Two questions on stipends

I thought the point behind communism was that every citizen was guaranteed employment.

So... explain to me how communism even enters the equasion here?

I paid my US$225.00 bucks for my 500 a week and I expect to receave it until the end of the world. Others are paying 72 bucks a year to receave 500 lindens.

Get off your all mighty High horse Conservative Work Ethic.

If I had wanted to work in a Virtural World I would had gone to the Sims on-line.

I say to you if you want a successful business, get out of your lazy chair and go into the real world, borrow the business loans and start one.

I wanna have your (virtual) baby, Magnum!

You have ignored this and I am calling you out on it. As I said, if I had wanted to work I would had gone to the Sims on Line. I come to Second Life to escape the real world which includes the Conservative Work Ethic and republicanism. For all of those of you who want to earn real money, why not go out and get a Real Job. If you want to start a business, go out and foot the Real Life Business Loans, Start-up Regulations and Government oversite and start one. But do it in the real world.

For those of you who want to start a business in Second Life, and don't expect a profit, and want to do it for fun, I say go for it.

I am not against Business. I am against a group of people trying to force everyone in Second Life to start a Business to get money they are already paying for. Besides if everyone started a Business they would overload all the markets. Also I do not believe its right to force people to work in a Virtural World (Why I did not go to Sims On-Line). People already work in the real world. Why remind them of their problems by forcing them to either make a business in SL or work for someone else in SL.

Keep Second Life, Second Life and Keep the Real World in the Real World.

My opinions of course.

Hahahahaha

Hunter alot of them still would and them printing the money out of thin air says nothing to its value. Ill point to project entropia or entropia universe yet again. Their money comes out of thin air as well. Their mone is worth alot more because their residents sell it higher and its actually based off an auction system as opposed to how SL is setup where a seller sets the price and you do the buy now deal. Them printing money wasnt a problem for anyone until it suited them to say so.

And by suited them to say so im saying that they made a mistake and now cannot fix it so they want to push it onto the stipends. New money entering SL actually helps the economy wether you want to hear it or not. More people have more money to spend. Its up to the sellers to determine the value of the L and they are the ones that are lapse in fixing the problem themselves.

The fact of the matter is these people are calling for a solution to fix a mistake they themselves made. They want the value of the Linden to go up and regardless if more money is taken out or not it wont make a difference. You put to much faith into them as people. The trend is likely to continue till they have their way because it actually makes the stipends look at fault to some people when the stipends really are not the problem.

The thing is this trend is likely to continue no matter what is done. People feel the need to sell their L faster its going to drive the value down no matter what is done. As i repeat time and time again Economics is flawed as is a free market society because it fails to take emphasis on human nature. Lewis is right though if everyone pulled together and tried to sell at higher prices it'd go up. Thats IF they did which is a highly unlikely situation because they dont want to wait for their L to sell cuz omg they have to cover their precious tier or make a few bucks.

They do not care what happens to SL or the people of SL. They arnt looking at it as anything more then a business platform for them to make money and as long as that is their view they dont care what effects their actions have on everyone else. The stipends may come out of thin air but they arnt setting the price are they? The answer there is No. The volume of L in SL does not dictate the price. Supply vs demand might work except for the fact that not all money coming into SL is sold on LindEx and not everyone is selling their L.

You see the thing is there are people that come here to sheerly enjoy SL. What the sellers do with their money is their business but alot of them choose not to let it sell at a higher value instead they choose to let it sell faster. They themselves cause an adverse effect on the economy with their notions of supply vs demand. If the L is all put in at a given price of higher value and demand remains the same as it has been the price is going to go up. If the opposite occurs the price goes down.

The buyers really have nothing to do with the equation other then buying L and its the people putting huge chunks onto LindEx at a lower value that are causing the fore front of the problem. They then come here and whine after they sold it. While someone brought up people saying the same thing during ratings its not really a fair comparison as its taking out some money coming into sl vs taking out all money in sl. There is a vast difference between the two. I dont know about you but i dont want to be forced to buy L just because some twit made a mistake on a currency exchange. Its tant amount to me paying my boss while im working really.

Its not fair to try to push this on all residents. If they have such a problem with stipends why arnt they giving theirs up now hmm? Why dont they give their stipend away or put it in a classified ad? The short answer is they are hypocrits and rely on the stipend as much as anyone else. They are calling for it to try and make a few quick bucks then will whine when their profit margin drops even lower then it currently is. And will start acting the opposite of what they are now rallying for easier money.

