How we turned the tide in the roach wars | Hacker News Reader

How we turned the tide in the roach wars

theatlantic.com

337 pointstptacek233 comments

We have effective pest control for roaches, probably developed around the same time. Using growth regulators like Gentrol make it so the cockroaches can’t breed effectively, so after a generation or two they go extinct. Somehow roaches got into our suburban home and I was able to destroy them using this method. Pesticides and roach bait didn’t do much — the growth regulators were key in permanently removing the infestation.

I’d guess the difficulty in a place like New York is similar to the problem I’m having with mice because we have a forest behind the house — an essentially endless reservoir of new roaches living in the pipes and throughout the city.

Source: was professional exterminator about 15 years ago. Growth regulators were the only thing that worked.

Yeah I’ve combined two products, Gentrol and Invict Gold. The combination nukes large populations.

Finding their ritual pathways helps in deciding where to sprinkle stuff that's bad for their health and that they'll bring home with them. One such thing is borax/boric acid. Ants, as well.

Speaking of New York—everyone’s story with roaches is that they get them when a new neighbor moves in. You can’t get rid of roaches in your apartment as long as your neighbors contribute the steady stream of new roaches.

Its... wildly accurate.

Neighbors decided they were tired of tenants and roach problems so they removed the kitchen from their rented apartment.

Roach problem went away for them and me.

I will randomly get a few waterbugs (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oriental_cockroach) which are alarming but it's usually when temps are dramatically changing.

These are one of the favorite hunting conquests for my two cats. They are fast and change directions quickly and can fly. They are tough to catch to throw back outside, but not as fun as a cicada that is flying around and your cat(s) are jumping off of the furniture trying to catch them again. There are times where the cat and I are trying to catch the waterbug before it gets somewhere hard to get, but for very different reasons.

I lived in a large building that developed a roach problem. They were able to identify the original culprit. It turned out that when they mapped the complaints about roaches in units, it was radiating outwards over time from a single unit.

Not that that made life any easier once the buggers took over the building, but hey

It is also unfortunately rather common that the person living in the source apartment never complains about having roach problems, never admits to having a roach problem, and certainly don't want to let people in to check or fix it. Which leaves everyone else angry and in a perpetual loop of infestations.

Yep. Prolonged vacancy is bad too. Usually pest problems are highest when moving in, and then keeping a place clean and occupied is the best way to maintain pest-free apartment.

Interesting, that makes sense. I lived in an apartment with 8 units back in my exterminator days, and my landlord was more than happy to let me in to all 8 of them to do a thorough spray.

It was much harder to spray apartment complexes with hundreds of units and treating for roaches in every single unit was prohibitively expensive (or my boss was a cheapskate, I don’t know), so we’d only do targeted treatment where we had seen roaches and surrounding units.

Single family homes were much easier to treat. I strongly suspect we got roaches in our single family house when a home care nurse brought them with her, along with a bed bug! I almost died when I saw that monstrosity, luckily we avoided an infestation, those are 10x worse than any cockroach. You do not want bed bugs.

Cockroaches can be imported by a person? How on earth does that happen.

All it takes is one pregnant cockroach in a box somewhere. They will often hide in electronic devices.

Step on one, eggs stick to the shoe and voila.

Coffee makers. I once picked up a nice, high-end Keuring machine for free from a neighbor. Later than evening, I noticed something moving around it. It was full of roaches. I put it in a trash bag and ran to put it in the garbage outside. The exterminator and landlord both said the warmth and moisture of coffee machines is a magnet for roaches and coffee is their favorite snack.

One more reason to ditch the kcups for the real thing using a french press or pour over. Use a percolator if you must but ditch those kcup machines. They make tiny single serve french presses.

Coffee grounds, cardboard, paper, compost, all favorites of the American cockroach.

It probably doesn't help much against a roach infestation, but fully automatic espresso machines make a good cup and keep the convenience. Ours was $1500 and has already paid for itself buying whole beans instead of k-cups.

I would imagine the broiler would probably be just as much a target as a keurig machine. Same with drip. Anything where it’s an appliance that just sits in its grime on the counter while producing humidity.

Can support this statement. Ours has a nicer version available today for $799 (Philips) and it’s freaking amazing.

Can also support this the only thing better than a super automatic coffee machine is a better super automatic coffee machine or an aeropress

OMG......

I once had found a nest of ants inside a laptop.

The laptop was on a table in the middle of a 40'x40' room but one day I came in, turned it on and for the next 15 minutes ant pieces flew out of the fan exhaust.

Your life may be morphing into a Blumhouse movie

Sprint sent me a magic box some years ago (It's like a cellphone repeater). UPS helpfully threw the box out in the snow where it was discovered a few days later. We installed it and bits of bug I'd never seen before started coming out. Turns out it was full of dead German cockroaches that presumably froze to death.

I live in a pretty rural area so the only ones I see sometimes in the summer that have hitched rides before are the virginia woods cockroaches that fly. But I've never seen them infest a house, they just seem to be attracted to the lights.

Corrugated cardboard (boxes) can be a vector for cockroach eggs. I once crewed on a yacht whose captain forbid any cardboard boxes to be brought aboard for this reason.

I once had bed bugs, and can attest to how nasty they are and how difficult to get rid of. Eventually we learned that none of the bed bug repellent products work, and the only thing that actually works is diatomaceous earth.

We got bedbugs once at my old place. We think we just randomly picked them up at a Marriott we stayed at a few weeks prior to noticing them - crap luck.

We got rid of them by sealing the mattress for 6 months, and letting them starve. This was after taking a pass at them with sprays and such (the ones we could spot).

Did you ever notice most all hotel and motel rooms come with a chromed luggage stand? The chrome makes it impossible for bedbugs to climb up and into your luggage.

I learned that too late! But yes, this is an amazing piece of knowledge not well known.

Ivermectin actually works, as long as everyone in the household takes it for at least two weeks (length of the BB lifecycle).

Isn't it safer to have control mechanisms that don't involve taking some drug ourselves?

Effective control methods include:

- Heat: improper heat treatment has caused house fires

- All sorts of poisons: poisoning not just the bugs

- Diatomaceous earth: Using the wrong kind, or using it improperly can cause diseases like silicosis

And all the creative yet incredibly stupid things people think of when they are desperate.

But done properly these techniques work with minimal risk. The same can be said of Ivermectin.

Don’t forget the use of organophosphate insecticides in the form of Nuvan Prostrips, which are chemically similar to nerve gas for humans.

