{"id":28,"date":"2004-11-11T13:17:40","date_gmt":"2004-11-11T21:17:40","guid":{"rendered":""},"modified":"2015-10-12T17:06:11","modified_gmt":"2015-10-13T01:06:11","slug":"accelerating_change_conference","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bayesianinvestor.com\/blog\/index.php\/2004\/11\/11\/accelerating_change_conference\/","title":{"rendered":"Accelerating Change Conference"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>\nThe 2004 <a href=\"http:\/\/www.accelerating.org\/ac2004\/index.html\">Accelerating Change Conference<\/a> focused much more on current changes than last year&#8217;s attempts at providing long-term visions led me to expect.\n<\/p>\n<p>\nThe one topic that excited me was a virtual world called <a href=\"http:\/\/secondlife.com\/\">Second Life<\/a>. While it might sound superficially like just a virtual Burning Man, the designers are serious enough about their nationbuilding to encourage commerce, both within the system and via currency exchanges such as <a href=\"http:\/\/www.gamingopenmarket.com\">The Gaming Open Market<\/a> with other worlds. Their VP of Product Development Cory Ondrejka described Hernando de Soto&#8217;s book The Mystery of Capital as &quot;must reading&quot;. They have been careful to insure that people have few incentives to take disputes arising in the virtual world to meatspace courts. For instance, they once banned a vandal from the game who owned a fair amount of land; they auctioned off the land and sent him a check for most of the proceeds &#8211; $1600.\n<\/p>\n<p>\nSome of their customers are doing well enough in the virtual world that the company that runs Second Life has trouble offering them a salary good enough to compete with what they&#8217;re making in virtual life.\n<\/p>\n<p>\nThey don&#8217;t seem as concerned about the highly deflationary effects of their monetary policy as I expect they ought to be. Why will people buy their land (the sale of which seems to be their main source of income) if they can earn a safe and sure return by just holding the local currency?\n<\/p>\n<p>\nThe responsiveness of the company to citizen complaints (e.g. simplifying and later abolishing taxes in response to tax revolts) is fairly strong evidence that a non-monopolistic dictator is better than a democracy with monopoly power.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The 2004 Accelerating Change Conference focused much more on current changes than last year&#8217;s attempts at providing long-term visions led me to expect. The one topic that excited me was a virtual world called Second Life. While it might sound superficially like just a virtual Burning Man, the designers are serious enough about their nationbuilding [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[20,18,21],"tags":[74,64],"class_list":["post-28","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-freedom","category-investing","category-virtual","tag-macroeconomics","tag-transhumanism"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p80O1l-s","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bayesianinvestor.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bayesianinvestor.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bayesianinvestor.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bayesianinvestor.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bayesianinvestor.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=28"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/bayesianinvestor.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":357,"href":"https:\/\/bayesianinvestor.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28\/revisions\/357"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bayesianinvestor.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=28"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bayesianinvestor.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=28"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bayesianinvestor.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=28"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}