Broken Toys

in other words, the average player will benefit from the inflation on monster-dropped goods, or derivative materials because they will have to farm less to pay fixed vendor costs.

You argue that the average player will be upset at having to grind less.

No I argue that the player wants a fairly decent if simple simulation of an economy that includes liquid currency. If you let inflation run rampant then you both cause it to devolve into a barter economy and may as well make fixed price goods free. If they were meant to be free you would hve designed them as such, but you didn’t presumably for a reason.

The same is true of real-world economies, and yet we still consider them to be producing wealth. You’re even worse at economics than I am, lol

On the contrary, real world wealth is made up of resources both tangible and intangible not currency. Here dollars can and are printed somewhat arbitrarily. So there is a fundamental difference between wealth and currency. Wealth that can be transfered from Second Life to the real world just happens to be real world currency and there is a finite supply of it within the world.

@VPellen

I see what you mean. Real world currency is completely devoid of worth except that which is assigned to it by social agreement. Well other than the paper, people did wallpaper their houses with confederate currency. On the other hand virtual currency, so long as there are fixed price goods available, has at least some value no matter how minimal since those goods have use value.

I’d still argue that it causes bad things to happen to the game both in terms of balance and player enjoyment.

[Scott]What matters is whether or not the community collectively decides to accept this.

[Prokofy]Collectivism. Yikes, that’s socialism. No. Wait. It’s communism!

It is also Democracy. If 50.1% of the people vote option A over option B, all the people who wanted option B are stuck with option A until another vote. The community collectively decides by majority rule. And if you now try to tell me that the majority of WoW players want RMT, I hope you’ve got hard evidence to back that up.

Wealth that can be transfered from Second Life to the real world just happens to be real world currency and there is a finite supply of it within the world.

Makaze, a bit of Wikipedia reading material for you:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seigneurage

i don’t blame you for not understanding it tho, i only read up on it when that Zeitgeist movie talked about the north american currency thing lol. Seigneurage is what the US & Mexico & Canada etc wouldn’t want to share… and it is exactly the same thing, no more no less, as what Linden Labs has. you get it in any situation with printing money, not just virtual worlds.~

gah, why do i keep trying… Scott Jennings is probably going to ban my IP for repeatedly stating it’s not worth it to post, then continuing to spam his blog with posts, etc etc

I’d still argue that it causes bad things to happen to the game both in terms of balance and player enjoyment.

The point of my seeming to argue in favor of RMT was that from the player’s perspective, it is somewhat morally justifiable. If you don’t want RMT in your games, don’t design a game where players feel the content you force them to grind thru isn’t fun. It goes like this: as you place more emphasis on the individual using the scale of beneficiaries from actions, and less on the overall group, you go from “Gold buyer has large benefit from buying gold (aka not having to grind content); everyone has small loss but it all adds up”

to

“Gold Buyer has a large benefit from buying gold; any given individual player has only a small, or even zero loss.” zero because if why should you care if someone buys their items with gold, it doesn’t affect you after all.

So, people who evaluate moral/ethical actions mostly at the individual scale, a ‘free’ metric, will see it as ok. Those who tend to evaluate at the group level will see it more as a hurtful action…. depending on what everyone sees the collective point of the game as. Varies with culture and so on, which is why in WoW China buying gold is 100% ok and the gold economy and financial dimension of the game coexists with the social and ‘achievement’ aspects… as mentioned in the last thread.

However, whether the individual player is justified in seeing RMT as a moral action, the company is not justified (for reasons I haven’t gone into..) in treating it that way unless the entire culture has stabilized at an ‘RMT is ok’ perspective. These memes tending to polarize like that. Failure to understand all these nuances is the kind of thing that makes….. ~

@Taemojitsu

If he hasn’t banned Prok, he ain’t worried about you.

I was referring to runaway inflation due to any reason, but seeing as that’s at least one symptom of gold farming…

Very true that people looking at things from only an individual perspective will favor RMT (for them at least) while people looking at a larger picture will see the harm it causes to the overall system. And it’s not likely to have a zero loss as the activity used to generate the gold almost universally leads to at least some loss in play experience for all players.

WoW China has a fairly broken in game economy, at least in terms of liquid currency.

I never thought you were arguing for RMT, just your pipe dream of making a game that’s so fun for everyone that no one wants to RMT. Which is really just a game that would be so fun for you (and people like you) as to not make you (and people like you) want to engage in RMT.

