How landcutters are still hurting the mainland

A while ago the conversation regarding 16/32 sqm extortion plots went like this:

Resident: "How am i receiving a warning for a function on my land allowed by linden labs. Where in the TOS does it say I cannot use banlines for privacy?"

Maggie "On a 16m parcel? Er. Do you stand in the middle of it and knit, or something like that?"

There was a Virtual Knitters group formed especially for those who wanted to sit and knit on their 16sqm parcels, however not very many AV's were interested in joining and the knitting stool along with a special knitting privacy booth designed for 16sqm parcels, built by *me* for the low price of L$5000 just didn't sell, so the group was disbanded about a month ago. I prefer crochet anyway...

Oh well, some things make it in SL and other things don't. I for one don't see the justification to sell a 16sqm parcel for L$5000 sitting in the middle of a sim with no traffic and that nobody but the surrounding land owners would want, to make their parcel(s) contiguous. You do have good reasons to just tolerate them, my best reason for NOT having them there at all is it simply BOTHERS me that it's there and the owner(s) of those 16's are trying to make a quick buck from me - nobody else is going to buy them, they aren't going to lower their prices because they don't like me, so the holes exist, for no purpose at all...

Not at all, I just thought it was obvious from what I said. I stated my position that smaller parcels can interfere with development and should be subject to relocation. You then asked me to check the line of reasoning that lead to the conclusion that "all sims in which no parcel smaller than 512m exists, would constitute Better Mainland Development," which is fallacious on two levels.

The first flaw is deducing that because some parcels less than 512m interfere with development, therefore all parcels smaller than that size have the same effect. I reiterated in my response that I was only asserting the antecedent.

I alluded to the other flaw by pointing out that even if I *had* asserted that all smaller parcels interfere with development, it would not be valid to conclude that all sims holding larger parcels would develop better. Some sims with larger parcels suck for completely unrelated reasons.

Let's try an analogy: Some people who take heroin die. We can't conclude that everyone who takes heroin will die. Nor can we conclude that everyone who doesn't take heroin will live forever.

And certainly showing that some people who don't take heroin die is not a good argument for the safety of taking heroin.

I think, however, that there's a fundamental misunderstanding of my position that really has nothing to do with this line of reasoning. It seems that I'm interpreted as "deploring" the existence of smaller parcels, or condemning them, but I said nothing of the sort. In contrast to other remedies to the microparcel problem, I'm explicitly not seeking to prevent them from existing, nor even to prevent their owners from charging whatever they like for them.

But exactly as you say, the problem is configuration, so to solve that problem in the case of smaller parcels, I propose that their *location* is not guaranteed as part of ownership, whereas their *size* is.

Why pick on the smaller parcels? Simple expediency. I mean, if I wanted to expand my 16 but a neighbor's 4096 was in the way, it would seem kinda silly to relocate that 4096 to make room. Why 512? No deep theoretical reason for that number; it happens to be the largest common parcel size that constitutes less than 1% of a sim, but the cutoff is pretty arbitrary. Do larger parcels get in the way of each other? Sure, but I'm not proposing to solve world hunger either.

To reiterate, I'm not making any moralistic claims about small parcels being "bad"; I am claiming that Mainland development would be better served if its Estate manager had the flexibility to sometimes move stuff around, just like every other Estate manager on the grid, and I'm proposing a practical way that could work.

(Oh, as for my claim that larger parcels are abandoned less frequently than smaller ones, it's just my observation. I'd be very surprised if it were not correct.)

I love it! (and thanks for explaining...I'd still been scratching my head).

No, I don't defend extortion. It's completely indefensible, in my view, and I think LL realizes that it's well worth the time of their employees to stamp it out.

But if you read through many of the posts in this thread, people who acknowledge that LL is cracking down on extortion are STILL maintaining that a 16m parcel sitting, empty of content as well as ban lines,to the west (let's say) of a 4096m parcel, is somehow Retarding Good Development.

My surmise is that people are letting their understandable dislike of extortionists lead them into making wild overstatements about small parcels.

If the small parcel isn't inside a large parcel, and it is empty, then.....well, I just haven't seen a single person make a case for that situation being bad and wrong.

(This doesn't even take into account the fact that after YEARS of land changing hands, the only way for Mainland to become nice rectangular parcels with no 'bits' would be for LL to seize all land and redistribute it. And that sounds a bit too Early Soviet Union for my taste, thank you very much....)*


*actually, even that severe a measure wouldn't be enough to get rid of all the 16m and 32m bits, because of the irregularities introduced by the Roads. So you'd have to delete all the Roads and Water Channels, too, in order to eliminate all small parcels.

