Prims and taxation a SLifer study

Prims and Taxation.

Its seeming has come to everyone’s attention with the last tax day that the taxes are either flawed skewed or just plain misunderstood.

I have been informed that the reason the taxation is the way it is is because of bandwidth. Stating that depending on size location etc. of a primitive within Secondlife that it creates bandwidth issues which cost Linden Labs RL money. I fully understand this but what I don’t understand is the methodology of taxation of the prims. I know we all tend to compare SL to RL from time to time and I guess I am fixing to be another one but with a little more common sense applied I hope.

Unfortunately I have come to the philosophy that if you want to build in SL and keep your taxes down you need to build low and buy a lot of land. For some of us though that is not feasible.

In RL it’s cheaper to build up than it is out. But the reverse seems true in SL. The higher you build the more expensive it becomes. This is understandable for objects that are “Floating” in space because they are not attached to anything.

However, Items that are connected to Items that are touching the ground IMHO should all maintain the same tax base as those that are on the ground. This would allow for more distinguished builds to take place with in the world but at the moment when a person builds high like my castle or Catherine Cottons Fairy village was it creates havoc on us to fight for paying for taxes. But if a person decides that they want to build a floating castle they could but the taxes would be higher because it would be detached and floating.

Let me give you an example of what I found out this weekend. I had a tower that was on the front of my castle. It was linked and it cost me 90 to build but taxes were 255 on it. 9 prims 255 tax dollars. To me that wasn’t worth having so I decided to try an experiment being as to the fact this tower was attached to a floor that covered a hollowed out area beneath my castle. I took that same tower which is now used to chain up big red and moved it across the loch to where it stands now. Its current cost attached directly to the ground $89. It was used in the same format on both builds linked to the ground but because one sat directly on the ground and the other was attached to blocks that supported it on the ground the taxation was totally different.
Now I took that same tower and reduced the size on all the prims 2 meters in Diameter and 1/6 of its overall height. In reducing and re-linking that same tower just smaller now is only $63 linden dollars. However a square tower of the same size consisting of the same prims is $32 something doesn’t add up when you do that with the primitives.

When trying to plan and build there is no conservative way to do it when the variation of taxes is so great. I have two large builds but the one that seems to show the most promise at the moment is my dragon. Notably there are several castles through out SL so I may be dismantling mine one last time because it has slowly become a dream that due to taxation will never come to fruition. I am still currently loosing over 1200 a week in taxation and I have completely reduced the castle to ½ of its former glory. But the really sad part is the castle is incomplete I was trying to work and draw an income and keep It going by adding more to it as my taxes and income balanced out. With the current methods of taxation I will not be able to support such a build for a great length of time.

Its unfortunate that this has to happen. I appreciate all the donations I have received so far on behalf of Big Red and I will keep her up and in the world for as long as those donations hold out. However as time goes on I will prolly have to dismantle the castle because I cant stand to pay more taxes on an object than it actually cost to build in the first place.

I want to thank everyone for his or her time in reading this and please feel free to comment.

Sincerely, Shadow Weaver.

Assuming you own the land already, this statement is not correct. At least, not in the instance in a remodel. We discussed adding a story to our existing home with a builder and it significantly increased the cost per square foot over just adding space on one floor. Reason being the additional work that had to be done to the lower story to support the upper story.

Now this is just a comment on that one quote and yes I know the same stuff doesnt apply in SL. I'm also aware there are differences between new construction & remodels. I'm just pulling from personal experience.

Another problem with that thought is the fact that you can't link objects that are over 10 m away (or something close to that), so it become impossible to discern between the "floating" and the "sitting on top of." I understand what you're saying, as I used to have a sky scraper, but I guess getting notice by having a taller building constitutes a tax increase. (plus people could always make long thin cylinders, and perch houses on top of them...)

Misnomer, you are correct also when it comes to a remodel and based on what you mentioned your right there is no need to get into that because both statements are true.
But as a general rule on a new build yes it is cheaper on a refurbish its too cost prohibitive.

Now Dion True they could do what you said and we would be dodging poles flying through SL but it would have to be porportionate to the connection For example your Sky scraper you mentioned would be an excelent example. Each floor connected by walls and were a prim that was used for the floors stretched it would effectively touch the lower prim of the same mass. If there was a way to say if the mass of the higher prim is no greater than 1.5 the size of the prim supporting it. Then the linking and fesability would be there.

just an observation.

Shadow

I think a reason why higher objects cost more in taxes is because higher objects can cause higher bandwidths. If you notice while flying, if your flying fast, objects closer to the ground get built first on your screen, and then builds up. I ecspecially notice this on the beanstalk in Welsh. Taller objects can also cause more problems while flying through the world, as if your computer doesn't build the objects fast enough while flying, people will ram straight into them. It's not fun to be flying along, then run into a wall that you didn't see there. I've slammed into quite a few of the Si's and Rathe Billboards while flying, because they didn't build fast enough, and now it's gotten to where if i generally go past an area many times, i know where to fly and where not to. But it can be a pain for those huge tall objects to load up, because generally they are made up of many, many prims.