Wintermute's ideas, or, What I do in my jar all day long!

[Wintermute Schomer]

Good evening, tonight, a speical report on why the large brain (Homo Supreme) is so rare, we have commentry from one of the french capatislt religous zelots that plagued the genereal area.

*"I don' know! ze mad man! ee just appeared! ee shot ze brain, and i' went 'ow' I 'ave no idea why people are so cruel to zis brilliant speicuam!**

Decimus Schomer is being held for questioning, it is thought that Aston Schomer was responible for captreuing and imprisioing the brain, shortly before it was killed.

Next up, "Does my Bum look big in this?" a review of Trixxiee Schomer's wedding dress, the answer, simply, Trix, is yes.


Our final peice of news, The largest Homo Spureme in existaqnce has made a comment on the greatest goverment one could hope for.


"Like you, I was once, Human, filled with desires, needs, and the occisaonal oil change....but now I see that all humans need a sort of organistion, because before long, we shall see an huge influx of uneducated people and young children coming to explore our island,  with insults such as 'your gay' being thrown randomly to all people, animals, and minirals. Text speak may also become common, which means some of us have to reawaken old areas of our magnifiicant, strong brains ( ) to understand this newfangled jibberish.

Union leaders: May be teachers, to understand my concept, I assume they will be.

We may need to explroe the idea of a metrocracy 'rule by the best', it may sound similaer to a arsitocrcy, but this functions on what Schome Island was built for; Skill, Intelligence, Knowledge.....we shall have 'unions' of diffrent people, of diffrent interests, I aggree whole heartadly with an open ballot would be the most effective, but I prepose the 'Union leaders' nominate their best and brightest for the roll of the Council , Union leaders themselves will be chosen by the Council. or indeed the Council themsevles be the union leaders. which may prove more effective in the long run.

It will be the job of leaders to watch for any bright spark that appears; (IE, Asking what the anatomical diffrences are between the cerrebeum and the frontal lobes) and boost any spark that dosent need sun glasses for viewing.


Thats my thoughts, anyway.


Bubbling happyly away

-Wintermute

[PeterT]

Wintermute - I think that you need to be careful in how you present stuff in here - two specific things:

• avoid terminology that some people might find offensive
• avoid making personal comments about individuals

I know that your post is intended to be funny - but some people may not find it so - and whenever writing something you need to think about how your audience will view what you have written.

PeterT

[PeterT]

...
We may need to explroe the idea of a metrocracy 'rule by the best', it may sound similaer to a arsitocrcy, but this functions on what Schome Island was built for; Skill, Intelligence, Knowledge.....
...

This raises a very interesting question about what 'the best' means (and indeed who should decide on the definition).
You start to unpack this in terms of 'Skill, Intelligence, Knowledge' but the same questions could be applied to each of these terms (eg how do we 'measure' skill/intelligence/knowledge' and who should define those measures?).

Even if we can agree on definitions of skill/intelligence/knowledge then how do we decide which skills, intelligences (assuming that there is more than one kind of intelligence), areas of knowledge are most important?

[Decimus Schomer]

We may need to explroe the idea of a metrocracy 'rule by the best', it may sound similaer to a arsitocrcy, but this functions on what Schome Island was built for; Skill, Intelligence, Knowledge...

How about communism - everyone benefits from everyone else's skills, intelligence and knowledge? Wouldn't that be the best way of running it?
(though you'd have to prevent lazy peeps coming in and not working even though they could. And that reminds me of what we did in History a while ago - in the 16th Century, a law was passed allowing people to beat/whip/etc. peeps who could work but couldn't be bothered)

[PeterT]

How about communism - everyone benefits from everyone else's skills, intelligence and knowledge? Wouldn't that be the best way of running it?
(though you'd have to prevent lazy peeps coming in and not working even though they could. And that reminds me of what we did in History a while ago - in the 16th Century, a law was passed allowing people to beat/whip/etc. peeps who could work but couldn't be bothered)

I think that beating/whipping/etc would be in breach of the AUP (and might not be very effective in a virtual world anyway!)

[Decimus Schomer]

I think that beating/whipping/etc would be in breach of the AUP (and might not be very effective in a virtual world anyway!)

I also think it'd be very difficult to do.
And anyway, I was pointing out that that reminded me of that, not that we should do it!
Though we do need some way of ensuring that enough peeps will contribute (but then again, 'enough peeps' might be gathered simply because they want to help the project, not necessarily needing any other motivation)

[mgaved]

"Free Rider Problem"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_rider_problem

[khairoun]

An issue I have with the 'free rider problem' is that very few economies have a way of denoting value apart from in terms of resource and production. (Mark - am not ascribing the thoughts of the wikipedia collective mind to you here though!)