BTW Cimexa is the current best practice for desiccating bed bugs upon contact, and, unlike diatomaceous earth, is approved for use in human living areas.

Interesting that it works. Some quick googling shows that it only slows them down. For example: [1].

[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6901371/

There are multiple studies so far showing that it works; they can become paralyzed as well as prevented from maturing into adults, which effectively ends the reproductive cycle.

So it seems they discovered an anti-dote to roaches, but not to bed-bugs.

Is there any hope? C'mon science, do your thing!

Heat, Bedbugs die at 119-125 degrees fahrenheit after a few hours.

I put 6 propane gas blowers in an apartment, the kind that is used at construction sites. Let that run with thermostats and cameras for a few hours. Bedbug free. Have since done it at 2 other apartments after months of infestations, immediately fixed.

Source: personal experience, after trying lots of other methods.

https://www.orkin.com/pests/bed-bugs/does-heating-or-freezin...

> their heat-resistant eggs require temperatures upwards of 125 degrees.

Achieving that temperature in a home would be nearly impossible unless you live in very hot summer area and likely cause substantial damage to a lot of things.

I've done it in Vermont USA in the summer with all windows closed.

Infrared saunas are 120-140f.

https://www.saunasociety.org/sauna-experience

A car reaches 120f on a 70f day in the sun in 90 minutes so I don't think that temperature would damage that many things.

https://www.scottsfortcollinsauto.com/how-hot-do-cars-get-in...

This company selling electric bed bug heaters says 7 minutes at 115f.

https://convectex.com/pages/bed-bugs

Yes heat is an effective treatment. I've also seen 10kw Resistive load banks used in load testing of single or three-phase AC power systems utilized this way. They are essentially bed bug killers as they generate a tremendous amount of heat.

https://mosebachresistors.com/products/bed-bug-heaters

> It was much harder to spray apartment complexes with hundreds of units and treating for roaches in every single unit was prohibitively expensive (or my boss was a cheapskate, I don’t know)

I lived in an apartment with ~300 units and they sprayed in the units at least once a year. Not sure what they were spraying (they said it was pet safe).

But if you’re the exterminator, why would your boss being a cheapskate have to do with it? Wouldn’t they be the one being paid?

I think he meant the landlord was being a cheapskate here

Yes, we’re being paid but also underbid to get the contract, and using more chemical than strictly necessary will cut into the profit for the job. So we mixed the chemicals the same, but wouldn’t spray growth regulator in every apartment (more expensive) and we wouldn’t put roach bait down in every unit only ones with roach issues and ones surrounding that one.

You want to keep the bugs down but not totally eliminate them, otherwise why would they need you? My boss never said that explicitly but we’d just use the minimum chemical mixtures in our tanks unless we were treating some specific infestation.

It wasn’t a scam exactly but it was definitely a “the squeaky wheel gets the grease” sort of thing. One person would pay $80 and get an outdoor treatment only. Another person would get a 2 hour intense complex spraying and attic dusting, extremely thorough, with follow up visits for the exact same price. Like any sort of service job, really.

That sounds like a very shady business…

I lived in an apartment that had the kitchen redone. Once that happened no more roaches.

Now whenever I move into a new apartment I use space filler foam and silicon to seal around all the possible entrencences bugs could use to enter my apartment internally. So far so good.

My own memory of New York is that if noticed an absence of roaches in your apartment, that meant you had mice, and the mice were eating the roaches. I told a friend that (she had happily commented about not having roaches) and she looked rather alarmed. I should have kept quiet.

There is a secret third option, which is to have a cat in the apartment :3

And when the cats get out of control introduce a bear? Or is it an alligator? ;)

You need to eventually make this ecology circular.

Just ate our apartment cat—-thanks for that advice.

Wait now I need a new one

I don't think NY has a native bear population (well, it does, but it's the wrong kind of bear), but you could get the alligator from the sewer.

I will have to ask the old lady who swallowed the fly.

Alligator. When winter comes they freeze to death.

You huff glue, eat cat food, and chug some beer.

Think Tank afficionado and Always Sunny fan? Quite the man of culture.

IASIP was a fairly popular show among my cohort of staffers.

Reassuring to know IASIP is upstream of US policy. We’re going to make it.

But comptrollers get paid shit.

No, just butcher all but one of the female cats to make *cat meat roasts*, and stick the spare in a cage. (Keep the males for vermin control.) See also [0].

0: http://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/Catsplosion

Because it’s new york, sometimes the cats lose to the rats. https://youtube.com/shorts/g-PXxTkPQ3c?si=02VGLetMiroJz_FP

You have absolutely no idea what a cat actually fighting or trying to kill something looks like.

That cat isn't losing, it's playing. It's toying with the rat and the "loss" was it repositioning to stalk it (the pressed to the ground body pose.)

Cats will fuck up all manner of wildlife an order of magnitude or two their weight.

Our cats have discovered that dead mice aren't any fun to play with, so they'll go to great lengths not to kill them. They'll pounce and stun them for a bit, then the mouse recovers and tries to scurry off - and the cycle repeats. Eventually the mouse finds a safe haven where a cat can't get to it.

A friend's parents used to have a maine-coon-esque cat who once brought home a lamb it had discovered in a nearby field. Would have had to get this thing over at least two fences but somehow managed.

Rats ≠ mice. Rats are a public nuisance that hang around because there’s always trash outside. Mice are the ones that invade your apartment.

I’m sure rats do invade some apartments, but that’s gotta be crazy rare.

Every month or so, my apartment building sends someone to knock on every door of the (admittedly small) building to offer to spray a few places (like behind the stove) to keep out pests. I hadn't thought of it from this perspective before, but it makes sense from the perspective of trying to solve the problem you mention; the only way to keep them out is to handle it uniformly across all the units, and having someone come around to offer it every so often makes sure that new people moving in get it treated and no one will forget due to having to remember on their own.

this is why bombing a house doesn't work, the roaches flee to the neighbors, they then bomb and they flee back to your house (or migrate back over time).

I absolutely refuse to live in houses with roaches, too many horror stories. I once moved out of a house and left everything I owned in it due to the roaches.

It's the activity of the move that disturbs them. Same thing with mice/rats. Happens when nearby buildings are under construction, as well.

So much of the problem of extermination is due to SEO and misinformation, agree or disagree?

If a poorly educated, stressed mom working two jobs googles "cockroaches in kitchen", what percentage of online information she finds is naive, misguided, maliciously lies, etc?

