New York City hiring top rat killer
a002-oom03.nyc.gov
a002-oom03.nyc.gov
Or like teams of trained dogs.
Ratting dogs are certainly a thing, but it’s probably unsafe to release a bunch of dogs into the sewers.
If your problem is hundreds of mice, get terriers. They just kill and move on, they don't play with the mouse or eat it.
Makes one feel fascinated and troubled at the same time.
Were they digging in some specific place they knew would have an especially high rat concentration (a nesting area perhaps?) or is the whole large field that dense with rats and that's just where they happened to be working at the moment?
We set up some owl shelters and raptor poles. Snakes, cats, raptors are all predators. All of them unavailable in cities where rats don’t just survive, they thrive!
Gophers are a big problem. As it’s an organic farm, pest control options are limited. A few years ago, someone came to test their sonic gopher eradication system. Using sound waves. I don’t know if that would work for other rodents.
Squirrels are just rats with a bushier prettier tail. We love squirrels. Weird.
(There are other issues as well, like the cats destroying local bird populations and getting sick when they kill poisoned rats.)
A bobcat on the otherhand... Depends how much you want to replace one animal with another.
yeah, basically treat the root cause rather than symptoms of the problem. Hiring more rat killers is like taking pain killers instead of fixing whatever injury is causing the pain.
Realistically this problem would require some sort of position that has temporary authority across multiple departments where systematic changes need to be made to actually solve the problem. Instead you get more rat killers as a band aid solution
I imagine simply requiring bins/dumpsters would absolutely devastate the rat populations.
[1]: https://nypost.com/2021/08/21/raccoons-terrorize-bronx-nypd-...
video of some people running away from racoons
Naw, they've tested them in Toronto: none had rabbies since 1997. A sick raccoon usually has distemper, which you have nothing to worry about as a human. It's the 2-3% of bats with rabies you have to worry about.
https://www.toronto.ca/community-people/health-wellness-care...
> Try to get between a raccoon and it's trash
Why would I do that?
Many people have spent countless hours exposed to them and never gotten sick, and very few people get rabies from bats at all, so the risk appears very low. I suppose the people around them the most follow certain safety precautions that regular people don’t.
Although cases are exceedingly rare (1-3 per year in the USA I think?), evidently that shoots up occasionally: https://www.cdc.gov/media/releases/2022/p0106-human-rabies.h...
That link does make 5 cases up from 0 seem like a big deal, but… A chunk of that time was during quarantine time, and dropping from 1-3 to 0 isn’t so profound (though it’s far preferable, of course). M
In any case, I wouldn’t wish rabies on anyone. I suppose I just wish we were less afraid of bats and able to help them flourish. Apart from rabies, they are incredible animals that do a lot of good for their ecosystems.
Bats are amazing but the way to let them flourish is to leave them alone and maximize conservation. Humans should not be commingling with bats (or even researching them as nonchalantly as we have been) until we get MUCH better at biomedical engineering and immunotherapy.
I agree about staying away from bats. I mean, if there’s a risk of rabies at all, I don’t want to go near a single one of them. But like you say, letting them be and conserving (or even restoring) their habitats would go a long way in supporting them. Ideally there would be no human interaction element.
I suppose people worry that if bats flourish, we will encounter them more often. I’m not sure how likely that is at various scales. Say their populations double, would we see twice as many bats and see a doubling of rabies cases? I’m not sure.
Because you're trying to throw away your own trash, in my case. I don't even bother taking it out at night anymore, there are raccoons there half the time. And they do not respond well to me getting anywhere near that trash can.
They’re curious about me, and as long as I don’t stare or move too quickly, they just dig in my garden (they mostly seem to eat these large beetle grubs) and wrestle each other.
I wouldn’t interact with them, but I’m glad they aren’t afraid of me anymore. Years ago I accidentally cornered one in my shop and it let out the most terrifying guttural noise I’ve ever heard from such a small body. These days I have a feeling they would be uncomfortable but not in attack mode. I was about 5 feet from one while putting trash in my bin a few weeks back and it just watched me from around the corner of my shed. When I moved here, I either wouldn’t have been given the chance to see it there or it would have scrambled up a tree.
Overall I think they’re pretty laid back animals, but we tend to scare the hell out of them.
Watching the babies wrestle in the grass is a real joy. It’s also incredible fascinating to watch they way their hands work. They aren’t as dexterous as us, or perhaps I should say not as generally so, but they have a kind of dexterity that is almost entrancing at times. There is a lot of spatial awareness and capability in their movements.
As long as they aren’t in my house, shed, or shop, then whatever. I’m happy to share some space. But yeah, definitely not pet material for me.
Come to think of it, I get depressed from being indoors too much.
What NYC needs is to overturn Ghouliani's ban on ferrets and release a ton into the subways. I'll also take reintroduction of least weasels or stoats. Unlike the omnivore raccoon, ferrets are an obligate carnivore. There's something like a 2500 year history of using ferrets to hunt for rats. One of a ton of old sources on it: https://www.gutenberg.org/files/42305/42305-h/42305-h.htm
EDIT: More on NYC's history with ferrets and the ban, https://observer.com/2015/01/new-yorks-most-misunderstood-ma...
Worked out great! /s
It accumulates fast.
Seems unlikely that trash is the only source of food for the rat population, too. Or that dumpsters or bins magically keep out the rats from the trash. Rats can be crafty!
Shinjuku: 50000/mi2
Hong Kong island: 91500/mi2
kowloon: 111450/mi2
The point is that Manhattan isn't particularly dense when compared to other world-class cities major population centers, and these other places have solved the problem of trash collection. NYC exceptionalism seems to be the fall-back explanation for why it "can't be done"....but to me it fails under further inspection....literally fails the smell test :)
Finally, you're correct that the trash bins aren't a panacea, but not allowing a literal rat buffet to fester on the sidewalks 3 nights a week is a good first step.
Some are emptied on a schedule while others send a signal when they are full. It would also take a similar amount of time to pickup a long street full of rolling steel containers holding around the same amount of trash.
