New York claims a small victory in 'forever war on rats' | Hacker News Reader

New York claims a small victory in 'forever war on rats'

thetimes.com

68 pointslareading199 comments

Very proud of NYC in leading the way to having trash cans, an advance that will surely spread to other less developed cities nationwide.

Yes perhaps one day cities like Tokyo will catch up

Most of Tokyo (and Japan) doesn't have an excessive amount of pedestrians' litter. Public garbage cans are rare, though many convenience stores and some train stations have them.

Is there litter? Yes. Is there much less than, say, Vancouver, Bangkok or London? Absolutely.

It's due to a couple things that tourists may not be used to: -Be prepared to bring your garbage with you until you are home.

-Garbage is sorted differently in each municipality in Japan, and often the garbage bags cost money. Who is going to buy those bags and sort someone else's garbage?

-It's changing, but walking around consuming snacks, food, drinks in Japan is not that common. People do that at specific locations, thus they don't find themselves with empty food wrappers and drink cups while walking around. Thus, they don't see a need for public garbage cans.

-Crows make a quick mess of garbage here. Observing the above points means that (most) of Japan doesn't need stinky, sticky, flies-and-wasps-buzzing-around, crow-magnet garbage cans, which look almost as bad as litter everywhere.

Have you seen the litter that piles up late at night in many Japanese cities? People simply leave their trash everywhere but the city cleans it up by morning. Tokyo is one of the most littered cities I've seen at midnight compared to any western city.

Are you referring to the shibuya crossing area? Apart from there I don’t see that at all

Lots of areas where it's prevalent to see litter, not just in Shibuya. Walk around any popular neighborhood at night and you'll see it.

Vancouver is pretty clean, have you ever been to Paris or Rome? (I’ve lived in all three)

It’s not litter that causes the rat issue in NYC, it is the huge masses of household and business garbage.

they do just pile up garbage bags on pickup day that i've seen

Never been to Japan, but AFAIK they used to have trash cans but got rid of them due to a sarin gas terrorist attack in 1995.

Tokyo is significantly cleaner than NYC, or any major US city. I think this is GPs point.

Rat populations mostly aren't sustained by the sorts of trash cans that passersby toss garbage into (or fail to). They're sustained by containers carrying large amounts of residential refuse. (Consider the proportion of garbage you, personally, throw into a public trash can compared to your own trash can, especially food waste.) And I'm not well-versed on the specifics of Japanese waste processing, but I'm fairly confident they have something analogous to dumpsters and residential trash collection, even if they don't have public bins.

Many businesses and residences typically bag their trash and leave it on the street curb.

The main exception is when a building has a managed trash facility, which is a room that people leave their bags in instead of on the curb.

I don't know, there's a decent amount of rats where I live, but no outdoor dumpsters and very few public trashcans. Trash is kept indoors and brought out at the daily collection time.

I always assumed sewer access and the occasional rat-stronghold in poorly maintaned buildings was the issue.

Much of central London could stand to be more developed, by this metric.

Here in İstanbul we don't have a rat problem thanks to the huge numbers of cats in the city.

We have over 200,000 stray cats in Brooklyn alone--as I learned recently when one cute but particularly insistent kitten tried to make its home in ours--yet somehow they are collectively terrible at hunting rats.

Interesting. I'd make a guess. In a cat friendly city like Istanbul you'd see cats freely and safely venturing everywhere. Rats would have no chances say in a cafe where a couple cats are sunbathing. Where is in cat unfriendly cities like a typical American city the cats aren't present on the streets, probably because this is where they get caught by Animal Control, etc., and they are more confined to some back alleys, empty lots, etc. And the rats problem for example in NYC is a street problem, i.e. where the trash is. And for example here in Bay Area the several colonies of feral cats that i know about aren't in populated areas where they could have been impactful upon street rat/mice population, instead these colonies are pushed out onto the edges of wildlife areas (where they still do useful things like protecting the birds nests/eggs from rats, etc., yet it woudln't really affect rats in the populated areas)

I think it’s more like NYC rats are bigger than cats. Istanbul maybe the heat keeps them slim.

Istanbul isn't too hot. I think it has more to do with the fact all the buildings in Istanbul are made of concrete.

The city is like a giant concrete pool. No rotting wood buildings for rats to move within the walls of.

>I think it’s more like NYC rats are bigger than cats.