If it was just simply removing printing money sure but thats not what they want and i think you dont see it. They want a way thats going to force us to buy L because they think its going to drive back up the value of L if they do so. I've yet to see a viable reason to get rid of the stipends they just give the run around or try to start calling us socialists etc. Its quite simple and i really dont understand it if they have such a problem with how SL is why dont they just leave? Honestly all they seem to do is complain unless every little thing goes to making them money.

I hope LL realizes that removing the stipends and essentially by doing so turning this into a basically business platform is a bad move for you, for residents, and for the people whining that the stipends are evil. There is no cause for it and if they really wanted the value of the L to go up they can do something about it rather then coming here and whining. LL put the control of the value of L in the hands of the residents and as such the residents have the power to control it!

Hi Lina,
That is price-fixing and highly illegal in most civilized economies, as someone else pointed out. Besides that, the market could not maintain it because there will always be people selling at the real value of the L$. And the real value is determined by supply and demand. The L$ is devalued simply because the supply is continually rising, not because sellers are setting prices. A seller's desire for higher prices can not move a market.



An auction system is essentially the exact same thing as an open-outcry market, which we have in SL. If you visit the floor of any market exchange, it's just a big auction. The only difference I can see is that an auction may limit the number of participants.

The forces that drive an economy are much stronger than any individual or group. As I see it, what people here want to see changed is one of those driving forces...supply.

-Hunter

Does Entropia pay stippends? I thought everyone came in broke and had to actually work to make their money? (in Entropai's case earning money by collecting and selling commodities and such)

I do not see a problem with stipends for premium members. We pay a monthly/quarterly/yearly fee for the game, plus tier if we have land. That should cover the stipend. Should LL buy the stipend money off the lindex?? I don't know, seems like it would solve everyone's problems, but it would cost LL money. I do not think members should be EXPECTED to spend more $$ on SL in order to get $L. Buying $L's is fine if you need EXTRA money, but it should not be expected to be the only way to get money for premium members. The right to "own" land is not worth the premium membership fee and tier.

I really don't understand the players that become reliant on their $L sales in order to fund their SL. I don't have $L problems because I play within my means. I do not pay more tier than I can afford so I don't have to worry about selling enough stuff and $L's to pay my tier with. If people would do that then the value of the $L wouldn't matter as much. But the way I see it people are being greedy and EXPECT people to pay for their game. They say we should be willng to pay $US to buy the product of their hard work, but why do they need such a good price for their $L's, mostly to pay tier. So in a sense we are paying their membership fees too.

If they cut off stipends all together, $L's will soon be way too scarce, everyone will be hoarding them, not buying anything, and people will still have trouble selling enough products in order to get enough $L's to sell to pay their tier.

The way I see it, the new way the linex works lets the buyers say how much they think $L's are worth...that is a good thing since things are only what they are worth.

Is it neat that people are making $US from a virtual world, yes it's incredible that people pay, in essence, RL money for virtual content and land that could be wiped out with a key stroke...then again people pay a lot fo money to go see a playoff game and have nothing but the memory to keep afterwards as well. Should people come into SL expecting to make aliving out of it...NO!!!! IT'S A GAME!!!!! It's VIRTUAL! It's NOT REAL!!!

Please...capitalists....STOP TRYING TO TAKE ALL THE FUN OUT OF SL....NOT EVERYBODY CAN OR WANTS TO CREATE, NOT EVERYONE WANT'S TO TURN INTO A VIRTUAL PROSTITUTE TO MAKE SOME $$, NOT EVERYONE WANTS TO LINE YOUR POCKETS IN ORDER TO BUY SOMEONE ELSE'S PRODUCTS!

361 assumes you only get the stipend for the premium account fee. I have personally calculated 489 as the balancing point, above which premium accounts become completely worthless. This takes into account both the 512 of land and the 500L stipend.

361 is still an important point for those that don't care about owning land. 489 is the point where no one anywhere has a reason to go premium.



I wouldn't pay $210 a month if I had no way to recoup most of that and potentially make a profit in the future. As a newbie, I would have probably quit after a couple days of flying around and looking at camping chairs and obnoxious Impeach Bush signs if it weren't for the potential to make money.

It was that potential that said to me, "Here's a pretty boring world filled with spam and crap... but, I can make it better, and make some money in the process". I hope I've made it better, though I haven't made a lot of money.. Yet at least.

Without the monetary incentive... What would I think? "Here's a boring world filled with crap and spam... and they expect the users to pay them for the privilege of working to make it not suck?? Screw this!"

The money is what makes it more than a game. It makes it a platform to create 3D products of your own. As a game, Secondlife pretty much sucks. As a platform, it has potential. Pitch it as a game with no money making potential and watch those retention numbers go way down.



