How is this possible. I don't do these virtual races, but seeing emails and fb posts claiming they are selling out seems like a sick joke or some kind of troll.
How is this possible. I don't do these virtual races, but seeing emails and fb posts claiming they are selling out seems like a sick joke or some kind of troll.
I just don't get virtual races. Is it just a matter of running a pre-set distance, timing yourself and then submitting the time? You're still running by yourself, right? And, who verifies whether the distance is accurate? We all know GPS is inaccurate so someone could run a 2.9 5k and claim they set a PR.
This sort of stuff happens all the time under capitalism.
Like how ISPs charge you for different internet speed despite internet is not a consumable product and not limited. They just restrict it if you choose to pay less.
The concept of rent is similar - there's no cost to a landlord to you occupying a property and the asset is not depleted as time is unlimited.
I guess race is a "sell out" when the number of entrants equals the number of participation medals they have.
VRObserver wrote:
We all know GPS is inaccurate so someone could run a 2.9 5k and claim they set a PR.
GPS is usually quite accurate. But also who cares if someone runs a 2.9 5k and claims a PR?
you must enter a username wrote:
GPS is usually quite accurate. But also who cares if someone runs a 2.9 5k and claims a PR?
The next time you line up at a competitive 5k, feel free to start .05 miles back from the start line and see how you feel about GPS accuracy over the course of a race
someone running over a tenth of a mile less and claiming a PR is more insidious than outright cheating, because at least the cheater knows they didn't truly earn what they achieved
Virtual race across Tennessee has 25,000 registered at $60 a pop... Race Director is clearing over $1M USD for his idea.
appleswan wrote:
This sort of stuff happens all the time under capitalism.
Like how ISPs charge you for different internet speed despite internet is not a consumable product and not limited. They just restrict it if you choose to pay less.
The concept of rent is similar - there's no cost to a landlord to you occupying a property and the asset is not depleted as time is unlimited.
I found the moran. Internet speed is not limited? There's no cost to a landlord? To say appleswan does not understand the world around him or her would probably be a massive understatement.
I understand how a virtual race could "sell out." They ordered a fixed number of shirts, medals, etc. at a fixed cost, and they sell exactly the number of "registrations" for which they have merchandise. What they're really doing is selling an expensive tee shirt and medal to chubby ladies who need acknowledgement that they exercise so that they can convince themselves that they live a healthy lifestyle. This allows them to elude guilt despite overeating and guzzling wine. The "race," the distance, the time, and the accuracy are just as unimportant to most people in a virtual race as they are to those people at a regular race. They just want the merchandise to acknowledge that they must be a healthy person.
What would really be a crazy good business would be if they could convince people to continue registering for the race with the understanding that they would not get a tee shirt or medal because they signed up too late. Then those registrations would be extremely profitable.
Jeljo wrote:
Virtual race across Tennessee has 25,000 registered at $60 a pop... Race Director is clearing over $1M USD for his idea.
What event is this?
its obvious you knoww wrote:
you must enter a username wrote:
GPS is usually quite accurate. But also who cares if someone runs a 2.9 5k and claims a PR?
The next time you line up at a competitive 5k, feel free to start .05 miles back from the start line and see how you feel about GPS accuracy over the course of a race
someone running over a tenth of a mile less and claiming a PR is more insidious than outright cheating, because at least the cheater knows they didn't truly earn what they achieved
Personally I would have no problem with thinking of a gps distance as a PR - I'm sufficiently old and slow that nobody cares about my PRs other than me. Like you say - you don't really know whether it's measured long or short, so it's not like you're actively trying to cheat it.
It's obviously limited in the sense there is a top speed but that isn't what I'm referring to.
Why do you have a data cap on your smartphone? Who are you depriving of resources if you decide to download 100 films over a month? There is no scarcity of internet like there is gas or water.
It seems absurd to have a limit on a virtual race what you're referring to is a limit on merch and they've tied to two together to create artificial scarcity.
My pronouns are he/him btw
There is absolutely a finite cost and limit to "data" that is derived from the finite limit of resourses like oil and water that you suggest. Data centers are massive computer systems that enable transmission and storage (the "data" that you are referring to is the transmission) of data. The cost to run and cool those computers is a real limitation and consumes energy.
It does seem absurd to create an artificial scarcity and "sell out" a virtual race. They could always just take more registrants, allow them to do their thing, and send the merchandise later after they produced more tee shirts and medals. I don't think that the scarcity encourages people to register anyway. I think that people are happy to sign up to be a part of something that thousands of other people signed up for. If anything, it may alleviate their guilt and give them the comfort of camaraderie knowing so many other people also paid to go for a run alone and get mailed a tee shirt for doing it.