C'mon, man, its a myth. NYC rats are max 2lb. Even the giant rats - those mine sniffing ones in Africa - are 3.3 lb max. A cat is 10lb+ of pure predator muscle and instinct. A rat has no chance against typical street cat (one can see that even from the reaction time perspective - cats with their 20-70ms are among the fastest mammals while rats have only 150ms+. Just watch Youtube cats vs. snakes).

I don't know about Istanbul but the problem is more like, cats are actively controlled in the U.S. in terms of animal control, spaying, neutering, etc. You don't really have a proper predator-prey dynamic play out with the population because the predators are more contained than the prey are.

I have a tiny skinny female 3.5 kg cat who regularly brings home rats that look half her size, my other fat male cat 7.5kg never catches anything nor does my huge 54kg Doberman.

I've seen cats in India choose to hunt only mice shorter than their heads and take their time for the mice to give up all their fight. Cats are risk averse.

Yeah there’s no way that would happen in the west. In Canada you often hear stories of cats on the edge of properties or just sitting in a field and some lady driving by will stop, pick it up and drop it off at the shelter (which in some cases will only hold them for a few days before giving them away). There’s a huge well organized group of people keeping every animal not fully controlled in check and not keeping them indoors is frowned upon. It’s mostly cultural not just animal control regulation, like most enforcement of municipal rules.

I have friends in the countryside in North America, and I can corroborate that: as development has encroached, the new subdivisions have filled with former city-dwellers.

Three times in a single month, do-gooder passers-by trespassed past a prominent fence to nab my friends’ dog, who would snooze innocently in the front pasture in the afternoon, and “rescue” him to the county lockup.

The animal control people know him by name now, but they can’t do much to waive the mandatory “re-adoption fee”…

Wait so random people steal this person’s property, hand off to some (presumably) public agency, and the agency is charging a fee to have said property released? Sometimes it seems the US is a strange place. (Maybe the dog is missing dog tags?)

That’s correct! Nothing punitive, just “admin fees,” I guess to cover the cost of a kennel for the afternoon and of reading his microchip to confirm his vaccination status. They’re really big on “user fees” around there—they even charge prisoners a nightly fee for “using” the cells they were imprisoned in [0]

I’d venture that there’s grey area there that’s relevant here: to you and me, the animal probably registers as “property,” where to the people doing the “rescuing” it must look more like a precious innocent soul cast out into the cruel harsh world (like the kids they repossess as “neglected” for walking around their block untethered to a parent or nanny [1]). I figure too many superhero movies and crime shows, and not enough exposure to the natural world.

The dog did have collar and name tag; his tags have since been expanded and clarified, and large signs erected at the edge of the property with a photo of the dog and “I LIVE HERE”… so far much better results. And yet.

[0] https://www.npr.org/2022/03/04/1084452251/the-vast-majority-...

[1] e.g. https://reason.com/2024/11/11/mom-jailed-for-letting-10-year... and https://abcnews.go.com/Lifestyle/free-range-parents-found-re...

> There’s a huge well organized group of people keeping every animal not fully controlled in check and not keeping them indoors is frowned upon.

Why does this work for cats but not for rats?

There's no old ladies willing to pick up rats in their car, and no rat shelters to take them to if there were.

Nobody is “picking up” a feral cat unless they like bites and deep scratches. If you can approach and pick up a cat, it’s a pet. Leave it be and it will go home when it wants to.

I've seen citizens trap racoons and release them further from their property. My mom got an annoying feral cat in her car and also dropped it off many km away and it showed up again a week later.

I believe Istanbul has over a million cats.

Hmm... Cats are more mousers and they're not actually that good at catching rats, which are much larger. Typically this was the job of small dogs.

(Not to say it can't be done. My own housecat killed a rat)

Anectodal but my cat brought home at least a dozen full grown rats in her lifetime. Sometimes afterwards she got sick, but only for 1-2 days. I don‘t know how many rats she just devoured before i could throw them in the thrash.

lol impressive.

I guess you instead have a cat problem.

That's like saying the Midwest has a squirrel problem

Here in San Francisco we don't have a rat problem due to the coyotes in the city.

It comes and goes depending on construction:

- https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/north-beach-rats-may-...

- https://hoodline.com/2015/10/rise-in-rat-sightings-reported-...

- https://old.reddit.com/r/sanfrancisco/comments/j2n2ch/absent...

I had some come inside due to that last one but I didn't let them last long lol

Also don't have a stray cat problem....

