Nice article, thank you. I've been landed in an SRE role (having been a devops engineer / platform engineer) with an inheritance of various tools I didn't previously know, including Ansible, and this kind of overview is just what I need.
I am amazed at that too! This is (according to the article) defence industry and government jobs, which you'd thought would take these things more seriously.
There's a few things I don't get about this. Are they after primarily the salaries? In which case, the NK worker is going to try and work well enough to keep the job and remain undetected. Or is it for commercial espionage and blackmail? In which they'll be doing little real work but will be stealing information rapidly.
Also, what changed in the US to make the scam more difficult there?
Another bit of ignorance: they refer to 'commons' as if that meant, in English, unrestricted public use or access. It doesn't. A commons is a piece of land with specific usage rights for specific people - e.g. local farmers allowed particular grazing rights. "give the commons back to the public" implies a history which this country has never had.
The way this article reports the campaigners, you'd be forgiven for thinking that there are no existing rights of access in law, and for thinking that private ownership of land necessarily means absolute access restrictions.
This is not just a problem with this specific article; I've seen it numerous times, and it makes me think that this is a consistent pattern of this campaign; the campaigners are either wilfully ignoring the rights which already exist or are themselves woefully ignorant. Either way, they're doing the public a disservice by spreading what looks a lot like misinformation.
It's from an Old English toponym, and those are sometimes quite variable across the country; for example locally in Sheffield any steep hillsides are named 'cliffe' e.g. Attercliffe, Brincliffe.
Maybe? But a few things count against that hypothesis. Elephants are already very mobile animals, so they can simply move away if they don't like the smell; dislike of the smell would, you'd think, drive them to move away rather than remaining with the corpse, moving it around, and trumpeting loudly.
Secondly, do elephants do that with other animal corpses they discover in their travels? We would expect not, though this would need observation and trials to find out for sure.
Thirdly, does this way of burying the corpse make it more difficult for scavenging animals to discover the corpse? If so, that counts for the other hypothesis.
> Take Joyce Higashi, a San Jose homeowner who built an ADU in her backyard. She now rents out her 500-square-foot abode for $3,000 per month to traveling nurses.
That's not scalping, though is it? Scalping is when somebody illicitly buys up a lot of a limited resource (e.g. concert tickets) and then pushes the price up.
What this person has done is to add to the stock of the resource (rentable property), and rent it out at the market price.
I realised a while ago that I dislike the "Show, don't tell" rule; I much prefer writers who allow themselves to tell, to be story-tellers.
A couple of particular examples: Angelica Gordischer's Kalpa Imperial, and all of Susanna Clarke's writing. Both quite storyteller-y, and better for it.
The discoveries that are being made about plant biochemistry (and soil and fungi and so on)and the implications for agriculture remind me a lot of the debates about diet and nutrition.
It keeps on emerging that we have such limited understanding of these very complex dynamic systems, and that all the technologies that have been applied have been based on massive over-simplifications and have accidentally made things worse.
The key is to think about it, not in terms of just the money brought in, but the wider benefits to society: keeping traffic off the roads is a big one.
That is what makes running national infrastructure difficult; it's never entirely obvious how to balance the different factors.
It's true about the trees being felled thousands of yours ago; it's believed to be the same in my local countryside, the Peak.
That claim about half of ancient woodland lost since the 1930s : that's true, but it's referring to what ancient woodland still remained in the 1930s compared to what remains now. Both are very small areas, compared to the amount of land which became forested after the last ice age.
A quick reference I've found; wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blanket_bog) has "In some areas of Europe, the spread of blanket bogs is traced to deforestation by prehistoric cultures.", cited to an article in Nature: Moore, P. D. (1973). The influence of prehistoric cultures upon the initiation and spread of blanket bog in upland Wales. Nature, 241, 350–353.
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