On that note, here's a hilarious link to a South Park episode which nicely illustrates your point.

http://video.glath.com/view/southpark.Make_Love,_Not_Warcraft

I haven't finished reading the article yet, but I suspect this problem is a little blown out of proportion. The designers most definitely did plan for this, and the game is built to be resiliant to gold farming. The player economy is huge and important, but nevertheless a marginal aspect of the game. You can accomplish virtually anything without using it.

I suspect most of the millions of people who play Warcraft have fun and are not addicted to it.

Uhh, excuse me, but the designers didn't expect sweatshops to pop up and waste asian people's lives farming gold. That's what's sad about it, the waste of time. I'm not talking about the people having fun, I'm talking about the people having to work for next to nothing doing something they hate and wasting their time on it.

I'm strongly fighting the urge to downmod your comments, because you seem to "mean well". But "meaning well" is the sort of attitude that leads otherwise intelligent people to turn away from the basic facts of the free marketplace.

People want "gold coins" or whatever.

So and so wants a job.

A middleman arranges for an exchange of "gold coins" for real money by setting up an apparatus of technology, labor, marketing, and sales to allow it. (THIS ISN'T EASY.)

Everyone is richer for it, with the possible exception of the people buying the "gold coins" who are high-class cheaters. But the guy who buys a Porsche is an extra-high-class cheater on the dating market, and I'm more worried about him any day of the week.

The important thing is: Everybody is free, and it's this freedom (and not the FSF's "freedom") that took Ling or Wang or whoever out of the rice field.

Unskilled wage workers of all sorts have been wasting their days almost exactly in this manner since the industrial revolution. It's worth noting that when Karl Marx wrote "Estranged Labor" the working conditions were much worse.

Incidentally, pages 6 and 7 makes it sound as if working in a good RMT outfit is actually fun and challenging. Apart from the exaggerated description of the time and effort it takes to reach the "maximum number of experience points," it's a very accurate description of what it's like to play Warcraft. I'd certainly rather spend 12 hours a day as part of a 40 man team solving Warcraft raid encounters than spending 12 hours a day packing sneakers or something.

The wage is comparable to other menial jobs in China. I personally would rather farm gold than work 12 hour days in a manufacturing plant. At least you can chain smoke and maybe even listen to music.

What's sad is the hundreds of millions of Chinese people that would kill to have a standard of living as high as a city-dwelling gold farmer.

Well said. If there was better work than Gold Farming they would do it.

I'm with Milton Friedman in thinking that Sweatshops are a good thing, in that they provide a job for people who've got no place else to work. Remove the sweatshops and they starve.

The real problem is that we have an economic system where people would starve without sweat shops. Capitalism has this nasty little problem of all the wealth getting concentrated in the hands of the few and globalization exacerbates the problem. Unfortunately, no one's figured out a better way of distributing wealth.

And the alternatives to capitalism have an even nastier problem: absolute instead of merely relative poverty.

Incidentally, the Chinese wouldn't starve without sweatshops. They'd be peasant farmers. The reason they work in sweatshops is the same reason workers chose to work in the "satanic mills" of England in 1800: being a peasant farmer is a very hard life.

I don't know about China, and not about the satanic mills, but as I have recently about the industrial revolution: back then actually it wasn't possible for everybody to be a farmer anymore. On the one hand, there was an enormous population explosion (which had also been encouraged by Feudalism, I think, the "owners" of the people had an interest in owning more people for a while). Then Feudalism was abolished, and nobody took care of the people anymore. hence the poverty and their willingness to do awful work. In that sense, I don't think Capitalism was really to blame. I suspect a similar thing could be going on in China.

Are you implying that the Industrial Revolution was caused by population pressure? That would be an amazing coincidence, wouldn't it, if jobs in factories appeared at just the moment it "wasn't possible to be a farmer anymore."

In fact the history of every country that industrializes is the same. People work on farms till jobs appear in factories, and then they move to the cities-- not because it isn't possible to work on farms anymore, but because it's such a grim life.

And incidentally, feudalism was over in England centuries before the Industrial Revolution got started in the late 18th century.

Exactly. The guy above got it back to front. The population explosion was because of the extra wealth from the industrial revolution lowering the death rate due to the end of famine. http://www.mises.org/books/conquest.pdf

Feudalism ended in England in the 16th century, hundreds of years before the industrial revolution http://www.tiscali.co.uk/reference/encyclopaedia/hutchinson/m0006447.html

Well then it wouldn't be a coincidence, would it? I mean if population explosion was caused by the industrial revolution. I didn't mean the industrial revolution was started by population explosion, only the squalor was (among other factors) caused by it.

Sorry I don't have the books with me right now (until next week), and I didn't learn them by heart. I seem to also remember that there were machines before the "revolution" - maybe it still was a change of political circumstances that permitted the revolution (free trade between countries, possibility of ownership giving incentives for entrepreneurs etc.). Certainly several factors worked in combination, it's not like the invention of a particular machine triggered it all.

I also seem to remember that China has the fewest farmland per person of all countries in the world. I don't think anybody can simply be a farmer. I know I couldn't just be a farmer in my country.