At ~USD 1.70 for one 35L bag people also recycle a lot.
[1] https://www.zh.ch/content/dam/zhweb/bilder-dokumente/themen/...
In theory, the city should own the physical fiber and be able to rent it out to anyone who wants to offer last mile service...
I think the issue is just basic cleanliness. NYC doesn't have it. There's trash everywhere, so that breeds rats.
will take probably 100 years or so
NY has simply learned to accept filth.
But it’s probably too crowded I dunno. Maybe people should start eating the rats… lol
Honestly, I got no problems with the rats. They're kinda cute actually.
Twenty years ago, I knew someone who worked for one of the large, upscale department stores, and she said they spent a lot of money and effort to try to control the rats in their elegant but old and porous building—which, like most department stores here, had many food shops in the basement.
In some European cities an area the size of a parking space is a few chutes into an underground dumpster. It moves the trash (and the rats looking for it) out of sight.
Yeah, I know it can be an unpopular opinion, but I've always found them adorable, and after having gerbils in high school it's hard for me not to just think of bigger versions of them (obviously they do have other appearance differences, like the tail having less hair and the snout being more pronounced, but the way they move and act is surprisingly reminiscent of my past pets). Don't get me wrong, I'm not going to try to pet them like I would a domesticated pet rat, but they mostly just hang out in the background and don't seem to have any more desire to approach people than people have to approach them. I suspect that there are public health reasons for wanting to curtail the population, but people seem so disproportionately disgusted by them compared to other public health hazards that it's hard for me not to wonder if the political desire to get rid of them is influenced by that.
Wait, are you the one posting all these pro-rat posters? [1]
:)
They have all the money & this part of the city was literally planned IIRC. But yeah, no working sewage.
No, wrong. So wrong. As I’m sure you can already see, it’s far easier to just leave your trash on the street than to take a trip to the city-ordained liquor stores to buy the approved bags. And with the bags being tiny and flimsy you don’t have much of an option for anything larger to get tossed. Got a big pillow? A dirty paint bucket? A 2x4? Just leave that anywhere. It was honestly one of the dirtiest places I’ve ever lived.
The difference is, if you leave garbage without the right bag/on the street your neighbours are going to dump it back on your front door.
Larger item dumping is still a problem though. Some places issues coupons for a certain number of trips to the dump/year for local residents that can help.
It's a natural consequence of American individualism.
Rotterdam, the Netherlands: if you leave a trash bag on the street, inspectors will go through the trash to find identifiable information. The fine is 300+ EUR.
The system pays for itself.
Edit: I looked it up, they've changed it to a three-strike system. 125/250 for the first two; your choice of 500 or 3 days community service (cleaning up litter) on the third strike.
American cities generally have more of these problems than the burbs so this line of reasoning doesn't work irl.
Also you just haven't seen those fines. Doesn't matter what your sense of community is, once dem fines start rolling in you will NOT litter.
For European city dwellers, "where you live" and a sense of "ownership" extends far beyond the walls of your apartment/home - to incorporate your neighborhood to some extent.
For a lot of US folks in cities, this doesn't seem to be the case.
At least, that's what I got from the post.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/sports/sportskind/2022/11/28/...
In this case, anyway. It's actually pretty difficult to get rid of some things, so people can build up a lot of junk at home - Marie Kondo's books in Japan actually have extra sections on how to get rid of it.
This is made up gibberish IMO, and it is the real, actual problem. No, you won't get shot.
America ... land of submit to the imagined bully.
(How else can this concept be viewed?)
The legal basis for that theory, "stand your ground laws", are suspected to lead to ~700 additional shooting killings each year [1].
In a state with these laws on the book, any neighbor's land has to be viewed as potentially deadly hostile.
[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/02/21/stand-your-...
They also do not make it legal for you to pursue someone either.
They have to do with retreating from an assault.
Again, this is just another excuse, and part of the problem. The more Americans view interaction through this lens, the worse they are for it.
Literally people have died thanks to these laws because of trigger-happy arseholes thinking they're backed by these laws, even if there have been verdicts to the contrary like [1].
The problem is: there are way too many guns in circulation in the US, there are way too many vaguely written (or titled) laws that seem to allow this kind of use, and it sends shockwaves through the country regularly. Hell, it even has an impact on policing because police legitimately have to fear getting shot over as benign interactions as traffic stops [2][3], with the result of outright homicides by cops in return [4].
I'm European and hell no I won't ever visit the US until y'all have your gun problems resolved (and your border control under control instead of employing rapists and other goons with a license to search your electronic devices, but that's another topic).
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/24/us/michael-drejka-stand-y...
[2] https://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/news/public-safety/stor...
[3] https://www.police1.com/officer-safety/articles/ga-officer-s...
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killing_of_Philando_Castile
Made me think of this, a story about neighbors killing each other over perceived trash dumping offenses. America is big enough you can't say it won't happen
Have you even traveled much across this huge and deeply diverse country? Or do you just stereotype and generalize by pulling assumptions out of thin air?
There are also many, many very clean communities in the United States, and many people or groups of people who despite loving their personal freedoms and individualism, also take community spirit very seriously in many ways. The country has been famous for this for centuries.
Goddam how simplistic some of the U.S bashing on this site can be, much of it based on incredible levels of ignorance and caricaturesque notions from people who don't even live in the country. Many of them Europeans too, who should know a bit better about avoiding stupid stereotypes and simplistic depictions of complex cultures.
Also, another major myth of the U.S is that social safety nets don't exist. They're not as well woven as they are in many developed countries, but they're very present and heavily funded. In fact, the single largest annual U.S federal budgetary outlay, costing trillions per year is the whole range of social support programs managed by its government (see link below).
What's more, keep in mind that managing such a thing is much harder in a country of 320 million people than it is in your average European state, of which none have a population of over 90 million (Russia excluded). The U.S social safety net could be much better, especially if spending on other things were discounted, but it's not absent or even close to it.
Also, I partly exclude military spending, because though this viewpoint won't be popular at all here, the colossal U.S defense budget works as a sort of (very flawed) global safety net for many other countries in their relations with certain neighbors.