Agreed. And, maybe more subversive, it's like there's some effort to discourage the solutions that actually work (e.g., poisons and growth regulators) in favor of "natural solutions" that don't do any good. For instance, here's the top of the Google page I get for "cockroaches in kitchen."

https://img.bigchief.wtf/i/cf993b56-5831-4d4a-974f-4860158db...

boric acid is extremely effective. I use only boric acid, and i live in a forest. I put the powder under the stove, around the edges of cabinets, under the fridge, etc. After a new dusting (every 3-4 months or more) the carcasses will show up, maybe a half dozen.

And if you want a spray to kill insects you can see and watch, IPA (rubbing alcohol) and mint extract works fine. Except against centipedes.

For ants boric acid works sometimes, but so does talc or diatomaceous earth. However this stops them from tracking while you clean up whatever they're after. In my experience dealing with sugar ants, pissants, RIFA (fire ants from south america), fire ants (red ants in CA), and so on; the only 100% effective way to get rid of them is to put popcorn kernels in a blender and chop it till everything is smaller than 1/16" or so, and leave that somewhere moisture can't get to it. Ants eat it and bring it back to the nest to eat and then explode. I can't verify they actually explode, but that's the mechanism of action.

AFAIK boric acid and DE aren't harmful to humans, and corn and rubbing alcohol are usually fairly safe.

Isn’t that problem with everything now and Google search? I can’t find information that I can confidently trust to be genuine. Just SEO spam.

Recently I was looking for information on better food and treats for diabetic dogs and was inundated with so much bs I gave up.

Because of this I use Kagi's FastGPT to get infos like this: https://kagi.com/fastgpt

I mean from a cursory glance, yeah Googling it doesn’t look great. Baking soda, diatomaceous earth, boric acid, and bay leaves come up as the top results. I didn’t even consider any of those having worked for a few years in my early 20s as an exterminator. Right when I quit we were starting to use the “green options” like eucalyptus oil spray if people requested but they barely did anything. They were mostly for paranoid people with too much money who didn’t really have bugs in the first place. We weren’t spraying apartment buildings (which often had the most problems) with that stuff.

More broadly to your point, I am certain recipes and diet advice at least are totally captured by SEO with bad advice. My cooking has improved so much now that I stopped Googling recipes and mostly consult Kenji’s Food Lab book. For fat loss, I’ve lost 80 pounds mostly eating tons of fat and completely cutting out sugars/grains. The Internet is in a sad state where a Google search that can make someone money will often steer you wrong.

I guess growth regulators must be pretty well tested because the concept is inherently quite scary, but it is still a bit scary to an uninformed person like myself, haha, so I’ll ask the dumb question. No side effects in humans, right? Your customers could still have kids?

It’s a good question. I treated my own apartment building for roaches many years ago, five years later had a completely healthy kid, she’s 8 now. For the sake of full disclosure, my second kid has a pretty major birth defect (spina bifida) but this was after the first healthy kid and before we developed a roach problem at our current house (one of the home care nurses actually brought them in) and treated for that, and many many years after I’d stopped being an exterminator, so the timelines of exposure -> birth defect don’t really line up.

The spray isn’t an aerosol, you apply it under corners and in places kids shouldn’t be able to reach. I’m not a chemist, but I know you’d have a real bad time if you drank it straight.

I always worry about the poisons for creatures that want our food because, well, they seem likely to track it into the place we keep our food! But I guess the plan is mostly not to eat food from containers that the roaches have gotten into in the first place.

Indeed, chemicals are scary, we trashed our entire pantry. It’s just not worth the risk. When you spray the focus for roaches is generally on cracks and crevices though, places roaches like to hang out and places humans shouldn’t be very often. It took about three months after spraying the growth regulator to have them fully disappear from the house.

From what I've found online about IGRs they mimic hormones that control parts of the insect's life cycle. They might, say, cause something to happen earlier or later than it naturally should have occurred. There are many things in an insect's life cycle that have to occur at the right time for the insect to reach adulthood and reproduce. Screwing up the timing doesn't kill the young insect, but if it makes it so it will never reproduce. Keep doing that to the insects in a place for a few generations and they die out.

Most of us probably do not want to do this, but cockroaches are in fact edible by humans. If IGRs mimic cockroach hormones, then eating a small amount of cockroach IGRs should not be any worse than eating some cockroaches.

Hormones are incredibly potent. It is not safe to conclude that a “small amount” of residue would be safe, as that could still be orders of magnitude more than occurs naturally in a roach.

Hm your anecdata is pretty concerning..

I don’t disagree with you, but I wasn’t going to exclude it from the discussion. I’m not trying to convince people to use IGRs or other potentially dangerous chemicals. We all have our risk tolerances and while I don’t think it’s related, it’s also worth stating.

If I thought there was a correlation, I’d for sure sue. But the birth defect my daughter has is often caused by a lack of vitamin B at a vital part of the gestation process. I hadn’t been an exterminator or sprayed my house for bugs for that matter for over a decade when she was born, and my wife and I had a perfectly healthy kid three years before. The roach treatment in my house occurred years after my daughter with a birth defect was born. The correlation is extremely weak at best.

Furthermore, while I’m not saying it’s impossible, but in my mind it feels very unlikely, especially as my wife was never exposed to any of those chemicals. Also, it’s not a genetic defect, which would come from the father, but more a mechanical one in gestation (failure to fully develop and build the spinal cord).

Anecdata is not a thing.

I think this kind of data must be collected systemically, and if it isn’t, it is a failure to ask lawmakers about, not ex-pest-control professionals.

Anecdata is recognized by the Oxford English Dictionary [1] and has been around since the 1940s.

That being said, the usage here probably doesn't mean what the downvoted commenter was implying.

[1] https://www.oed.com/dictionary/anecdata_n

Not a dumb question at all after learning all of the shenanigans that corps have been doing in suppressing information about their product's safety through out history. Even your skincare products can have ingredients that are now thought to be endocrine disrupting and cause all sorts of issues.

It is a good habit to learn about any chemicals being used in your living spaces. Any company that says the ingredients in their product are "trade secrets" so they are unable to tell you what they are should be a company you avoid doing business.

Given that roaches were affected by the GHI it appears they were immune to other pesticides and were not simply evading bait/poison? It could be the issue with the pesticides sold to consumers being too weak (understandable, as some consumers will try to consume those despite any warning labels and the vast majority won't be using any PPE while applying).