Ive seens rats running between trash, kearny/washington streets

How’s your bird population?

I saw plenty of birds in Istanbul, and the rest of Turkey.

But Istanbul does have a stray dog problem. Dogs in this city are either obese and sunbathing or extremely aggressive.

I guess there aren’t any cats in the Ak Saray.

too many cats aren't good as they prey on birds and everything.

Bit warmer there though?

That's generally better for rats, is it not? Year-round availability of food, with the downside of more endemic disease.

a city rat mom can have 6 litters a year of 7 rats each, life expectancy < 2 years... so in theory, seasonality of food would have little effect on annual rat population.

in practice, this is born out because NYC is very cold in winter, and it is swarming with rats.

(og ja, nordmenn, dere kan takke meg for at jeg kaller det en byrotte)

Living in Baltimore was a mess with rats until the city issued the rat-proof trash bins. Now I rarely ever see them.

Insane that one of the richest most developed cities in the world just dumped their trash on the street without using cans

Theres a long story about noise complaints you should listen too. They had them then got rid of them.

Yup, if you live below the 20th floor in most buildings, the trash cans thudding at 2am is pretty jarring.

I am sure there is an engineering solve to pad the cans and dump truck, not sure if it was looked into or not.

Well... There's another thing that they could learn from other cities. You can pick up the bins at 6am for example.

Yes, although then you have a lot more traffic to deal with. A typical garbage truck moves slowly down a city block, preventing a line of cars behind it from moving. Every change will upset some constituency, and their various needs need to be balanced. Life in the city!

viraptor hasn't been to NYC apparently. No way are garbage trucks roaming at 6 am. What a cluster bomb that would be.

The comment was less about the specific time and more about "see how other cities solve this". I get that it's a complex issue, but also many issues around it are self inflicted/imposed.

Some Sydney councils for example rotate the routes often to avoid one place getting a 3am pickup constantly. (it's stretched until midday or so) And that's before getting to the part where the traffic itself is a problem and how is emergency response supposed to work in a place that can't handle a garbage truck.

I think people underestimate the amount of trash NYC produces. The survey the city paid for that was the impetus for this plan actually advised the city to give up on bins for Manhattan because it would require basically daily pickups. And in defiance of all good sense they're picking up trash 6 days a week. I genuinely commend them on doing the hard expensive thing anyway.

Do you not have wheelie-bins in the US?

In the US, yes, but in New York we generally just pile up our trash bags on the sidewalk on garbage day. We don't have alleyways between our buildings and most of the street space is taken up by free car storage.

NY serves a rat banquet on the regular and pikachu-faces at the amount of rats that attend.

> most of the street space is taken up by free car storage.

'Subsidised' I think is the more correct term here.

The thing being subsidised is free on street parking. Free on street parking is not subsidising the already existing street space.

most of it doesn't cost any money. I believe "free" is an accurate description.

The land is some of the most valuable and costliest to maintain in the world. The absence of a parking meter just means someone else is footing the bill.

Yes, and I think that was implied already?

This is such useless pedantry. We all know what was meant.

They're addressing a common misnomer. And one of the costs of street parking is that the parking spot is free. It ties right in to the discussion on the cost of street parking here: can't put trashcans on the street, garbage truck can't access trash cans from the street.

Free as in healthcare.

How often is garbage day?

Also a bit wild to me that there's not like a communal dumpster.

Some population dense cities also do underground dumpsters, has that been floated?

> How often is garbage day?

For general household trash, if you are eligible for DSNY collection, it's two times per week except for some holidays. Recycling and compost are once a week. If you contract to a private garbage collection company, it's whatever you specify in the contract.

> Also a bit wild to me that there's not like a communal dumpster.

Large apartment buildings of course do have trash chutes leading to a dumpster of some sort. But inside or outside smaller buildings, there is no space.

> Some population dense cities also do underground dumpsters, has that been floated?

There is an underground garbage handling system on Roosevelt Island. The idea of underground dumpsters in other parts of the city been floated, but it's impossible because there is too much density of existing underground infrastructure and much of this infrastructure is not mapped, making it impossible to plan an excavation project of such a scale. See e.g. https://dsny.cityofnewyork.us/wp-content/uploads/reports/fut... (pdf). (There are also interesting engineering questions of how underground dumpsters would work after heavy snowfall.)