Sure, but this can be summarised as:
It’s great that people donate tens of thousands of dollars to buy a paralysed child a wheelchair. At the same time, it’s a shame that they have to.
Is this post a travel ad?
Do we pretend cities are overwhelmingly clean just because places like Dallas also exist? Are people supposed to first take selfies in NY and Philly, in Chicago, SF, LA, and Phoenix, to be permitted to say they're dirty?
Maybe on average it's not so bad, but "this place is diverse therefore the opposite is true" is worse than anecdata.
> Goddam how simplistic some of the U.S bashing on this site can be,
Nobody is bashing the states. And nobody said American individualism is all bad.
> Or do you just stereotype and generalize by pulling assumptions out of thin air?
Is individualism -> not my problem really a bad explanation? Even when people to try to explain why their hometown in the US is clean it usually starts with "no walled enclaves here/people don't live in little castles".
I think you might taking issue with the assumption that American cities are dirty in the first place, not my attempt at explaining it? It's hard to tell since most of your post is you being upset with me, making accusations, very little substance.
This is an obvious strawman. The point is "this place is diverse, so any widely general statement about it is likely to be false".
Excuse me for not being most charitable trying to extract meaning beyond that.
It states that witnesses reported him putting the box of his new LG tv, in with the paper rubbish.
It then states that a subsequent investigation proved, that it was indeed his LG cardboard box, with, o horror, the styrofoam packaging still inside! Don't laugh, it's a crime.
It concludes by politely offering a close to a 1000 CHF fine, lest he'd like to discuss the matter in front of a judge.
That's really harsh, and to think that at some point I really wanted to emigrate there, not anymore, I guess.
What happens to the people who barely scrap by but who receive this type of fines?
But, as someone else pointed out bellow, supposedly the judge also looks at the person's income, and, hopefully, the fine is commensurate with said person's income (i.e. not really reaching 1000 CHF).
It is really not that hard.
And the fine is high, but if you don't enforce rules, the rules become meaningless and then for example the recycled paper worthless, because there is too much plastic in them.
Edit: but to be clear, I would not call the police on someone who did not do proper recycling. I would simply tell them directly.
You never do it again, that's for sure. Switzerland is a very fine-heavy society. Sounds like a bit more research before developing that wish would have been beneficial for you... good for you that you didn't follow that wish.
Yeah, I realise I dodged a bullet.
We did visit Switzerland and one of the main no-no-s for me was when I saw that the authorities can enter your house to check on you almost at will, if you live in Government-subsidised housing, that is. I did grow up in a Communist dictatorship, where all the housing was basically subsidised, and we didn't have to put up with crazy intruding stuff like that. But it is a very clean country, I'll give the Swiss that.
Really it isn't that big of a problem. A judge would likely look at your income but if you want to compare there are better/worse things to look at, like healthcare might be one. It is after all avoidable by just recycling unlike needing healthcare.
In the trash room of your apartment building the bins are usually extremely clearly labelled, and plentiful.
The reason Switzerland is so clean and nice is because there are a set of ground rules for the benefit of everyone that are rigorously enforced.
Total aside, just FYI it's 'on par with'; in this usage 'par' comes directly from Latin without passing French, where 'par' is not about equality. I think the French equivalent would be 'égal à'.
The answer is, as you have, severe enforcement or provision of an affordable alternative.
I have the most amazing garbage collection. No litter, no dumping, the trash is picked up and taken care of.
1. The cost of the trash bags relative to median income in some neighborhoods was too high. When a 5 pack of bags is $9 and you earn $7.25/hour before taxes, it is suddenly not that easy to justify doing the right thing when the free thing is possible.
2. People lived in apartment buildings and multi family homes so there is no easy identification of who exactly leaves a car battery or a mattress on the sidewalk at 3am. Having cops watch all the streets all the time for this wouldn’t work and neighbors don’t want to bother watching each other.
3. Because people didn’t earn that much relative to cost of living, high fines would just throw poor people in jail while those who can afford the bags can just buy the bags. So you’d still have trash on the streets but also cause people who can least afford it to lose their jobs by making them miss work.
4. Minor point but where you buy the bags matters. It was highly inconvenient that you couldn’t buy them at grocery stores. Instead you had to literally go out of your way to go to sketchy convenience stores and liquor stores instead.
Plenty of people used the bags but there were enough who didn’t that it made the city dirty. And once you get used to seeing trash on the street you are a lot less likely to think twice about contributing to it yourself.
over the past few years some changes were made. 1. a garbage truck ACTAULLY knocks on your door every morning, rain or snow and collects your home garbage. what used to happen was people earlier would fill their dustbins and once they were full, would take it outside to the nearest electric pole and just dump it there. stray dogs, straw cows would have a feast....
Now, the municipality took measures by giving garbage bins to everyone (for some tiny amount) and the garbage truck would take the days worth. that and the garbage collectors would double as street stray pickers so during their rounds if they found any random garbage, they would collect as they went. then they would manually sweep the streets every other day.
markets and other stuff, there is an informal "rag pickers" who take away business packing and other stuff because it is consistent and they get some income so that doesn't go to the streets. the municipality then goes around at night and does a manual sweep, every single day.
NO-ONE buys trash bags here. It is JUST TOO expensive like you said.
there is one part of the problem that still remains. Our city/region is still developing so there is constant constructions going on EVERYWHERE. the construction related wastage is neglected somewhat and people go at night and dump it here and there but otherwise i can safely say our city is MUCH MUCH cleaner than it was 5 years ago.
one of the good steps was the mandatory municipality fees which is only a few hundred bucks in local currency and that has helped a lot (plus the employees of the municipality nag people about leaving trash which helped in its own way)
Dog shit on the street? I never heard of anyone being fined for it.
Dumping/litter? Nope, no enforcement.
I don't know what it is. Absolute, profound, laziness? The gardai are useless. Though I remember when I registered to vote at the Garda station (I had just been naturalised) the officer told me "whatever you do don't vote for the Green Party" (explains some of the above I suppose)
I think of myself as left but I must admit I'd be really interested in a politician who wanted to actually enforce the law.