I don’t think it’s an issue of pesticides being “too weak for consumers”. You can buy all the same stuff as an exterminator[0] (use PPE and follow the labeling, don’t break laws, etc), but when you spray you’ll notice a huge knockdown, hundreds will die, but it only takes a breeding pair to get right back to an infestation in a few months. Generally when doing roach infestation treatments you do a multi tiered approach, with max legal mixes of pesticide + growth inhibitors in your spray then putting down bait in spots that you DID NOT spray (or they won’t ingest the bait). They’re just resilient little buggers. Spiders are actually harder to treat, but most people don’t end up with spider infestations. And then bed bugs are in a class of their own in terms of awfulness and difficulty of elimination.

[0] https://www.domyown.com

Which roach bait products have you had success with?

I do buy industrial strength pesticides on Amazon but apparently if you were to buy off a reputable supplier you'd need to give your exterminator credentials. I spray Bayer's Polyzone outside and use Tempo between walls/floor and cabinets and see a dead roach inside every quarter or so (there are commercial food establishments nearby so roaches are just roaming the streets). Never bothered with GHI as the pesticides already do a great job.

In Germany you certainly can't. They would outlaw handsoap if they could get away with it.

Thanks for this link and your replies in this thread. As someone who had to feverishly dust boric acid around my kitchen last summer (because in Washington state, it seems many online stores like Amazon don't want to ship anything effective. Maybe regulations?), I'm looking forward to trying out Vendetta Plus or something similar if these German roaches return.

Incidentally I've actually found "natural" solutions like boric acid and diatomaceous earth to be wildly effective (in killing/reducing established populations, not preventing new ones), if a bit unsightly and inconvenient to have lying around in piles to actually force the critters into crawling into them.

I probably ought still spend a day off sealing everything I can, though. Probably more pragmatic and less technically barbaric.

I would recommend getting an actual duster (aka "hand bellows"), especially one that has an actual spring to return the bellows instead of just a "plastic spring". I learned it from this video [0].

It really helped to basically make the dust small enough for the roaches to scurry through (instead of avoid like a pile). They don't really want to eat it (like bait), so they need to accidentally walk through it and then clean themselves (and incidentally ingest it).

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ubfUacj7zQQ

Any suggestions for mosquitoes? It feels like the roach problem is a solved problem. But mosquitoes not so much.

I know many tropical countries have successful stories fighting mosquitos by simply removing every single place that might contain water: ponds, flower pots etc.

Mosquitoes I’d normally focus on doing a full yard treatment of a granular, we’d use bifenthrin back in my day, no idea what they’re using now (but bifenthrin is still on sale), you can use a spreader from Home Depot and it just takes a light dusting.

But as a sibling comment said, making sure your gutters don’t have standing water, or that there are little ponds without fish, is going to be your best bet. A big problem is going to be stuff near you, as their range can be 1-3 miles.

So, live in a well developed area with lots of people around taking care to avoid mosquitoes? You’re right it’s a hard one.

it's not going to eradicate them, but if you just want your patio clear for an evening thermocell (and the knock-off refills from aliexpress) work great.

removing standing water on your property is a good start, but mosquitoes are a lot more mobile than roaches, so you'll need to do a lot bigger area than a normal residential lot for it to be very effective.

Deet. You just need to keep em off you.

Also fine fly screens reduce it to an outside problem.

Totally agree about using bait with reproduction control for roaches. I tried almost every roach control thing from Walmart and Home Depot and called multiple exterminators, but then I found Vendetta Plus Gel Bait. It's a birth control-based Gel bait that kills all German roaches hiding in the house. Wish the big stores would sell only that instead of all this other useless crap.

do they make one for Argentine/Porteño roaches?

Interesting, wasn’t previously aware of Vendetta. I feel like all conversations about eradicating roaches need to distinguish between 1) getting rid of german cockroaches and 2) getting rid of any other cockroach. I’ve had less success with the former, especially within a row home in Baltimore built in the 1910s. You need to get in the walls and under floorboards to eradicate the issue with the germans.

> essentially endless reservoir of new roaches

We have a similar problem with box-elder bugs. About 3 years ago there was a massive explosion of them statewide and now we have thousands coming into the house every fall and staying until summer. They don't seem to live very long, but reproduce rapidly and since we have a lot of box-elder maples on the property, among many other trees, there's a constant supply of them.

They're harmless, but ugly and annoying as hell and so far impossible to get rid of.

Also, cats. I now have two cats and now I average 1-2 American roach sightings a year.

I've seen a chicken eat a roach when I threw it outside a home. So I guess on the countryside, chickens can also be an option.

Getting rid of an infestation of roaches in a detached home is much easier than out of an apartment. It is pretty much impossible! But you can seal up holes.

What is a difference between growth regulator and insecticide?

Boric acid works, too. In fact it works well against any insects with a shell exoskeleton, like cockroaches, ants, or termites. The boric crystal punctures their exoskeleton causing them to lose body fluid.

It also works against the colony as it’s a slow acting agent that the insects can bring it back to the colony. The insects communicate by touching so the powder is spread from one to the other when they rub each other’s antenna during meeting.

Boric is really cheap. A large bottle in Home Depot is about $4 to $5.

Edit: story time. My parents used to live in a mixed use condo building where the commercial ground floor had a number of restaurants. They had a bad cockroach problem. I got him a bottle of boric acid and sprayed around the pipes and corners. He never saw another cockroach again.

We had a swarming of termites outside around the house after a raining season. Called the termite guys. They came out and said it’s the subterranean termites under the ground outside and the water disturbed them. They drilled holes around the house and injected liquid solution into them. They sprayed the crawl space underneath. I asked them what the solution was. They said it’s basically boric. Oof. Their service charged $2800 and the material was boric.

Isn't inhaling boric acid in indoor settings going to produce the same effect for our lungs?

Human and pets have soft tissue that don’t seem to be bothered by it. I meant inhaling a large amount of fine powder of any type is a problem. Boric acid seems to be pretty heavy that they’re not airborne easily.

Boric acid was used in detergent, pool cleaning, eye wash, mouth rinse, toothpaste, skin treatment, and some food preparation.

Asbestos was used everywhere, that's not proving that it's safe in any way...

The acute median lethal dose for boric acid in humans is estimated to be several grams per kilogram body weight, which is not very toxic. Chronic consumption in lower doses may cause kidney problems. As pesticides go, it appears to be pretty safe.

It's probably a good idea to wear an N95 mask when applying it, apply it in areas where it won't be easily disturbed, and make sure it doesn't contaminate food or water.

not to mention, pets sniffing it up?

Pets have soft tissue and not bothered by it. It’s a fine powder causing sanding problem for the thin exoskeleton hard shell of the insect. It might cause scratching on the nails or claws of pets but they are so thick.

