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Eliminate it. Replace it.
With?
Paid classified ads for land sales.
Land Search is consistently abused. It hurts land owners who are confused with the tools, and sometimes sell their land accidently to land bots. It hurts land sellers who honestly price their wares by unethical sellers who undercut the search with dishonest prices.
Just do it the free market way LL. Make them buy an ad to sell a parcel, like any other real estate agent in real life. Rank them by amount paid and area listed instead of by parcel size and price.
Just a thought.
Something that deeply annoys me is the pricing structure these days.
Linden Lab should not be pricing sims differently at base tier costs. What I find on the new mainland is Linden selling subsidized double prim lots that no private land baron or rental firm on the old mainland can offer. Point blank – double prim lots on Class Five sims sold with grandfathered Class Four level single prim tiers.
I can only think Linden is undervaluing their own land, and overcharging private sim owners. It damages both the mainland and the private sims.
How?
For one, as the prices are low on the mainland, it causes a moral hazard. A high degree of people who bid on auctions are not people who want a plot of land for themselves, which is how most private sim land barons operate. Rather, LL’s main auction customers are land broker middlemen who bid up the auctions, then sell the land at an inflated price to the actual buyers. Many new buyers, noticing the reduced price of these sim tiers, are eager to get them, and overpay the brokers. This was worsened by the drop in entry prices, without a corresponding change in tier pricing. Many are leaving behind land in private sims and older sims on the Mainland, and are in fact not new people.
This can only happen because the tiers are subsidized. Class five double prim sims should carry a double price in sim tier, and do in private sims. These low tiers are cannibalizing the rentals of equivalent private sims and older single prim Mainland sims.
Private sims actually give LL more money for less work, and far more diversity, as LL will never have the manpower to cater to every land theme and business interest. Content creators and other businesses arise on these themed communities and islands, which overall translates to more money flowing in the SL economy. LL will then make more money from the LindeX. All LL has to do is sell sims to people who are willing to do the work to create communities, and cater to sectors of the market that LL may not even be able to imagine. Because private sims offer the ability to “create the world in your imagination”, this is far easier achieved with them. Beautiful things often result, like my home continents of Caledon and Winterfell. Which sadly are under threat from the current economic situation.
No one group or company, not even Linden Lab, has a complete set of knowledge about the economy and market interest. LL seems to continue on the mistaken path of trying to push renters on private sims to the mainland, where most emphatically do not wish to be. Many will quietly leave SL altogether rather than move away from their communities they can no longer afford.
In fact, what is really happening is a subsidisation of mainland brokers over private sim barons and other types of themed rentals on older sims – both mainland and private. My own experience in the last two years, after multiple extortions from such types when I owned mainland, many of these brokers are really nothing more than carpetbaggers, only committed to the extreme short term in Second Life. Making money quick and cashing it out, rather than building community that can create more wealth in the longer term for all of us. LL, we are better off without these people having too much control over our economy.
These people often did and still do engage in extortionist activities. Due to the long lax of LL properly enforcing rules against coercion and misuse of sim resources, these “businessmen”, insulated from the full impact of the financial risk of their land holdings by the subsidy of mainland pricing and poor control by LL of their coercive activities on neighboring residents, fueled the bubble on new sims, aiding a great deal in the Mainland overexpansion. They often cut parcels which were unsellable and only useful for extorting neighboring plots. These people did not represent honest community demand, and most of this land got sold to new land flippers, rather than actual customers. The few customers who bought into these areas learned how dreadful many of these people were and fled to the private sims, despite the higher prices. As the demand falls off due to our slowing world RL economy, these “investors” are far more likely to abandon their land, resulting in sims that are not paying their way.
There is a greater danger from all this. LL runs the extreme risk of killing the LindeX and other exchanges, which depend on the flow of buying and selling Lindens to keep this economy afloat. Fewer people to buy and sell Lindens means less money changing hands. Less money for content creators, less money for themed communities. This is an ever more present risk due to the surge of the US dollar, which also threatens to completely price out many of their foreign customers, who are now a major source of revenue to the Lab.
So I have a few simple suggestions as to changes.
Crack down hard on coercion and extortionist practices on the mainland – this can be done by enforcing rules against abuse, and turning off the ability to subdivide mainland plots on new double prim sims, maintaining them as double prim with easements.
Class Four sims only should have the 195 pricing structure.
Class Fives should be raised to the higher 295 structure everywhere, or lowered to the 195 tiers. (depending on demand)
This should have the effect of more people going back to older sims, which are still quite good performers for most residential purposes.
Owners of double prim mainland should pay double prim rates according to the class of server. We need to move to paying per prim and away from paying per square meter.