Heck, there is no reason that a virtual race should have an end date. If I were a "virtual race director," I wouldn't care how far you ran, how long it took you, or what date you did it. If you want to buy a tee shirt and medal from me and be a happily paying customer, I would oblige. I would keep the registration open until people stop signing up at a rate fast enough to justify the cost of printing more tee shirts.
“Selling out” - I don’t think that phrase means what you think it means.
Race in real races.
appleswan wrote:
It's obviously limited in the sense there is a top speed but that isn't what I'm referring to.
Why do you have a data cap on your smartphone? Who are you depriving of resources if you decide to download 100 films over a month? There is no scarcity of internet like there is gas or water.
Just stop talking. The medium is finite. You can only pass 1Gbps down a 1Gbps cable (what most data centers use for access) due to the properties of electrical currents or fiber optics inherent in the type of medium used. When a single person consumes all the bandwidth on said cable, no additional traffic can pass. Thus you are depriving someone else from using that bandwidth and there is scarcity. The only solution ISPs have is to keep adding more expensive cables and switching equipment *or* enforce data caps.
This isn't just a problem for big, bad ISP companies either. You see this same phenomena yourself if you try to do something like run many WiFi cameras over home WiFi or if you live in an apartment building with many WiFi networks using the same frequency. Throughout will slow to a crawl. And that isn't even physical media. It's just air waves, right? No scarcity to air waves, right.....?
So virtual races have physical medals and shirts too? Why? There is no event! Are there people who can't time trial 13.1 miles without a medal? Look, just set an alarm, wake up early, and run your normal long run at race effort.
There were some events originally scheduled that were giving out the medals and shirts regardless of whether they did the virtual race option or not. But even before that there was a surge in virtual races, there seemed to be a market by those who were typically in the bottom half of race results who needed to validate their runs with a medal to make up for their lack of effort.
appleswan wrote:
It's obviously limited in the sense there is a top speed but that isn't what I'm referring to.
Why do you have a data cap on your smartphone? Who are you depriving of resources if you decide to download 100 films over a month? There is no scarcity of internet like there is gas or water.
You know absolutely nothing about communications technology.
It's genuinely not my area of expertize so could you please critique this for me. I'm willing to concede some ground and say maybe I shouldn't have been so loose with using infinite, scarcity and limited interchangeably.
https://techcrunch.com/2020/03/12/coronavirus-could-force-isps-to-abandon-data-caps-forever/
Well I can't exactly explain every detail about how the internet works in a forum post. So any explanation I give would necessarily have to be oversimplified and incomplete. Pretty much everyone connects to the internet through their ISP using a router that allows them to share their internet connection between multiple devices in their home. Let's consider an example where the router has a 100Mbps connection to the internet through an ISP, and the router also has 100Mbps connections to four devices in the home each belonging to a member of a four-person family. Each family member has the potential to download a file from the internet at 100Mbps, but if all four of them try to download a file at the same time they must share the 100Mbps connection from the router to the ISP even though they all have a 100Mbps connection to the router. Just because they all have a 100Mbps connection to the router doesn't mean they can magically get 400Mbps through the 100Mbps connection from the router to the ISP. Understand?
Basically the entire internet is like this on a much larger scale. If every single customer of your ISP all decided to download a large file at the exact same time, your ISP would not have enough bandwidth supply everyone with the advertised speed simultaneously. And it would be extremely expensive and wasteful for them to build a network with that much capacity, because the typical usage is orders of magnitude lower than the sum of each user's maximum bandwidth. It would be like if your transportation department decided to size their roads based on the assumption that every single person in your city needs to be able to drive on that road at the same time.
If you want to debate the reasonableness of any specific cap, then that depends on a number of variables that you probably don't have access to. There are a lot of factors that you probably aren't considering. For example, network capacity is not uniform, and it may not be practical for ISPs to fine-tune their cap policies to a very granular level. In other words, there may be practical reasons why they may have to apply a single policy to an entire city even though the network capacity varies from neighborhood to neighborhood. This is just one example of many that I could list. On the other hand it very well could be true that with more and more people streaming netflix regularly, ISPs have been continuously upgrading their network capacity to the point that caps that may have been perfectly reasonable in the past are overly conservative now. But this is a generalization that may be true in some cases and not true in other cases due to varying factors in specific areas for example. To state categorically that caps are unreasonable without knowing all the relevant details is ignorant.
sink wrote:
Jeljo wrote:
Virtual race across Tennessee has 25,000 registered at $60 a pop... Race Director is clearing over $1M USD for his idea.
What event is this?
Two of the biggest RD scammers are organizing this:
https://runsignup.com/Race/TN/Memphis/TheGreatVirtualRaceAcrossTennessee1000K