*shrug* Clearly neither me nor the many other people who have tried can convince you of that, but I’m quite sure that experience will eventually.

Lumley, I *know all that* about currency. I thought you were talking about like swords and helmets and stuff. I mean, I guess the game gods have to keep them in short supply. And not overprint them. But…if the game gods print them and people buy them at what they’re worth, even if they are gold-farmers, why is that strip-mining? That’s how economies work. It’s too bad the gold-farmer got it, but the game-god at some level can’t care.

Absolutely right that the spam — and I’ve seen it on the screen too — is a customer service, disciplinary issue. If the game gods can’t figure out how to filter, nodraw, whatever it is they call it, that’s their problem. They need to get it done. They don’t have the Lindens’ excuse of running common carriers or pretending to.

<Actually at a fundamental level there is a limited amount of real wealth in Second Life and each dollar (not Linden, they can and are created somewhat arbitrarily) you earn and then remove from the system is a dollar that someone else put into the system.

This religious belief is very deeply held, like the Virgin Birth. Yet, it’s false. If I work hard and create value and bring in new people, the Lindens have to print more money. And more people are motivated to cash out at a higher rate and they buy their money and I am paid and cash out at a higher rate for more dollars. So, there isn’t this zero-sum game you imagine, literally.

@Jason. I’ll bet there are more than 51 percent of WoW players who have bought something outside the official game economy. So, by their actions, they voted for RMT, even if they scream they don’t want it in general because they want to be the exception, not the rule.

Democracy needs to be liberal democracy that protects minorities, not last-election democracy.

@Scott, the collective is not wise. It’s a dumb beast. I don’t care what it wants. You need the rule of law, and that you achieve by freedom of speech and private property. Ultimately, RMT will prevail, or at least be a much more common option.

Even if the orange juice tactic failed, I have to say that at least this discussion is much more civil and easy to read. It just proves the old adage my mother used to tell me when I was just a babe:

“It’s better to be pissed off than be pissed on, unless you’re in a german porn film.”

Prok>I really can’t care if he is offended

That’s OK, Prok: nothing you say about me offends me. I deliberately avoid responding to your various allegations not because I’m bothered by them; rather, it’s for reasons entirely to do with self-aggrandizement: the more you defame me, the better I look.

Richard

The problem with your assertion is that once you devalue gold, the economy moves on to the ’swords and shields and stuff’ as a UNIT of currency.

See : SoJ.

It’s Bad. Your Ideas are Bad. You haven’t thought them through. At all.

Also, it’s clear you don’t understand WoW. At All.

See : SoJ.

You just referenced a term of the art that would require Prokofy to spend two of those precious, precious seconds of her capitalist life googling. You’re gonna get yelled at.

>That’s OK, Prok: nothing you say about me offends me. I deliberately avoid responding to your various allegations not because I’m bothered by them; rather, it’s for reasons entirely to do with self-aggrandizement: the more you defame me, the better I look.

Richard,

I’m not “defaming,” you Richard, and fortunately, we’re not in England where you can speciously and vindictively sue me with petty concepts like that.

And I’m not “making allegations”. I’m reporting on your views. You seem unwilling to take individual ownership of these views and their consequences. I marvel at this. Ah, you want the ownership to be collective. Right! *REDACTED*

I would expect, talking to someone like you who claims to be a grand master that if your views are characterized as “socialist” — particularly hearing your rant about the Second Life land market and your aversion to it — that instead of being petulant or mutely mutinous, you would say, “Well, I concede that my concepts are a bit utopian, this idea of equality and justice, but I can’t concede they are socialist because of X Y Z.”

You are unwilling to convert any game/coder discussion into another realm of property/power/social systems. It’s as if you don’t think your code has any consequences, as if it exists unattached in an ethereal realm. Your code has consequences, Richard, and you need to take responsibility for them. If you shape a generation of games and gamer culture, have you no responsibility, and are you going to pretend that code is blindly law with no coder accountability?

Are you really going to claim that you, maybe more than anybody, is responsible for disseminating the impractical, socialist meme that everywhere and always, some game-god should level the playing field, strip us all of wordly wealth, and plunk us down to skill grind like serfs and factory proletarians and kill other people until we’re bored and are forced into migration, being sure to prosecute anybody who tries with persistent ingenuity to bypass these horrid barriers? and we’re supposed to say “it’s a game” and “not a meme” and not *the* culture in a world where there is no longer any literature? No longer any literature. No young people studying verse or reading or editing poetry magazines, but only games…

In this world of social media “transparency” where we can learn of your child’s orange juice preferences, what’s the big deal, Richard, about describing one’s personal or public political positions?! There would be no 1,000 page threads here if you were willing to step up and be a man and say after the first sentence, “Why, yes, I voted X about Y and I also think A about B and C.”