Edit: research suggests that consuming a large quantity of boric acid causes problems for pets or small animals.

Internet suggests that it actually has to be ingested by the insects, not just have contact with their exoskeleton. So for example it doesn't work on bedbugs since they won't eat it.

Could it be the bed bugs don’t communicate much and don’t have a central colony so the boric infection cannot be spread among them?

Diatomaceous earth is damaging to insect exoskeletons.

Don't breathe it in though.

I've found making my own mixtures of boric acid for ants didn't work well. I read there's two basic ant types - sugar lovers and protein lovers. So I tried a mix with peanut butter. And I tried a mix with honey. And I tried a mix with both.

The ants would happily eat either peanut butter or honey by itself. But they avoided the mixtures. I did spend a couple of days trying different strengths until I ran out of boric acid.

Then I gave up and bought a tiny dropper bottle of ant poison. Put a single drop on each ant trail I could see (around 5 drops total). Two days later, I didn't have an ant issue anymore.

You're mixing up Boric acid and Diatomaceous earth. Boric acid works by the overloading the roach's weak digestive system, it also kills ants. They key is to get pure, do not get the formula with the 'attractant'. Diatomaceous earth needs to be 'food grade' there is a much more dangerous form for pool filters. But that stuff is more for out doors as a perimeter defense and maybe garages and say exterior basement stairs. Boric acid works well but the true solution to urban roaches is exhaustive sealing all your walls, baseboards, electric recepticals, any entrance of piping and weatherstripping your exterior door. I keep boric acid on my apartment door stoop. Boric acid is great in they cant evolve against it and they eat their dead so one east some and it takes out 5-10 others back in the nest. But the key is the effort to seal your walls, and I've encountered very challenging situations with metal cabinets in a friend's place. I got this experience living upstairs from an South Asian Deli in Manhattan. But I'd say I've been roach free 19 out of 20 years here. Two outbreaks, one I broke down and got an excellent exterminator, which I'd normally move heaven and earth to avoid. But we get less than about 6 per year total. as their hiding spots are death traps and we do keep our kitchen shelves and cabinets cleaned out periodically.

Roaches are very easy to exterminate with gel bait + gentrol + maybe powder for cracks. About $70 worth of equipment for a big infestation (I've solved a few for friends in NYC). It's just that 90% of exterminators in cities are useless, its a minimum wage job and its in the pest control company's interests to not solve the problem permanently.

Gel bait has been huge for me. We're in an area that gets roaches pretty frequently. They still get in, but we'll find them dead and in much smaller numbers than when we used a spray. About 2-4/year now always dead vs ~10-15/year half of which were alive.

The best solution to roaches I've found is to support your local ant colonies! Healthy ants will eat all your other bugs and the only drawback is having to keep your dry foods in ant-proof containers.

I always have a bottle of silver powder and when I get a new apartment (every year) I pull out the oven, fridge and dishwasher and put that stuff down after vacuuming the area.

One time the situation was so bad I also had to use the diatomaceous earth power in combination.

I stored all my food trash in my refrigerator for months an no food was left out that wasn’t in a sealed plastic container.

Along with having the apartment spray I was able to get it under control.

Won't they evolve around this too at some point? I feel like the only truly effective way to eradicate pests long-term will end up being swarms of little robot predators that wipe them out by force.

The article covers that point near the end.

But then you are just introducing two new types of bugs..

inevitably, because evolution acts on the regular expression of genes.

Near the end of the article it says there appears to be a very slow comeback with roaches in slightly increasing numbers that do not prefer the sweetness of the effective bait pesticide combo, apparently not developing an immunity.

The TL;DR is that a product was developed in the 80s that poisoned the roaches, but not immediately so they could return to the nest and spread the poison. And it worked for a long while until the only survivors are ones that aren’t attracted to the taste of the poison.

This approach was used to suppress rabbits in Australia, us in the disease myxomatosis. The infected rabbit didn’t die immediately but would return to the burrow to spread it. When I was a kid you could see myxie rabbits outside, dying, with pus coming out. Of course the survivors eventually were the ones immune to myxomatosis.

Well, you are always supposed to cycle through insecticides.

And, of course, you won't ever be able to contain an species that occupies an otherwise unfilled niche. Make sure to preserve the predators and clean any artificial niche or populate it with some alternative species.

I believe people already knew that in the turn to the 20th century, but somehow almost no big project anywhere does the full set of actions.

> Make sure to preserve the predators and clean any artificial niche or populate it with some alternative species.

Rabbits are not native to Australia, and they have no natural predators on the continent. Introducing new species to Australia's wildly unique ecosystem is rightly frowned upon (see rabbits, introduction of). Neither of these solutions would be effective.

> And it worked for a long while until the only survivors are ones that aren’t attracted to the taste of the poison.

I used that product in a vacation house in Spain and it really worked wonders. And that was around 2017/2018. So not all cockroaches have evolved yet!

You need to go to your local China Town and get the real poison the type that Amazon/Walmart wont sell. Roaches start moving out on their own when they see that stuff.

Yeah combat and all that shit at home depot doesn't do jack. Bengal is the only thing available from mainstream ecommerce retailers that actually works. Not sure if the best version of it can be shipped to california though.

Is that "the chalk"? When I lived in NYC that was legendary -- you could watch a roach touch it and almost immediately fall over dead.

The only thing that worked for me was sealing up holes, and that wasn't 100%. I tried the genetic-warfare gel that others here are talking about, and it didn't seem to work -- it could've been working, but being in a 6-floor walk-up meant there were probably millions of roaches to take the place of the dead ones.

The other thing I noticed is that whether you have roaches in NYC is a complete crapshoot -- I lived directly above a bar/restaurant and had zero bugs of any kind, and I lived with no bar/restaurant in sight and had a roach problem. Go figure.

There is a quite peculiar article on Wikipedia [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Depopulation_of_cockroaches_in...]. Also, please check the Russian version of the article.

Here is some Bed Bug info, went through that before both in my apartment and a separate infection my mom got after being in Geriatric Rehab. Her place was extra tough with all the clutter, but the dishes for the bed legs and getting the bed free standing is the best first method. I'd advise against most pesticides as many or neurotoxic. Growth regulators are probably ok.

Ecovenger by Exoraider is the best verses bedbugs. It was Developed at Rutgers University.

Here is a totally different Rutgers Professor who has really advanced Bed Bug Control. Traps and isolating bed legs and getting beds away from furniture and walls is the basic method. https://njaes.rutgers.edu/bed-bug/methods-to-control-bed-bug...

