The Alphaville Herald

Op/Ed: Second Life Sex Worker Blasts Zee Linden’s Proposed Wardrobe Tax

by Urizenus Sklar on 10/11/06 at 5:18 pm

Zee Linden’s Wardrobe Tax
by Cardie Mahoney

[Cardie Mahoney is a well-known Second Life Escort and Model, services described in more than enough detail on her web site cardiemahoney.com. She is also a frequent visitor to Crayonville, but she won't say why. I mean really, she goes to Crayonville but never *my* island? What's that about? Maybe if I had one of those l337 Crayon T-shirts... Anyway, back to the subject, following is an essay that she qwertied for the Herald--a cooled down version of an earlier hating piece. See, at the Herald we are all about polite nonvituperative discourse. --Uri]

“You may take my land [tier] but you’ll never take my Jimmy Choo Shoes!” Is that going to be the rallying cry against one of the ideas that CFO Zee Linden is floating around inside Linden Labs?

In an interview with SLNN, Linden is quoted:

“There’s a bunch of things that I and others on the team are thinking about including: simplifying the tier structure on the mainland, having differential upload prices, charging people who are carrying excessive amounts of inventory, accepting Lindens in lieu of monthly fees, and increasing the spread on the LindeX to enable other exchanges to thrive. All of these things are difficult to figure out and implement.”

I blogged about this this morning while pretty much in rage – this is nothing more than a wardrobe tax. You may joke about governments taxing the clothes on your back, but this is seriously under consideration? With the amount of clients and parties I need to attend on a weekly basis this could really hurt me. But who else is this going to hit? How about every single in-game merchant and builder? Textures need uploaded for the product, and the boxes, and the in-game stores, builds need to be archived in case of SIM restarts and rollbacks, previous versions will be there to help when tweaking a new product, the list goes on.

People collect stuff in Second Life just by being in SL. Stay here a couple of months and you can easily have an inventory approaching ten thousand items. Start building, or working a little store selling your items and you’re going to shoot your inventory count up really quickly. The interview was by email, so this was no slip of the tongue quote, this was information that Zee was happy to give out.

And the big corporations with builders sacrificing their surnames for ‘a five year plan?’ Well I’m sure they’ll get a deduction from their employer, while the little independents struggle with yet another added expense

www.cardiemahoney.com

[Uri adds, see also the excellent comments by Crayonista C.C. Chapman]