Differences between SL and FL economy

I think we need to say what is the difference between the Internet EWare Economy (software, ebooks, services, etc) and the SL Economy.

One fundamental difference is the micropayment system. I believe this creates the heart of what chip calls the "impulse buy" economy that SL enjoys.
Is this a bad thing?

What other differences are there between SL and FL economics?

Imagine yourself living in a self supporting neighborhood where a lot of educated and or talented people gather - that is SL. They tend to be thinkers, innovators, designers, etc. you wouldnt need for much in the way of supplier what with virtually unlimited resources.

The supply chain issue is different. There really is none. There is no movement of raw resource, other than land (textile in my case P) from farm to processing plant to mill to consumer. Just the same for homes, or what have you.

- There is no supply chain.
- An individual entrepeneur has big advantages over collaborative ventures.

Do you mean to say SL and Florida? or RL? What is FL?

i'm going to venture to speak for chip and say that when he meant "no supply chain" he wasn't really referring to a "production chain" as you describe, but the real world supply chain which is all about physically bringing products to market (inventory, warehousing, shipping, putting on the store shelf, etc)

- in terms of infrastructure, we are obviously missing the legal and accounting standards & foundation which fosters collaboration and investor trust (repetitive, but I can't resist banging on this until LL starts presenting good ideas on this issue -- thinking this will be totally "private sector" ie member driven is naive)

- in terms of shopping, there are clear transportation efficiency differences. In RL, it take TIME to go from a shop in midtown to a shop in downtown. In SL, I can TP/fly from Umber to Bragg to Slootsville in a very short period of time. Malls lose transportation efficiencies, but they retain their "eyeballs" benefits

particularly since most consumers have been conditioned to respond positivly to the inundation of commercial imagery.

As for your expample of division of labor in 3d production, this is true, but even in the real world it can be more of a hinderance than a benefit. I'm a one man shop animation company. I can't match the complexity of work that a studio can do with dedicated specialists, but I make a lot more money for a lot less work than those salaried specialists do. I just have to animate shiny corporate logos instead of spaceships and dinosaurs

Jeffrey, I'm intrigued by your points. Do you have time to elaborate?

I see the cost of storage/bandwidth as an underlying cost of production within SL, but one that is built into our monthly fees and thus currently hidden from the user. This may change of course.

* Very minor typo fixes for readability.

I'll speak for my own gut here, allowing that I'm sure this will be a long and interesting discussion in the years to come:

My intuition is that open source and open standards are the only way to go for SL long term - for us to reach the whole world in the way that the web has will probably only happen under this sort of model.

I don't think becoming more open would be a bad business move for LL, because there are so many central services that we can offer for a fair price - once SL goes to truly global scale those charges can create a very large and sustaining business.

Pragmatically, there are things that need to happen to make this possible:

We have to preserve some sort of system to protect the rights and permissions of content. This means that in some manner the servers must become untrusted - a 'man-in-the-middle' from a crypto perspective. Today, the SL servers are totally trusted - if you owned a server you could take all the money and copy all the objects of anyone who walked into it. I can imagine that long term you get a notice on entering insecure servers, and you can choose what objects and how much money you want to 'carry' when you go in. Coding this is going to be a big change, and lots of work.

Additionally, as also discussed here, we need to make the protocols between servers very simple, so that folks can start from scratch with server code if they like. HTTP got really widespread in part because it was really simple - you could write a basic server in a few hours. Ideally something like SL needs to be comparably simple - you should be able to write a 'hello world' server and connect it to the grid very easily.


Projects like OSMP are great, and something that helps us understand what priority we should give to these changes. Ideally I'd like to see the metaverse get built as quickly as possible, which means that everyone is working on interoperable code and content. If big projects get underway that are challenging SL in scale and capability, it means that we are doing something wrong - not being open enough fast enough.

Do you mean to say SL and Florida? or RL? What is FL?[/QUOTE}

"FL" means First Life, often called "RL" or "Real Life"

This is actually quite interesting to me, and something I might take up with you for debate at some time. I was under the impression that salaried professionals typically received higher job security and benefit-versus-cost in general... but then, this is not the current topic.

Its possible to create systems to perform these tasks with the current tools, but the design and operation of such systems is faulty at best, and unmaintainable by mere mortals.

Enter: Telehub Traps.
((S)ome) residents don't happen to possess the latest and greatest computer or the fastest bandwidth available, often at or just over the minimum specs for SL. These people won't fly from Umber to say Luna, simply because they can't.

(1) No unit production cost; all costs are in design and marketing.
(2) For non-custom items, order fulfillment time is zero.
(3) Avatars don't *have* to buy anything, since they have no material needs.
(4) Contracts are essentially unenforceable.
(5) Tools for profit sharing (Groups) are crude, one-size-fits-all.
(6) There is no patent protection for inventions.

(4) and (5) limit the growth of collaborative for-profit enterprises; private partnerships can only exist if high levels of personal trust have developed between prospective partners, and publicly held corporations are impossible.

(6) limits the rewards on scripting as a profession, either alone or (see above) as a collaborative effort with builders and texturers.