The problem is that the rules against extortion are not rules against grief building, or just poor building.

By grief building I mean things like the huge "LAG ->" sign next to a crystal garden in Sundana, or the "jump the wall to freedom" sign visible above the wall of a Gorean camp. As long as no-one is asking for money for the land, these are still permissible as far as I know.

So the thought that one of these could spring up anytime is going to scare people off - I could well understand that.

It's odd, actually, as I read this I began to think that the mainland could be psychologically important in many ways. Now that I have moved to an island I have a block of land there that has been empty for more than a year because I'm left thinking, what can I build here that is soooo special that people would tp here to see it? And the answer is, nothing. Back on mainland where all I needed to do was make the shared world a little better that pressure was gone..

I do appreciate your explaining your objections more fully. I don't agree that you successfully pointed out flaws in my reasoning (and I'll explain THAT further on). But it does make a difference to me if someone says 'that's flawed' merely as a tactic, or if, instead, they can verbalize specific objections. I might learn something from the latter.

My demurs: 1) Of course my discussion about claims that all small parcels interfere with development was intended to show that such claims are logically flawed. I've probably typed enough about that so won't explain again (unless asked). 2) This one follows this quotation of the next words in your post:




2) continued: Of course they do. But recall that the statement of yours to which I was replying was this:

"The big problem isn't the outrageous prices, it's that these parcels are simply in the way of better Mainland development".

I was responding to that blanket statement. Neither it, nor the post in which it was made, contain the qualifications you later added. For that reason, when you characterized my statements in post 41 as constituting 'faulty reasoning', you were, I believe, unfairly expecting me to have responded NOT to what you'd actually posted in the sentence I quote just up above, but to qualifying remarks you were going to type in the future.








I think the analogy might be more useful, since our base point of reference is 'small parcels which might be overpriced but which are empty of all content and ban lines and which are not donut holes inside larger parcels', if instead of heroin you chose something less definable by its Life versus Death properties. (Empty 16m parcels with the traits listed can hardly be said to be dangerous.) I would suggest: tickling.

Well, sure. And it's easy to see why people wish these things didn't happen. Personally I wouldn't enjoy a platform that might be policed closely enough to prevent such things, but I know that many people would be fine with it.






That's very interesting viewpoint. I have my own personal list of things I think are Good about the mainland, and they do include the necessity of learning to be tolerant and to realize that I can't control every aspect of my environment. And this is a major difference from Islands, where owners (mostly) DON'T need to be tolerant, and CAN control every aspect of their environments. (I'm not saying this to put down Islands, which have their own virtues.)

But I hadn't thought about the idea that there's more pressure to be extraordinary on an Island.

If I wanted to move into a zoned sim I'd go talk to Anshe Chung. I don't want LL making that decision for me.

I CAN'T turn off "show property lines". It's too important that I always have clear indication that there's a sim border to trip over and where it is.

I CAN'T turn off "show property lines". It's too important that I always have clear indication that there's a sim border to trip over and where it is.
I can't see a checkerboard of glowing red lines emanating from a collection of 512s. They're too big.

Who the hell is demanding anything even vaguely like that?

As someone who's seen the utter chaos that ensues when you have lots of smaller parcels (like first land was back in the day), I tend to think a parcels size is directly measurable to the amount of commitment value it has, and that roughly determines what an owner might or might not use it for. Larger settled parcels absolutely tend to stay in one owners hands longer than tiny ones, so that in itself is a reason to "prefer" parcels in your sim stay large and uncut. It may not be dislike of extortionists so much as knowing that the smaller a parcel is, the better the chances are it will change hands more often. The more times it changes hands, the higher the likelyhood is that one of those times it will be picked up by someone who WILL have a negative effect on the sim (ie extortion, cutting, etc..). I don't think empty small parcels are wrong or bad at all... but I DO think the smaller a parcel is and the cheaper the land is, the less commitment value it has which greatly increases the chances that it'll get used for the things so many dislike.

