It’s a performance optimization for rendering a large amount of html. If the DOM had all the items in memory it would perform much worse. Thankfully browsers are working on a feature where you can keep the markup in the DOM for things like CTRL-F without hurting performance.
Granted the main reason such a technique is needed is designs that avoid pagination.
We had web pages with big lists and tables in the DOM 20+ years ago, they were fine. The difference is that now we use web frameworks that do work proportional to DOM size many times per second.
Call me a conspiracy theorist, but I think it's all a plane to make it harder for people to save stuff. If the content just stays there after you loaded, you could just save the page as HTML and, if there wasn't a lot of javascript shenanigans, it should save it okay. When you add this element, this doesn't work anymore. I'm pretty sure instagram, for example, does that with the intention of making it harder for people to save profiles.
I am usually just a backend developer, but for a little reporting application that I built, I couldn't get the UI team to do a UI in the short time that I had to build it, so I had it output some basic HTML. About 10000 list items. Rendered imperceptibly fast on my browser.
Then because of $mandate, the report was moved to the team's standard React UI frontend. Now it takes 5 seconds to load and only gives you like 100 items at a time, so Ctrl-F is broken. Also, filter dropdowns somehow did not work until they fixed it, so it appears like the select tag was not fit for their design and they rolled their own.
Pagination is part of it but most of it is simply using inefficient JavaScript frameworks and not learning how the DOM or CSS really work. The maximum number of elements you could have on a phone a decade ago was measured in hundreds of thousands (median) or millions (iPhone), and the hardware & browsers have gotten faster. The problem is that you have had a lot of very turnaround focused developers shoveling out code which uses deeply nested elements, poorly-scoped event handlers, etc. which mean that too many DOM elements are created, unnecessarily touched during updates, and the overall complexity means that on the off chance someone opens their browser’s profiler they won’t see a single obvious problem and will likely proclaim it unfixable and say something like “the DOM is slow”.
Also who would you even send it to? How do you guarantee they receive it? If you do certified mail that is a cost and another thing to take up your time.
True, although I'd rather pay the few dollars for that and the 10 minutes in the post office, than spend endless hours on hold just to be hung up on and start again.
That’s assuming the letter even works in having the subscription cancelled. Regardless of whether or not it should work, I am certainly not confident such a thing would be handled properly. If it isn’t then you are back to customer service or i guess hiring a lawyer.
10 minutes during weekday business hours plus 30 for commute and 20 minutes of standing in line if you go at noon. Also, the discoverability of this workflow is complete dogshit.
None of this is a problem for me, but I fully understand why dishonest businessfolk love to exploit the hell out of these "tiny conditions" and then turn around and pretend they don't understand why they are a big deal.
Tie congress’s pay to the minimum wage (e.g 7 x minimum wage). If they can’t afford to live imagine the large portion of society working making a tiny fraction of what they do.
Congress should also have the same medical insurance that someone on Medicare or Medicaid does. If the coverage isn’t adequate for a senator then it isn’t adequate for a poor or aged person either.
Could someone help explain why a minimum wage exists? I would be hard-pressed to find a job paying less than $15 an hour these days, which is double the minimum wage. Seems like the free market is doing its job?
My understanding is that it is an attempt to balance power between very low skill laborers who have virtually no bargaining power and the businesses that employ them and could attempt to push wages down even farther.
Imagine a small town where people basically either work for the coal mine or the Walmart. The coal mine can't employ everyone, so for everyone else they have to work at Walmart and at whatever terms Walmart dictates. Minimum wage provides a floor on how bad the terms Walmart offers are.
It's also intended to prevent having people who work but can't afford to live (their labor being effectively subsidized by the state in the form of welfare). There's a lively discourse around whether it's effective at that.
You are correct that in some economic circumstances and some levels of minimum wage, prevailing wages will be higher. I think one could argue that if prevailing wages rise above minimum wage, it's a signal that low skill laborers have some level of bargaining power through high demand or unions.
Some states do have a minimum wage around $15/hr, though. Anecdotally, I'm seeing the same as you near me. The prevailing minimum wage seems to be between $15 and $20 an hour; that's what the chain restaurants and groceries around me are offering.
That will likely crash at some point as market conditions change (maybe robots take over, maybe age demographics change, who knows) and minimum wage should be there to be a stopgap on how far those wages can fall.
Given your small town example, it makes it seem like if we are going to have a minimum wage, it should be legislated lower than the Federal Government. As you said, states are moving past the federal minimum wage already, and it is seemingly successful.
It makes some degree of sense for the federal government to have a minimum wage because they have welfare programs. I don't think it's desirable to allow companies to pay wages low enough that the employees qualify for federal welfare.
> As you said, states are moving past the federal minimum wage already, and it is seemingly successful.
Sure, that's basically the current system. The federal government sets an absolute minimum wage, states can set a higher (but now lower) minimum wage, and in some circumstances, cities can set a minimum wage higher than the state.
It works well in concept. I don't think we're great at adjusting the federal minimum wage for states that don't set their own, but that's more a reflection of stagnation in the political system as a whole than an indictment of the minimum wage system.
> In 2022, 78.7 million workers age 16 and older in the United States were paid at hourly rates, representing 55.6 percent of all wage and salary workers. Among those paid by the hour, 141,000 workers earned exactly the prevailing federal minimum wage of $7.25 per hour. About 882,000 workers had wages below the federal minimum. Together, these 1.0 million workers with wages at or below the federal minimum made up 1.3 percent of all hourly paid workers, little changed from 2021. This remains well below the percentage of 13.4 recorded in 1979, when data were first collected on a regular basis. (See table 10.)
It has gotten significantly better, but it's still easy to forget about the other 1%.
Sure, these kind of regulations feel unnecessary at times of high level of employment. But sooner or later there will be another economic downturn and a lot of people out of work.
it would have made more sense to create their own record label than to try to turn a free and open platform like podcasts into a closed platform like they tried with podcasts
That would be Spotify's Direct Distribution Contract, something they also established in 2018, shortly before (or in parallel with) their podcast acquisition strategy.
