[setr]

Then you dont know your western history :-)

There used to be whole towns where you'd get entirely paid in, and shop with, corporate funny money

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Company_scrip

[chrisco255]

I visited one of these ghost towns at an old zinc mine in Arkansas. The town literally popped up to service the zinc mine workers back in 1900-1920ish. Because it was in the middle of nowhere, the company was the only real provider of goods and services. Some good photos:

https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/rush-ghost-town https://encyclopediaofarkansas.net/media/morning-star-zinc-m...

[kalleboo]

At least company scrip was used to buy food/normal goods, albeit at a large markup. "Blizzard bucks" sound completely useless unless you're really into games

[oefrha]

Since you can trade WOW (and many other MMOs’) items for real world cash, I wouldn’t call Blizzard bucks useless. In fact I’ve heard people playing WoW for a living...

Basically, say Blizzard compensates you $20k in Blizzard bucks, and you auction off $20k worth of items at a reduced rate, you end up taking $20k * discount rate from Blizzard’s revenue, roughly speaking.

[Xelbair]

>Since you can trade WOW (and many other MMOs’) items for real world cash, I wouldn’t call Blizzard bucks useless. In fact I’ve heard people playing WoW for a living...

You cannot do that, ToS forbids that, and if you were caught i expect that consequences would be harsher than just a ban.

[masayune]

Yeah you can't do this w/o risk of getting fired. Blizz had an internal affairs division that would track this kind of stuff down.

[oefrha]

Huh that really sucks.

[dqpb]

Not to mention all those people who got paid nothing at all.

[tluyben2]

> hen you dont know your western history

Seems not too many tech people like history: if they did we would not be looping Greenspuns 10th rule derivatives on everything ; nosql, microservices, js, query languages, etc.

[biggy_sauce]

Could you please elaborate?

[tluyben2]

Microservices for instance; companies spend a lot of money to manage microservices to end up with a really bad implementation of Erlang OTP. Bad enough to mostly see they now also created a very bad version of the monolith they should have started with and thus go back to a monolith. Or macroservices as Uber now calls them.

Nosql usually ends up as a really bad version of a rdbms with a query language that is a very botched version of sql. And then we move to postgres as it is actually better in every way.

Javascript was literally (the author wanted to implement scheme but that did not look like Java) a really badly done version of Scheme which had to look like Java. So this is directly Greenspuns 10th rule.

And we can go on: all these things have solid and scientifically sound implementations and yet we reinvent the wheel, badly and then usually drop it or try to reverse the damage by actually thinking about history for a second (wasm).