Taxes

Can we PLEASE bring back taxes.
I can already tell you that 50 people will likely reply saying:
NOOOOOO..
But please read on, before you do.

Back in beta, a long time ago, when we only had 4 mature sims, and we had the ampitheatre and a bit of public land here or there...
We had taxes. People hated them, many people hated them...
but, now without land taxes, we have land barons, so now, we have to spend more than 2 L$ per sq meter of land. We used to release the land, or sell it low. So now, I was looking for a decent plot of land, but the only good one I found was set at 5 L$ per meter.... grr.

If taxes come back into play for just land, many people wont buy land in the auctions just so they can sell the plots at higher prices.

It wont be that much of a tax either, paid in L$, maybe a formula like this : (sqMeters L$ / 16) per week. Very simple. So if you have a 1024 plot, you pay only L$ 64 every week. (maybe lower for new members) Not that much. This will also go for groups, land contributers will split up the taxes for the land that they own.

There can be an exception for island owners. They dont have to spend taxes for their islands, since they are already paying a good deal of RL money for the island already.


I thought it would be a good idea, but of course, barons will be filling this post with rants. Just a suggestion, everything went perfect before.

Have a wonderful day.

what about the people who are paying tier for their land (everybody)? do they get an exception too since they're paying RL money for their plots?

if you make it too weak it won't have any effect so you might as well not have it but if you make it strong then you pay tax and tier and life sucks. any money you save in a one time land purchase gets eaten by long term taxes.

so to summarize........

we do pay taxes on land. we call them tier fees and pay them monthly. there are two good reasons for ll to not revert to the old system:

first, it never worked properly. the code was alway buggy and over or under charging people. people didn't hate paying the taxes so much. they wouldn't pay them now if they had. they hated the fact that they had no idea from week to week if they were going to be charged 10L, 1,000L or 1,000,000L for the amount of land they owned.

plus, real dollar tier fees are what pay the bills at linden lab now. they can't give that up by reverting to a tax system that collects toy money.

Hmm, why dont we remove the land teir then.. and do it the old fashoned way. I knew people would argue, but what else should we do to control barons?

cause then LL loses tons of money and that makes them sad.

well kinda begs the question of whether they need something done about them but for me i just don't buy from them. that makes them shrivel up a lil bit so imagine if alot of people stopped buying from them.

might be fun to have a "try to define Baron in a way that at least one other person will agree with" contest. i know they get alot fo flack but i can't see anything evil going on. the L$ keeps rising and prices keep falling. there's tons of land to be had in different ways. just seems weird to make the whole world of SL jump thru a hoop to "control" a tiny hand full of people. especially when it slashes LL's income.

taxes on land means people will own less land which means less premium accounts which means less tier fees which means less money for LL which means less SL for everybody.

or...... owning land means having a premium account which means getting a nice stipend from LL each week. the stipend pays your taxes anyway which means it's exactly like having no taxes but less stipend given out. people scream about the loss of L$ and tier down or buy L$ from GOM. end result is less premium accounts etc plus bad blood towards LL and it doesn't solve anything cause it's like taxes don't exist.

anyways.....it was before my time but i kinda think they got rid of the taxes for a reason and the best reason i can think of is cha-ching US$ for LL in tier fees instead of shuffling play money around each week. no way they're giving that up. plus "barons" mean US$ for LL thru auctions right? and since land prices keep dropping that means players aren't getting squished under any baron boots, at least not bad enough to matter.

taxes are a bad idea period but if they're just designed to control barons then they punish everybody else to maybe control a few people who might not even need controlled. bleh.

edit: forgot to say barons and everybody else can buy L$ on GOM so small taxes wouldn't drive them out of business or whatever. make taxes big enough to put a squeeze on them and suddenly nobody who doesn't have a big SL business can afford land taxes or keep any L$ when the stipend's all they get.

That and grants pay the LL bills, anyway. This is pretty much exactly what I was going to say - and other than one more "sink," taxation in L$ would not be useful and quite frankly become a barrier to tiering up.

Anyway, see sig. Move along.

I think we should bring back one type of tax... the teleport tax. Keep free telehubs for people without L$, but give us the ability (like in the olden days) to teleport directly where ever we want, for a fee.

No additional land taxes! I already pay $75/month RL money, that's more than tax enough.

-Ghoti

Ok, you proved enough. Ill stay with the no land taxes.

Yes, please!

neko

i would love this as long as it wasn't more than L$50 from one side of the world to the other.

Whyever would we want to have to pay to teleport? We should just be able to teleport arbitrarily, IMO...

If land barons are paying $400 US to hold the land, making them pay 10k L instead isn't going to send them running from SL. It's not that taxes are worse than land fees. It's that at the beginning of the game the concept of spending THAT much money a month on a game sounded unbelievable. Now its commonplace.

How about reinstating the light tax?

A lot of people use that 'feature' to great detriment, and it is a GPU killer with attachments clientside.

That or severely attenuate local lighting effects altogether.

Well, true. Preferably there would be no cost associated with teleporting. But then, that would be the death of telehubs.

I'm of two minds about that.