Interesting. Reading the report it looks like the biggest issue any sort of communal trash system faces is we simply don't have that in the US. NY would need a lot of trash trucks which are only being manufactured outside the US. They'd be one of the only cities doing this as well.

It looks like underground would be an option, but the big deal breaker is potentially needing more frequent pickup and specialized trucks.

> NY would need a lot of trash trucks which are only being manufactured outside the US.

Put them on a boat? Or are the legal hurdles to importing so high?

It becomes an ongoing maintenance problem even if you import them - if nobody in the US has experience servicing them, and nobody else is buying them, then you end up being the sole subsidizer of the cost of things like having a stockpile of parts around.

Cities like rome that have real archeolorical things going back centuries and they can dig easier than nyc. Quit using that cop out if they can do it you can too.

> Large apartment buildings of course do have trash chutes leading to a dumpster of some sort

The bags therein get put out on the street in a big pile, however. Or they did before the new bin situation.

The volume gets pretty intimidating; for Manhattan, you're talking around 140 cubic yards of garbage per block per week [0.1 yard / person, 1400 people / block], which would be ~4 of the 40-yard dumpsters (the 8 x 8 x 22' ones you'll see outside construction sites, roll-on/off trucks) per block.

That they're able to collect that much garbage anyway means it's not an unsolvable problem, but going from using that much space once a week, in the form of piles of garbage on garbage day [with the remainder of the time it being scattered in smaller piles in buildings' garbage rooms], to 24/7, means you're losing like 12 parking spots per block, or like half a building lot per block, if you're storing them off the street.

Noting says you need to wait a full week between collecting garbage.

That’s the thing about changing how things work, you can change multiple things at the same time.

Oh no, less parking, however will we recover?

It's the same amount of trash either way.

By your calculation, they would get 12 parking spots worth of random small pockets of space back per block. In reality, it would be more than that in usable space, because who want to do anything directly next to a distributed pile of garbage?

I suspect the NYC underground is already so crowded with pipes and cables and under-sidewalk storage areas and other things there won't be much space for such dumpsters there.

I feel like people would sue the city if they had to walk more than a minute to dump out their trash in NYC. I was there for a few months when the trash bins were being tested out, and seeing people complain about it was… interesting?

Were the bins in the street and not on the sidewalk for this test? These complaint were likely really about taking away a parking spot.

People would rather walk through a maze of garbage bags than make things slightly less convenient while driving. We are way too car-brained.

Yup, those were the exact complaints actually! A bit wild to my stupid brain, but it is what it is.

Where do you store full trash bags in between pickups?

Still on the sidewalk. NYC is perpetually full of trash bags in comparison to other major cities (or non major cities)

This sounds so wild. Surely it would be much more efficient, for space and picking up, to have containers for trash.

there is a push to use garbage containers, and the requirements have partially rolled out, but it's a very controversial political issue.

On the street.

Go to Google Maps, zoom in on New York City, then drop a Streetview pin randomly anywhere in the city.

Chances are very, VERY, good that just by panning, not moving, you'll find a trash bag dumped on the sidewalk.

There are garbage bins in NYC. Here's one: https://www.google.com/maps/@40.7238555,-73.9968645,3a,75y,5...

Yep a trash bin right next to: "trash bag dumped on the sidewalk"

It's funnier if you don't explain the joke.

That’s assuming it was funny in the first place.

In trash rooms, hallways or alleyways if one exists (common outside of Manhattan).

Depositing trash bags on the street is legal?

For real? I thought that was a movie thing. Then again I though steam release manholes was a movie thing too...

New York was weirdly built without alleys so there is a legitimate issue of where do you put the bins when it's not trash day that almost every other city doesn't have

Well, they find the space to store their trash right now. So they definitely have enough space. The amount of trash would presumably roughly be the same before and after this change.

Eg they could sacrifice some street parking spots for the bins.

They could even charge the bins the same amount of money they charge for street parking (and fold these costs into the costs for trash disposal they charge trash producers).

> Eg they could sacrifice some street parking spots for the bins.

Taking away curb parking is one of the most heated political issues in the US.

It's controversial enough to take away parking to make the road safer for pedestrians and other drivers (new daylighting law in SF), so I can't imagine how hard it would be to do it for some trash cans.

Someone should try to campaign on turning all NYC sidewalks into parking spots.

As sibling implied basically every other major city in the US uses bins or dumpsters. Except NYC.

