valleywag.com — You can earn a lot of Linden dollars in SL, in fact fairly rapidly sometimes, but...If you can actually collect your SLLs from your counterparty - which turns out to be an enormous problem - you can't cash them out for USD easily or profitably. Entire banks will suddenly disappear...
Jan 23, 2007 View in Crawl 4
homunculiheadedJan 24, 2007
Execept that economic mobility in global capitialism can only be achieved through finding new, exploitable material and human resources. Western low income workers can only develop economicly through the exploitation of Chinese low wage workers, and Chinese low wage workers can only develop through finding new markets to exploit. Think of the end game of global capitialism? Can you honestly explain a system of exchange in which every one has the same possiblity for economic advancement or even a scenerio that doesn't not rely on explioted resources?ForlornHope has a point, and he's right that this plays out much faster in a virtual economy.
sweintraubJan 24, 2007
<a class="user" href="http://gramos.wordpress.com/2007/01/24/second-life-was-first-a-belgian-band/">http://gramos.wordpress.com/2007/01/24/second-life-was-first-a-belgian-band/</a>
espritexJan 24, 2007
Eh, I have fun, and its better than working at some mcjob while attending classes.
polygoneJan 24, 2007
Does anyone know the max poly count for various objects?yeah, save the jokes..... :P
zer0cubedJan 24, 2007
Another intelligent rebuttal: <a class="user" href="http://www.3pointd.com/20070124/sl-economy-not-quite-examined-by-critic/">http://www.3pointd.com/20070124/sl-economy-not-quite-examined-by-critic/</a>
rumataJan 24, 2007
A lot of people here seem to be missing the point of the article. The author is not saying you can't get money out of SL. He in fact repeatedly says that you CAN take SMALL sums of money out of SL; what he has a problem with is that you can't take relatively LARGE sums of money out of SL. Just so we are clear, let's define small and large. $27 at one time is small. $120 a month is small. A few thousand dollars a year is small. $300 at one time is small. What is large for the purposes of this discussion? Large is at least several thousand USD at one time. Why is this distinction important? Because the author had a specific test in mind - he wanted to evaluate SL as an economy that is suitable for Wall Street type financial transactions - where we are talking about tens and hundreds of thousands of dollars easily changing hands every second. If you look at it from a Joe Schmo perspective, what Wall Street does is make money on money - not real, tangible goods and services, such as swords, and clothes, or even hookers. Wall Street makes money by investing money (or things that are so liquid that they are equivalent to money) in various creative ways. In order for this kind of thing to work, it has to be backed by a very real economy, with a great multitude of real businesses, cash flows, exchanges of goods, stable currency, liquidity, stock markets, etc. all working together in a very well structured, regulated and reliable system. Why do you think your bank is willing to pay you 5% on the money you put in your savings account? Because they can take your money and make more than 5% on it by investing it in more complex ways that are not necessarily available to you. To make the long story short - what the author has proven is that SL's economy is not yet robust enough to reliably support these higher level financial transactions. What the SL economy IS strong enough to support are low-level, goods-for-cash based transactions. Kind of like what the real world could support several hundred years ago - you make a thing, you sell a thing. Maybe you lend somebody money and charge them a fee for it. That's it. No checking accounts, no money markets, no mutual funds, no derivatives, no stock exchange. And no arbitrage on exchange rates, god forbid. Is this conclusion surprising? Certainly not. The real world took hundreds of years to develop to the point where high complexity financial transactions are possible. It's silly to expect SL to shortcut this process so much as to develop a robust enough economy to support this within a few short years. But calling it a pyramid scheme is also not fair. It's not any more a pyramid scheme than the real world where people who have money have a lot more chance and opportunity to make more money than those who work for a reasonable salary and don't have substantial savings to engage in things like mutual funds and complex financial investments. The SL economy is very young - that is true. It's unreasonable to burden it with tests that cannot even be passed by many real world countries (have you tried making money on the Kazakhstan stock market?) and expecting it not to fail. Conclusion: Is SL economy real? Yes. Is it advanced? No. Is it growing? Yes. Is its youth such a bad thing? Absolutely not. After all, it Wall Street sharks overran it, it would start resembling RL so much it might loose its appeal. Just my 5 cents.
Closed AccountJan 24, 2007
Hilarious. I presume you are the same Randolphe who wrote the blog post which Valleywag shamelessly cribbed for this article. I see you already tried pimping your original blog post a bit earlier:<a class="user" href="http://www.digg.com/gaming_news/Making_Real_Money_in_Second_Life_is_a_Fraud">http://www.digg.com/gaming_news/Making_Real_Money_in_Second_Life_is_a_Fraud</a>Bearing this in mind, it is interesting that you are so derogatory of the activities that occur in Second Life and need to resort to exaggeration and base generalisations to bolster your case: "They be true. It's not just a brothel, there's also virtual real estate flippers, rigged casinos, and disturbing pervert clubs."Sure these things happen, just like in the real world. But like the real world, they are overshadowed by the vast majority of positive interactions.Great to see your Second Life prejudices emerge. Certainly gives us a new perspective on how to take your article.
melvinstarbrookFeb 7, 2007
i think SL is just a huge upgrade of IRC :)