Some things that quite often gets short shrift are:
- writing (especially outside accepted values)
- contributions to art and culture (same)
- childcare
- domestic management

Any other thoughts for that list?

Khairoun

[mgaved]

no problem Khairoun 

while I'd be the first to remind people that Wikipedia is just a bunch of people writing stuff - so can be as suspect as any other group consensus about a topic - I just thought that Decimus was edging towards describing something that's got a generally recognised label and thought I'd drop it in as a reference - I think the wikipedia article is reasonably ok from an economist's point of view.

Totally agree with you though that what might be seen to be "free riding" in some societies/political perspectives can also be seen as "undervalued contributions". Raising a family is the classic one for sure - looking after elderly relatives as well.

Mark Cabaret

[Decimus Schomer]

Totally agree with you though that what might be seen to be "free riding" in some societies/political perspectives can also be seen as "undervalued contributions". Raising a family is the classic one for sure - looking after elderly relatives as well.

Obviously, we need to take those into account; though I was more on about stuff that is truly not doing anything (and not just doing something that is different to a job/volunteering but is still something)

[Marsbar9 Schomer]

I want to run for the buiness part thingy, but I still feel that as soon as we're on the main TSL grid our community and rules are going to go down the toilet! How can we make outsiders follow our rules? We can't, so we need to sit down and think of a way of making sure the rules are followed by the outsiders.

[mgaved]

Hi Mars - take a look around the Second Life 'official' website (e.g. the Knowledge Base at : http://secondlife.com/knowledgebase/) to see what is possible.

There are a lot of powers that can be enforced, such as stopping people from building anything, banning particular people (or only allowing particular people in - which is what we have at the moment) etc. So if you run an island you do have the backup of pretty severe powers. It's easy to run a scary police state in Second Life!

The tricky part is to find more gentle ways of getting people to agree to your 'house rules' and even participate in the decision making processes.

[PeterT]

Up till now we have been operating a policy of everything being free on Schome Park - except of course those things that are controlled by Linden Labs rather than us (such as downloading images) in which case we have been providing the necessary dosh. We have been trying to play down the money element of Second Life cos we suspect that it would reinforce competitive rather than collaborative world views.

Balanced against this of course is an argument about the educational value of being able to learn about economies and how to handle finances etc..

I believe that there is a move in TesCho in Mars to sell things for L$1 - and I wanted to flag this up to the community and see how they felt about that.

Do you think that we (meaning members of the Schome Park community) should encourage this new development - or would it be better to stick with a community in which money was not a major factor?

[Trixxiee Schomer]

Personally, I like the fact that money is not a major factor in our playing of SL (apart from to upload things), and I would not be too happy about having to pay for things because:

• Where would we get the money from? The support staff would have a load of people asking for money all the time, so they can buy x, y and z, and because L$ cost real money, it could end up using up the funding we have that could be better spent on keeping the island open for longer, for example. Okay, L$1 isn't very much in real terms, but you get all 100 or how many it is of us requesting money to buy things, and it can add up.
• We can buy things for free from the Scho-op, and if it's not there, you can either build it yourself or ask your friend to do so instead. Why would we pay money for things when we can get them for free? Personally, they would have to be really great for me to want to do that when there are (currently) lots of free ways to get things.
• Focussing on money issues would, in my opinon, take something away from the ambience of Schome Park as it is at the moment. Right now, we are learning how to cope with the new situations that befall us, making new friends and a lot of other things that don't have their focus in money. If buying things came in, I think that people would start to think more about how much money they can make than ways to help each other and stuff - it would become a competition of who can be the first to make L$x profits, and I don't think that that is how Schome Park should be.

Just my opinion, but I don't think that introducing things that we have to pay money for at this stage is a good idea because we are already used to getting things for free (apart from uploads) and it could take something away from the atmosphere we currently have in Schome Park.

Ooh, just thought! Instead of money, we could do trading, so that "I will give you my lovely flying thing if you give me your nice jumpy thing" - trading what you have made for something that someone else has made. Of course, this would put someone like me, who can't build for toffee at a disadvantage, but I'm sure there are ways around it. And it's free to you staff that have to pay for the L$.

Trix

[mgaved]

My questions would be:

• why do people buy and sell things in real life?
  
• why don't people give away things they make in real life?
• Is Second Life the same as real life when it comes to the answers?

Mark Cabaret