In New York City, the trash workers union prevents dumpsters from being used, which would kill jobs. Remember: trash is not a problem to deal with. It's a solution to unemployment.

I moved back to the south after living out west for 20 years and it is insane the amount of trash dropped by trash workers while they are dumping bins. Part of it is cultural in that trash is literally piled at the street in bins of varying condition vs out west where you know if it doesn't fit in your 90 gal bin it ain't getting picked up by the robot arm.

The transition from "pile everything in a heap" to "if it's not in your wheelie bin it's not getting picked up" happens pretty quickly. Just need the garbage company to specify that in their contract with the municipality. I honestly miss being able to pile up oddly shaped pieces of trash though. Now if you have something weird, it's just not going to get picked up and you have to figure out how to get it to the dump.

I don't see much of that in North Carolina.

I've heard that it was that it was because it would remove parking space.

But if what you are saying is true, that's what you get for not allowing multi-concern unions. Our union branch that take care of trash collection workers is also responsible for municipal cleaning workers, as well as dump workers: making the job worse for cleaning and dump workers is just not something the union would push for.

Or alternatively, it's what you get for allowing unions. (At least unions that have special extra rights compared to any old club that people can form.)

Unions have obligations in the US. You can't organize a protest or strike for other professionals. You _have_ to follow some rule before and after a strike. You cannot "just stop working" (because some industrial processes, when let down, can destroy the whole factory). The right the unions got are written in blood, and honestly in the US, it seems to me they control workers a lot more than they protect their rights, at least since the 70s.

In any case, the US should destroy the unions by removing all legislation preventing work organization or giving them special rights, and let them reform as grassroot unions (your "old club that people can form") and let them grow from this point.

> You cannot "just stop working" (because some industrial processes, when let down, can destroy the whole factory).

Well, people in any old club can "just stop working". But they are facing contractual penalties including getting fired. And I think that's fair.

> In any case, the US should destroy the unions by removing all legislation preventing work organization or giving them special rights, and let them reform as grassroot unions (your "old club that people can form") and let them grow from this point.

Yes. Though removing the special legal rights (and the few obligations) from unions would basically destroy them.

You seems to believe unions appeared out of nowhere. Just remember that the NRA was initially created to limit firearms access for workers. When unions as they exist in the US are destroyed, something else might take their place. Hopefully it won't be new Luigi's but a better work organisation.

> You seems to believe unions appeared out of nowhere.

No, why?

The British monarchy also didn't spring out of nowhere, but that doesn't mean Britain couldn't turn into a republic, if they wanted to change their laws.

Here in Singapore we barely have any unions, or rather in practice unions barely have any influence.

Compare also https://pseudoerasmus.com/2017/10/02/ijd/

Where would the dumpsters go? Serious question, the impression I get is that there is no room in many places in the city.

Dumpsters would go where trash goes now. Instead of trash sitting on the street, the same trash will sit inside dumpsters.

Parking spots that currently house individuals’s cars could be used for dumpsters instead.

Ignoring the political backlash around taking people's parking, I would instead point out the likely rate of hitting dumpsters in the street with how tightly packed people would park around them.

NYC was, for large stretches, built without the alleys that lots of other cities would use to store such bins, and I don't think you can easily accommodate the volumes of trash that people want to turn over with just street storage without significant logistical problems with how much you disrupt the flow of people in the city.

Even if we eat the cost of parking around residential locations, businesses have gotten used to using the space in front of their restaurants as additional seating, so cannibalizing that for dumpsters will cause massive backlash on that front, to say nothing of the nasty effects on people's desire to eat when sitting next to a dumpster.

I agree that NYC is slow moving on a lot of things, but this is also a genuinely hard problem.

What if all cars were required to haul trash?

They had plenty of room for on street restaurant expansions in many parts of the city.

Room would have to be found.

At this point, even massive dumpsters on the sidewalk would be an improvement.

That is at odds with the fact the article says they are using bins and picking them up 6 days a week, I don't see any union complaint here?

I thought the problem with it was the lack of space.

Well, the trash on the pavement is taking up space, too.

Proper bins could pile the trash higher, so they would take up less floor space than the random distributed piles.

And as other commenters point out, you could sacrifice some parking spots.

> could pile the trash higher

I don't actually think you can get denser storage, at the moment, than the raw piles of garbage bags. In some places, they are absolutely willing to pile them higher than people stand, sometimes, and proper individual trashcans would sacrifice some space for their size, and actual dumpsters would be pretty disruptive to place since there's not much in the way of locations to land them on.

