Inflation-free money

I've stumbled across a page with a bunch of interesting money-related links - this one.

Quite interesting book there is about inflation-free money. Unfortunately, it's not available on amazon, so I could not get a paper copy, so will have to continue reading online. There are a few interesting thoughts about avoiding inflation, and community money. I'll include one interesting quote here:


Between 1932 and 1933, the small Austrian town of
Wörgl started an experiment which has been an
inspiration to all who have been concerned with the issue
of monetary reform up to this day. The town's mayor
convinced the business people and administrators that
they had a lot to gain and nothing to lose if they
conducted a monetary experiment in the way suggested
in Silvio Gesell's book "The Natural Economic Order".


People agreed and so the town council issued 32,000
"Work Certificates" or "Free Schillings" (i.e.,
interest-free Schillings), covered by the same amount of
ordinary Austrian Schillings in the bank. They built
bridges, improved roads and public services, and paid
salaries and materials with this money, which was
accepted by the butcher, the shoemaker, the baker.
The fee on the use of the money was 1% per month
or 12% per year. This fee had to be paid by the person
who had the banknote at the end of the month, in the
form of a stamp worth 1 % of the note and glued to its back.
Otherwise, the note was invalid. This small fee caused
everyone who got paid in Free Schillings to spend them
before they used their ordinary money. People even paid
their taxes in advance in order to avoid paying the small
fee. Within one year, the 32,000 Free Schillings
circulated 463 times, thus creating goods and services
worth over 14,816,000 Schillings. The ordinary
Schilling by contrast circulated only 21 times. (8)
At a time when most countries in Europe had severe
problems with decreasing numbers of jobs, Wörgl
reduced its unemployment rate by 25 % within this one
year. The fees collected by the town government which
caused the money to change hands so quickly amounted
to a total of 12% of 32,000 Free Schillings = 3,840
Schillings. This was used for public purposes.


So it looks like "decaying money" were very much stimulated to circulate - so they were a much more effective instrument of enabling the trade.

In my mental experiments I came to concepts that were similar, better yet, they did not require the any centralized authority to govern them - which is pretty cool, I think.

I'll write some more about that in a separate post, when I can crystallize it more.

How to do business in SL: find a freebie, reduce permissions, resell.

update: the continuation of the story is here.


One of the SL residents has kindly mentioned to me that apparently there's a clone of the primskirtbuilder for sale on the SL Exchange.

In case you prefer to pay L$3500 for a clone, when you can get the original for free, you can visit the seller's page here.

Now, looking at the whole range of products offered by this seller, I suspect that I'm not the only one from whom this undoubtedly entrepreneurial person have "borrowed".

I do not feel like pursuing any legal actions for this person - it's boring.

But I hope you might help me by just exposing this.. err... arguable commercial practice by dropping this person ("coral giha", as it is written) an IM with your opinion about his actions.

I suggest that if you have purchased this item, you grab the original *full permissions* item for free from me, and claim your money back. (hey, and you can drop a fraction of that L$3500 into my tip jar, I would not mind :)

HTML on the parcel media in the new RC viewer

this is pretty neat.

Even though no clicks, I guess a lot of cool stuff could be already possible - if the browser does support something with AJAX (aka XMLHttpRequest) and indeed JavaScript.

Which version of git to use ?

We've spent a bit of time putting up the git to push the svn updates into an "official" git mirror - but appears the version that is in the debian package is 1.4.something - whereas I have 1.5.something on my box. The difference between the two is quite dramatic - especially with the observed behaviour of the git-svn - when I used it, the end result was some stale files and directories in the git repository - which I do not observe on my git clone.

After a small bit of googling I've found this page on gnome project - which basically dooms the 1.4, even though the reasons are a bit more religious than I'd like them to be :-)

In short - it seems like the git users would need to always run the latest version of git in order for the thing to be usable.

Now, the cool thing is that of course, as usual, in the usual "let the million worlds bloom" motto, there's already a mercurial repository :-)

My conclusion for the git repo on opensim so far is: go for the latest git and install it from source (errgh. this is not too cool, but is there any other choice ?)

Opinions ?

The wonders of search...

I find it amusing to look on the analytics how the folks arrive to this blog.

Some of them arrive due to a mischievous title - while seeking for information on color blindness - I should at least do some research on that topic to a bit rehabilitate myself on that.

A lot of folks arrive to look for git and opensim - which is understandable. Apparently the celebrity lookalikes for some terribly stupid reason generates some traffic.

But the most amusing thing I've found was the search query "who got shot in history". I felt terribly puzzled when I saw this, but appears I am a first (!) hit with my photoshoot post from a while ago.

Go figure. I assume the smartness of the search engine has figured that when someone is asking "who [verb-phrase]", the terms "I [verb-phrase]" are the good candidate answers.

I wonder how far are we from the concept-based search. Last time I read on this topic, the opinion from google folks their only love and religion is the statistics. So I'd think that they don't have much feeling towards all this toying with opencycs and link grammars. (Ok, I have to say it was more within the context of some announcement of the newfangled search engine that was promising to change the world - and as it appeared later - i think was just burning the VC capital - so maybe they *do* believe in link grammar parsing in the end - especially given that there're some works about the statistical parsers based on the link grammars - I won't spoil the fun of finding and reading those for you - they're near one of the links above.

Even yet better than free: paid! :-)

Ok, this one I have to link to - as even with the diagonal reading this is an excellent post. Prok's reply to the "better than free", which I bookmarked a few days ago.

Minus the classic Prok's rant that "all you morons tekkies imagine the information *has* to be copied" (which is a misunderstanding of at least my point of view anyway, so I do not hold any anger) - it is an excellent read.