I've been lucky enough so far that the original mainland sim I've lived in for over 2 years generally has real large parcels. That, plus the land is pretty expensive which I think helps to keep it from being thought of as throw away land. Even then, every time a rare parcel goes up for sale, it's always unsettling thinking about what could happen there. I've collected several little ad-worthy plots all over the sim, and it would be great to move them all together, but even WITH the cooperation of some great neighbors its still darn near impossible to do because of tier concerns for all involved. There's also at least 3 good parcels owned by absentee lifetime members that makes consolidating everyones stray land even harder.

B.S. you have every right to complain about these issues. they are annoying and an obvious extortion. by discussing them in public, LL might take notice and actually do something about it instead of just saying they will and then turning a blind eye.

i am not personally facing these issues at this particular time, but i have in the past - and i really hated it. i bought ad farms out, and then when i couldn't handle the tier, i sold some back off in giant parcels and lost lots n lots of money. well, don't you know ad farmers came right in and scooped it up and carved it up again. i was disgusted enough to move (some my ex-land in Shark that was carved up into 16m plots still remains that way and still for sale at ridiculous prices).

Ah. Yeah, I think at least part of the misunderstanding is around *quantification* of "these parcels". In formal terms, I meant it to be existentially quantified (as I mistakenly thought was clear from the rest of the post), but it was taken to be universally quantified. I should have been more explicit initially; sorry about that.

That might be worth a few more words. Some microparcels rarely get "in the way" of development; I mentioned the "network" 16s, for example, where the owners volunteer to swap them around with other landowners in the sim. In contrast, the highest priced microparcels--those often called "extortion" parcels--are usually strategically positioned to be as much "in the way" as possible, either by being a "donut hole" in the middle of a larger parcel, or by blocking access to something of value (usually a Linden road or water), limiting development options for the larger landowner unless they pay the price.

I don't particularly see a difference in kind between these latter two (donut holes and blockers). Both are specifically intended to interfere with development sufficiently to cause the neighbor to pay the "ransom."

And in fact these are the prime target of my relocation proposal (rather than all smaller parcels). The ones with the ultra-high price tags are usually the problem--by design. But the underlying problem is that they're in the way; the price tag is just exploiting that. By making them all subject to relocation, we don't have to decide what prices are exploitative, nor ascribe malicious intent to the owners.

I've read the whole of this thread and I agree with Ponsonby. I don't see anything detrimental about tiny parcels that are empty and devoid of banlines, as long as they are not doughnut holes, and even then a doughnut hole cannot be criticised if the owner bought the surrounding land knowing that it was there, or connected parcels to create the hole.

I see no difference between a 16m parcel of a functioning network and a 16m parcel that's set for sale. If they are empty and with no banlines, they look the same as any other parcel, and the fact that they are 16m doesn't make any difference.

The idea that unwelcome things might appear on them at any time doesn't hold any water for me. Unwelcome things can appear on any size of parcel.

I've never been in the land business, and I've never cut land into small pieces (512 is the smallest I've cut to when I was selling a larger piece). I've bought land with 16m cut in 2 corners (which I eventually acquired at 1L/m) and I've bought checkerboard 16s at reasonable prices, for the prims, and joined them up. So my land activities have never been on the side of 16m merchants and I have no bias in that direction.

Like Ponsonby, I do think that the history of 16m plots is effecting how current 16m plots are seen.

In the bigger picture, it just doesn't matter what the owner of the surrounding land bought. That's just looking at that owner's "property rights" or something similarly short term. The issue is the viability of the Mainland as a whole. Just read some of the OpenSpace threads for the prevailing sense of what a hell-hole Mainland seems to all but us die-hard Mainland owners. It needs fixing, whether the current landowners "deserve" it or not.

I'd agree here, if it weren't that AFAIK all the network operators volunteer to swap their parcels. That makes all the difference to me.

Well, a couple of things here. First--and this may just be my bad luck dealing with G-Team--I've had no luck at all getting them to address "terrorforming": the ability to create seriously absurd land height that is at least as disruptive as a bunch of ugly prims. (I've also had no luck getting them to remove obvious prim flotsam, washed onto microparcels left without autoreturn or build/object-entry restrictions, so I get the ugly prim problem, too. But I think G-Team hates me--which is only fair, because I've made no secret that I think they're nincompoops.)

But second, size *absolutely* matters. It is just patently absurd to let 0.002% of the sim area deter anything at all about what happens on what is essentially the entire sim. The tier cost is completely negligible--pocket lint more than pocket change--so these tiny things simply do not warrant having anything like the same "rights" as build-sized parcels; one of the rights they don't warrant having is absolute say in where that tiny bit of space is located.