The trash bag piles also have the nominal benefit that they're transitory - that is, you don't have to permanently say "this space will only be used for trash storage", and with a place with space at such a premium sometimes, that really does matter.

(I'm not fond of the bags either, but short of the city dropping a truly astonishing amount of money on trying to buy up properties on each block to keep dumpsters in, as far as I can see, just getting the rolling bins out and about is the best reduction you can hope for.)

There is plenty of space, but most of it is taken up by individuals’ cars.

> It's a solution to unemployment.

No, it's not. Just because a union opposes something doesn't mean it would cause unemployment.

It absolutely is a problem to be dealt with. I understand what you are implying but it actually is a problem

Is there a source on this? This is the second of two conspiracy theories I've heard, the other being that Reagan is somehow responsible for getting rid of the communal dumpsters that are claimed to have once existed.

That's a sign the city has useless excess population.

I once saw a rat trying to open a wheelie-bin and when it looked up to me, I could see it think: shit, I'm busted; they know we are smart.

Washington, DC, has had "supercans" for about forty years. But it still has rats, though I suppose many fewer than it might.

I live in a city that most of HN would look down their nose at.

We have "wheelie bins".

Most of HN has seen San Francisco. I doubt they'd look down too much.

Even that doesn't solve it because the truck is too powerful for the bin. Over time the lid breaks apart from the grabbing and flicking motion. Plus some trash inevitably slips proper placement. And animals are smart.

People are trying to sterilize rats or give them birth control now vs kill them. If you kill a rat, you still have the environment that could support a rat and one is liable to more in from the populations nearby you didn't kill. If you sterilize the rat and release it however, it keeps other new rats from moving in potentially in the maintenance of its territory and it could be doing this job for you for years while you try and sterilize the rest of the area. And eventually these rats will die, and if the great bulk has been sterilized in some way then you may actually eliminate or push back sterile rat populations out of certain areas.

>>Even that doesn't solve it because the truck is too powerful for the bin. Over time the lid breaks apart from the grabbing and flicking motion.

I feel like you and I live on a different planet. Here in the UK we have those wheelie bins, they get collected using an automated dumpster truck that tips them inside itself, and I'm yet to hear about one of these braking - they are made out of proper thick plastic. Unless by "over time" you mean like 20+ years?

https://www.wheeliebins.co.uk/blogs/news/everything-you-want...

No they last about 2 or 3 years in my experience, depending on how lucky you get with them. Everyone's bin is at least somewhat damaged. A few are missing the top entirely. I've replaced a bad bin once, free service from the city, but the replacement is already starting to crack on the corners where it slaps down onto the tips of the metal claw holding the bin. It is quite violent how it slaps the lid. Here is a video of the units they use:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wXiywhZxZis

So no one cares that the trucks are clearly overpowered for the job and destroying bins every 2-3 years when other countries(maybe even other places in the US too?) have identical bins lasting 2 decades without any problem, even when using trucks that automatically dump the contents? Do you pay for replacement bins as residents, or does the city provide them? Either way, seems incredibly wasteful for something that is absolutely a solved problem.

Same here in Oregon. My bins are old (at least 16 years) and same as when I moved in.

I would think that is the truck was too strong, that could be adjusted. Or if city bought weak bins, they could be replaced by proper ones.

Here is the truck in action. I get only a couple years before the lid starts fragmenting at the corners and sometimes breaks at the hinge.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wXiywhZxZis

That looks like the standard bin and the claw is similar. But trucks here are gentler.

My guess is that your city designed trucks for speed at expense of destroying cans.

Australian checking in. Our wheelie bin lids cark it every decade or two, but I'd attribute that to sun exposure degrading them. The mechanical impact is just what finishes the job.

New York can hardly be called "the US" culturally

Nowhere in the US can be really. It's not as diverse culturally as "Europe" but it's more diverse than most countries by a lot.

This just in: huge country has a pluralistic cultural identity

Why?

Yeah how American is hip hop anyway?

Hip Hop has shifted as much as America has. The only big 2020s hip hop artist from NY is Cardi B. Then you have to realize she's mostly a pop act -- a majority of hip hop heads don't listen to female artists.

Yeah Cardi B is pop music.

