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Comment by culi | Hacker News Reader

Here's your link without the surveillance: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8XToPq9lsOM

I'd recommend Leila Philip's Beaverland: How One Weird Rodent Made America. It's a great work of narrative science writing.

I think we deeply underestimate the profound impact beavers had on the landscape in North America. We truly live in a post-beaver geography. The beaver hat fad in Europe was the primary driver of their population going from hundreds of millions to less than 100,000.

https://www.leilaphilip.com/beaverland

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Current North American beaver population is estimated to be in the range of 10 to 15 million.

Yeah they have rebounded a lot and we should celebrate that.

Yes it's heartening to see the rebound but the population reaching as low as 100k will forever place a genetic hurdle on restoration efforts. Not to mention beavers have been found to be highly cultural animals with local nuances in social interactions and even how they build their dams. There are tons of skills that beavers pass down through culture rather than genetics that have already been lost

I don't know about that; 100K is still a pretty big population.

off-topic: I've made a habit of removing all those `si` or `igshid` or `unique_share_id` (thanks airbnb for making it obvious, I guess) and I wish I'd have a "middleware" that removes them when I copy something, but I'm too lazy and it would not be cross-platform.

some apps have gotten sneaky though and made every shared URL an apparently unique one :/

Yeah the best policy is to avoid using a "Share" button as much as possible and always just copy the URL bar. I have a browser extension that strips them automatically too but I don't think it always works. I wish my extension, instead of just stripping it, would mangle it randomly just to add some data poisoning to websites that do this

It's not the same, as it only works on the receiving end, but I use the ClearURLs addon for stripping that out. At least it somewhat helps, and ensures that any URL I copy from my browser doesn't have tracking IDs.

https://github.com/ClearURLs/Addon

> off-topic: I've made a habit of removing all those `si` or `igshid` or `unique_share_id` […]

Also `pp`.

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