Employment Opportunities

What, pray tell, is your point? Other than to be a pedant with semantics?

L$60k in SecondLife.
L$30k pending sale on LindeX.
US$30 balance from last LindeX sale pending next tier fee payment.
Half a sim tier... approximately 55% of a sim owned.
(thanks to the 10% allocatation bonus of group owned land).
Mostly contiguous and all waterfront property.
(all numbers rounded down to the next lowest significant digit)

Nice of you to lump me in with "the people with all the wealth" though.

And your L$ net worth?

As far as the "innovative" aspect of requiring prim harvesting to build? What next?
Require people to chop down trees in order to make scripts and notecards?

Such a vastly arbitrary, cumbersome and backwards step would bring shame to the word 'innovation'

--
I'm a lumberjack and I'm okay.

<tongue-in-cheek>

If that's what it would take to have Linden Labs enable creation of notecards from scripts, then bring me an axe.

There's a great employment opportunity!

Hire someone, give them a secret-channel listener, and they get paid to stand next to your scripted object, listen on the channel, type everything they hear into a notecard and then "give" it to the object (which can then pass it on).

Useful, effective unskilled work!

If the cut-down-trees-to-make-scripts thing is done, it will open jobs for lumberjacks, tree planters, greenhouses to provide the seeds... Hmm....

*fills her land up with trees in preperation of the great changes to come*

I want leglislation passed saying that deforrested tracts of land have to be re-planted.

And since 'free prims' will gone, that means having to buy tree's from the authorative green man himself, the master of trees in SecondLife: Khamon Fate.

--
I gotcher 'green backs' right here buddy! =)

Obviously, that was not what I was talking about. With "inherent" I mean something that has a function within the game. Like eating or having fun creating visible, tangible results for your avatar, affecting status columns etc, as well as not eating for extended periods of time would bring along detrimental effects for your avatar. In other words, consequences that by themselves would create demand and be a main motivating force in driving the economy forward. SL lacks this factor in toto.
You can of course try to pretend you feel good from a glass of Champagne, but that's not the same thing.

Way back on page 2...

/130/39/95530/1.html#post951259

The unskilled don't even have to be near your scripted objects. And a few dozen employees online at any one time, could support thousands of objects (assuming they're not all trying to create notecards at the same time.)

Now saving the card back into the object would require a TP, but wouldn't be that big a deal because the notecard could be saved to the HUD, the hud can popup the map with the destination already filled in -- so th "typest" need only click teleport, and the HUD can auto-deliver the notecard upon arrival in the destination SIM.

The employee can then go back to whatever they were doing before.

Pay employee's L$1 per notecard transcribed, and charge the objects L$2 per notecard generated, or perhaps some pro-rated service -- L$125 for every 100 cards generated.

Obviously, that was not what I was talking about. By "inherent" I mean something that has a function within the game. Like eating or having fun creating visible, tangible results for your avatar, affecting status columns etc, as well as not eating for extended periods of time would bring along detrimental effects for your avatar. In other words, consequences that by themselves would create demand and be a main motivating force in driving the economy forward. SL lacks this factor in toto.
You can of course try pretending you feel good from a glass of Champagne, but that's not the same thing.



Who says your arbitrarily narrow definition of economics is the right one? Why do you think there is such a thing as an economy at all? Reason is, because human beings have needs. The extension of human needs in economics is called demand (as it also entails things that are not strictly necessary for our survival). In other words, economics has everything to do with eating and drinking and an economy is thus a social entity or structure by its very definition. In reality as in any computer game. Except in SL. And that is weakness in SL in my opinion, not an asset.

i have placed an ad for a teacher 500 per lesson teaching texturing/basic build not heard anything at all in 3 days.

seems only people who respond to job ads are noobs anyone with any SL skill is doing something already of their own.

so their is no unemployment
the demand for skilled ppl is a lot higher than the supply.

What ad? Where?

I wouldn't consider doing anything "for hire" in SL for less than L$10,000 per hour plus materials (uploads, required content, etc), unless I was doing it for fun... in which case I wouldn't charge anything.

Why? Because if it's not fun I can get more than that in chargable time outside SL.

I don't know. What was your point in saying that everyone was in the economic game whether they liked it or not? Because you *can* build all your own stuff and you *don't* have to own land (and you don't have to be a hermit, either).

First of all, Vasudha is totaly right. We need jobs to replace the basic stipends. That is player paid jobs (Wouldn't do much if they were Linden paid jobs).

There was the idea of prim mining/prim farming earlier and I think it is pretty good.
There has to be two kinds of prims: free prims and commercial prims.

Free prims should be almost the same as we have them now in-game. People can create them via the build menu. They have copy, mod, transfer but no resell permission. By that, people can still create things for free but they cannot make money.