That may be true. The hyper-prices are probably predicated on that, in part. But again, it's the viability of the overall Mainland product that's at stake here. It doesn't too much matter if the perception is false; it's the consequences of the perception that matter.

I would think that most landowners, who have a 16m cut into their land, don't have land to swap elsewhere in the sim, where the 16s will be out of the way, so they are stuck with the 16s. But now you mention it, I still have two 16s cut into my land, and I do have land to swap. I'll think about asking the two 16 owners to do that

Yes, absurd land height can be bad. I've only come across it once - the first piece of land I bought - and it helped to form a nice secluded area of the parcel, but I do see how terraforming can be a problem. However, it is the same with any size of parcel. Owners often flatten them, which causes near vertical edges for their neighbors - something I don't like. I'm imagining what I would do if a 16 was raised to the maximum height, and I'd probably put something like rocks and a waterfall against it and make it a feature. I can see that raising or lowering a piece to it's full height or depth, and setting it for sale it a very high price, is an attempt at what is being called 'extortion', but even that isn't particularly bad, imo, because it can be turned into a feature, or at least blocked off.

I don't agree with that. The owner of a 16m parcel doesn't dictate anything in a sim, except for the 16m itself. In all fairness, if a 16m is preventing a larger landowner in the sim from doing things with his/her land, then s/he has to reconsider what to do with the land; e.g. how to terraform it.

Parts of mainland are a mess without tiny parcels having anything to do with it. The first piece I bought had that tiny parcel that I mentioned (32m, and maximum height) and on two sides are normal sized parcels that are a real mess. I'd much rather have the 32m next to me than the mess on those two sides. The main sim I'm in had an enormously high office block on a nice square 1024. It was just a huge ad on all four sides (it was removed when the new rules came in). Between that block and my land are two 16s cut into my land and with nothing visible on them. They are *far* preferable to that office block - even if had been a functioning office block.

I agree that parts of the mainland do need cleaning up, and I agree that tiny parcels can be part of what needs cleaning up, but I don't agree that tiny parcels are intrinsically bad for the mainland, just because they are tiny. I'd rather not have to be creative because of a maximum height tiny parcel, but I'd rather do that than have much of what is on normal-sized parcels, and flattened parcels like steps.

Right, and I've done that for some, but I also own some land (in Lanestris, IIRC) surrounding a real mess, where the various microparcels are terrorformed in a kind of checkerboard of very high and very low elevations, right next to each other. It's pretty difficult to turn that into a feature. The best I could come up with was a forklift pushing rusty barrels into one of the holes, and a leaking chemical tank pooling up toxic waste next to another.

The thing is, size really does matter. As much as "stairstep" terraced 512s aren't exactly beautiful, one can kind of deal with it. But when heights jump 8m over a 4m span, and back again over the next 4m, there's just no way to make that anything but an eyesore.

Yes, I agree that microparcels *can* be bad. I just don't agree that microparcels are intrinsically bad, just because they are microparcels, and I do think that the history of them causes some people to have the view that they are bad simply because they exist.

The problem is, you don't get microparcels being created in any great amount except for [bla bla bla]. There are lots of legitimate uses for microparcels, yes, so we don't want to ban them completely, but any place that land HAS been broken up lots of microparcels that aren't, one way or another, under the control of a nearby landowner... they're never any of these legitimate uses, AND in the majority of cases they've been hostilely terraformed.

Once upon a time you'd find maybe a handful of "prim plots" off in the corner of a sim, sometimes, always owned by another landowner in the same sim. That situation isn't what anyone's talking about here, that situation has nothing to do with landcutters and adfarmers, and yes I appreciate that you're taking a devil's advocate position... but you're talking about a situation that's completely irrelevant here.

The difference is the owners of functioning network plots are willing to swap plots and the owners of extortion or ransom plots are not. And there are orders of magnitude more of the latter. Good luck trying to swap anything with one of the owners of the thousands of signature 777 L, or 1495 L, or 9900 L, or 16999L plots. They purposefully buy parcels in strategic locations so that to form a decent 512 or 1024, owners have to pay their absurd prices. The only way they will swap is if they are forced to, as has happened in a few cases. And yes, the history of how microparcels have been used in the past does inform my opinion, but except for the ads, that history is repeating itself every day.