Especially the great notion is the truck driver. While in the hypothetical matrix, the job is done by the machines who keep the meat they need to function (or for whatever the reason they kept the people in the half-asleep state - maybe as randomness generators?), the real-world is much simpler and much more complex.

Thanks for this post. When the credit is due - it's due. I'll need to reread both later when I have more time to think without interruptions.

30 pieces of silver...

I've been reading up so much on the SL content piracy in the blogs, that it is not much fun anymore.

Some of the folks it's an easy problem that should "just be fixed", and it is not fixed yet merely because of the stupidity and ignorance of the punk libertarian tekkies.

Some of the folks realise it's a damn hard thing, entangled with psychology, economy, philosophy, one's notion of integrity, and somewhat a little bit technical (I applaud Ordinal for the well balanced analysis of the situation - but call up for the benevolent dictator to appear out of the box and fix everything.

Personally, I believe in the openness.
However, one thing I question is if we'd take a random sample of 1000 avatars from the crowd - how many of them would knowingly go and save 30 silver pieces in exchange of their integrity ?

I've mentioned the experiment the other day - but today I thought - there's already quite a few places live, where this kind of experiment might take places - it's just a matter of exposing them.

For this purpose I've created a new blog Second Thefts: the alleged thefts in SL revealed and openly discussed.

The rest is written there, and I will be looking forward for any posts there, and we will see how the experiment turns out.

Better than free

A very interesting article about the money making in the case of freely copyable content.

A very interesting article - I suspect the conclusions from that are not only valid for the digital world - if you look around you, the RL is increasingly more and more about "Freebies", so the similar principles could apply.

Found it via Virtually Blind.

Let the thousand worlds bloom: the response to Gwyn's article about IBM, datacentre, and OpenSim.

Gwyn's mention of IBM putting the datacentre in OpenSim is by far more colourful than my dry hyperlink. And I'd figure it might be fun to write up a followup post. Disclaimer: all of the below is my personal views, and does not necessarily reflect any of the official positions of the "OpenSim".

First and foremost, it is a bit wrong to compare the OpenSim with Linux - the former is BSD licensed, the latter is GPL licensed. GPL does impose some "policy/political" views which BSD does not.

BSD licensing terms is a deliberate permission of the results to be used for any purpose, including commercial, by anyone.
If they do not feel like contributing back the results - so be it - but yet, with metaverse, I suppose it's in everyone's interest to have as much compatibility as possible, and the current events seem to prove this.

So, yes, you can take the code, put all the features you need, run your own stuff, and noone will feel unhappy (as soon as you do not refer to your code as "The OpenSim" - that irresponsible action would be indeed frowned upon).

The comment about the apache is not totally correct - there's a plethora of web servers designed for various purposes, in particular, the lighttpd is another very popular server, and there are tons of others. And I would not be surprised to see more than one server of the SL flavour emerging in the future.

I am not sure whether the central grid is "The" interconnection point - as there is still an issue of trust in the distributed environment, and at a certain point in time they will hit the wall, hard and solid, in case they do not pay the attention to this.

OpenSim is an extremely interesting beast with respect to its dynamics - everyone in the team is there for their own reasons, yet the end result that there is something evolving - which is quite an amazing thing to me, and I think this is not in the last order attributable to the BSD licensing which we very much want to preserve - primarily because it gives everyone so much freedom.

As for the comments by Jo, etc, let's go over them, they are amusing :)

"Open Sim's technical direction is to remove "stupid" limitations and in crease the power of the scripting language. This so increases the ability to grief within a world that essentially for any sort of stable environment user created content would have to be locked down solid."

This is soooo limited of a view that I am afraid to comment about this. The issues with the content, like I wrote just a short while ago are not technical, they are within the heads of the population who is always hungry for el cheapo content regardless of its origin. While there's a demand for the stolen content, there will be always a supply. And tackling this is a very hard problem - so given that for the time being we have mostly "good" users, this did not seem to be the biggest problem - there're a lot of far more low-level things that need to be addressed. So, first things first. Besides, "locked down solid" is a bit of an outdated concept. The information that is intended for the public viewing (which is what happens with all the content - since it essentially gets sent to all the viewers observing it) is hard to be made "locked down".

And yes - given the nature of the opensim, the flexibility and modularity is one of the key items. Right now, there are engines for LSL, C#, VB, JavaScript scripting engines. Of course, everything is a bit raw, but it's there. Go pick your favourite and hack on it. Besides this, some of the uses of OpenSim do not imply it being used as the worldwide open metaverse platform - hence the extra flexibility.


"LSL compatibility and asset sharing are not priorities for Open Sim. Even client compatibility is up for grabs. Therefore those will not be easily be leveraged."

LSL functions are being implemented by those folks who are interested to see it. While it's true that OpenSim is not intended as a clone for SL, noone prohibits anyone from having it done. Up for some coding, Jo ? :)
True that the client compatibility is mostly for pragmatic reasons - there is no reason to stick to that forever, as well as no reason to reinvent the wheel too much at this stage,and again, the compatibility is something useful to have.

"At some point, probably soon, it will very soon no longer be "too early" to license LL's server code. Then you have the choice between hiring programmers to patch OpenSim or programmers to actually create content for you in stable, enterprise proven, code."

Hiring the programmers to create the content is one of the worst decisions a hiring manager can make, really :-)

Sports car and me...

Found this on Looker's blog and figured I'd check it just for fun.

So, the end result is:

I'm a Ferrari 360 Modena!

"You've got it all. Power, passion, precision, and style. You're sensuous, exotic, and temperamental. Sure, you're expensive and high-maintenance, but you're worth it."

Dang, what can be better than a good ego boosting exercise ? I figure another 7 million participants think the same :-)

"Take the Which Sports Car Are You? quiz.