
How I Used Eve Online to Predict the Great Recession (2013) - nosuchthing
http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/RaminShokrizade/20130405/189984/How_I_Used_EVE_Online_to_Predict_the_Great_Recession.php
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larsiusprime
This guy basically re-discovered Henry George's land tax theory:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_value_tax](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_value_tax)

IE, if people can hold onto valuable property and keep it out of use hoping
its value will go up, they will, and you get speculation and thus property
value bubbles. Tax the land in such a way that landowners HAVE to do something
useful with it to justify the price of holding it, and that happens less.

~~~
wdr1
This makes me wonder if raising the cost of domain registration would see less
domain parking.

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anon4
The difference being that there are infinitely many domain names, but not
infinitely much land.

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scottmcdot
I'm in Australia. Is this why I can't access
[http://firsttuesdayjournal.com/the-rises-and-declines-of-
rea...](http://firsttuesdayjournal.com/the-rises-and-declines-of-real-estate-
licensees/)

I get:

journal.firsttuesday.us - Access Denied Error code 16 This request was blocked
by the security rules 2015-03-07 01:51:36 UTC

Edit:

Google cache works but no images.
[http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:4JhJyDG...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:4JhJyDGsInEJ:journal.firsttuesday.us/the-
rises-and-declines-of-real-estate-licensees/2983/+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=au)

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angersock
2015-03-07T01:51:36Z

jesus christ people RFC3339...learn it, love it, live it.

aaaaaaaargh

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anigbrowl
What exactly is the problem? The date he provided seems to be correctly
formatted on a superficial (5 minute) comparison. Venting without explaining
what you're upset about isn't likely to change anything.

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angersock
The lack of a trailing Z to denote UTC time (because that's all you should be
using anyways, but that's neither here nor there). Also, the use of a space
instead of a 'T', while compliant, means that any sort of parser that splits
on whitespace or does something clever will break things.

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mmastrac
This is why we need to raise domain registration rates. $20 or $30 should
reduce speculation to the point where good names start flowing back into the
system. The .com rates are way too cheap right now.

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rtpg
alternatively, just have a "use it or lose it" policy, where if nothing real
is being done with the domain or you don't have an "intrinsic right" to it
(say google should probably own google.co for various reasons), then someone
else can just register it.

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simoncion
I have a domain whose only use is to provide me a pointer to my home IP
address. Is this doing something real with this domain? If it is, how would
one go about determining that I was even doing this?

Or, do you intend to determine realness of use by the absence of blogspam
and/or domain parking web pages at the domain in question?

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SeanDav
It is dangerous to try to predict something as complex and interrelated as
investment, based on such simple parameters. The OP could have been right just
by sheer chance and is claiming insight, but is likely just luck and
survivorship bias.

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Rainymood
>How I Used EVE Online to Predict the Great Recession

Alternatively the posts we dont see are:

"How I used <X> to predict the Great Recession wouldn't be here for 2 more
years but never posted a blog about it because I was wrong and it was just a
theory anyway."

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presidentender
Did the author make any investments based on his prediction, other than the
friendly bet?

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serf
next up on forex trading charts : mmo economies.

a lot of btc traders used to track SecondLife lindens due to there being a
conversion scheme between the two currencies.

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Sealy
Are you the author of that post? If so I'd love to get your thoughts on
Bitcoin. Given your field of expertise as an "applied virtual economist" your
view is probably a lot more relevant then the "old money" economists of this
generation.

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bduerst
I don't quite follow how they extrapolate the housing economic bubble to a
pyramid scheme.

One of the fundamentals of a pyramid scheme is that early entrants profit, and
continue profiting as the scheme plays out. How does this apply to the housing
market if you don't get continual returns on resale?

An interesting correlation between Eve factories and the housing market which
they don't mention is that no rational actors are incentivized by
depreciation. There is only positive pressure on the price to push it up,
which is interesting because for many assets you have investors that can bet
on it going down (i.e. shorting).

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yen223
> "One of the fundamentals of a pyramid scheme is that early entrants profit,
> and continue profiting as the scheme plays out. How does this apply to the
> housing market if you don't get continual returns on resale?"

You buy your first house, flip to to the next sucker/investor for a profit,
use that profit to buy a second house, rinse and repeat. As long as property
prices continue to increase, you'll always win. Until the world runs out of
suckers.

At least, that's what's happening right now in my home country.

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vskarine
what's your home country?

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icebraining
The Github profile says Australia.

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yen223
While Australia might be facing a serious property bubble soon, I'm not from
there...

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jqm
I lived in Phoenix during the early-mid 2000's.

I certainly didn't need a simulation to tell that housing was an out-of-
control financial scheme that was about to crack and bring the economy to its
knees. You simply can't keep doubling property values every year without wages
or some other method of servicing the dept rising accordingly. The only thing
I wonder is why more people didn't see this.

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hibikir
Seeing that a trend can't go on forever is not difficult: Almost no trend,
ever, can go on forever. The trick is knowing what will happen to disrupt the
trend, and when it happens.

It's easy to say that there will be a recession in the future of the US and be
correct. It's almost as easy to be correct if we say we'll see one before
2025. But when, exactly? How big? If it was actually easy to predict those
things in detail, they'd be priced into market prices already.

Just look at property all over the country. In some cases, the bubble
deflated, and prices are still pretty low. In others, there was no real
popping of a bubble: A minor dip due to global economic conditions, but prices
are higher than they were 7 years ago. The difficulty comes from predicting
which ones will recover and which ones will not.

If anyone could do this, we'd see them get insanely rich in the financial
markets, but when we compare mutual fund behavior over time, the number of
people that beat the market in any period is no different than random chance.
We ignore the efficient market hypothesis at our own peril.

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matheweis
> If anyone could do this, we'd see them get insanely rich in the financial
> markets

Can you expound on this? I fail to see a scenario where anyone gets rich off
the student loan bubble letting off its air.

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curiously
causation and correlation bias. classic freshman logic.