I believe this is enough to even the playing field. I don’t think its a good idea to remove all mainland incentives, there is already the 10 percent bonus for groups and the 512 freebie for premium accounts. I think these however are more than enough.
Hard to write this post, but a few thoughts.
Openspaces were priced too low by LL and competed with full private sims – which are conversely priced too high in comparison to the mainland. Instead of doing the hard thing and seriously fixing the mainland mess, LL is trying to use pricing to preference themselves instead of listening responsively to their customers. I can only relate my own experience on the mainland, when a certain Linden indeed informed me quite unkindly that I should “get a private sim” when I had problems with neighbor harassment. And I owned a third of that mainland sim. Well, I couldn’t afford a whole private sim, so I moved to Caledon, where such harassment is dealt with in diplomatic manner. Not with a firm “well just move out”.
I never felt that Openspaces were preferable to full sims, and I believe full sims need to be priced exactly the same as the mainland. The problem with the mainland is massive subsidization and oversupply, not the private estates competing with it. LL needs to do the hard business of consolidating and closing sims on the Mainland that are not bringing in enough tier, and offer to relocate residents to new sim projects with clear and enforced rules, that prevents coercion and abuse being used by neighbors against neighbors. LL has taken some steps, but not enough. Contraction needs to happen, and it’s going to be painful. Sims reclaimed can either be used as newly covenanted Mainland or resold as private estates, or if its old hardware – just retired.
LL overexpanded the Mainland, and taking it out on the private sim market which sprung up in response to inaction on the Mainland issues for too long, is not the fault of land barons. Land barons filled a niche that LL abandoned themselves.
If you have a commercial business with even moderate traffic, you should be located on a full sim. Regular sims have more resources. Even a small rental on a regular sim is better than a whole Openspace. I am not against rentals on Openspaces – I think its quite fine to have a small rental on it, with the majority of the sim reserved for public light use. I am a big fan of easements, and prim multipliers and creative cutting of parcels can be used to great effect here.
Openspaces I believe are often “residential blight”. I’ve never been a fan of “residential only” land – it prevents healthy community building – forcing out residents who would fund part of their land with sales for those who just might buy the land for a month to have cybersex with the monthly fling – then abandon a month or so later when the bloom of both new land and new love has faded. The latter does not build a community at all.
What is preferable are clear guidelines to the conduct of commercial activity on both Openspaces and regular sims. The real world is a web of interwoven commercial and residential areas, and laws exist to stop coercion – usually not perfect but generally does the job. Nobody likes the office park desert, and nobody likes a bedroom community without towncenters. We want a woven web of community that includes both commercial and community activity, with a degree of decorum and privacy, that is allowed to weave itself. Let’s stop repeating the mistakes of planned communities and anarchism from the 60’s.
“In scientific explanation, there should be no use of mind or deity, and there should be no appeal to final causes. All causality should flow with the flow of time, with no effect of the future upon the present or the past. No deity, no teleology, and no mind should be postulated in the universe that was to be explained.” — Gregory Bateson
I only very slightly differ with the statement, but only slightly. I do believe that there is mind – those minds are ours. But they are fully biological minds, making choices, and those choices are made with the flow of time, presenting an illusion of teleology, an illusion of design and purpose in the world.
But really, life is creating its own purpose as it weaves its threads.
I really believe that the tapestry is always being woven, unless we’re all gone. As long as there is life, there is purpose, and therefore hope.
Deity should not be invoked in naturalistic explanation, for to believe that deity creates the world is to believe it to be a craftsman, vengeful, bumbling and making mistakes, and removing personal responsibility from us and the choices we make in this world. That’s no deity for me – I see deities as perfect, teachers and guides to be emulated in the physical world. Meditation and a direct experience with the ideal I believe is the only way to properly approach divinity… it is nothing for natural science.
“Although changed, I shall arise the same” – Jakob Bernoulli
This is a public domain image by NASA. A 3d modelling of the heliospheric current sheet, the surface within the Solar System where the polarity of the Sun’s magnetic field changes from north to south, a real world example of a Parker spiral.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heliospheric_current_sheet
Jacob Bernoulli had originally wanted a logarithmic spiral on his tombstone to correspond to his saying. However, the workers accidently carved an Archimedean spiral instead. In the spirit of the workers and of Archimedes himself – who applied mathematics to practical real life solutions rather than just mathematical theory, I will keep with the tradition. The Parker spiral here is not progressive like Bernoulli’s, it is Archimedean.
The Archimedes codex has thrown more light on the history of calculus in antiquity:
http://www.archimedespalimpsest.org/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archimedes_Palimpsest
More links:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archimedes
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jakob_Bernoulli
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parker_spiral
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