Physical assaults are really poorly handled by the courts.
For violent crimes, they even allow alcohol or drugs as a mitigating factor, and rarely follow up on the character references. Amusingly, for nonviolent crimes they are much stricter.
Worse - self defense is next to impossible. You can't own pepper spray or anything like that, and if you fight back you can also end up in the dock for assault.
> You can blatantly violate GDPR and the Irish DPC will look the other way.
The DPC is (deliberately) chronically underfunded. Some suspect this is to keep the country a friendly location for certain multinational companies.
> You can plop a couple mobile homes on to your land and nobody will do anything.
That doesn't violate the letter of the (backwards) planning laws.
> You can break any and all environmental laws
Enforcement of those is left to councils, who often are the ones breaking said laws (specifically, destroying habitats).
As for turf cutting, those laws were poorly thought out and likely will play a big part in the next election in rural areas.
Banning commercial harvesting is undeniably a good thing, but the hard and fast attempt to ban cutting for personal use has not been well received, especially in the current climate with regards energy.
> The gardai are useless.
Yes, they seem to have their priorities backwards a lot of the time. They are excellent at pursuing cannabis users and road traffic offenses, but pretty rubbish at everything else.
The easy out politically is to call for more Gardai to be recruited, but numbers aren't the real problem - quality and distribution are.
> the officer told me "whatever you do don't vote for the Green Party"
The Greens here aren't well liked for many reasons around the country - largely when they come up with policies, they ignore the objective reality of life outside Dublin, and tend to go right towards taxing the bollix out of you or banning things without providing an alternative. See also: turf.
Take for example, public transport. Outside urban areas, it may as well not exist. However the Greens won't advocate for expanded public transit in rural (or even commuter areas outside Dublin) because there is "no demand" and "everyone there will just drive anyway".
They are also entirely opposed to nuclear power, which is unfortunate.
They are often referred to as "Fine Gael on bikes" for a reason.
> I'd be really interested in a politician who wanted to actually enforce the law.
This would require systemic change of the Gardai. FF, FG, and the Greens have no interest in this.
It would also require probably some changes to the courts...
But sure. Its grand like.
I'm a green voter in Offaly, incidentally, and I ride my bike to the train (_some_ public transport exists out here!) and find a lot of people expect the greens to just give them free Teslas or something.
The officer not liking the greens on a personal level is fine. Telling someone not to vote for them, though, is appallingly unprofessional.
We chatted with the gardai because the neighbours (the ones with the multiple mobile homes who, for that matter, built their whole house without planning, but it's OK because all 17 of them will come and scream at any council worker who talks to them) left a dead crow in a bag by our house and one of them couldn't get why we might be freaked out by this.
https://www.clickondetroit.com/news/local/2022/08/16/residen...
But the reality is, the dump which has disposal standards costs money, so let's drop trash in pristine wilderness because we won't get caught.
You might not be able to throw out bags of household trash, for example. They also usually don't take certain kinds of waste like old tires, construction debris, appliances, paint, batteries, etc.
So people just dump it wherever they find empty lots.
Which is why salvaging is discouraged.
It's an important part of local culture cause all the old people like hanging out and hyucking it up together but I've got a TODO item to map public vehicle / pedestrian collision data against local trash pickup times to see how often scooters or cars are taking out the elderly that are walking into a second lane of traffic because the sidewalk is packed with people holding trash bags and the first lane is taken up by a trash truck. Bonus points if the second lane also had a slow moving trash motorcycle (some kind of separate private trash pickup entity I don't yet understand) that decided to simply park adjacent to the trash truck and directly in traffic.
Anyway plus side yeah in Taipei there isn't a rat problem like new york, so I guess in some ways it kinda works, definitely not ideal imo though. I don't think trash bins would work either here though, the alleys are too small, the road system too... improvised.
There is no country on earth with no crime. All countries on earth thus have authorities looking the other way on crime. All societies on earth are accepting of crime.
See the absurdity? Thus I think your post is over generalizing.
EDIT: I'm realizing that you might be a person who would make arguments about "personal responsibility" that consider nothing about environment and instead place wholesale blanket judgements on people for situations they find themselves in. Stop me if I'm extrapolating too far and being unfair, but when seeing any overweight person, would you think to yourself, "that person is accepting of their weight" ?
One police patrol car(or a camera) and one serious fine would stop it. And it did indeed stop most of it. It used to be common, but is not anymore here in germany, because people like me really get upset about that shit and so there is that anger energy that makes the institutions act.
If no one cares, than the dumbsters would just grow again.
As you can see, the mountains are snaked with literally hundreds of kilometers of such roads, all within 30 minute driving distance from taipei.
You believe this can be policed with one car still?
You accuse us of not caring?
Here, in Portugal, you can dump up to certain weight for free but you end up paying 30-40 Euros for a full van, for example. As a result people just dump garbage anywhere out of sight, specially rubble and other construction garbage. I find it shortsighted as the council then spends a lot of money cleaning up those places.
Much easier to drive to a remote location when it's dark and dump it with 99% chance of getting away with it.
As they say, the problem with incentives is that they work.
Instead, you should tax the consumption, and pay people who dispose of trash.
The bucketed glass, boxed paper, and plastic in a sack (one hundred each of which cost nothing ie €0.00, we just sign for them at the town hall, or - rather conveniently - a local bar) having been put out on a Monday evening are gone by 0800. These removals all cost about €180pa.
The larger bi-weekly bins are generally emptied by 1000, and we are billed by weight. As a single resident i get a hell of a discount on the total year, but i have to use the bin min 4 times a year. I often end up borrowing rubbish from my neighbours, just to keep my numbers up.
We also have a local dump for when house cleaning, much stuff, electronics, poisons etc. That's included in the $180 and can be used whenever open, as often as you like and you can stil take plastic, glass and paper there.
All i 'miss' is a large-item collection service, that may exist - I've just never asked, as I've never needed it.
When the system was introduced, about 15 years ago, people were upset that the big dumpsters were taken away and cats etc would rip open the bags, and the rubbish in the street would be unsightly.
