Eric, there’s several very important correctives to what you’re saying here that need to be heard.

No. 1, Jack Linden may be talking airily of building “parks, bridges, and roads,” but that’s not exactly what he’s doing, if you peer at the fine print. It will not be done all over the *existing* mainland — at least, not right away.

He’s not going to be finishing any broken roads, like in Manitoba, or putting in any Governor Linden protected park land on any new auction sims in the north, which was a previous practice, or picking up the trash in the scores of abandoned lands.

Rather, what he’s doing is building a new set of double-prim sims off the coast of Barcola, one of the earliest sims, with an Art Deco or Chicago 1950s theme for the roads and parks So these “roads and bridges” are *just in those sims* with 1024 m2 parcels *for sale* that the Lindens will sell to make a profit.

This guarantees them $320 tier per sim ( 1024 x 320), rather than the $195 tier for a sim they’d get from a single land baron, and gives them long term more profit than they could get from a land baron who might re-rent each of those plots for less than $5 to his customers. See how this is going to work?

So it’s not “improvement of the mainland infrastructure.” It isn’t a plan to fix roads, improve roads (some of them are broken, or have horrible textures, or even should be removed in favour of walksways) or make *the existing mainland on thousands of sims* look better. There is urgent need for things like making sure autoreturn is set to
“1″ on all Linden lab; turning off scripts on all infohubs and welcome areas to prevent griefing; and getting abandoned land quickly cleaned up of griefing items and trash and back on the auction. The Lindens have been slowly doing this — they did a speed-up recently put out about 6 sims’ worth, but then slowed down again in favour of selling the more lucrative new full sims selling for $2500 or even $4000 if they are landscaped well.

So the parcels in the Art Deco city sims are direct competition with the land market and the re-development market of residents. It’s not the first time Lindens have “GOM’d” or co-opted their residents’ businesses and intervened in the economy for their own benefit.

There’s a basic conflict of interest here, as Lindens need to sell good-looking land to meet their bottom line to pay for their programmers and servers. They need mainland sims to have lots of tierpayers, to sell for as much as possible, and for islands to continue to sell at a brisk pace, too.

But we need service to improve infrastructure of our existing purchases in the world, and policies that don’t devalue our land (effectively addressing griefers, ad farmers). It doesn’t produce any pay for the Lindens if their time is spent laying road in Manitoba or cleaning trash in Ganymede where they can’t manage to put on autoreturn because they won’t go to the trouble to transfer their Linden dam build there to the same group they have as a land owner there.

It’s the thousands of little things like that they can’t afford to take time or money to do to raise value *for their customers who buy or rent out land*; instead, they build new sims that will cost more money and hope people will move there *so they can have more income*.

This constant devaluation of the mainland is like the old Brezhnev-era joke, laying out railroad track ahead of you by pulling the track from behind.

As for “banning ad farms,” you couldn’t be more wrong. I wish! Many people wish! They didn’t ban ad farms. They have a far more narrower policy than that, Eric. What they are now acting on is abuse reports that claim harassment through small 16 m2 parcels set to extortionist prices. That means, say, a 16 m2 for $10,000. Then they will issue a warning, and try to compel the ad farmer to link up his land, sell it at a normal price, and leave.

However, the ad farmers are incredibly tenacious and have merely evolved a new harassment tactic. They link up their parcels, and put the same big ugly sign — or one even uglier! on that parcel. Then perhaps set a neighbouring parcel at a high, but not actionable price, say, 896 for $13,000. So then, no action can be taken. I’m happy to show you dozens of abuse reports filed on these new situations, and the situations inworld that remain unchanged.

Ad farmers have aggressively fought back against this policy by abuse-reporting all the people who tried to mitigate their extortion by putting up trees and creating arbour projects, etc. There have been LOTS of those. So now Lindens are returning those trees, and disciplinary actions begin to pile up for “tree waving” on to some ad farmers’ plot where he extorted you for years with an ugly, laggy spinning sign listening for avatars and clicks, and which you may not have realized he finally withdrew.

Worse, the ad farmers are now linking up parcels and stalking me, as an outspoken advocate against the ad farmers and a prominent proponent of the JIRA proposal which the Lindens did finally in part accept for their policy (use the TOS language on harassment and spam to address the problem of ad farms).

Where I used to have 10 ad farmers around my lands with extortionist parcels, but usually nothing on them, or perhaps a few one-storey spinning signs I could mask with trees on my parcels, I now have concerted, angry, aggressive ad-farmers with giant signs many storeys high with the land not even set to sale any more, so even if I wished to buy back the view, I’d be unable to. If the policy was really about “banning ad farms” I wouldn’t have this now.

So for me, the ad farm policy that I spent two years battling in every single conceivable fashion (blogs, petitions, demonstrations at the Governor Mansion, JIRA proposals, meetings with Lindens, etc.) has now simply grown worse for me and in a permanent way that the Lindens are unlikely to act upon.

They have reserved now the concept of “legitimate business” for these ad farms, legalizing them to remain if they merely have signs of any type, but if the land isn’t set for sale at a huge price.

The combination of these two policies — selling new double prim city sims as a placebo for actually doing the harder work of repairing the old mainland and dealing only partially with the ad farm menace means that their older customers like me are truly savaged. It’s hardly the payment I would expect from them after all this hard work I’ve done for 3 years taken care of *their customers better than they do and retaining them in Second Life* with orientation, free houses, cheaper rentals than Linden tier, etc. etc.

BTW, I pay my builders at least $25 an hour, if not more, for what they do. $10/hour for building is simply unacceptable; people could be earning that at McDonald’s, not doing complicated, picky creative work in Second Life.

So, basically professional development companies are paying its contractors multiple times what Linden Lab is willing to shell out? What’s Linden Lab’s plan? Low quality content?

Well, I for one look forward to hearing more about these jobs. For those of us who sit here in game, modeling anyways, getting piad by the hour for it sounds pretty decent, regardless of the wage.
- Maxwell Strong
Aran Trefoil

10US$ only for American Builders. The Exchange US$ to EURO ist not aceptable. But better as build a house for 1200L$.

Friendly Greetings

10 dollars an hr?
You can now clearly see what a TECH lead-driven, silly valley VC firm think’s of creative content and IP..

Ask what they payed the horrible coders of the laughable voice system…or the unusable search.

Motice no CCO at linden, just middle management paying pennies to try to get millions out of a sell to those who realize the eyeballs-advertising COME TO CONTENT - NOT tech!….

Clear now? Dont be stupid. dont work for 10 dollars an hr so 10 “founder” people can get a 500 million dollar sale to Yahoo..;)
or EA.

Build you own content, find you own sponsors and ad banner buyers…
bubba