't. So there's that. Anyway, there are two things that plague me on this venture of trying to fit these things down properly: 1) Let's say I got an ideal texture. I either buy it from a service like istock or buy it on the MP, or find it on a free PNG site, or cut and paste it from something on the Internet that isn't copyrighted, or God forbid, draw something. But here's where it starts to go wrong. The beautiful texture I got of the MP only comes in 512, not 1024. Or I can try to resize what I buy from these sites, which is usually way too huge for SL, but then it looks too stretched out. So if I have the 1024 m AO, I'll have to big up a nice texture or picture that just doesn't look as good bigged up as it did at 512. You would think that if you downsized the 1024 AO thing to 512, then matched the 512 to it, it would turn out fine. It doesn't for reasons that escape me. 2) When trying to deal with the AO, I can do one of two things. I can either first put the texture in the layers section of Paint (please don't ask me to go beyond to anything other than Paint just yet, thank you), then try to fit the AO over it and lighten it up with slider enough so that the job of the AO is still achieved as to lines and shadows but it isn't too light. I can compensate by brightness or contrast sliders. OR, I can first put the AO in and then import the texture over it. Honestly, sometimes either one of these techniques still doesn't look good, it's just too light. I've watched some excellent tutorials on this but I don't learn well by YouTube. So basically my question is: 1) how can you make a 512 fit on a 1024 so that its resolution looks better and not blurry? I have sometimes literally done this by cutting it into squares which I fit over the AO like a quilt, which I think surely can't be the right way. 2) how are you supposed to work the AO thing using layers? First texture, and AO on top of that like cutting out a sewing pattern? Or visa versa? When I ask the creators themselves, I get various reactions. Either they ignore me -- people as stupid as this shouldn't be trying to make stuff. Or they tell me to download their incredibly crazily complex PDF off some website. Or they are insulted and think I've insulted their work. So honestly, if they want to keep selling this stuff, and surely they do, I need a very simple answer to these questions like, "No, Prokofy, you can't take a 512 and do that with a 1024, either always use 1024s with 1024s or shut up" or "obviously, the template goes over the texture, not visa versa, as 4 out of 5 doctors will tell you".

So, I do grasp that ideally you don't want to put a script inside every single piece as it adds to lag. I couldn't see that this script ate very much script time, but every little bit hurts. (In fact, I couldn't see it show up on a script monitor at all but maybe the sim wasn't reporting instantly or it shows only when it use). And the other reason why you don't want to do this is the fiddly part, for sure. I did discover why this script "didn't work" on the way to finally "making it work". And that is that of course, you have to be scrupulous about labeling the script inside every single part with the number for that set the same. So if there is a 3-prim drawer with bottom, sides, and a handle, and inside are shirts, a cap, a knife, a cloth -- 8 distinct items each with a script in it -- then each piece has to have the script inside labelled "Drawer 1" (on the line where that number goes) or it messes up. If even a single part was left "Drawer 1" on the "Drawer 2" set, it doesn't move. The script is labelled 1, so if you have 2 drawers, the second set has to have each piece with "2" (as Racer explains in his original posts about this ages ago). Also, some of the pieces lag, so you get a jittery effect, not unlike real life. This script won't work right if linked to the main cabinet, so you have to soft link. Meanwhile, Rolig's little script is, indeed magic. Link up the whole set with nothing in any piece (unless you had a door creaking sound or something), then drop this little script into the root. Then the whole thing moves smoothly and with presumably less lag. Thank you so much, Rolig! PS The point of Racer's script is to have multiple drawer sets. But if they aren't linked to the cabinet, two drawer sets, both with Rolig's script, still work.

Hmm well I could try that, does it also move everything linked to the drawer? Also, what is this "one script" I am putting into the root? And then what you have pasted here is sufficient for the others?