I really don't think anyone in the whole city would go back to the dumpster ways (though there are dumpsters strategically around - several many for where tourists are (regularly emptied smaller bins are gathered together).
But I know the feeling of being unaware of such details... Renovations and furnishing produces huge amounts of cardboard trash. Took us a half year and many car trips to the local recycling company to realize that our neighbors just put their huge cardboard boxes next to their bin on pick up day! Insert Picard facepalm At least the recycler takes paper/cardboard for free, and is not too far away.
I understand it is difficult to raise taxes for this if they were not there in the first place. Aluminum collection, which has some value, could subsidize part of the tax. The other could come from some tax on real estate, since waste is supposedly linked to people (I know in Germany I pay for building trash collection).
With such prime real estate, it might be a problem to find the space officially (those trash bags are somewhere outside right now). Idk, maybe rats are part of Gotham city for now.
There are rules to this, if garbage was left on the sidewalk everyday at all hours of the day then every block would have would lined up with garbage on the street.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/oct/15/urban-fo...
This is what the new trash receptacles look like that businesses will be required to use: https://citibin.com/
The building next door has dumpsters... I see rats running back and forth to them.
This is the unofficial city byline: "New York City - where the rats always win."
This is currently a big issue in my city. Efforts are focusing on extermination only but since they can never get all of them it keeps making the problem worse in tbe areas of concentration.
Kind of like with weeds. Go ahead and pull them out, but as long as there are a few or some seeds remaining and a whole whack of substrate to grow in… They will be back in a hurry.
The rats can’t live there if food isn’t so readily available. I’ve seen the terrifying videos of them eating each other, but presumably even that could only last so long. Poorly managed waste seems to be a huge factor in this, and rats on a symptom.
You increase frequency of trash pick up 5x at the same staff levels. Rats be damned.
Also seems like a constrained enough environment that you wouldn't get mired in autonomous driving corner case hell. It would be small bike sized vehicles driving in bike lanes.
Mind you I’m not an engineer at all, I just play one on the weekend. But really, some seemingly trivial stuff can become really complicated in a hurry. I can see automated trash pickup accidentally disposing of kids or something on the first day.
Like you though, I love the idea. I’m just more discouraged by my own incompetence.
There are people-centuries of work applied to picking-up some much more controlled items on fabrics and warehouses. And the problem is just barely solved enough for the machines to be useful.
https://www.npr.org/2017/07/26/539304811/how-new-york-s-roos...
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ChatGPT
NYC is filthy.
NY can start by using garbage bins instead of the sidewalk. Even my suburban town collects garbage in an animal safe container.
Rats travel within a 100 meter radius from their nest in search for food, so more humans = more waste = more food. Even if we keep everything tidy there's always this 1% of assholes who litter.
At the same time the denser the city, the more difficult it is to conduct waste disposal services because even the nicest garbage container is going to smell, so you want it appropriately far from buildings and garbage trucks are large vehicles, which struggle in narrow alleys.
I dont want to be the director of rat extermination, but i wouldn't mind working for whoever writes copy on the nyc gov job postings.
>>New York’s Citywide Director of Rodent Mitigation.
That could be also the Director for IT security ;)
Being from Europe, is that whole thing New York City humor? It's incredible funny:
>>New York City’s rats are legendary for their survival skills, but they don’t run this city – we do.
Y'all know me. Know how I earn a livin'. I'll catch this furball for you, but it ain't gonna be easy. Bad rodent. Not like going down to the sewer and chasing mice and raccoons. This rat, swallow your whole pizza slice. No shakin', no tenderizin', down it goes. And we gotta do it quick, that'll bring back your stock traders, put all your businesses on a payin' basis. But it's not gonna be pleasant. I value my neck a lot more than three thousand bucks, chief. I'll find him for three, but I'll catch him, and kill him, for ten. But you've gotta make up your minds. If you want to stay alive, then ante up. If you want to play it cheap, be on welfare the whole winter. I don't want no volunteers, I don't want no deputies, there's too many CEOs on this island. Ten thousand dollars for me by myself. For that you get the head, the tail, the whole damn thing.
(I like that "island" still works because Manhattan)
More clever than cringe in my opinion.
HN post right above this "Ask HN: Who is hiring? (December 2022)". NYC is!
Good luck getting him to leave Philly, though.
But here's an article to list some of the tropes out more explicitly:
https://baos.pub/what-happens-when-men-write-women-b89bf325c...
I admit I'm not very familiar with the Monkey Island series but literally the first paragraph of the Wikipedia article for it points out that the primary purpose of this character is to be the primary love interest of the (male) protagonist
Bonus, here's some really fun visualizations that I think you'd enjoy regardless of whether you agree with me or not :)
https://pudding.cool/2020/07/gendered-descriptions/
My point is that if you comment "A female character written by a man" as an inherent mark against something, that's still a fallacy no matter what statistics say. If you had comments about Monkey Island in particular, then it would have been best to just say that, rather than directly say that no man could ever write a good woman character.
They also like vol-au-vent or other canapé.
They also liked dog food, but they would always dip it in water first.
Other bird feeders just dump out some seed, you are chefs!
I still can't believe he went from someone I stumbled across on YouTube in a low-quality shaky-cam video 10 years ago (or was it more?) to making NYT headlines (and he deserves it): https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/30/science/mink-animals-pest...
His YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/c/josephcartertheminkman
The reason the city doesn't implement containerized trash collection is because that would mean giving up a few free parking spots every block.
It got worse during COVID-19 because the city temporarily suspended collection/extermination, which caused the rodent population to explode, and it's never recovered from that. But eliminating the regular meals for rats would be an easy, no-brainer way to fix it.
Some particularly memorable examples include a 75 story residential tower with absolutely record-breaking trash piles, and a ~25 story residential tower with a trash collection point on the onramp to the Williamsburg bridge. Garbage trucks have to stop in the road to collect trash, manually, bag-by-bag, at every stop.
This is the policy for trash in NYC, and rats will remain a problem as long as it stays that way.