While I quite respect the problem that develops in trying to prove you’re not a camel when someone calls you a camel, this isn’t about A Tale in the Desert. This is about reading what you write, plainly, even about your real-life district and politics, and concluding that you sound like you’re to the left of Tony Blair. And you’re going to turn out to be a closet Tory? I don’t get the fastidiousness here.

Many British intellectuals are socialist in outlook. The “liberal” of the American type is considerably more conservative in foreign or domestic policy. It just seems like a normal conversation to locate oneself on this spectrum. You’re apparently pretending that you live in a realm outside of lowly meat-bound representative politics because you create games and are therefore beyond reproach.

Point of fact, I am in the UK, where we are currently scared that ISPs will retain our browsing history and sell it to advertisers.

Additional point of fact, Mr Blair hasn’t run this country for nine months now. So while your analogies may be correct, it would be more suitable to compare them to Mr Brown, our current Prime Minister.

And according to Political Compass, both the Labour and Tory leaders for the past few years have leaned politically right. The average member of the British and American public is, according to a few unreputable sources, further left than thier political administrations.

So calling Richard Socialist makes me look like an anarchist libertarian in comparison. Let’s drop the labels, because they bring too many negative connotations that don’t apply for what is, at heart, the entertainment industry.

No way, dude. This is the Metaverse.

It are serious business. (this needs a lolcat)

Back on topic, I find that since I cannot really drink orange juice any more, I find that those crystal light flavor-pack thingies that you add to water are a terrible substitute. They make baby jesus cry. Even robot baby jesus.

Jason: Please don’t make wildly unfounded assumptions.

Prokofy, responding to Jason: Wildly unfounded assumption!

This is why I love online argue..er, discussions.

Scott Jennings>Richard’s political preferences are completely irrelevant

Living in the UK in a constituency where, whatever I vote, the Conservative candidate will always get in with a huge majority, this is truer than you might suppose!

Actually, I’m quite happy to debate questions about my political philosophy; I’m just not going to debate them with Prok. Having in the past spent countless hours attempting to persuade her that I’m not anti-American, all to no avail, I know there’s no point in trying to have any kind of rational discussion with her. She believes what she wants to believe.

Richard

I think Prokofy is playing Forumwarz with us. Nice attack though it’s worse than Ophelia’s bad poetry.

Lum, I thought you learned something from your Ron Paul thread. Actually, I thought you knew better. Derek Smart, et al.

Don’t you have enough to do at work or something? Btw, when do we get to find out about that?

I’ve read that dentists recommend drinking through straws for everyone.

Living in Chicago my vote gets canceled out by the votes of several dead people.

I’ve read that dentists recommend drinking through straws for everyone.

Except wisdom teeth guy from earlier in the thread, you do NOT want to drink through a straw then.

You know what’s funny? *REDACTED* whinging about people using her RL name and gender, when she has done the exact same thing countless times to others.

You know what’s even more funny?

Prokofy whinging about “tech speak” (she means netspeak I think), while in the same comment concluding sentences with “LOL”.

Prok says: “Richard, about describing one’s personal or public political positions?!”

Prok refuses to discuss her personal politics herself, yet demands it from others. She has loudly proclaimed she won’t do this herself.

Even more funny is Prok trying to be big high roller here, claiming a large income, yet elsewhere on the web, countless times, she has claimed the exact opposite, when the argument was based on different subject matter. She has, in the past, tried to paint herself as the beneficent landlord helping newbies and barely breaking even. You know what I always found funny about that? Running a land rentals business and barely breaking even opens the door for people to claim SHE is a socialist. But wait! It’s changed! Now she’s bragging about how much she makes! *REDACTED*

In my 15 years online, I often find that people project a whole lot. Especially those gigantic hypocrites who make a career out of trying to drag other people down into the mud with them.

To the poster who mention the Hollywood blacklist: Prok has railed about what bunch of commies Hollywood is made up of, so that point isn’t going to go very far with her. She would probably like such a McCarthyist list to re-emerge.

Redacted? What are *you* afraid of?