Not to mention that wages in the mills were much much higher than in farming.

It's a myth that capitalism concentrates wealth into the hands of the few. In reality the opposite is the case: Capitalism is better at spreading the wealth among everyone than any other economic system. Look at the Gini coefficient, the freer the economy (the more capitalist) the less economic inequality there is: http://www.cato.org/pubs/efw/efw2006/efw2006es.pdf

http://tinyurl.com/2gd7ue

http://content.answers.com/main/content/wp/en/thumb/6/64/375px-Index2006_EFCapita.gif

Also the gap between rich and poor has been essentially static for the past 50 years, and shrinking since the 80s http://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/fandd/2005/12/images/walton3.gif

http://www.fraserinstitute.ca/shared/readmore.asp?sNav=pb&id=859

Yet more proof is in the Economic Freedom index. All rich countries have free economies, and all poor countries have un-free economies: http://www.heritage.org/index/countries.cfm for me that's the smoking gun that capitalism works.

http://web.archive.org/web/20060111094731/truckandbarter.com/tb_images/ef_in.gif

"Unfortunately, no one's figured out a better way of distributing wealth."

There are only 2 choices in economics: Capitalism, which is really just people trading freely (and seems to distribute the wealth the best) and communism/socialism, which doesn't allow anybody to trade (and has the worst distribution of wealth). The only other options are systems which are somewhere between, and evidence (from the Economic Freedom index) shows the freer the economy the better off everyone is.

Further China isn't particularly capitalist, it's still very heavily socialist: http://www.heritage.org/index/country.cfm?id=China (although that's changing year by year). So if people are starving in China it's not really capitalism's fault.

It's also a myth that capitalism causes starvation. In fact there were no famines in the 20th century in any capitalist countries. All the famines were related to Marxism (China, Russia, Ethopia, North Korea etc.)

(This has an indepth look at famines through the ages: http://www.mises.org/books/conquest.pdf)

[ I hesitate to comment, because this is all steering away from 'startups'... ]

I think the rebuttal to rms' comment that "Capitalism has this nasty little problem of all the wealth getting concentrated in the hands of the few" is very simply this:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero_sum_fallacy

While some kinds of wealth are limited, it's generally not a zero sum game.

Good call.

Startups are all about capitalism though aren't they. They are capitalism in action.

Yes, I'd kind of assumed that being pretty comfortable with capitalism was a given for those using this site, even though we may all have differing views on exactly how to best run an economy/country in terms of the details. (And that discussion is most certainly best left to some other site, or preferably, over a good bottle of Italian red wine:-)

I of course recognize that capitalism is all we have. It still pains me that politics in the USA are corrupted by corporations and that a billion people live in absolute poverty. Still, the average standard of living is higher now than it's ever been.

I just can't get past this feeling that there's something horribly wrong with our society... from pharmaceutical companies keeping AIDS medication locked away to an invasion of the Middle East to take their energy. This can all be explained through rational self-interest but it's pretty horrific to contemplate. Is there a better way? Will we ever achieve real Globalization?

Can and will global poverty be solved before humanity achieves a post-scarcity economy?

"a billion people live in absolute poverty"

They live in poverty because of a lack of capitalism, not because of capitalism. You might find this hard to believe but every poor country has a lack of capitalism. Check here: http://www.heritage.org/index/countries.cfm there's not a single contradiction.

If you really care about the poor I challenge you to take a few hours to read this PDF just to hear the other side of the argument: http://www.mises.org/books/conquest.pdf

Feel free to email me at lockster 4T gmail d0t com if you feel like a friendly debate ;)

Off-topic: is there any CSS that can be added to stop long words like URLs from causing a horizontal scrollbar to appear, i.e. to force the word to be broken in two?

You can have it chop off the end of the URL with "overflow-x: hidden" and an explicit width, but the only way to have it insert a linebreak is to count characters on the server and insert a break manually.

You can use a 'zero width space' (​)in some browsers to hint a breakable point, but it might affect C&P-ability.

Some other discussion of options here:

http://gojomo.blogspot.com/2005/03/cross-browser-invisible-word-break-in.html

Thanks, 200b is was I found too after reading the CSS 2 spec.

How is that different than millions of other McJobs out there.

They're getting paid to play video games.

They're getting paid to FARM in video games. That's very different from "play", which involves significantly more freedom, novelty, joy, and discovery.

Not to mention the sheer irony of spending their lives to increment a number in a remote computer representing virtual gold pieces. Not exactly efficient.

Your comment on wasting their lives implies that there's something better they could be doing. If there was why would they waste their time Gold Farming? Clearly for the people who work at the Gold Farms it's the best paying thing they can find, else they would switch jobs.

I think there are worse things in the world. After all, they don't really harm anybody, or do they? In WoW you can't really harm other players, I think.

You can harm someone indirectly through the in-game economy.

Out-of-game virtual goods trading can kill meaning of progress in a game- whether there was much meaning to begin with is another debate.

This economic link between worlds breaks the "magic circle" that separates game from real life. This can hurt or kill the experience of a game, depending on how much it relies on suspension of disbelief. Then again, this also opens opportunities to explore, both in game/experience design and in business.