taxation without representation

We want some accountability.

For the week beginning March 1st and ending March 7th, we wanna know:

How much L$ was taken in taxes
How much L$ went back into the common pool due to released objects
How much L$ was paid in stipend
How much L$ was paid in ratings bonuses
How much L$ was paid for voting booths
How much L$ was paid out for hosting events / teaching classes / given as prizes

And we wanna know how many people were taxed/paid for that period

We don't want much =)

is an actual chart

assuming that stipend gets fixed to a set amount of L$1000 per person per week

Show me/us how much of our taxes will be covered with different ratings

rating 1-5 + stipend covers L$X taxes
rating of 5-10 + stipend covers L$XX taxes
etc...

i'd love to see how money is allotted in the SL economy!

Add to that the calculations and formulas used please.

But rather than for a time period when there were known bugs, I'd rather wait until the bug corrections and the new changes to the economic system, rating system, and voting system are implemented. I will not get anything out of looking at something which will shortly no longer exist. I want to know what I'm going to be dealing with after the upcoming revision.

It's gotten to be impossible to balance your money not knowing such things as the balance factors between land and objects and how that effects your overall score, and I can no longer 'play' with my money, land, and objects to figure it out. It's gotten too complex and there are too many unknowns.

Thanks -
Kerstin

K, I agree with ya on the chart thingy -- wait til things are "set", then give us the chart.

But for the first thing I asked for, I really DO want to see it for the week of 3/1 - 3/7 for this reason: I suspect that Linden paid out a whole lot more L$ than they received in the form of tax monies. If this is true, and is shown to us here, it'll stop a whole lot of whining about high taxes / low stipends.

I agree. The whole tax/reward system needs to be spelled out, and when it changes, spelled out again.

If the response is "it's too complicated to explain", then it is probably just too complicated and needs to be simplified.

Tinkering with it now is fine, but once you go production I suspect every change will meet with skeptisism. So it would be good if the system was understandable, and soon. (relative to go-live anyway).

Just a note, I got PLASTERED yesterday with taxes...-2500!$$$!!!! I was like wtf! I was only covered for 700$!!! Before I was getting like 3500 a week... so that was all good. But now I just feel liek anoob again. I spoke with Char and she asured me that changes for the better were coming.

Could you guys (Lindens) give and explanation for the HUGE dip.

OK, to start here's some data between 3/1 and 3/7:

We collected L$388,433 in taxes
We gave out L$270,092 in stipends
We gave out L$113,440 in prizes and voting station awards

So net, we pulled about L$5K out of people's pockets, total. This is the old, arguably broken system, but in the end we won't ever be handing out alot more money than we collect... because doing so would allow ever-increasing amounts of stuff in the world, which the system just can't support. Sure, everyone wants to keep building more, but everyone also wants less lag. Unfortunately it's a direct trade off.

More data for that week:

We gave out L$1,575,821 for object deletion, release, etc.
We collected L$2,094,568 for object creation, claim, etc.
We gave out L$406,000 to new residents.

So net, people created alot of stuff and bought alot of land. Many of them were probably new residents.

In fact, the continual addition of more residents to the system has been a primary factor in the declining stipends. And that's not really fair is it? Hence the new, fixed, base stipend.

The issue of bonuses is more complex. In both the new and old systems, we allocate a pool of money to be distributed to people according to their score. The formula is essentially this:
your bonus = your score * (bonus pool / sum of all scores)
In practice we do this process for both your total score and your change in the past week, and merge them to create your bonus.

It used to be that the bonus pool was a fraction of the stipend pool, which varied constantly. Now, the bonus pool is fixed, and is very large, so things should be a bit more predictable. (we'll expand it as we add more sims ie space for more stuff) However, it's still impossible to give an exactly formula for x points = y L$, because it depends on everyone's total score. Consider this: each time you rate someone positively, your own stipend bonus (and everyone else's) will go down just a tiny little bit

As for the exact formula to compute your score, I'm not going to give that out - I'm not sure if we will or won't, it's kindof interesting leaving that up to a bit of exploration. Clearly ratings are a big factor.

As for the exact formulas for taxes, I won't give those out here either, but you can easily find out how much tax you'll pay on an object or plot of land by selecting it. You can even select groups of objects, and the total tax will be displays in the Cost field in the General tab of the object properties window. I encourage you to experiment with this to get a sense for what costs the most - floating castles are going to be expensive.

Finally, Nexus, your stipend should go up substantially on your next payday. Whether it'll be enough to cover your big pile of stuff, well, we'll see.

Please share your thoghts here on where we should be taking the economy - we still have room to tweak it, but remember that systems that result in unbounded amounts of money going into the economy just aren't going to work.

Ian, Thank you!
That was way more info than I expected.



Yes, we want a Perfect World, and we know you Lindens are the only ones who can give it to us <G>