The US confuses the hell out of me sometimes.
How do you get to the moon and invent the internet, but can't figure out how to collect refuse in arguably your most prominent city?
These absolutely were problems during the Giuliani and Bloomberg administration. People have been complaining about them for decades.
It got markedly worse in spring 2020 because sanitation services were temporarily reduced, but it was an issue long before that.
The only solution are distributed dumpsters/large containers, which are not popular because nobody wants a dumpster in from of their building
The Taiwan solution (garbage truck comes at the same time every day, stops briefly, you throw your rubbish in) seems to work well.
That requires
- not running trash collection overnight/early morning when people are sleeping
- guaranteeing that the truck arrives at a consistent and predictable time
- forcing people to be at home at a certain time to throw out their trash
All of those are absolutely non-starters in NYC.
Much better to use the solution that every other city in the developed world uses (putting trash in dumpsters)
Yet they are happy with a large pile of black plastic trash bags leaking all over the sidewalk in front of their building?
Trash bags don't block parking spaces. That's what the elected officials blocking this actually care about.
Couldn’t they put smaller dumpsters in the same space the trash bag piles currently occupy?
That's not been the sticking point, empirically. The issue is that the politicians who can implement this don't want to give up the free parking spots.
It's the loss of free parking that's the motivator, not the dumpster itself.
Most of us figured out that NYC is a (very expensive) cesspit and have no desire to live or work there. /s
- New York City Population [0]: 8,804,190
- Population of the United States [1]: 333,327,000
- Percent of people living in NYC: 2.6%
So there's no way to even figure out how this could be done without doing all the digging, etc., and at that point the expense is prohibitive.
Not to mention that building that system would require giving up parking spots for the construction, which would cause the same political pushback from the same opponents, so at that point you might as well just do above-ground collection for a fraction of the price, since you'll be fighting the same political battles either way.
Still great! No smell, less sidewalk space wasted, and garbage trunks can be less frequent since the containers are a huge underground volume.
This was in Kreuzberg and there seemed to be a lot of rats there because of some abandoned buildings and construction + fields of dirt for them to burrow in
- ensuring the truck arrives at or around the same time every week
- forcing people to be at home to throw out their garbage
Both of those are complete non-starters in NYC.
Much easier to use the system that nearly every other large city in the developed world uses (containerized trash collection).
There is one portion of Manhattan where that is done, yes.
That would be cost-prohibitive in most of the city due to the amount of digging required, and the expense of digging in NYC (an old city which has extensive underground piping and infrastructure that was laid before these things were regularly documented, so there's no way to know which water/electricity/etc lines are in an area before you actually dig there).
> Bachelor’s Degree required, preferably public policy, or related design fields, plus 5-8 years of full-time professional experience in a field related to this position
> Swashbuckling attitude, crafty humor, and general aura of badassery
Wouldn't you value someone who actually knows how to control vermin populations at scale in an urban environment? Why would you value someone who has a "public policy" degree. What even is that?
And why does this person need to be a funny pirate? In essence, Jack Sparrow with a public policy degree appears to be the ideal candidate.
To me it sounds like they're more interested in giving off the perception of doing something about the problem while entertaining the public about it, rather than actually solving the problem effectively.
That being said, it seems clear now that everything from the Adams administration should be treated as "giving off the perception of doing something instead of solving the problem" until proven otherwise.
Probably because the real solution (not putting trash directly onto the streets like it's 1780) isn't going to happen, so a degree in public policy will help make it look like you're actually going to do something.
Also, to facilitate this, most buildings (esp. multi-unit dwellings) have large trash rooms for collecting and sorting trash before management puts it out on the correct day for that type of trash.
NYC really did a great job with the marketing on this.
I think the real reason TikTok was successful is it popularized the audio/video meme and the means for them to go viral.
https://www.indy100.com/viral/rats-dont-run-this-city-we-do-...
My younger self had higher hopes for humanity.
Vouchsafing the violently vicious and voracious violation of volition?
I'm choosing to believe this is a v for vendetta reference
And a Ratatouille reference too!
If the answer is no, folks we're just wasting our time.
> Proficiency with Microsoft Word, Excel, PowerPoint
(Silva's opening monologue in Skyfall)
Then they tried buying really stinky cheese in a port and baiting and ambushing rats on one of the cargo decks using bats to kill them. Got over 100 that way but the next morning a rat literally ran over the captain’s breakfast table. Clearly this didn’t work.
So finally they caught one rat and sealed it in an empty aluminum can with a microphone inserted into it at one end. They then lit a torch under the can to make the rat squeal. The mic was connected to the ship’s PA system. As the rat screamed all the other rats took heed and thousands of them jumped overboard. He said it was a scene out of a horror movie but they didn’t have rats on that ship again for years (cats managed the population after).
I don’t know how true this is but I suppose it could be and he certainly made it sound believable.
"...even attempt to control the movements of kitchen staffers in an effort to take over human jobs."
from
"Rodents spread disease, damage homes and wiring, and even attempt to control the movements of kitchen staffers in an effort to take over human jobs."
Actually I think...a lot...of jobs could be filled that way?
[1]: Yaddah, yaddah... "Given the opportunity, players will optimize the fun out of a game"
[2]: An unfortunate habit, given the heightened difficulty of pausing IRL time
The author, Robert Sullivan, delivers the influence of rats and ratting on the American Revolution. It goes so far as to draw a connection between rats and the Boston Massacre, IIRC.
It made me look at rats in a new way, I highly recommend this book.
https://gem.cbc.ca/media/absolutely-canadian/s22e33?cmp=sch-... https://livewirecalgary.com/2022/09/21/calgary-filmmaker-alb...
Coming this summer… Snakes on a Train
Not using ACPI-based Windows-intended hardware, which will unfortunately consist of most of the PC-based motherboards you can purchase on the market today, can help avoid this situation in the first place.
You basically need to clean the city. I've been there in the summer - the place stinks to high heaven from uncollected rotting food, I don't know how the locals handle it.
You'll never be able to trap or kill your way out of this, rats are too smart, and breed too quickly.