And whoever heard of Lauryn Hill, Salt-n-Peppa, Erykah Badu, Eve, Lil Kim, Queen Latifah, Missy Elliot?

You're talking about basically 30 years ago.

That's an entire previous generation. Not speaking disrespectfully but none of who you mentioned have mainstream cultural relevance in _today's hip hop_. Kim and Missy come closest.

If your argument is going to be that New York is the cultural center of hip hop, who from New York is representing today's hip hop? Who is selling the albums?

My argument was that one of the most American things ever (hip hop) is actually rooted in NY.

The rest is a response to 'hip hop heads don't listen to female artists' so I mentioned a bunch of heavyweights. This can degenerate into 'no real scotsman' so whatever.

There is today a whole lot of pop artists that use hip hop aesthetics, but as usual the real stuff is very much underground.

The fallacy is actually named "No True Scotsman" for whatever that's worth.

C'mon really? In the Book of Fallacies they used the other word? Talk about pedantism.

Native New Yorker now living in the real America vouching for the accuracy of this comment.

The majority of the US shops at WalMart. New York City doesn't even have one.

But we have many Target. The K-Mart closed :(

The rest of America finds Target too expensive and also kind of overrated.

What would happen if we managed to get rid of every single rat on the planet. The great rat extinction.

Would other species take it's place? Mice?

Or would the planet just be a better place?

Seeing as shrew-like animals are the oldest species of mammals and date all the way back to Triassic era, if you killed off one rodent species another would necessarily take its place. They also managed to survive several great extinctions in the last 250 million years and gave rise to our own species. Given the importance of them in the food chain, the world would most certainly be worse off without them.

Well, if you have food scraps lying around, something will eat it. (Even if it's mold.)

I'm not quite sure why you would want to do genocide on rats. Some people even keep them as pets, you know?

>Some people even keep them as pets, you know?

Weird people.

Man I had a rat infestation in my house recently, and after that I think I could get behind a rat genocide.

Those fuckers got into my pantry and started knocking jars over, they poop on everything, they make a lot of noise, they get into the air conditioning ducts, they will chew through pretty much anything that isn't thick metal or plastic, and they reproduce like crazy.

We were able to get it under control and we hired someone to find and seal up the spots they were getting in from, but I gotta say that it wasn't an experience I want to go through ever again.

The only "good" thing about rats vs mice is that they're decidedly not subtle, so it's a lot more clear that you actually got them all. Mice are smaller and sneakier and when we had an issue with them a few years ago it took quite awhile to know before we knew they were gone.

Reminded me of this job offer from the city [0], 2 years ago! Seems it paid off then!

Searching for this post, I ended up scrolling through the HN result of "new York rats" [1]. It paints quite a story! Couldn't imagine it was such an intense topic (running for more than a decade!)

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33819860

[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?q=new+York+rats

The year is 2025. New York takes the bold, unprecedented step of storing their waste in receptacles which cannot be easily chewed through by pests. Will this wild experiment yield results? Scientists remain skeptical.

While the design of NYC - plus economic pressures - never accounted for domestic waste storage ( in a global and universal way for all buildings/tenants ). The truth is no one ( with actual power ) did anything meaningful to stop this.

It became some type of "culture" or "it always has been this way" type of situation. With a city budget in the billions and a VERY active and "enforce/fine" happy public sector there is no excuse of "people don't just follow basic sanitation rules", it's in the culture and I hope this finally starts to go away as there is no reason to be this way.

Considering that, according to polling, most residents would rather live with rats than lose the parking spot per block required for proper bins, I’d say this is a huge accomplishment in the fight against rats… and car brain.

I hope the recent congestion charge can slowly change the culture towards market pricing for parking spots, too.

And I hope they make the congestion charge more dynamic. Here in Singapore where we had congestion charging even long before London, we have some electric gizmos that measure congestion and adjust the charge dynamically. Basically, if traffic slows down, they hike the charge. If traffic flows smoothly enough, they lower the charge.

If only they could train rats to steal cars, pack them full of trash, and drive them out to the suburbs.

I guess I'm confused about the article now because Brooklyn has trash cans everywhere, and I even recall seeing them 2-3 years ago. If I pick random street views every street has lidded bins

You're likely underestimating what rats can and will chew through to get a bite to eat.

No, I'm very familiar with rats, but I can say for a fact that my friend's heavy duty plastic wheeled bins (the common ones) have been on the street 24/7 in NY and haven't been chewed into in the past 4 years. Probably how smooth that plastic is.

