Vasudha Linden - "the economy does not need stipends to sustain it.”

You've been hanging around Jonas too long and have
been brain washed...

Objects can and are regularly "sold" by paying the creator a sum, and then one of the creator's objects giving the buyer the product. It's how vendors work.

You have a warped understanding of the term "paid for" Oh well.


Let's imagine for a moment that, instead of letting the L$ rate float, LL will buy and sell as many L$ as people want for a fixed rate of, for example, 250 L$ / US$. This way they'd be taking upon themselves the cost of any unbalance in the creation and destruction of L$, automatically stabilising the L$ supply.

If there were too many L$ issued, the players would simply sell more of them back to LL, costing LL money (and giving them an incentive to reduce the supplies or grow the economy/userbase faster to absorb those excess L$). Reciprocally, if there were not enough L$ issued people would buy more of them, bringing LL more revenue.

The balance that currently exists between players regarding the market value of L$, would be replaced by a balance between players and LL regarding the financial worth of SL's economy (if that makes any sense).

Would the added stability help grow the economy fast enough for the added risk of people selling out to be compensated ? I'd like to read Vasudha's take on this.

Depends. If they provide features that can be used to make resident-provided jobs more workable rather than just providing jobs that would be great. Two that come to mind:

* Resale price, allowing customers to act as comissioned salespeople.
* Group inventory, allowing people to model clothes without having to own them, or allowing people to work as "stockers" for group-owned assets.
* Better group rights, making jobs like 'groundskeeper' more practical.

It would also mean less overall money flowing through the system, since the premium stipend is enough for "mad money" for casual purchases.

One thing they could do would be to eliminate the distinction between premium and basic accounts, and just make the "premium" be a bundled 512m tier and L$2000/month Lindex subscription deal, but allow anyone to tier up without getting the Lindex deal if they want...
Hmmmm... that would make the "free" teir 1024 for $6 instead of 512 for $2, so the first 1024 would only be $1 cheaper (and come out about the same if L$ drops below 300 to the US$).

Remove the stipend for basic accounts and a lot of people on basic will just quit playing, or will finally give in and start camping... and while basics on camping chairs are a drag on the grid, basics hanging out and chatting and just generally being part of the virtual world are essential. There's, what, ten basics to every premium?
Like ringtones on cellphones.

OMG. Ringtones for Instant Messages! L$10 to upload the sound, and L$10/week to make it a ringtone for someone on your friends list.

The fact that the only reason that economy exists is because players are paying for it. Almost all the money that's going in to Second Life, all the money Anshe and the rest make, comes in the end from people who are paying to play. If education, product research, training, and every other "non-game" use of Second Life was added up... would it pay for a single sim?

Nobody would "sell" anything. They'd give you stuff for free after you paid the vendor. In fact a lot of vendors already work that way simply because one-prim-per-product sales boxes require too many prims.

I have an idea for that, though. Make a "sales box" a prim type. It's like a regular box, except it's always phantom, non-physical, and all the prim parameters but size and orientation and color/texture are greyed out like it was a linkset, it can only be textured on "face 0", and it can only be linked with other "sales box" prims. Scripts running in it can only call a limited selection of functions to set the text and fast pay.

But...

1. Linden Labs keeps 1-3% (rounded up to the next Linden) of any sales made through it.

2. It doesn't count against prim quota.

Because it's the simplest possible prim and doesn't interact with the physics engine, it doesn't impact the sim even as much as a simple plywood cube and it's easy for the client to render. It's worth paying a bit of "sales tax" to get away from scripted vendors.

I have been in SL over 6 months and have heard over and over again if you want lindens go work for it. Well, where can you get work? Unless your a woman and want to sell yourself as an escort or dancer, or your a creator and able to make things, or have enough USD to become a land baron and make millions there is not much out there. I would like to find out just what you mean by work....just what is out there beside sitting in those dumb money chairs????????????????????????????

This is the most sane and logical suggestion I've seen in this forum in a long damn time.

Which is just what the people arguing for stripend removal want.

Let's just face this fact ... the only people who would truly benefit if stripends were removed are those who have deep enough pockets to corner the market on $L. The would-be money barons. The jibberjabber they lay out in this forums about how this would be for the best for SL's economy are full of bs.

They want to be the new money barons. Buy up ALL availible $l's and raise the price to as high as the market will bear. The same thing happened when 1.1 came out and we had the first of the land barons. They immediately went out and snatched up all availible land and set the price to ridiculous, outrageous prices. People had no choice in the matter ... they had to pay.

That is until LL finally started chugging out new land, and ohhhh how the barons complained about the terrible economy and falling price of land.

Does any of this sound in any way similiar?

Drop stripends and you have no new money coming into the economy. Barons buy it all up and jack the prices up as high as they can go. People who'd like to, oh I don't know, BUY something they can't make on their own would have no choice but to buy $L at outrageous prices.

When 1.1 came out I warned about the land problem and the people who would corner the market and charge insane prices.. and people said it was silly to think that. Now I'm saying the same thing about the stripend. Lose the stripend and deep pockets will overnight corner the entire market and charge insane prices.

Just to clear up a widespread misconception: you can certainly have a Basic account and own land: I've been doing it for two years, paying exactly $15 a month and getting a 2048 tier (and the occasional Lindens). The Premium account is just a discounted package of tier and Linden dollars.