And it’s not political “vetting,” like the Hollywood blacklist to demand accountability? Hello? When people have that much influence. Over culture. Over you, me, our kids, the world. Sorry, but there needs to be a grand calling to account. You can ridicule it coming from me. You will not ridicule it coming from not only Congress but the liberal media. In fact, it already comes from those sources and your ridiculing of it doesn’t hold up, much of the time.

McCarthyism is about political warfare using guilt by association, fear-mongering, falsehoods. All that is well documented and understood. But…are you to say that if someone backed Moscow in the 1930s, and was silent about the show trials and mass murder, and even celebrated the Soviet regime, that if they made movies, that it didn’t matter? that if they had cultural ideas that sprang from their Soviet fellow travelling, that it didn’t matter? Why is that ok? Wagner and Ezra Pound are picked apart for their following of fascism. What, communism is exempt from analysis of cultural influence?

Somebody’s political views are not, in social media, kept in a jar under the sink. They permeate their game and world design, my God, if that isn’t clear, I don’t know what to do with you, you are obdurately blind.

Kayn, um, thanks for implying that I can’t tell when Gordon Brown replaced Blair, but my reference was to an old post on TN obviously, when he talked about Blair — duh.

It’s one of the cherished ideas of British extremists who really loathe Americans these day that Americans have “become conservative” and they are “still liberals”. They have no awareness of how far gone they are to the left. This isn’t a blog about politics so I’m not going to go on about the obvious: that British liberals had no plan for what to do about Saddam and his mass graves, and that’s part of the problem why we have even more mass graves today for which we are implicated.

Mira, rant away and make all the attacks you want without redactions *cough* but at least try to broadly stay in touch with the facts. I’ve never refused to explain my views, ever, in my life. You are mistaking me for another. I constantly post on my blog about my political views, affiliations, voting patterns. I’m an Obama voter in the primaries. I vote a straight Democratic ticket most of the time, except when I might veer off to a local Green candidate on a local issue. My only crime is a 911 Pataki vote. I haven’t supported Reagan or Bush or anything remotely connected to them. I’m a card-carrying dues-paying ACLU member. I oppose the war in Iraq, and go to demonstrations about it. Did you need anything else? Oh, gosh, I could become a McCain Democrat if Dave Winer doesn’t shut up about Obama. Still, my plan is to vote for Obama. Isn’t this an urgent national and indeed world task for our time?

I’m glad Richard spent his countless, uh, minutes spent on one page on Terra Nova, which someone could Google up, in which I pointed out that he was being anti-American. He remains unconscious of this. Most Brits do. They rant and rave and carry on and don’t hear themselves. It’s impossible to make them aware.

The idea that one has to “air a history of Richard Bartle’s voting history” is silly — and you’re completely ducking my very well-placed confrontation about the way in which political and social views meld into game design and have cultural influences.

You think designers don’t have politics, and they don’t influence games, and games don’t influence culture?

Oh?

And anyway, we are to conclude that this voting list is non-existent, since he feels his vote is pointless in his Conservative district (see, electoral nihilism, dissing of representative democracy, so common among geeks).

What’s interesting about people who don’t want to participate in participatory representative democracy, and who sing the praises of social media as the big corrective for all this corrupt evil biased stuff is that they don’t then want to say what they believe. Richard Bartle can make a petulant lob over the cultural barricades of a claim that he won’t debate his political philosophy as if this “just isn’t done” by gentleman or “just not relevant” (it reminds me of Mark Zuckerman refusing to ask the direct question of whether or not he is worth a billion).

To me, what this says is, “I get to have influence over culture and even politics but I don’t have to explain my real agenda, my real views, my real thoughts, I can surf endlessly on the surface of amplified social media and games and never have to be accountable — furthermore, any effort to make me explain myself will be treated by my fanboy operatives as “McCarthyism”.

>Mainly because one of the more inspiring presentations I’ve heard at an industry conference was Richard Bartle espousing precisely this: that code *does* have consequence, and that game designers are helping to build new and better worlds, and that we should think long and hard about the implications of this for society.

I’m glad we’ve flushed this out now, and there is a resounding validation of what I’m saying, even without any fucking clue about the consequences. It’s very, very scary. (Do you have the reference for his speech at this industry conference?)

Code does indeed have consequences. These cultural memes he and all his comrades and you are coding into games and game blogs have consequences. They sure do. And you are just one of the many lieutentants of the game gods purveying this idea of “new and better worlds”. Nobody has demonstrated at all to me or any other libel that they are better. Indeed, we only further document that they are worse, with horrific implications.