I'm not disputing that microparcels were used in ways that were bad for a sim and for neighbours, and no doubt some still are, but I think that history is influencing some people's current views about them. All I'm saying is that a 16m parcel with nothing on it, and no banlines round it, isn't detrimental to anything. Land height can be used to make it a little detrimental, but that can handled by the neighbours. I'm not suggesting that all microparcels fit in with the neighbors, of course, but many do, and microparcels shouldn't be judged according to the history of them, or judged to be guilty, solely on the grounds that they are microparcels.

I haven't had a lot of experience with them, but I've had some. A stack of floating ads eventually went up over the 32m piece that I mentioned, so I built a tower round it and nobody saw the ads until the new rules came, and they soon disappeared after that. The grid of 16s in my main sim weren't obtrusive in any way, but I've seen grids and strings of microparcels with large For Sale sign on each, which *were* a blight on the landscape. And I've had other bits of experience with them.

So I'm not disputing that microparcels can be a blight on the landscape. I'm simply saying microparcels are not intrinsically blight just because they are microparcels, which I think is what Ponsonby was saying.

Phil, are you honestly arguing that the CURRENT situation with microparcels is significantly different than it was before the adfarming ban?
And I'm saying that THAT IS NOT THE SITUATION IN SECOND LIFE RIGHT NOW, for the majority of microparcels out there. They're not isolated 16m parcels. They're STILL, even now, clumps of parcels with abusive terraforming and advertisements. They ARE being judged AS THEY REALLY EXIST. Right now. They ARE being judged AS THEY ARE STILL BEING CREATED.
The vast majority are. You think people should change their opinion, that's not going to happen until the reality has changed.

For most of my sessions in SL I fly around quite a bit, on all the continents.

I haven't seen what you describe and and curious to get a look at some examples. They must be fairly isolated since, as I say, I do fly around a lot. Still, it would be interesting to see what you're talking about---could you provide us with a few locations to look at?

Quote:
Originally Posted by Ponsonby Low
This doesn't even take into account the fact that after YEARS of land changing hands, the only way for Mainland to become nice rectangular parcels with no 'bits' would be for LL to seize all land and redistribute it.



Who in hell might be demanding it, I couldn't say.

And, forgive the obvious question: why are you asking me about demands when I haven't claimed anything about demands? (Check my posts for confirmation.)


Still, the topic of LL imposing eminent domain (for the purpose of moving microparcels) has been brought up several times; see, for example:

POST 38: I now think that the best approach is to simply announce that henceforth, LL may at its sole discretion relocate to another sim parcels smaller than 512sq.m. contiguous and convex area.

...There *are* sims the development of which *is* curtailed by the existence of disconnected microparcels. Currently, the landowners--and more importantly, the *potential* landowners--of each such sim are constrained by these parcels, each comprised of 0.02 to 0.78 percent of the sim (16 to 512 sq.m.).

POST 52: smaller parcels can interfere with development and should be subject to relocation [AND] I propose that their *location* is not guaranteed as part of ownership [AND] Mainland development would be better served if its Estate manager had the flexibility to sometimes move stuff around...

(These are by Qie Niangao.)
((those "ANDs" are mine.))

Yes, you're correct.

And I also agree with what you said up there a ways:

"The owner of a 16m parcel doesn't dictate anything in a sim, except for the 16m itself. In all fairness, if a 16m is preventing a larger landowner in the sim from doing things with his/her land, then s/he has to reconsider what to do with the land; e.g. how to terraform it."

It seems as though people are attributing all sorts of bizarre power to the owners of 16m parcels. I guess I've waded into this because the whole thing seems to fall a bit short of rational thought*, and I'm a fan of rational thought.

Anyway, this topic could be seen as a subtopic of the general question "How much, and in what ways, should LL intervene on Mainland?" And that's always worth discussion.


(I'm not a fan of the 'LL should move the microparcels' idea. It just seems a bit...authoritarian. I can't see that people are helpless to deal with empty 16m's that bother them in creative ways--you've suggested some ideas, for instance.)


*Edit: I really do believe that, but I am NOT saying that I think the people who are extremely upset about the existence of small parcels are necessarily irrational people. I myself fall short of rational thought in certain circumstances: for instance I hate, with what is certainly irrational hatred, the disappearance of the short 'e' [when Pen becomes Pin and Senate become Sinate, etc.] So....just thought maybe I should mention that though I sincerely think most objections to small parcels put forward here do fall short of rationality, I'm not claiming to be better or smarter than those posting here.