silly goose meekah

  • 13 Posts
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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 22nd, 2023

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  • Elections in the US aren’t really all that fair TBH.

    Researchers at the Brookings Institution agree that the strategic manipulation of our electoral process is largely to blame for the erosion of US democracy in recent years. Brookings says this manipulation takes various forms: the intentional addition of administrative barriers to voting, unfairly drawing electoral maps, the subversion of the election certification and counting process, and the violent coup attempt on January 6, 2021.

    https://blog.ucs.org/liza-gordon-rogers/us-elections-arent-as-free-and-fair-as-they-should-be-heres-how-science-can-help/

    The United States is experiencing two major forms of democratic erosion in its governing institutions:

    • Strategic manipulation of elections. Distinct from “voter fraud,” which is almost non-existent in the United States, election manipulation has become increasingly common and increasingly extreme. Examples include election procedures that make it harder to vote (like inadequate polling facilities) or that reduce the opposing party’s representation (like gerrymandering).
    • Executive aggrandizement. Even a legitimately elected leader can undermine democracy if they eliminate governmental “checks and balances” or consolidate power in unaccountable institutions. The United States has seen substantial expansions of executive power and serious efforts to erode the independence of the civil service. In addition, there are serious questions about the impartiality of the judiciary.

    https://www.brookings.edu/articles/understanding-democratic-decline-in-the-united-states/







  • Having more beautiful and structured URLs. I suppose for those cases it’s more of a preference, and with the tooling I use (.NET) it’s not too difficult to achieve.

    I guess my gripe with your original statement was that I was thinking mostly of state like user login etc. I have to concede it’s not totally garbage for the cases you mentioned.










  • Fair enough, I haven’t given that too much thought myself until now. After playing around with Firefox’s URL cleaning, I realized there are some parameters I want to keep. So, by clean I mean removing all unnecessary parameters in the URL.

    For example, https://youtu.be/jNQXAC9IVRw would become https://youtu.be/jNQXAC9IVRw, but https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jNQXAC9IVRw keeps it’s parameter, because it is necessary.

    I guess replicating the logic for deciding which parameters to keep is not trivial, so the easiest solution is probably just manually pasting links into firefox, and just copying them cleanly from there. Thanks for providing some code, though!