Economic Facts and Fallacies

[Nanos]

Eve-online (Like all MMORPG's from what I can gather.) rely heavily on reputation, your word is your bond only if you have enough history to prove your a good bet.

So anyone who scams people and the word gets out, their name is mud and the only people who will deal with them is other criminals!

Which is also again terribly interesting to watch a bunch of them (I spent a great deal of effort in the spying game to gain intel/etc.) as they rip each other off.

As such, huge amounts of resources are wasted with people infighting and the majority losing, for a few to rise to the top.


I also studied how wars started, as again this particularly interested me how events would start with a single moment and mushroom. (One war in particular I tracked to a single person shooting someone on their own side and refusing to apoligise, eventually leading to a civil war at a cost of something like 300 billion credits a day in losses.)


Those groups able to band together and work cooperatively could score big time, but the game environment made it very hard to impliment decent levels of security. (Eg. stopping your managers from running off with the stock.. I had 4 managers steal several billion credits from me, half of which I was able to recover by stealing it back )


One idea I have to reduce the freeloader problem is to have a customer forum area where everyone can debate and initiate a vote to have someone removed. The aim is to encourage people to prove to each other that they deserve to stay, as the product is provided on a weekly basis.

(One thought from someone is that this will only result in liers and cheaters being able to stay with all the decent folk you really want being pushed out..)

Its a low cost product, so I can afford to give it a try and see what happens.

The product itself might best be described as a service, its a lottery prediction service. Unlike the competition which charges upfront a fee (And has something like 100,000 customers.) I'd charge nothing to join, no requirement to enter an email address, so people wouldn't have to worry I was harvesting addresses. And if the numbers provided won, I'd expect 50% of the winnings for them to continue to stay as customers.

(For the purposes of this example we can ignore the predictability of lottery numbers on the basis that even just providing random numbers, your still looking at some people winning anyhow.)

This way, with some 80 lotteries around the world, I can get people to enter the lottery for me, using their own money and reducing my risk to zero. As long as a few pay up their 50% I'll make something, and I can adjust the number of customers per lottery over time to get the level of income I seek, assuming that is that anyone pays up!

Eg. at the moment I'm thinking 30 people per lottery, a secure login site/forum for them to gain access to the numbers.

[jmc]

MSimon:
The Iron Law of Prohibition makes a lot a sense intuitively. If your in danger of getting caught it makes sense to maximize the concentration of your products, squeeze the most value into the smallest most easily concealable volume. Of all the arguments against prohibition, that would be the most compelling.

Having said that there are graphs which show that smoking did go down under prohibition, (By a factor of 2 rather than 10) and then rocketed up during World War 2 (possibly due to the trauma you mentioned). Herione use in China, where dealers are executed is about 0.1%, Heroine use in Britain and the US is 0.5%. If your going to wage war on drugs you need to win otherwise its not worth the effort.

Regarding the booze in Iran, that's just a single story. We really need statistics. I'm inclined to believe prohibitition can reduce use by a factor of 2 or 3, but no more than that. As a result of it not being eliminated is always easy to find plenty of cases of seizures even in countries with prohibition.

Perhaps the best approach is two pronged, supply affordable drugs on prescription to die-hard addicts through a method of delivery which causes as little harm as possible. This would remove the inelastic element to the demand. While coming down as hard as possible on all black market activities in this area, to raise the price and reduce the elastic component.

In the absence of further evidence, I reject your view that all addicts needed the drugs before taking them. I think it seems far more plausible that genetics and trauma, make many vulnerable to addiction. And then trying the drug is the final trigger that causes it. Maybe in more extreme cases drugs should be prescribed, but that decision needs to be made by a competent expert. Self-medication is no substitute for perscribed medication.

I'm also quite appalled that the police stopped you from printing your views in the newspaper. Peoples views need to be rebutted not supressed.

[Nanos]

I wish we could address practical today solutions, rather than idealistic tomorrow solutions.

Sure I'd love a change in the law and hopefully makes things better, but as that isn't likely to happen tomorrow, we need practical solutiosn today that we can action in our community.

We cannot become drug dealers ourselves and supply a free product, so our legal choices are limited to sticking our head in the sand and hoping the problem will fix itself tomorrow, or preventing our neighbours who are drug dealers from doing their business.

I vote for the latter, as its not illegal for us to organise a community to be fully legal is it..

We could fund our own private security force, sniffer dogs and go all out to help maintain the law, whatever it is.

By all means lets press to change the law, but lets do our best to uphold it as it is, or else we'll just continue to suffer from the crimes of muggers and burglars as they steal from us to fund their habits, and get beaten up in the street by the lawless gangs roaming the streets, is that what we want to continue ?

[jmc]

I don't endorse the leglization of drugs, outside of prescription even in principle. I think a world where you can buy marujana, heroine, ecstacy and God knows what else over the counter at the Newsagents would be a terrible world! Tony Blair tried 24 hour pubs as part of the general insane liberal idea that the more accessible you make a substance the less 'cool' it becomes and the less people use it. The result was failure.

Opium was legal in China in the 19th century, and the problem of its use became so widespread China wage war against Britain, the most powerful nation on Earth t the time, just to make it illegal, so widespread became the social problems it caused.

What can we do today?

You could try preventing your neighbours who are drug dealers from doing their business, if you live in a crime invested neighbourhood and are very brave (I believe many are members of violent gangs who don't enjoy being reported to the police).

If you are in a more respectable neighbourhood where good people live. Perhaps the best thing is just to get to know your neighbours. So long as everyone feels alone, gangs will rule the streets. When neighbours are strangers, all they will do is peer out their windows in shock when their neighbours get beaten about. When good people look out for each other and watch each other's backs, and stand up against crime it can be nipped in the bud while its still at a manageable area.

The problem with private security forces is they are quite expensive limited in scope and don't represent the law in the same way as the police do. Better to encourage vigalance in the local community and build up a relationship with the police and the community.

After all, people ready fund a security force to protect them with their taxes. That security force is called the police. Why hire a second one?

[Helius]

I don't endorse the leglization of drugs, outside of prescription even in principle. I think a world where you can buy marujana, heroine, ecstacy and God knows what else over the counter at the Newsagents would be a terrible world! Tony Blair tried 24 hour pubs as part of the general insane liberal idea that the more accessible you make a substance the less 'cool' it becomes and the less people use it. The result was failure.

We could clearly make such drug use "uncool" and yank the rug out from under the market at any time, but refuse do do so because of social inertia and acceptance of the status quo. The problem is that everyone would be effected, and that won't wash. We like simple solutions, even if they aren't solutions at all.

If you wanted to force a sharp decline the illicit drug market among young people, just require certification of long term drug free behavior before one could acquire a driver's license or register ownership of a vehicle. A urine, blood and hair sample would be required for a license or registration. There are a lot of other privileges that could or should require a drug free makeup; Driving is just obvious. There are a lot of far gentler social sanctions for drug use that don't involve prisons, and are far less costly that could be implemented. The problem is, drug testing would need to be ubiquitous, and that would not be acceptable to the wider population.

Such testing and non-prison social sanctions will never happen because people really prefer the status quo despite the huge social and financial cost.