It’s frankly an embarrassment. We advertise to the world the idea that NYC is one of America’s best cities, and the first thing that people see upon arriving is mountains of trash.
Where people go, rats follow. If you think that your town/city/building doesn’t have rats, you are wrong.
HN commenters don’t have all of the answers. Garbage bags on the street are a nuisance, but not the problem.
I've never even seen a feral rat in real life. Might make for an interesting Ask HN poll. Estimate how frequently you see rats.
- Haven't yet
- Once per decade
- Once a year
- Once a month
- Once a week
- Daily
These places spend alot to control them. Google for “rat bait station”. You’ve seen those at any Walmart, grocery store or in the shrubbery on the side of retail buildings.
It’s 100% due to the garbage bags on the street. If you walk by one of the huge piles in Manhattan (e.g . outside the NYU dorms), try throwing something at it, you’ll see dozens of rats scatter.
I find it hard to believe that inexhaustible mountains of calorie-dense food would not affect the population of an organism adapted to that niche.
Well to be fair, Staten Island used to be the literal garbage dump for NYC, and being incorporated as the fifth borough was actually the reason this stopped (because it's illegal to dump trash within the city limits).
[0] https://gothamist.com/news/nyc-orders-4-million-mckinsey-stu...
> "NYC recently hired McKinsey to conduct a 20 week study"
I mean, do I have to say anything else? The joke writes itself.
The political will is key here, since to effectively fix the issue someone will need to stand up to the sanitation union, who will be concerned that this new paradigm will require fewer workers, as well as to the thousands of seething car owners who will fight tooth and nail to keep their free parking spaces. So far, nobody has wanted to take on this challenge, and so the residents live with filth as the rats continue to feast!
I was going to say that despite the objections from car owners, we did get Citibike... but if I use that word, I know they'll just replace the bike stations with trash containers. "Cleaner city and no parking spaces lost," they'll say.
Putting garbage in containers is the kind of thing that sounds like a great idea at first glance. And maybe that's for the "greater good". But what's this comment about losing parking? The devil is in a lot of very specific details, but I'd have some concerns about the side-effects of losing parking spots being significant to some people.
For instance, in many areas of NYC, reducing the number of legal parking spots means more people having to drive around for 30-60+ minutes trying to find a legal spot, which certainly has an impact on the city's cleanliness, not to mention the safety of the roads (increasingly agitated people wheeling around trying to find one of the increasingly vanishing legal spots). And not to mention the impact on people in stressed economic situations. Does a low income earner who needs his car for work now have to choose between spending time and money driving around for an hour plus trying to park legally, or does he risk a ticket that he can't afford now?
I can see some creative solutions that might kill multiple birds with one stone, but I'd just like to point out that reducing parking has a real world impact on people and isn't something to be undertaken lightly.
Also at second glance, and a third if you go look at other cities in the USA and around the world. It works great! It solves this problem! NYC should just do it.
Yes, it solves this specific problem, but what about the problems it potentially creates?
The comment I responded to mentioned losing parking on every block as part of the proposed solution. That's a hell of a large negative for quality of life in New York. There's a lot of details here that are being completely hand waved away.
Now, maybe it's still worth it, and maybe there's good rebuttals and counterpoints to the points I brought up, but the negatives aren't even being brought up and weighed. That's not how you fully evaluate some idea. There's no solution to a problem that doesn't have some unintended cost.
Also, Inevitability, homeless people will figure out how to pop the sealed rat proof door open, throw the trash on the sidewalk, and setup shop inside. The NYPD will laugh, and some judge will grant an injunction forbidding eviction of the resident pending a hearing.
I'm not from NYC or even the US, why wouldn't you just use bins that the bags go in? I don't understand, please help me understand this. I'm thoroughly confused.
https://www.bing.com/images/search?q=new+york+trash
Most cities in the USA have either individual trash cans (suburbs/low density, once a week): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UluH0QmnwfM (ONE HOUR???) or dumpsters/dedicated crushers (high density, can be once a day): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XDTrUs6TeNc
The sidewalks are plenty wide for that, nyc doesn't even come close to how narrow some european cities without such problems are.
Seems to work really well tbh.
I'm willing to bet landlords don't want to make these investments to their properties in nyc, and have more of a voice in local government than their tenants, who are probably mostly indifferent about the issue at this point anyhow.
The issue is the collection point, not the storage prior.
You're getting to the heart of the problem. That would mean fewer workers and the sanitation union has a long and ironically sordid past of ensuring that less workers are never needed.
Perhaps we could pass laws that require anyone delivering something (hi Amazon) to also take away some proportional amount of trash, removing the externality they currently enjoy. I am sure they would eventually be a lot more efficient at it than the current system.
Just about every city on the planet has rats.
Like, being young and naive once I thought "that's just how cities are!" but having traveled the world, most cities are NOT like New York.
In my neighborhood there is trash pick up 3 days a week. Some houses on my block (2-3 family buildings) will throw out something like 6-20 bags of trash a week. YES seriously.
Removing access to food, destruction of their warrens, and killing the rats themselves.
New York City can not hope to begin on this while garbage disposal involves piling bags of trash on the sidewalk.
Other cities address this by improving their dumpsters and garbage cans, and while that doesn't eliminate rats, it drastically reduces their population, and limits their ability to spread as quickly.
After that it becomes possible to populations further by filling warrens and killing the actual rats.
https://www.boston.com/news/local-news/2022/11/15/somerville...
Here's the famous textbook example usually given: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Hanoi_Rat_Massacre
It's been tried many times, the results are effectively the same and the programs end up getting canceled (such as Chicago's 1977 program)
Almost like marketplaces of individualistic privatized incentives are a really terrible bad fit for collective societal problems.
This won't stop people from doing it though. If you've got municipal authority and don't know this history, you're probably the type that considers themselves brilliant for coming up with such a creative market-driven solution and don't anticipate the eventual consequences which have repeated themselves quite a number of times.
Incentive programs works for say cans, because the cost of pulling them out of the waste stream is less then the cost of building a factory to produce them. But for hearty robust animals that eat garbage and have lots of offspring, probably not.