Living in a big + damp city for years, roaches are unavoidable (especially in the summer months).

We adopted cats in 2020, and haven't encountered a (living) roach since. I'm afraid our cats aren't very cost effective as pest control, but they do the job!

>cats aren't very cost effective

You're catting wrong. Requires more scritches.

This is a great article, but man, the tone of news media used to be great. Can you imagine an NBC journalist writing something as funny as "Congressman Silvio Conte, dressed to kill today, proclaimed a war on Capitol cockroaches." particularly about a Republican(gasp!)?

Polarization is so much worse now, but the issues people faced in this period were nuclear annihilation, the ozone layer falling apart, Iran shitshow etc. Crime was 10x higher.

I miss when things were a bit kinder, I guess. Everyone is such a dick now.

In this context, saying that he was "dressed to kill" was not the journalist complimenting his dapper attire, but rather making a corny pun. TV news networks force their anchors to use groan-worthy lines like this to this day, as a way of keeping the audience's attention.

Obviously, but it's still fun and witty - instead of "TRUMP|BIDEN - A TRAITOR - IS HERE TO FUCK YOUR KIDS" that you get from the mainline media now.

Conte was dressed as an exterminator (it's mentioned further down in the piece). It's a pun.

I'm hoping housing architecture evolves to become anti-roach and anti-termite as first class citizens. Any nooks and crannies and I know a german roach is hiding in there.

Another amazing product is Bravecto for ticks and fleas.

I've had dogs all my life in a very tropical climate. I've battled with ticks for ages. It was always a combined-arms war of attrition just to keep them in check.

But then came Bravecto which is basically a WMD/Genocide machine for fleas and ticks. Just one simple pill and it eradicates them all. It stays active for 6 months too so it really just wipes them out from the area and the dogs stay clean for over a year after that.

This is a massive technological conquest, IMO

How does it work?

I have always wondered how flea and tick medicine works. It makes your blood poisonous?

It’s not for people but yes, it makes the dog’s blood “poisonous”.

> It makes your blood poisonous?

It makes the blood poisonous to the central nervous system of the ticks.

Here is an article about them if you prefer reading: https://www.petmd.com/how-do-common-tick-medications-work-pe...

Or this video about them if you would rather watch and listen: https://youtu.be/4QDDHjRZIZM

if it affects flesh that way wouldn't it have clear effects on the internal organs? or are the biology of insects so much different vs mammals

this kind of technology perplexes me

Lots of poisons (and herbicides, and medicines too) work by targeting a single chemical pathway. E.g. binding to a specific receptor or doing something to a specific protein.

I think insects and mammals do have pretty different biology, but even if they didn't it would only take one chemical pathway that insects used and mammals didn't that you could exploit.

> if it affects flesh that way

I assume you meant to write fleas? But in case you meant flesh: it does not affect muscles directly, it affects neuro transmission. (which of course paralyses the muscles)

> wouldn't it have clear effects on the internal organs

Excellent question. And yeah it seems invertebrates have different molecular mechanism enough that these drugs affect them and not us vertebrates.

This does not appear to be 100% though. There are some, admittedly very rare, reports of neurological effects in pets. There is this[1] case for example of a Kooikerhondje exhibiting neurological symptoms. Luckily it seems at least in that case the symptoms cleared up on their own after about 10-11 hours.

> this kind of technology perplexes me

oh yeah. As far as I'm concerned "this is witchcraft" is actually a more satisfying answer than the reality.

Caution: There is a quite distressing video embedded in the article showing the dog exhibiting symptoms. You might want to skip this one.

1: https://bmcvetres.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12917-...

For sure. Fleas used to be impossible.

Also, pantry moths. My sticky pheromone traps have pretty much eliminated them.

You can also buy the wasps you release to kill the pantry moths, haha

let's see: on the one hand, a sticky trap I can put somewhere out of sight, and gives visible evidence of its effectiveness.

On the other hand, a bunch of little insects that fly around and catch the other little insects.

Tough choice.

Pheromone traps don't really work to eradicate an infestation. In my country they even have to be labeled as such. They are meant as an early warning system.

> don't really work to eradicate an infestation

I think if people don't see it, then operationally, it doesn't exist.

Is it just me or is this stuff stupid expensive (and going up in price over time)? I found the other one, NexGard, worked better with my dog for some reason. Not any less expensive though. That said, you are right... it works surprisingly well.

> It stays active for 6 months too

Are you sure it's 6 months? It's possible there might be different versions internationally, but the US version seems to claim 12 weeks (~3 months): https://us.bravecto.com/dogs/bravecto-for-dogs/

Fleas haven't been an issue here since i started keeping chickens. I only have 3 chickens right now, but still no fleas. This is the first year where ticks have been a nuisance, maybe 4-5 ticks a week on the animals that go outside. I usually also have guineafowl, but the local wildlife loves eating guineas, and they're 3x more expensive than chickens, so it's hard to keep throwing money at that problem. Guineas are much more effective at killing snakes and ticks than chickens, though, in my experience.

I have a legitimate fear of cockroaches and sometimes I wish editors would refrain from putting a gigantic roach picture at the top

What makes the fear legitimate?

Perhaps he legitimately has the fear, not the fear itself is legitimate.

Every fall our house in the mountains has an invasion of dampwood termites. Never very many, at most you'll see about four or five a day, for 2 or 3 weeks. And then they're gone. But they are relentless, and always at the same time of the year. We've called four different exterminators and they all say the same thing. "They only eat damp wood. Find it and get rid of it." And then they leave.

But we're surrounded by redwood trees so... we're just screwed I guess.

I know they're pricey, but when I lived in a subtropical rain forest for 7 years (in a decaying 100+ year old cabin) the solution to termites/roaches/mold ended up being running three dedicated dehumidifiers (~2000sqft). This cost me hundred$, annually, but was absolutely worthwhile.

Diatomaceous Earth will also kill anything, including fleas/bedbugs/ticks.

https://ghostarchive.org/archive/OJMMe

I really wanted this to go more into how the poison works, and contrast it with previous solutions, maybe talk about those as well. If the roaches no longer like sweet, can we flavor it like something else?

Instead it was talking about how roaches make the hosts feel in their presence and then absense, and how they feel about the Combat inventor’s perceived sleight.

I don't understand why we don't just create a genetically engineered cockroach that wipes them all out by outcompeting and then dying off? The same way they want to with mosquitos. Almost nothing subsists on cockroaches. It wouldn't disrupt the ecosystem at all, especially in cities like NYC.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mimic_(film)

Man growing up in the suburbs sounds like heaven compared to this. Pouring your cereal and roaches come out? Thats a scene from a nightmare or horror film.