Then there are commercial prims, which you can harvest. These will be resold to the content producer. If we take out the function to transmit inventory items across sim boundaries, we can create some jobs in the transport sector. There can be people transporting the prims from the producer to the buyer.
The commercial prims should have all permissions except copy. By that we can have worker who can cut the prims into the desired shape, because no single person would build 1000 skyscrapers all by himself. Ok, still you have to assemble all the parts to the finished product. Either you hire some trusted people who now the blueprints or you hire a scripter to script a automated assembling script. The workers put their prims into a big box which automatically rerezzes them in the correct position.

After the production process, you need some people to fill and refill the vendor stations. Because it is nocopy, you have to refill the vendors once they are out of stock.

Keeping the premium stipends will allow the Lindens to control the monetary situation. If there is too much money in SL, they can temporarily lower the stipends and vice versa.

Basic players who wish to want to play SL without working can still do it by buying L$ on the market. Ther other players can earn money by working. The good thing is, there won't be any camping chairs anymore.

As with every other proposal related to a hypothetical "resell permission", this would not work.

I'm not going to explain why, again. You should be able to figure it out.

Hiya All,

First, this thread is very interesting, when it is left on track. I have learned a few things about SL I didn't know.

Next, I have been in SL since last November, and spent little time here as a free member until January. At that time I spent a few weeks wandering around, and finding old friends from other chat programs. That month I became a premium member, because I saw the potentially fun things I could do in SL.

I didn't have a lot of L$ at that time, and pretty much still don't, but I had some friends. These friends wanted to open a business, but it sounded kinda dumb to open a business without a product to sell. I bought more land near my friends to help out with the business area, and we decided to make a second hand shop. That still didn't make sense to me, and as I was gathering things to resell, I again couldn't figure out what we were doing. We more or less took free buys, and reinventoried the items for resale. This actully sounded illegal to me, and if not, it was definitely unethical. So, I saw the future of sales as a dim light on the horizon. I eventually disbanded the idea of being in this store.

As I moved on, buying new land, getting rejected by my so-called friends, learning more about the building side of things, and meeting new friends, I acquired a job by accident. The job was offered to me one night as I was dancing in a very nice club for fun. I wasn't really looking for a job, but the time was good, and the pay didn't seem all that bad. I didn't know the owners from Adam, but they seemed nice enough, and paid me up front. So, I stayed with the dancing job. It brings in a few bucks, about L$169 per night, and that comes out to about L$676/week. A bit better than the stipend of L$500/week, and I have fun doing it.

As of now, in SL, I have a two part life. One is my learning the fun things to create, and the other is the job I have dancing at my favorite club. I also try to help anyone who asks for help as much as I can from what I have learned so far. Socializing comes with just everyday interactions. BTW, I am usually online with SL about 5 hours per day, but not always.

I think the point is, if you want to have fun, and aren't concerned with making extreme money in SL, you can find a job in SL now, and it won't drag you into the "why am I working in SL when I work in RL" Syndrome. Fun is the key word here, or at least that is my feeling. Money is just an incidental benefit of being in SL.

I pay my monthly fees quarterly, and have 2048m2, so I pay $15USD for the Land Use Fees. It's not that demanding on my budget, but between the stipend, the job, and a few things I might sell, I do ok. I make about $24000/year IRL, so I am not one of the big spenders with SL, but I do enjoy my time here.

Just my newbie two cents, I thought maybe it might help.

*HUGS* Barb

To create jobs, LL themselves need a few wake-up calls.

First of all, the very perception of "Join SL, make money" is flawed. This tends to invite excessive competition, hence reducing profit margins.

Secondly, co-option of business continues to be a threat. Dismissing issues such as GOM as a feature, does little to instill confidence in potential for business.

One only needs to look at the trend of the $L to see, that employment in SL is spiraling downward.

Then there is the issue of dispute resolution, something which does not exist in SL.

Lastly, IP rights are not upheld.

All in all, a very poor climate for business.

Can't make L's working for others when they do NOT pay. Therefore LL needsto require a minimum wage for all employees and provide time clocks to draw the funds straight out of the boss's account.

I'm not f@#king mining for prims. Or buying them. I pay tier, I'm already paying for prims.
Artificial jobs are not any kind of solution, and neither is artificially creating commodities.
I'd go on, but I cant be assed. It's just too silly.

Again I agree with Fade... this is getting to be a habit. lol

While I may not pay tier I do, however, pay rent and lots of it in Ls so in effect I am also already paying for the prims.

Artificial jobs? You mean as opposed to a synthetic world with a virtual economy(debatable)?

...

Asinine indeed.

An economy can be real in a virtual world and those US$ are very real.

What's the point of paying tier at all? Paying for land you already own. Why?

If the game was based on a needs/moods structure or prim manufacture, or both (or something else), what need would there be for keeping the tier system?

Tier is a sort of money sink, isn't it? Well, the other things act as money sinks too. And better up. Instead of going straight back to Linden where the greens are doing nothing useful at all, wages equal sheer buying power in the hands of players. Which is used for purchasing the very things you design.

So people would make money and you'd make even more money. Circulation of capital - a boost to your profits - everyone happy.

based on another thread, Mistah Hand genuinely seems to think that there's no difference between creating products in Second Life and "crafting" objects in Everquest.