Just start with a tiny little thing. How can a world/game that makes you kill everything all the time be right? We’re told WoW makes you “collaborate” better. I hear grown men at the IBM learning summit making this claim about management training of the future occuring in WoW for only $10 a month with this generation. The cheapest after-school management training program in world history! But…collaboration about killing things. And brutally rejecting anybody who lags behind, falters, isn’t skilled enough to make it on the quest.

>This may strike you as horribly collectivist or silly or “literalist” or something (note: dismissing an argument you cannot respond to as “too literalist” is profoundly silly), but to those of us actually familiar with the problems of modern society, it’s actually quite meaningful: the hacker ethos expanded to levels of implementation. (Which, by the way, is libertarian, not collectivist.) We *can* help to reform broken social connections. We *can* aspire to something greater than what we see around us. We *can* help to make a better world.

I find it appallingly scary that you can imagine that you are familiar with the problems of modern society, and I am not. Are you fucking out of your mind?

The hacker ethos pretends to be libertarian, which people think is “liberal” without the “tarian”. It is in fact horridly collectivist in the worst kind of tribal way. We have lived inside the biggest collective coding experiment in modern history, Second Life. We’ve seen the ethos, thank you very much. Nothing “libertarian” about it, if that is to be understood in any kind of positive way. Rather, it’s the most chillingly malicious and conservative machine out there.

You cannot reform broken social connections when in fact your Broken Toys is all about imparting a really destructive and nasty form of socializing amoung people right here on your blog. Surely even you can see this.

It’s useful also to document what you are saying here about your belief that you are doing good with the hacker ethos. I would hear the same argumentation made by those in countries where mass atrocities have taken place, that the perpetrators believed they were doing good.

Please Scott for the sake of your blog just make this end. It doesn’t matter how well reasoned your argument (or anyone else’s) is going to be you aren’t going to make progress talking to a wall. All you are going to get back is hyperbole, insults and statements made with no actual evidence to support them back at you.

Do as the title says and bury this and never speak of it again please.

Profoky,

People play games to have fun man.

Fear and hatred of RMT is not evil. RMT has a certain place. As someone noted earlier, RMT has no place in say, chess, because who would want to play when some rich ass will buy more queens than you?

“Oh, I get it that people WANT that. But in part it’s because they are induced to think there is something delightful and pastoral about this lovely “level field”. They never get to ask: is there a different kind of level field that is made by THE RULE OF LAW over even the game-gods, rather than game-gods stripping everybody at the gates.”

There’s nothing at all wrong with the game gods stripping you at the door. Usually I want to play a game where I’m on an equal level with the people I’m playing with, it makes it fair, and it makes it MORE FUN.

I know you like RMT because you think your hot shit and make real money out of second life. I bet you feel like you’re more clever than other people. Hell I bet you are, but when real money is tied to the game it’s no longer a game. IT’S A PIXELATED EXTENSION OF REAL LIFE. You aren’t competing with others to have fun. You’re making decisions in the persistent world to make MONEY with some fun on the side. That is why Bartle doesn’t apply to second life. You aren’t being motivated solely by FUN any longer. Sure, I bet you enjoy playing second life, but you have real world economic interests that you need to take care of. In a “game’s” economy, you’re also not motivated SOLELY by fun, but when the gold you’re throwing around isn’t pegged to the dollar, it becomes a lot easier to do as you please with it.
I see GAMES and RMT as two different beasts entirely. Two sides of a spectrum. FUN vs ECONOMY. Gold farming is not an acceptable economic activity in WOW because it messes with the balance. When someone in WOW paid real money to buy that sword, it has affected the players around him. When I bought into playing wow, I bought into a fair and even playing field. A persistent world MMORPG can never to “fair” in the aspect that other people won’t have invested more time to get more items or attribute points, but that’s accepted because you bought into that and still have 1v1 skill. But to tie money to the process perverts it, changes the dynamic too much towards RMT and too much away from game.

“A world where the game god does get to keep fixing his Porsche forever, with your $10 and you never get to buy a Porsche. I don’t think even most people playing games would like real life to turn out that way.”

Hell no I don’t want real life to turn out that way. Hell yes I (mostly) want my games to turn out that way. Second Life is MORE LIKE REAL LIFE than it is a game. Money drives your actions in second life. You may find it fun, just like I find making money as an engineer fun. But it is driven by much larger wheels than that of enjoying yourself. When a game is “strip mined” for its resources as Lum pointed out, its lost its ability to be a “game”.