Growing up in the midwestern suburbs in the 80s we saw them occasionally, but nothing like what was described here.

Same for me in suburbs in the 90s/2000s. Never saw anything other than millipedes (which are also gross). Now in San Diego and every time I go to little Italy I wish I wasn’t wearing sandals because so many of the big ones scatter across the street (why can’t the city do more to get rid of these?)

Who would have thought Joe’s apartment would be unrelatable?

I think they're celebrating a little too soon. A few years ago I lived in a roach infested apartment in Seattle and we used every form of pesticide imaginable, essentially to no effect. We were finding them in our food, inside kettles, etc. It maybe wasn't as bad as the waves the post described.

I guess this quote from the article even admits that roaches have become wiser and are on the rise again:

So, roach numbers are slowly going up again. And if you read publications of the Pest Management Association newsletter, which maybe I’ve done recently, you can see that there’s, you know, there’s some chatter about how roach calls are increasing.

Okay, so I pulled some numbers. I went to the American Housing Survey from the federal government. In 2011, 13.1 million estimated households had signs of cockroaches in the last 12 months. In 2021, 14.5 million.

Awesome. Now do bed bugs. Please.

When I was a landlord - i found foggers that I bought at Home Depot very effective. Nuked roach populations between tenants multiple times. Had personal experience living in the same unit - after putting out traps, fogging, and subsequently keeping the place clean - no more roaches. But as soon as nasty people move in, they come back.

By the way, you mileage may vary based on construction etc, but in brick row homes where I rented - I found that roaches from neighbors weren’t an issue. Once eliminated in my unit - I didn’t see them coming back from the neighbors.

Mice however, were much harder to control. I was never able to completely eliminate them. Nearly but never entirely gone - they travel between shared walls. In a single home - I was able to completely eliminate them relatively quickly and easily, but not in a row home.

I lived in the lower unit of a duplex that was a converted 1880s house and saw mice in the basement and heard neighbors' complaints of mice upstairs, but we never had them on the first floor.

Later we moved to the upper unit and found that when the kitchen was put in to convert the house to a duplex, someone had cut a big hole for the kitchen pipes that left a clear view down to the basement-- and a perfect tunnel for mice. We covered the hole and didn't have any more mice after that.

If you've got mice, you've not got rats ...

If they kept coming back, that means you never really exterminated the population, just got their numbers low. You need to make the population go extinct

Unless the new tenants brought a new colony with them. It's pretty common for people to have eggs inside their electronics and furniture when they move.

The audio plugin does not work on my Firefox

Total nonsense article. The tide on roach wars was indeed turned but much later by the invention of PfDNV in Wuhan.

It doesn't appear that's the kind of cockroach they have in NYC. But it was the kind we used to have in Atlanta.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smokybrown_cockroach

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_cockroach

https://horizon.documentation.ird.fr/exl-doc/pleins_textes/p...

At least four species have been shown to be susceptible to PfDNV including the American cockroach. It’s basically Covid for cockroaches.

This kind of filler-laden writing will be quickly eradicated, like the cockroach, but by AI. I had bing or copilot, whatever microsoft is calling it in the edge sidebar answer the question I clicked the bait for.

> According to the article, they solved the cockroach infestation by using a new product called Combat, which was a bait that contained a slow-acting poison that could kill roaches through various mechanisms of transfer, such as feces, vomit, cannibalism, and necrophagy. The bait was attractive to roaches and could wipe out entire colonies, even if only a fraction of them ate it. The product was developed by American Cyanamid, a chemical company, and tested by Austin Frishman, a cockroach expert. The product was launched in 1985 and became a huge success, reducing cockroach complaints and populations across the country. The article claims that this was a forgotten achievement in the history of pest control, and that the roaches are slowly coming back due to behavioral resistance to the bait.

Source: Conversation with Bing, 12/27/2023 (1) The Cockroach Cure - The Atlantic. https://www.theatlantic.com/podcasts/archive/2023/11/cockroa.... (2) Cockroach Infestation - Signs, Prevention, and Control of Roaches. https://www.familyhandyman.com/article/cockroach-infestation.... (3) How To Get Rid Of Roaches - This Old House. https://www.thisoldhouse.com/pest-control/reviews/how-to-get.... (4) How To Get Rid Of Roaches – Forbes Home. https://www.forbes.com/home-improvement/pest-control/how-to-....

It was entertaining to read.

I think it's a transcript of a podcast, to be fair. But yeah I had the same reaction.

>This kind of filler-laden writing will be quickly eradicated

It's a transcript of a podcast. I agree it was annoying to read, but the purpose of a podcast is not maximum-efficiency transmission of information.

All good conversations ebb and flow, and the interview process is just trying to distill the conversation to some entertaining or useful end. Some would use A.I. in an attempt to distill it more, and may find some gem or morsel worth consuming, but miss the depth and value of the conversation itself. It may be time saving for information transfer, but at the expense of the connection that a conversation grants the participants (and to a slightly lesser degree listeners).

Remember that this technology was developed for the NSA because of the data deluge it's surveillance systems created. Who had time to listen to hours of recorded phone calls looking for potential dangerous activity? Speech to text helped alleviate the problem for a short while, but when the internet took away the monopoly the phone companies had on long-distance calls, the volume of international calls went ballistic, and the NSA needed a way of filtering the data to something more useful. In comes A.I. to the rescue!

Who wants to read a transcript of a podcast. 99% invisible does this so much better - a long podcast with all the details, accompanied by a short article with photos. More work of course, but that's what the AI solves.

People who can't hear, just for example?

And fwiw, "this isn't condensed enough" could be applied to 100% of novels, achieving a 100% compression rate, since none of it is useful.

I'm very sorry if you're the one person with a cockroach infestation that has to be eradicated right now and you critically depend on the information in this one article and don't have access to any other resources, but maybe just accept that there are different writing styles for different things, audiences, and even over time for the same person.

> People who can't hear, just for example?

I don't see why people who can't hear would like to read a transcript of a podcast rather than an article either.

While I will certainly find AI summarization useful I think in this case the summary misses the human experiential component that we get from the recollections of the host and guest.

Precisely what I don’t care to read. Especially when they start the article giving background, tease that there’s an important thing coming, and then instead of getting to the point, it starts an interview which resets the conversation back to talking about the background again. I absolutely hated everything about the way this article was written.

Might you share what your question was? Or did you simply say "summarize"

I understand what you mean, but if you subscribe to the Atlantic it’s because you actually want long form writing from some of the best essayists of our time.