Fwiw the pilot program isn't using metal cans either, and apparently is working.

Edit: fun side note, I've seen a squirrel eat a hole through a 2" oak door to escape a basement, so Im not discounting a motivated rat :)

Rats live where there are bins too.

When will the woke nonsense stop. /s

I guess there are no homeless or unemployed people in NYC who could be mobilized to work on the problem.

Humans struggle in urban environments to resolve problems because “someone else should”.

> someone else should

Isn't that kinda what you're suggesting here? Most piles of trash aren't caused by homeless, its residents, so why should they need to be responsible? Residents could just buy their own cans as its their own problem

The homeless aren't exactly the best workforce. For many, there's a reason they are homeless despite plenty of support systems that helps people become more 'homeful'.

Similar, but generally less so, for some of the unemployed.

If you want to 'mobilize' people, just advertise jobs normally and use a normal hiring process. One that should, of course, be open to currently homeless or unemployed.

For your proposal, compare https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_100,000

I have never really felt the allure of living in a big city. Higher cost of living, smaller living spaces, noisy neighbors, rats apparently...

More restaurants, more music, more entertainment, more culture, "scenes", more romantic partners, more job opportunities, high energy, hustle, fashion, always something to do, etc.

Cities are great when you're young.

They are, but man the appeal does wear off, at least it did for me.

I moved here when I was 24, and I loved it for the first 8 years. Almost overnight, when I was 32, I realized that I actually don't enjoy living in the city anymore. It's loud, expensive, I don't really do "indie" restaurants, I don't like most art, and I'm married so I don't really need more romantic partners.

I still live in NYC, purely because my current job won't let me move, but I have been looking for an escape.

They are also good for business.

deploy remotely controlled small rat-like robots, where the public can sign up like a game to pilot those bots and kill rats to score points and make a small amount of profit.

This inevitably ends in someone breeding more rats.

if it costs $0.50 to raise one rat, then the fee for killing one can be $0.05. storing them somewhere, feeding them,etc.. surely costs some amount. if people are just throwing stuff rats can eat, then nothing is new, that's what's happening today.

At $0.05 per rat, you'd have to kill 330 rats per hour to make minimum wage (in NYC it's $16.50/hr).

just supplementary income or something kids can do to earn a bit. soda/beer can recycling costs about as much and people collect and recycle them just fine.

Deploy larger independent autonomous rat-hunting creatures. The public can volunteer to feed them treats and rub their bellies.

The public would kill people.

only if the bots use poison. impact-based methods at worst would harm the feet of pedestrians, but the public would need to create accounts, receive payment,etc.. so tracking them down and arresting them would be trivial.

Imagine kids on their switches hunting for rats using robots!

I have a feeling the robots would lose...

I mean... if you make a robot capable enough to move in a non-plane sidewalk, cross streets, climb into guts, and etc, it will still lose to rats.

I'm not confident I could win in a fight against a pair of rats, even if I have bats or guns or whatever.

The fact that they say it has reduced rodent sightings just makes it seem like the rats are in the bins now

Steel cans provided by the resident are the best option for cost and sustainability. “Metal recycles forever”. Residents should be forced to provide their own metal cans with tightly fitting or latching lids. Garbage collection should not be provided 6 days a week to Harlem that’s wasteful. Once a week at most is more reasonable.

Every resident/household in NYC having their own metal trash can would mean the streets and sidewalks near dense apartment buildings would just be covered in cans.

I’m not sure what the optimal pickup rate is but it should be more than once a week, especially in the summer. NYC apartment dwellers don’t have room to store full trash bags inside, and are generally discouraged from doing so to avoid attracting vermin, and you don’t want trash putrifying in the summer heat on the street for a week.

Why does the frequency even need to be centrally decided?

> Steel cans provided by the resident are the best option for cost and sustainability. “Metal recycles forever”.

Those two sentences together means buying the trash cans over and over again.

The collection thing is tough as there’s no alleys or anywhere to keep it.

I agree 100% on the metal cans. Metal cans are cheap and effective.

Or the turing uplifting test for rats leveled up.

Never seen a rat any city I’ve been even NY. Serious

That’s quite the accomplishment. I saw three separate ones just on my way home today out of the corner of my eye.

Mayor is still there though.

This is great, i'm always so turned off by how disgusting NYC is and struggle to get past it to enjoy the other parts

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