I'm providing content, not the "crap of reality".




Yes, it's great. And it's sad to see something with so much potential filled with spammers, scammers, camping chairs and cookie cutter casinos and clubs. To harness that potential to create something worth doing (or buying), and getting paid for it, that's what it's about.

That's our challenge Lewis. Whether you do it to make money or for some higher purpose, our goal needs to be to show people a better way. Create original content so people have more options than the same old boring clubs and casinos.

Take griefers for instance... I got tired of getting shot up when working in a sandbox. So I made some interesting targets to shoot at. I found that if I slapped a few targets out, people would shoot those instead of at me most of the time! Sure some people just get off on shooting up other people, but others are doing it out of a lack of an alternative.

It's our job to give people something interesting to do in this game. Stop lamenting the "get rich quick" people and show them a better way.

The problem with this, though, is that for one group of people to be making money, another group has to be spending it - after all, the money has to come from somewhere. For US$ to go out, the US$ has to come in somewhere.

If SL really didn't have any appeal other than the ability to make money, then no-one could make money - there would be no-one spending money because to those people there would be no appeal.

There's at least some people who build in SL just because they want to help build the best possible world. It's the "noosphere" business, that people write about in Open Source. But having money involved really messes it up for those people - it brings in situations like competition and similar. It creates the situation where it's in the interest of Joe Housebuilder to stop you building your own house because if you could do that you wouldn't have to buy one from him.



But why do people go to casinos? You guessed it - to get money. And why do they need money? To buy the same content you're talking about. And why don't they pay US$ for it? Because as you said above, SL's appeal to those who don't create, or make money creating, is still relatively limited. Essentially they seem to do one of two things: get together with a social group and set up a microcosm talker-style environment for themselves, or play a competitive game where the aim is to "die with the most toys" without spending any US$.



That's an excellent spirit, but only a few types of content I've seen created so far really increase interest levels in the game. It's a very hard thing to do or think of.

They dont pay stipends but your not actually working in the game its playing the game and earning money during that time. That money comes from nowhere. Their system is actually auction based as opposed to SL's straight up buy or fill an order setup. While supply/demand does determine some value of L hunter at the same time the sellers determine the value at which that rate changes. They can slow it down or they can speed it up.

The point is though that they can in fact change it if they wanted to but it'd take them pulling together. And you know what price fixing would shut up alot of people in SL that are sheerly here for profit. They'd have to wait their turn instead of pushing their way thru. The thing is and this could really be tested. If LL put LindEx in reverse and made the higher value sale come up first we would see the market move in the opposite direction simply so they can get ahead.

While I will admit supply and demand are part of the equation its not just on them and the fact that the L value can move up sometimes proves that. There are to many factors in the equation to point blame on anything but the sellers control quite a bit of the equation with how fast value drops. When they put in alot of L for a cheaper price they cause it to drop faster and faster.

The thing i wanna get at here is right now if i asked any of you to give up your stipend you wouldnt. My stipend often goes to helping out a new player and will so more now that they dont get any money. While having a business in SL is good and all there has to be a line drawn between SL being a business platform and something more. That line is the stipends that allow alot of people to enjoy SL there is no reason to get rid of them in the foreseeable future but LindEx could use some work. Mabye make an auction system etc i dunno.

And dont rack in all clubs there please. I know most clubs are kind of generic in SL box lights throw best in events try to work off some kind of weird little profit from it. Club Republik - Owned by Me and Sable Sunset is a club as such that doesnt fit your average mold for a Club. We dont have 20k traffic we dont toss out a ton of events we dont hand out a ton of money and yet people come. They enjoy themselves while there and respect the time and effort we put into the place. We actually built and scripted the entire place and are constantly developing new things for it.

Sure i have escort and dancers and hosts and dj's like alot of clubs but im not in it for money. If money is earned it may go towards bonuses for staff, help us make things to upgrade the club a bit more, its not put on lindex for sale and pocketed so we can cover our tier. We currently only hold 3 events a week and hold a constant of about 6k traffic a day. Are we the most popular club in SL no. Are we unique or creative you bet ya.

In fact alot of the stuff we made for the club alot of people have asked why we dont sell them. Well easy answer we want to keep it unique. Just come look sometime look at the actual work put into it look at the heart the time the effort the dedication. I gotta agree with yumi for one group to make money one group has to be spending money. If you force people to buy their money people are going to make less money even if the lindex manages to climb back up which is highly unlikely if LL tends to help to try to prevent deflation they will see less people buying their products.