Death of the telehub might not be a bad thing, given how many (most?) telehubs have turned into lagged out mall zones. No telehubs might help to spread out these commerical zones, or limit them to only a few big concentrations, with other people choosing to spread their stores around the grid (why vend in a mawl when you can be less laggy in a less populated region and teleported to directly by people that are looking for your goods?). People that can not or choose not to own land could still rent space in whatever mawls survive.

On the other hand, teleporting makes the world smaller and the telehubs provide good geographic anchor points. They are a mechanism to have us 'stop and smell the flowers' around them. In this they have both failed and succeeded. They succeed in plopping us down in the middle of 'the flowers'. "Here! Check out these stores!" They've failed in that when one teleports in, there's so much concentration there and painfully slow to rez that many of us get the hell out of there ASAP even (especially?) before half the builds can rez.

I guess they have succeeded too well.

My ultimate solution woud be:

1. Teleport anywhere for $10
2. Fix the sim crossing problems so vehicles are not so troublesome! I'd rather fly anyway if I'm not in a hurry.
3. NUKE almost all of the telehubs, leaving some stratigically located around the map for mawl concentrations (or maybe these are only on private islands), Welcome Areas, etc. Teleport to a hub for free.

-Ghoti

if this is turning into a discussion of telehubs than yeah i agree we should be able to teleport any place for free and telehubs can die hehe. i've never ever wanted to mess with the stuff that's right by the telehubs. ummm actually the only time i even want to be in the same sim as the telehub i have to go to is on an island or Ahern. it's not like whatever's there is bad it's just the only reasn i'm there is cause the telehub makes me be there. and i try to get away to where i do want to be as quick as i can.

but since this started out as a tax discussion and about taking L$ away from people i figured pay for teleporting any place is an ok idea.

If you got rid of some, but not all of the telehubs, people with shops near the ones you got rid of would scream, probably.

But I don't think it would be necessary. If we had good for-sale search capability and the ability to teleport directly to the location for a nominal fee (e.g. L$10), I think the free telehubs would still be used by Basic Account customers just wanting to get around, or people wanting to go "somewhere in Sim X", but the general traffic around the telehubs would loosen up and they would become more usable for everyone.

I'm all in favor of fixing the sim crossing vehicle problems, so trains, blimps, etc. could offer transportation services and people could use their cars, boats, etc, but it seems to be a difficult bug to fix. Unlike some pessimists, I don't think LL is choosing to ignore this bug in favor of flashy new features. I think they've been working on it and they honestly don't know yet what's causing it and how to fix it. I've written code, and some bugs can be really, really hard to root out, especially in a complex system. And I think this system is now pretty high on the "complexity attempted by humans so far" scale. You get to a point after a while where you don't have any more leads on how to tackle a bug, and you'd be more productive working on something else for a bit, until you get that flash of inspiration that gives you a new approach to tackle a problem.

At least, that's been my experience.

neko

Andrew Linden posted in another thread details of what's up with LL's attempts at fixing vehicles. (about halfway down the post)

-Ghoti

Taxes were fucking terrible and I'm glad they are gone.

Bring back the Light Tax!

I hate the idea of taxation but I'll play along.

1. No exceptions for island owners isn't right-- what a "good deal of RL money," constitutes is relative so it should be the same tax for everyone.

2. If you are going to have property taxes and penalize land owners you might as well just have a consumption tax on all goods and services. Why should land owners be penalized for establishing a residence while those who spend all their money on goods and services get a free ride.

3. Where do these taxes go? Is it a penalty or are the funds to be used for something that benefits/protects the community. It seems to me as if the government (LL) is already funded. If it is a penalty, why should anyone be penalized for working legally in the economic system?

ok... (these arent by order u have)
1) would telehub tping be free/optional
2) if 1 is false, how would poor ppl get off islands?
3) telehubs arent that bad, once u get there, just fly striagth up as high as u can, go to place, drop down

Ok, stupid time. What's the light tax?

mmmmm... taffffyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy.... OK, Owl u fat sack of crap, the light tax is a tax on light @=(^_^@)

No taxes. We pay more then enough RL $ in tier fees. I was here when Sl had taxes something I am happy to not relive

we used to pay weekly "taxes" in lindens for the total sm of land we owned. we also paid 10L(?) each for every prim we rezzed onto the landscape and some extra amount if those prims were light material. the whole system was supposed to meter the amount of resources any one av could demand from a sim.

two things were wrong with the system. it didn't fairly meter the resources among the residents of a sim. it was too easy to game. i only found out after the fact that there was automatic forgivness if you couldn't afford your taxes any given week. all you had to do was create an alt and give them all your money. some people owned more land than ryan linden and never paid a lick of tax for it.

also, the calculation code never worked reliably. the thing that those of us who were actually paying the taxes hated most was having no idea whether we'd owe 1000 or 5000 lindens the next week. the whole thing was scraped in 1.2 and now we only pay taxes on the total sm we own; but we pay them in real dollars instead of lindens.

what hank is alluding to is the fact that the light tax did work fairly well to make people think twice before they polluted everybody's land with a myriad of coloured light sources. my solution is to leave local lighting deactivated. a better solution for ll will be to write code that manages light sources better. we actually need two types. one that provides very local lighting only and one that can be seen from afar but doesn't glare massive lighting effects between the source and the viewer.