As far as a working system, we should look to Alberta (https://alberta.ca/albertas-rat-control-program.aspx) - lots of free resources and budget is set aside for rat proofing and removal - as in calling in exterminators and DIY rat killing things (such as poison) are free.
Call that socialism if you want, it's worked for decades.
Not that this isn't tried constantly. Heck, we did it in the war on terror and it basically just resulted in kidnapping and human smuggling.
It's not that these market approaches for social problems are impossible - they just usually need markets on top of markets on top of markets to fix incentives and distribute money around in a complicated way with a bunch of administrative overhead. At the end you get at best mediocre results at exorbitantly high cost and enormous complexity. For example, the american health care system...
The real problem is, especially in the USA, some people just totally lose their marbles and become frothing lunatics if anything even looks like it has a remote resemblance to anything socialisty so cost effective reasonable proven solutions that have worked many other places for decades are off the table and we get these 7-layer wedding cake Rube Goldberg machines because we want to show how ideologically pure we are in our demonstration of market efficiency
I'm just joshing around. You make good points, and I appreciate your sincerity.
>we get these 7-layer wedding cake Rube Goldberg machines because we want to show how ideologically pure we are in our demonstration of market efficiency
This simply doesn't connect for me in this case, given that the the New York and Chicago rat problems stem from trash collection issues under the purview of public agencies.
Spray the sewers and garbage bins with nicotine or seized cocaine or some addictive equivalent. Killing them just kills off the weak ones and polarizes the population, whereas a method like this using managed addiction will keep their numbers down and actively managed.
15th century London had better trash disposal, and those people threw their poop out of their windows. (or so I am told)
Humor in this listing meant the ad got publicity and was read more widely - it gives the Mayor some brownie points showing they're doing something useful. It also got the ad read by more potential candidates so the quality of applicants will be higher.
God damn NYC.
You’ll start on the low end and get a 2k bump per year for a decade or two, eventually hitting the cap.
This is beyond the range stated.
Having worked for years in IT for a municipal service, our standard formula was a raise of 0% to 3% based on a performance rating, with 0% being "you're on a PIP and going to be fired soon" and 3% being a top-performer.
This is speculation at this point - but I would assume NYC works against a similar system.
I’ve been much more impressed with the city council than the mayor as of late. Our esteemed mayor seems to have more of a taste for cutting QoL projects (like compost collection, and bike lane expansion) than he does for cultivating them.
Whether he's effective can be debated, sure.
Rat killing is a field?
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/the_americas/alberta-ca...
This a ridiculous title, or have I just read too many fantasy novels where they're just called "Ratter". Malazan and their ratter guild comes to mind.
The about section however is a pretty rad:
>Do you have what it takes to do the impossible? A virulent vehemence for vermin? A background in urban planning, project management, or government? And most importantly, the drive, determination and killer instinct needed to fight the real enemy – New York City’s relentless rat population?
Final though: I think it should definitely include terriers (the OG ratters). Those would be some happy dogs.
There are other animals that do, but not sure people want hordes of foxes, for instance, in place of the rats.
Speaking of, the cars are the real problem - the rats proliferate on garbage, of course. So, to cut their food source, the garbage must be hidden from the rats until it is collected: This is axiomatic in my eyes. To hide the garbage, it makes the most sense to just place it inside a modular rat-proof container that is plopped onto a parking space. But it's politically very difficult in NYC to take away parking spaces, especially at a scale that would be required to house all the trash. It's also not possible to go underground like Europe does.
Thus, to truly solve this problem, NYC has to tackle the automobile problem head on and that hasn't been politically popular there for a long time. (Thanks, Robert Moses!) But I'm optimistic for change!
I belive you may be thinking of a couple of [well to do] places in The Netherlands, which despite being in Europe, does not represent it all (unfortunately).
Other European places would have the same problem as NYC regarding going underground...lotta wires and cables and pipes and tubes and tree roots down there.
Although, now that I think about it, the elevated risk of hitting cats in the street would probably make most drivers slow down in the city, which is aligned with my worldview.
Also, cute cats everywhere. I could pet them. It could be a form of utopia. Sorry birds. Although birds would probably do fine actually, they're extremely well adapted to take advantage of verticality in the city.
I'm in! Ship the cats from the kill shelters to New York so that I may pet all of them!
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perverse_incentive#The_origina...
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.atlasobscura.com/articles/h...
The Great Hanoi Rat Massacre of 1902 Did Not Go as Planned (2017) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30050420 - Jan 2022 (4 comments)
The Great Hanoi Rat Massacre of 1902 Did Not Go as Planned (2017) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27264816 - May 2021 (85 comments)
The Great Hanoi Rat Massacre of 1902 Did Not Go as Planned (2017) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19864148 - May 2019 (18 comments)
The Great Hanoi Rat Massacre of 1902 Did Not Go as Planned - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14499431 - June 2017 (1 comment)
The NY government will then get in on the racket and make capturing radioactive rats illegal without possession of one of three rat disposal licenses that are auctioned to the highest bidder each year on condition that rat feed be purchased from the NY government, and any proceeds be split evenly with the MTA — which still spends $49 billion a year on overtime despite no workers, riders, subways, or buses having survived the initial nuclear strike.
https://tenor.com/view/killer-upset-kitty-gun-meme-gif-86573...
"In addition, the documentary looks into the history of cat domestication, and how in the middle ages the church tried to get rid of cats due to their association with witches"
only difference is, now it's "toxoplasmosis and cat scratch fever" instead of witches.
Do you have numbers on the prevalence of those ills? As compared to well-known rat-borne illness?
[1] https://peerj.com/articles/13122/ [2] https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rspb.2018.082...
https://excitedcats.com/can-cats-kill-rats/
of course, the cats can induce the rats to move somewhere else. But if it's a big city, they're not going to move out of town.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/dec/19/new-york-cit...
"You.... dirty rat!"
Second, if the city hasn't realized they need to introduce containerized and properly sealed garbage collection city-wide by now, they never will.