The only really interesting point you’ve made in this thread, and one I think we as MMORPG fans and RMT fans alike need to walk away with is this quote:

“Nobody ever wants to talk about that dark, hidden place in this Family, of what happens when you Reach the End of a game, when you have all the gold, all the swords of wonderfulness, you beat all the bosses, and you’re done even playing the sort of meta game of going back and ganking noobs or whatever it is you kids do. So..you then move to another game. And…that’s why your worlds always suck, because the only way to fix them is by forced migration. First, forced egalitarianism — which is prepared to punish anybody who goes outside the borders to buy their way in with illegal RMT — then forced equal outcome (no cashing out, except illegal gold-farmers) and then forced migration (a variant of this boredom-forced migration is “if you don’t like it leave,” from forums harpies.”

I’m just saying all this forced egalitarianism, forced stripping of inworld wealth, and forced migration takes it toll on the soul. It has an affect on culture, on relations, on thinking, on real life. I realize it’s not politically correct to say that. But given the enormous toll it *is* taking, it has to be said. And Richard Bartle is in part responsible.”
The reason that is so is because no one has created a good enough MMORPG yet. MMORPG’s are not perfect, the treadmill system is flawed, and endgame consisting of shitty content and “PVP updates” trickled in will not suffice. The reason our games don’t survive is because they are not good enough.
If nothing else, I believe that a MMORPG is an entity that’s stuck between chess (skill) and full blown RMT (economy). Second life is waaay over on the RMT side of the spectrum, while MMORPG’s hover closer to chess. The problem with MMORPGS is it combines the fact that people like to have more skill than other people, but people also like to earn and collect shit, and get rewards. It’s varying shades of grey that are a hell of a lot harder to create than black or white. When someone can gracefully split the difference between skill and economy through game mechanics and implementation, it will truly be a work of art. Until then, I guess we ARE stuck moving on to the next best thing. Hopefully though, game makers keep the balance more toward the GAME side, verse the ECONOMY side, so the switch to something new requires less loss of built wealth in economy.
P.S. You use a lot of artsy metaphors and vast historical knowledge to talk about games and it makes it real hard to figure out what were even arguing about and comes across as mostly needless.

When someone can gracefully split the difference between skill and economy through game mechanics and implementation

UNPOSSIBLE

because Makaze said so. And of course all Professional game designers will agree, because otherwise it means they’re incompetent.

Please keep using analogies and making broad generalizations about non-relevant subjects everyone; don’t worry you’ll convince them eventually.

Prokofy,

I have seen you refuse to talk RL politics on other sites. You usually would add in a comment about how the people you were speaking to were so beneath you that you wouldn’t grace them. Good to see you’re still a Kameleon though!

I find it odd that while Prokofy is loudly proclaiming that games like WoW are socialist constructs, her son is over on the other computer, playing WoW.

That’s some conviction there. Paying for her son to play a “socialist” game. LOL!

(I don’t usually use “LOL”, but I think maybe speaking the same language as club-wielder-with-thesaurus might help to convey context, in this case.)

On the topic of WoW – Prokofy, running around on your son’s account for an hour or two, doesn’t make you qualified to judge it. I’m sure you will come back with some rubbish about how it does, thats fine, but it won’t change my mind. You know about as much about WoW as George Bush knows about diplomacy. Superficial at best , and likely much of your “understanding” has been gleaned second-hand, from others.

WoW is partially a closed simulation of a capitalist economy. Replete with an Auction House and all. A very heavily used Auction House at that. I wonder if the common people in the Soviet Union were (legally) allowed to sell items they purchased or made, at a mark up?

“Personal ad-hominem attacks, from you or others, will no longer be tolerated. Feel free to make them in your own home all you want, they are not welcome in mine. This has already been clearly stated. You are not an idiot and are capable of following simple rules of discourse.”

Ok, no problem Scott, I’ll cool it.

Scott, what you have written here is tendentious, because you’ve merely believed what somebody said based on zero information right here on your blog.

You’re advocating show trials for designers for whom you disagree? Who is being the unreasonable Marxist again?

Did you see me write anything like that? Where? Of course not. You’re just saying that to be provocative. You, who run a blog, where people are slayed and skewered in kangaroo courts of tribalist mob rules constantly.

I don’t know where to start with you. But…I do know where to end : )