Economic Stupidity at the Lab.

I have a friend, as you know dear reader, called Pixi, and she has termed her “blonde moments” as pink moments, pink being the theme colour of her life. So, I chuckled somewhat to get an email from Pink Linden.

Pink wondered if I would be so kind as to answer a questionnaire regarding my product sales in SL. ...... to put you in the picture........mostly, my product sales cover my tier....period.

Now while I would usually rather read "Is Gastric By-Pass for Me?" than answer a questionnaire, I find that the questions reveal more than the answers (answering "frogspawn" to everything gets you dismissed as an idiot unless it's a Degree paper on Surreal Biology, of course).

The reason behind these questions was to find out one simple fact.... could the Boys take any more of my money with my consent? If they offered me..... an ‘approved vendor”, or an up-market classified listing, or....what could they do for me that I would pay them for??

Obviously there is a thriving economy between avis that the Boys want a bigger share of.

Now, I think this is short-sighted and stupid. Sucking blood regularly ends up killing the host. I contribute about 1000US$ per year to the Boys already, and have no intention of increasing this huge sum in the near future.

Builders and artists have provided the content for SL. It is the content that sets SL apart from every other current and future VW. No world, it seems, will ever catch up with the rich complexity that we all enjoy.

So, the stupidity, seen from my point of view, lies in the fact that the Boys give nothing back. IBM (and others) hosts a good sandbox, benevolent individuals host art sims, and we exchange scripts, goods and services often unpaid. Like the Monty Python sketch I want to ask...”what have the Boys ever done for me?..”

If..... (a big if, I know,)... the Lab sponsored art, building classes, free art show sims, free tools, ...basically anything that made building easier (the scalable prims issue is a scandal, however you look at it)... that would be the way to stimulate the economy.

The continued churning out of land, driving land prices to a record low, the lack of any inflation in the exchange rate, the continually increasing restrictions and the total lack of an RL advertising budget has driven this world into a monumental economic stagnation.

To then use time and resources to find new ways of sucking a few more dollars out of the pockets of those people that have spent years building this world is symptomatic of how poor the understanding of economy is at the Lab.

Don’t get me wrong, I love SL, and I love the recent stability in the grid, but that’s what I pay their wages for....

No one, apart from the Boys, is responsible for this stagnation...it is totally down to them.

:))