DA BONEYARD

notthatkindagay:

A gold farmer in China who plays games and sells virtual currency can earn the same wage and, sometimes, more than might be paid for assembling toys in a factory for 12 hours a day. As a result, this activity has emerged in the past 10 years as an ingenious, though controversial, way for poorer nations to earn money from information and communications technologies and a way for impoverished workers to build digital skills that might be later transferred to other information technology jobs unrelated to game playing.

I’m a nerd, and read a lot of sciencey magazines and whatnot. I read this article on the plane yesterday and it struck me. The fact that up to an estimated $3 billion in real-money trading (RMT) has been transferred to developing countries from Western GAMERS blows my mind. Kudos, developing world.

A gold-farmer in China working 12 hours days 7 days a week can make a significant wage comparable to a factory worker. Multi-player online role playing has now become an industry.

 If you think that’s interesting then the rise of gold farming networks should be pretty weird to you. (I also seem to remember some organized crime involvement in this industry but cannot find anything with five minutes of google-fu.)

From an article on textbooks that rehashes the past ten years of creationists bitching about those liberal pig dogs and their goddamn publishing companies pushing things like evolution:

Battles over textbooks are nothing new, especially in Texas, where bitter skirmishes regularly erupt over everything from sex education to phonics and new math. But never before has the board’s right wing wielded so much power over the writing of the state’s standards.And when it comes to textbooks, what happens in Texas rarely stays in Texas. The reasons for this are economic: Texas is the nation’s second-largest textbook market and one of the few biggies where the state picks what books schools can buy rather than leaving it up to the whims of local districts, which means publishers that get their books approved can count on millions of dollars in sales. As a result, the Lone Star State has outsized influence over the reading material used in classrooms nationwide, since publishers craft their standard textbooks based on the specs of the biggest buyers. As one senior industry executive told me, “Publishers will do whatever it takes to get on the Texas list.”

Until recently, Texas’s influence was balanced to some degree by the more-liberal pull of California, the nation’s largest textbook market. But its economy is in such shambles that California has put off buying new books until at least 2014.