So I know doors are a special hell in SL and I have been all over them for years and solve them in different ways or don't -- but my question today is very specific. Why can't things you link to a drawer stay put when the drawer moves? There is an old script and old forums discussion on this and it seems the solution is to put the script into all the parts of the drawer, say the bottom and the sides, and then each thing you put in that drawer, say, shirts or lavender sprigs. integer drawer_num = 1; // this is the top drawer - all componenets // of a drawer should use the same number. // EG: change to 2 for all 2nd drawer prims float slide_dist = 0.5; // distance in meters drawer should open integer is_open = FALSE; // assume drawer starts out closed string close_message = "CLOSE DRAWER"; // Close message to send to other prims string open_message = "OPEN DRAWER"; // Open message to send to other prims default { state_entry() { } // end of state_entry state touch_start(integer nullvar) { if ( is_open ) { // it's open, so close it is_open = FALSE; llMessageLinked(LINK_ALL_OTHERS, drawer_num, close_message, NULL_KEY); llSetPos(<-slide_dist, 0.0, 0.0> + llGetLocalPos()); } else { // it's closed so open it is_open = TRUE; llMessageLinked(LINK_ALL_OTHERS, drawer_num, open_message, NULL_KEY); llSetPos(<slide_dist, 0.0, 0.0> + llGetLocalPos()); } } // end of touch_start state link_message(integer sender_num, integer num, string str, key id) { if ( num == drawer_num ) { if ( str == open_message ) { // we are bing asked to open if ( ! is_open ) { // if closed, then open. Otherwise do nothing llSetPos(<slide_dist, 0.0, 0.0> + llGetLocalPos()); is_open = TRUE; } } if ( str == close_message ) { // we are bing asked to close if ( is_open ) { // if open then close. Otherwise do nothing llSetPos(<-slide_dist, 0.0, 0.0> + llGetLocalPos()); is_open = FALSE; } } } } // end of link_message state } But is there a limit? Can it only handle 2? or 3? I thought at first the issue was the root prim, which is another bane of SL. But no. There's also the issue if you have more than one drawer, each script has to be labelled 1 or 2. But...it doesn't work. One piece out of a set of 3 or a set of 5 lags and won't move with the rest. Maybe this is an optical illusion. But it seems not to move, really. I'm not even talking about linking the drawer to the cabinet, so that it would work in any direction -- I figure it's a given that a set of prims like this supposedly talking to each other are not going to work if further linked to another set. But what's the deal? How can I get it to work?

BTW no one seems interested to comment on why you would have to add rules to Windows Defender now to be able to see search and use it, when for 16 years before this, you didn't have to do that. Why?

I realize you, like others, are clinging to this romantic/nostalgic view of pods being "there when you need them". But you don't always explore the Mainland every minute -- perhaps you don't even log in. Perhaps you live on an island. Meanwhile, those of us who log in every day and live and work on the Mainland see them all the time, and they are empty. There's nothing fun about empty pods constantly crossing the view. This is a subjective, romantic emotion that I wish people would examine more closely. The idea that if you "had to go to them" this would "diminish their use" is utterly illogical. That's because they are not used. They are empty. No one is in them. Go and look. "Having to go to them" is merely a matter of going to the next sim and looking for a station that could be standardized and recognizeable. If you really live on the Mainland, you would get to know that the pod station is on such-and-such a sim and go there. It's honestly not rocket science. In fact, if there were stations, and they were recognizable, the pods would get MORE use because instead of hoping to randomly see one on your sim where you are now, you could go and climb on one like a bus. They spam all day all across the roads based on the mistaken idea that if they provide enough of this spam, when the whim takes someone who is nostalgic for pod adventuring and can't be bothered with the expense of a horse or even getting a 30L Saturday vehicle, why, they will be there. Except they are both "not there" in fact for that whim and there too much for that person who has no whim. It really is the worst of both worlds. No one rationally planning transportation would have this idiocy. It is all based on emotions, nostalgia, posturing to get in with the Lindens, etc. The Lindens need load tests. A tiny number of people need to have nostalgic trips. The rest of us do not need any of this.

I think you, like others who constantly want to justify the spam cars, just don't see them. So you don't get it. No, it's not like an escalator. RL analogies don't work in a virtual world where for starters, cars are not needed at all! You can fly! That's what is particularly ridiculous about all of this. You can fly -- or teleport if, um, your arms get tired. In RL, you NEED an escalator. Elevators can get crowded; escalators are REQUIRED to get from one floor to another, because YOU CANNOT FLY. Plus, they are vertical, not horizontal, and PS they don't come flying across your city block every 10 minutes. The pods a) are not needed b) are horizontal c) constantly come across the view.

No, that is ABSOLUTELY NOT TRUE. Lindens say this; fanboyz say this; it is NOT TRUE. If it were true, why, the last time I checked REMEMBER ME -- yesterday! -- that would do it, and today I wouldn't be here with this blasted bug again where it asks me to log in to see people's profiles. I have set this from the web; I have set it from inside SL; I have set it on Opera, Chrome, Edge -- it NEVER sticks.

No, I wouldn't do that because it's precisely the nuisance you say. And I checked and no. It's just part of the glorious bug that keeps asking me to log into profiles, etc.

If they existed as recognizeable station and were in search to boot, you'd have no problem finding one and jumping in it. That's another myth about this infestation of the roads -- that they are there "just any time" and that's the justification for letting them constantly spam. But you've just proven that in fact no amount of spamming will ever be enough because you may want one when there happens to be a gap. Again, all the more reason for stations to rez on demand. The end.