Removal of the basic stipend may not seem like a big hit right now but it'll add up eventually regardless of supply vs demand SL's economy is going to go down hill. It wont remain stable ever and people need to stop hoping that its going to. Well there is one way but that'd piss off content creators even more. LL just controlling lindex. There is the fact that they could just buy the stipends but thats going to get them less money. LL needs to remain profitable to develop SL further and if you take away all incentives aside from business you might as well just toss SL in the shitter now.

Someone spends money on Lindex to buy $L, and uses that money to buy a dress. That money is cashed out of Lindex and the $US is paid to LL, LL takes that money and pays it to an employee. The employee goes out and buys something from a store, like food, or toys, or whatever, and that money goes into an RL business. That RL business takes the money and pays it to its employees. It's employee takes that money and uses it to buy $L on Lindex to get yet another dress.
It's the circle of cash!

The only difference between a straight auction and Lindex is the time and quantity. Besides, $L gets auctioned on eBay just the same, too. As for "playing a game" versus "working," that depends on your definition. Running around poking stuff over and over is mostly work for me, not playing a game. But if you think that's a game, maybe we can figure out how to have something similar in SL that will actually help generate profit that you can "play" for a ittle money too.



People aren't stupid. If I saw that I can buy $L at $270 per $1us at the top, and way at the bottom it showed that I could buy $330L for just one $1US, I'll obviously take the better deal, regardless of where it's at. In regards to people "pulling together," there are about 2,500 people selling/buying every day, and about 200,000 total in game. They would ALL have to "pull together," since if ONE of them undercuts everyone by $1l, EVERYONE looses, and the cycle begins again. And LL fixing the price? Won't happen either. I'd rather sell my $L for $500US today and loose $100US, then hope to some day a month from now sell it for $600US.



It going up ONLY proves that for that day demand is actually higher than supply. esterday while watching the market, there were just as many $L being added for sale. However, unlike the days when $L was dropping, the $L for sale was actually getting snatched up fast enough that no one had to undercut. And when someone undercut for about $20k to $30k, it didn't have an effect, because that undercut money was bought off too fast for anyone to notice. Note that yesterday's transaction history shows that $12,000,000L was traded. That means that the same supply of money was moved through. There was just more demand for it, which kept the price down.



I would, I was the one who proposed that there should be an opt-out feature in SL. And I burn mine every Tuesday. A bunch of other people do too. Only people here who don't are Jamie and ReserveBank.



It's not called SecondBusiness. It's not called SecondGame. It's called SecondLife, which means that, just like in real life, you can make anything out of it that you want. You can play games, others can run businesses to support your games by providing you with land and content. I don't see a reason for drawing any lines.

Actually it may be somewhat higher than 489. The more $L an alternate account can make simply by existing without any meaningful input by the player, the more that account can be farmed. I think that might be an unstated reason why dwell was removed too. Dwell brings about camping chairs, which in turn brings alternates being created to use them to suppliement the 500 per week stipend. And there are other ways to make money with little time commitment too which can further suppliement an alts income.

How much does anyone want to bet that the players who do this are the ones who try to convert the lindens to dollars the fastest. They may not be the sole reason for the drop in the $L, but they are sure part of the puzzle.

Economics is not zero sum. If I put in $5, I'm buying someone's lindens. To them, the cash was worth more than the lindens. To me the lindens (or what I could buy with them) is worth more than the cash.

We are both richer.

Now I take those lindens and buy something for 1750L. To me the item I'm getting is worth more than 1750L. To the person selling it, 1750L is worth more than the item, or since most items aren't a limited resource, 1750L is what they consider to be worth enough of their slice of time investment that your purchase represents, over the sales life of the item.

Both are richer.

Later on the vendor takes that 1750L and spends it on something else. The cycle continues. The point is that in every voluntary transaction, both parties become richer.

Precisely because the Linden is a floating, market traded instrument with no fixed price, this is how it can reflect the value that is created with each transaction. A proposal to fix the value of the Linden does mess this up and make the economy work a lot worse, and if the linden were fixed it would be a lot more zero sum.

But thankfully Linden Lab understood the power of free markets to manifest the value of a currency and let it float.

Stipends are not a voluntary transaction. Stipends destroy value by causing Linden holders to be party to a nonvoluntary transaction. I can't choose whether LL dilutes my L$ holding every Tuesday. If stipends were a sort of voluntarily paid charity, that would be fine. But printing new money and handing it out below market value in such a reckless fashion is a very bad idea.

What you said above was this:

In reality, it's even better than that. LL pays people some L$, then those people go out and spend the L$ with content creators like myself. In effect, LL is paying the content creators to create content. However, they don't pay us directly. Instead, they pay a bunch of people who vote on what content is best with their L$. This way, LL pays good content creators more than bad ones, good/bad being defined in terms of marketability here. So they aren't so much "paying people to play" as they're paying content creators to create, and rewarding them in a very meritocratic way...