This confusion leads to considering Basic stipends and Premium stipends as the same thing, when they ought to be kept rigorously distinct in theoretical discussions like this.

I don't think newer people can do that anymore. I Think they stopped that mid to late 2004.

Yes, older basic accounts can own land....
ones created now cannot.
To get Land when I had a basic, I had to upgrade to a Premium account.

Sales tax isn't as hard to impliment as some people here are indicating.

For objects to accept payment they must add a money() event handler, and when people right click on it -- the payment actually goes "through" the object to the owner.

So to say that when you buy something through a network vendor, the money just goes straight to the creator and then the vendor delivers, isn't quite right. There is a trigger/event there that can be trapped and taxed.

So you simply make it each time, any object, receives a payment -- a tax charge is incurred. I'd suggest something like zero tax, if the payment was zero, then a percentage tax (rounded down) for all all other payments. Perhaps with a cap. I'd start with something minimal like 5%, capped at L$10 per transaction.

Could people work around this? Yes. If I right clicked an avatar, and selected Pay -- or looked up an Avatars profile and selected pay -- then yes, it would go directly to the creator. The creator would then have to give me the object manually, not via a scripted mechanism.

But working around the sales tax would require manual, HUMAN, unscripted labor.

Perhaps, potentially also creating room for an unskilled labor force (sales people) for larger purchases. This would be more effective is the sales tax didn't have a cap, or it was larger (say L$100) -- then you could hire sales people that could be paid directly (no tax), and who would then give the client the item(s) directly. This would work best with scripted items, that could have safe guards in them to track the number in distribution.

So, you're saying that *any* payments through a machine would be taxed? Does that include deposits and refunded money?

Yeh, that'd work. And it'd really cut down on the *ingo and other gambling. And Ginko wouldn't like it. And if you capped it people would just implement private currencies based on deposits instead (they might anyway... Dark Life already has one in operation).

But it'd work. I'm not sure it's a good idea, though.

Yes. All payments. Would give a big incentive for scriptors to build their objects correctly, so that they set the quick pay amount to be the EXACT amount that needs to pay -- so there wouldn't be a need for refunds (from when ppl pay too little or too much.)

Personally, I haven't really messed with Ginko, but I don't think it's needed -- so I'd have no hard feelings watching go away.

Could always have a top AND bottom cap. Payments under some minimum amount could be tax free.

There are a half-million ways to slice it, and finding the right one would be key.

For example could just tax all transactions over L$10 and have a max tax cap.

Other possibilities are income tax, where your AV is taxed based on income from scripted objects -- this could be done daily just like group dividends/expenses, or it could be done based on montly numbers where it would take into account expenses as well (so that if Ginko takes in 1.2 million deposits, and has 1.18 million in withdrawls, they're only taxed on the 20,000 net gain.)

Could tax on scripted inventory transfers -- every time a scripted object gives an AV an object, tax it L$.01 for each object -- so after transfering 1,000 objects the tax is only L$10.

Implimenting taxes is technically simple, it's policy, quality of service, and player reaction that'll be the hardest to deal with. Just like the heated through going on when the Lindens asked about adding an Event listing fee. Personally, I think it's a good idea if kept small -- the doom say'ers are saying that it'll kill Second Life. <shrug>

This would completely cripple the service industury. If a tax is what's needed, then a per-prim + per-texture object transfer tax is the way to go. If you or your machine transfers the object, you get taxed. There's no need to cripple the service industry to implement a tax.

There's no current way of controlling how much somebody pays an object, which is why all vendors have to have the ability to repay sums that are not quite right - if they're honest of course.

I have to pay if I lend someone money? They have to pay if they lend me money? Alternatively, salespeople can avoid sales tax if people give them money manually for products (I've done that before, given people products when they've paid me, particularly for contract work)? We don't have to fill in tax returns in SL, and there is no IRS to investigate.

The idea that a tax, or modification in the basic way SL works, is needed is still lost on me in the first place to be honest.

I guess what he is saying is that every transaction would be taxed,
not the item or service of purchase. So if you buy a widget or give
Johnny L$100, a percentage will be taken in taxes.

I guess a better name would be a Transaction Tax.


The downside, if it was percentage based, rich people will be
killed on taxes. It would have to be flat-fee based. But that downside,
is can a flat fee be low enough to not be an road block to trade, but
effective enough to accomplish the initial reason for the tax?

That's a relatively sensible contribution from a joke alt, but it's not going to make me take you seriously.

What do I get for my taxes?

This is the question... taxation without representation?

It's been pointed out on the scripters that this isn't possible in SL even with the new pay price set up command.

The problem is that you can click "pay" on a vendor, get the pay dialog - with all the buttons nicely set up by the script to pay exactly the right amount and only that - but then hit the "change item" button on the vendor while the pay dialog is still showing. The script can't force the stale pay dialog to go away.. so if the buyer clicks on the button they pay the wrong amount.

bad idea for it on -all- transactions.. the slingo and such pots need to be exempt form it or thers goes that business, which draws alot of people to sl and out of their little world. Without those games as a face value cost, people will get out less..because if all you can do is shop and hang out.. why shop?