It’s not for everyone. Especially when our attention spans are shorter than ever.

To be fair, this one is a transcription of a podcast. It's not really the kind of long form writing Atlantic is famous for, so I can understand the GP wanting a shorter version.

I agree about the writing, and I gave up on the article.

How do you know it's accurate? How do you know which details are accurate? For example, was it called Combat, or was that another product in the article (maybe a failed one)? What important information was omitted?

Issues like that make the summary useless, IMHO. (Not a criticism, but a point about the value of information with unknown accuracy.)

AI summaries have been common on Reddit for almost a decade now. Where does the problem of "accuracy" come in? They weren't even using LLMs

How does that address the issue? Being common on Reddit (or any social media) isn't evidence of a good idea. It could be just as accurate or inaccurate on Reddit, for years.

> "accuracy"

How could there be scare quotes around accuracy? You question its reality or importance?

Where is there ANY evidence that these summaries aren't accurate? Until you produce it, it's as substantial as ghosts and evil spirits.

The burden of proof is the reverse, in any field of knowledge it's on the person making the claim. I could make up anything in the world (and many people do); it's the requirement for support that separates truth from fiction, science from fraud, fact from misinformation. You can't publish a scientific paper without evidence, and say 'it's true until someone proves otherwise'; it's false until you prove it. Same in a courtroom or anywhere else.

Until there is sufficient evidence that the summary is accurate, there's no reason to believe that it is.

fwiw, all caps is against HN guidelines. I'm mentioning it because there seems to be a rash of it this week.

> The burden of proof is the reverse, in any field of knowledge it's on the person making the claim.

You made an unprovoked claim of inaccuracy based on what?

The universal, clever retort! Let's agree then that nothing is demonstrated without sufficient evidence.

Let me save you a click and a long read: the innovation is Combat roach traps, which contain a poison bait that a roach brings back to the nest and transfers to other roaches. This resulted in a 93% drop in roach complaints in one survey.

It was entertaining, though.

these do work well in my experience, but there is a tradeoff to consider if you live in a large apartment building. if you have roaches in your unit, your neighbors probably do too. if you use this kind of trap, you might attract everyone else's roaches to your apartment. it can be an unpleasant few weeks as they all stumble out to die, one by one. if the infestation is really large, this basically never ends.

if you have a decent landlord, I recommend trying to engage them first. they can hire someone to spray all the units, so you don't have to turn your place into a roach graveyard.

The large apartment building issue is a big one. I lived in a building (10 stories, 70 units plus commercial space on floors 1-3) for ~10 years. The first several years were great, not a single pest of any sort. And then the roaches (German cockroaches) started to show up.

The problem was that once they got into the building they were impossible to eradicate everywhere as no one, including the owners, were willing to bite the bullet and treat it as a whole-building problem. So instead you'd get little pockets of treatment and a never ending cycle was created.

Years later in our house we found and killed a single German cockroach. And of course, living in a city, if you find one that means there are many more. We were terrified. But after a single treatment by a pest control company we haven't seen any other activity for several years. Still have no idea if somehow we *did* only have that single one or what. But I'm not complaining.

> Years later in our house we found and killed a single German cockroach. And of course, living in a city, if you find one that means there are many more.

Being in a city has nothing to do with it. Cockroaches are social, like sheep (or humans). If you live in a city and you find a spider, it was just the one spider. If you live in the remote wilderness and you find a cockroach, it was hundreds of cockroaches.

The point I was raising was regarding the different species of cockroaches. In rural areas there are species that primarily live outside but can find their way inside. German cockroaches tends to be more urban and indoors, so if you see one you can't hand wave it away as having just having hitched a ride into your house.

I had the same experience in a big building. I basically rendered my own kitchen unsafe for human food preparation with all the poisons I tried, but still it hardly made a dent because there was a near infinite population of german cockroaches waiting to recolonize my unit from the walls and surrounding units.

I had the same situation recently - a single German cockroach chilling on the front of our dishwasher. Being sufficiently terrified by reading r/whatisthisbug and the like, I had a pest control company out the next day to treat. They could find no signs of infestation and I haven't seen a single one since (and we did set out traps to monitor). The Orkin guy who came out said it's not uncommon for a lone individual to venture into a home.

Interesting,

Advion is what people in NYC swear by (It does the same thing)

Traps that do the same with ants has worked for me too. Put it out, they swarm it and after a bit ... they're all gone.

Doesn't work reliably against Argentine ants; they form supercolonies so even if you take out one or two queens, it may not be enough.

[edit]

AFAIK, it's still the best way, but it's not the near 100% knockout it can be against other ant species.

Only thing I’ve had that worked against argentine ants was termidor sc. Non repellent, and slow kill time. Spray it on an active walkway, and it will slowly spread through the colony and kill them all off. Again, supercolonies, so it isn’t a perfect solution. But it’s the only thing that works for me for 6+ months at a time. Then, I have to spray again as soon as I see another Argentine.

I you don't destroy the cockroach, life might come back more quickly if you keep them alive (after a mass extinction). /s

Too many "like's" and "I mean" filler words. Things become unreadable/unlistenable when when every other sentence has an unnecessary like injected into it.

Yeah, transcripts of verbal conversations are like that.

No I don't think we should excuse speaking this way, which isn't something everyone does nor something so many people did years ago. It is a particular style of speaking that is over-represented in certain journalist types.

The use of "like" in this way has been attested since the 1920s, and had been overwhelmingly common in colloquial American English for around 30 years.

It's, I mean, distracting and unpleasant to, like, listen to when every other sentence has, like, meaningless words injected into them which, I mean, could, like, be removed without changing the meaning at all but which, I mean, would be more, like, concise and sound better.

No, it is certainly not true that people have been talking this way since the 20's nor that radio shows, media, journalists etc presented information in this sloppy manner.

It is trivially verifiably not just a default way of talking by listening to podcasters or journalists that exist right now that don't do this but also watching/listening to older media especially. This is akin to vocal fry, another recent grating social phenomenon that has become acceptable for a certain type of public speaker that is drastically different than most people and media types spoke even in the 80's and 90's let alone decades prior.

https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/RealisticDiction...

This is a transcript of a podcast - but I hear your point about impressive communication

Quite obviously this is a podcast, that's why I said "unlistenable" as well. At least with written word you can sort of skip over it and don't have to hear it. In any case this isn't a universal requirement of the genre; it is a more recent thing where it is acceptable to speak this way and not everyone does it nor did so many used to do it.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com