VAT – Ciaran Laval

The Taxman’s taken all my dough and left me in my stately home, lazing on a sunny afternoon.

In a pleasing but rather bizarre announcement, Linden Lab have blogged; Cheaper Monthly Premium & the End of VAT Charges. First of all let’s take a look at those cheaper monthly premium charges :

Now, we’re reducing the standard cost of a monthly Premium subscription to just $9.50 a month. Enjoy all the benefits of Premium Membership for less!

The price of a monthly Second Life premium membership has been reduced by 45 cents a month, down fro $9.95 to $9.50. The quarterly plan remains $22.50 for three months and the yearly plan remains $72.00 a year.

On a month by month comparison the quarterly plan works out at $7.50 a month and the yearly plan works out at just $6.00 a month, so they both offer better value than a regular monthly plan but some people prefer a monthly fee, there’s a good choice for different use cases here. The rates and other Second Life related costs can be found here.

Premium Membership in Second Life offers some perks, including :

A personal and private home or free 512m tier if you want to buy a plot of mainland.
Expanded support, including Live Chat.
Exclusive Experience: Magellan’s Grid Hunt.
Exclusive Activites: Dune Buggy Racing in Racer’s Gulch.

For more details on Premium Membership perks in Second Life, go here.

Where the blog post gets bizarre is with the next part of the announcement :

We will also no longer charge VAT for Premium subscriptions. If you live in a region where VAT applies, this means an effective savings in some countries of more than 20% below what you would have previously paid!

I’m not sure what exactly Linden Lab mean by this. Are they really saying the aren’t charging VAT or are they actually absorbing the VAT? Let’s go into speculation mode and look at a couple of scenarios.

Continue reading “Linden Lab Reduce Cost Of Monthly Premium Membership For Second Life And End VAT Charges On All Premium Plans”

So my ususal Monday trick of listening to Digital Human on BBC Radio 4 for blog inspiration failed this week because they were talking about Cyborgs, transhumanism and whether we are all subsconsciously becoming Cyborgs and try as I did, I couldn’t find an angle to get to Second Life from that material, a jolly good listen however.

So I decided, after urgings, to investigate e-books. This was a tale of woe, first of all I tried to get an e-book from Waterstones. However to read e-books on the PC I needed to download Adobe Digital Editions, this was a breeze and now I was cooking on gas, all I needed to do was remember my Adobe password and I could install my soon to be purchased e-book on different mediums, if I didn’t register, I’d only be able to read it on my PC. At this point things went tits up, I couldn’t remember my password. Aha, there’s a password reset request and sure enough, I was informed an email was on its way. Several hours later and I’m still waiting.

So instead I went to Amazon, installed their Kindle for PC reader, realised I’d forgotten my Amazon password… oh heck but this time a password reset request actually worked. The only annoying thing left was having to pay VAT on my e-book, in the UK we don’t pay VAT on physical books but an e-book is considered an electronic service, not a book, even though it is a book, I’ll save that rant for another day, although Remember Remember, the fifth of November is an ideal day for a rant about The Government! The real moral of this story is to remember your passwords.

Then I read a little and decided to quickly take a look at the Second Life storytelling scene and popped to the Seanchai Library.

Continue reading “Books And Libraries”