OTOH, if LL stops giving stipends and such, they effectively stop paying their content creators. I'm not seeing how de-incentivizing is going to help with making more good content.

Now, constantly pouring money into the economy isn't good for *investors*, those who, say, buy land or hold on to assets or whatever, because the value of the L$ they have keeps declining over time. But that's not an issue for the actual creators, because they're constantly getting more L$ -- they're receiving most of the L$ that's being given to the players. So their share of the L$ pool increases, while those who aren't creating are seeing their share decrease.

I, for one, think this is a very, very good thing for the game in general. I think it's too bad that LL seems to be trying to cut back on the amount of money they're handing out to players to spend. Sure, it'll help make sure those people who are sitting on large LL pools without increasing them faster than inflation are losing money, but again, that's a good thing. When all the math is done, their loss is the gain of the actual content creators who are receiving all those extra L$.

Economy, schmeconomy -- it's a game. Reward those who are making it a fun one...

May I quote you when landowners don't feel like paying tier? Now, if you don't mind SL being carved up into 512 and 1024 sized plots, that's fine, and maybe that's fine with others too.

But for content creators with basic account that rents, or premium accounts who need to have the cost of tier offset by in game profit they are going to feel the pinch and eventually close shop. I make no predicition when that will happen, only that it will eventually if out of pocket expenses increase.

If LL got rid of tier completely, that would work too. At least until it time for LL to pay their bills.

No they won't, because if they're any good, they're going to continue to see in-game profit. Sure, the value of individual L$ decreases, but the value lost to inflation is small compared to the value gain from the fact that they're getting more L$. If I sit still, then yes, I'll start losing money, but if I'm the kind of person who would sit still, my business is doomed no matter what. If I'm going to succeed, I need to keep moving forward, keep competing for all those extra L$. As long as I'm getting my fair share of the new L$, my overall wealth increases. The only people who see declining wealth are those who are holding on to L$, because X dollars become a smaller and smaller ratio of the total pool.

Putting freshly minted L$ into the hands of players is a means of redistributing wealth. A greater share ends up in the hands of those who continue to make new, quality content, while the percentage in the hands of those who don't decreases. This is, as I said, not a bad thing. It's brilliant, really...

New $L is not wealth distribution, its wealth dilution, sort of like making more beer by adding water. .

Now some businesses will ride through the declining value, intelligent pricing, and lots of new content could do it. The ones who will get hit the hardest are the one time sellers, such as pre-fab homes, as well as those who rely soley on stipends. Those who buy lindens on the lindex will simply get more for each dollar.

Now using taxed lindens collected through sinks to use for stipends, that is truly wealth distribution, and is something I am all for. Just call it something else besides stipends, such as wages earned off line. That would protect the value of the stipend benfitting those who rely on them, as well as making it easier for content creators to pay tier by preserving the amount of lindens that need to be collected to offset the USD cost of owning land.

Not really. It's more like cutting the pie into smaller slices. Ultimately, it's the same amount of total wealth, but there's more L$, so each one is a smaller slice of the pie.


Anyone who continues to sell more will profit, those who rest on their laurels will lose. No reason whatsoever why pre-fab sellers would be more likely to be in one category or the other -- it's up to the individual.


No, that would not make it easier, it would make it more difficult. If the number of lindens I need to collect to pay tier remains constant, and the number of lindens I'm collecting does, things stay the same. But if the number of lindens I need to collect increases, and the number of lindens I'm collecting increases even more, THAT makes my life easier. So as long as I'm making more linden at a rate exceeding the inflation rate, I'm better off.

Remember, minting fresh L$ does not increase nor decrease the overall value in the economy. It does, however, put more of it in the hands of players who will then spend it with people continuing to innovate. Old money loses value, but fresh ideas are rewarded with fresh money. Overall wealth in the economy remains constant, but who has how much of it shifts, and it shifts in the direction of the content creators, and more to the better ones. This makes it easier, not more difficult, for them to pay tier or do whatever else they wish to do with their greater share of the pie.

Herin lies the problem, people playing beyond their RL means. Nobody should need to have their tier offset by in-game profit. Everyone should only pay the tier they can afford. With vendor machines, someone could have a VERY successful shop on a 512 plot.

Stipends were in place when you joined. Plenty of other online enviroments w/o stipends to invest in. Plenty of RL opportunities to invest your dollars. You knew the situation going in, don't whine about it now.