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Comment by chirau | Hacker News Reader

When i first realized that their primary purpose was to get rid of rats, I had quite the chuckle.

Yeah this is why I dont find it endearing. It's just pointing to unsanitary conditions. It's ubiquitous in NYC which may have dulled some senses but it's not ubiquitous everywhere.

Cat's themselves are not very sanitary. Better than rats, sure, but they are a source of toxoplasmosis which is very dangerous to pregnant women for example. Limiting exposure is manageable when keeping as a pet, but its a terrible baseline for a cramped public store.

The vast majority of NYCs problem can be tied to their trash debacle, which is so outlandish it's hard for anyone not from there to believe is a real thing in 2206.

It appears they finally discovered dumpsters recently: https://www.amny.com/news/curbside-empire-trash-bins-coming-...

(Another crazy trash city was (is?) Seattle with their weird judgement causing everyone to compact their trash.)

It's still a problem in 2206?

Oh sheesh now I have to leave the typo in (and it'll probably be correct, at least according to the historical documents: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=20SwR_zIWv4 )

I'm from 2207 and it's not a big deal.

Don't listen to the raccoon.

> 2206

Let’s not get ahead of ourselves.

[Posted from 2026.]

What about Seattle's trash was crazy? I've lived here for 14 years and never noticed anything weird about it compared to other places I've lived.

IIRC they got a judgement against them a long time ago and charged more per can to pay for it - but my memory may be off. All I know is all the older homes have trash compactors and there was something called the "Seattle Stomp" and it wasn't a dance. https://www.spokesman.com/stories/1995/jan/26/seattle-stomp-...

You do not recall correctly. That's not an article about Seattle. It's an article about Spokane, which is little college town close to five hours away from Seattle. There was no legal judgement, and there was no municipal government action here. A private corporation raised their prices, and their customers reacted by trying to get more for their money. John Smith's invisible hand continues to sculpt our reality.

He's being overly dramatic, and it's not a "Judgment", it's simple economics. Seattle is basically out of landfill space, the Cedar Hills landfill is a 96.6% capacity, so all trash needs to be trucked out of state. To minimize the cost of doing that they encourage sending most of your waste stream to recycling or compost instead. Many of the local trash haul haulers provide nice large recycle and compost bins, but a tiny landfill waste container unless you pay extra, hence the necessary compacting and stomping. My hauler charges an extra $25 fee if the flip-down lid on the garbage container is not fully closed, and they send you a photo and video of your non-compliant container along with the bill.

Again, this is not a judgement or a mandate. You can pay for a larger garbage can or for a multiple garbage cans if you want to. But you have to pay for how your consumption habits impact the cost of disposal.

There are areas of the city where instead of dumpsters, businesses and apartment complexes just put trash bags out in the alley/sidewalk for daily collection.

https://www.seattle.gov/utilities/your-services/collection-a...

And the difficulties of trash handling are further traceable, at least in Manhattan, to the decision by city planners in 1811 to not build alleys. No obvious place to store trash, nor an obvious place to put it when being collected.

If you drive in Manhattan you'll also notice a whole lot of delivery trucks and other vehicles blocking lanes, and a lot of designated delivery-only parking zones. This is rooted in the same lack of alleys.

San Francisco doesn't have alleys, either, not anymore than NYC. In older buildings, including older apartment buildings, trash cans are kept under stairways, in service rooms, in ground-level hallways, or for single-family homes in garages or backyards, then wheeled out to the sidewalk the night before collection day, blocking pedestrians. Then the garbage men have to roll those bins into the street, maneuvering around parked cars, etc. NYC doesn't have trash cans because New Yorkers perennially chose to continue to throw their trash on the ground like they always had. Blame unions, blame habituation, but you can't blame NYC's architecture and layout; nothing about it is unique compared to other cities globally or even nationally.

Chicago has allys. Trash goes in ally. Streets smell nice.

NYC has no allys. Trash goes on sidewalk. Streets smell stinky.

NYC was built without alleyways and much of NYC is single vaulted sewer systems due to its age. There is no space to put underground trash bins.

NYC is also non-uniform, so there are different types of trucks and streets.

Adam's admin largely solved this during his term, but the above ground bins are unpopular because they're ugly and then it takes time to retrofit the garbage trucks for mechanical pickup.

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/03/02/upshot/nyc-tr...

The reasoning gets worse the further you peel back that onion. Basically dumpsters are too large for sidewalks. Logically, it would make sense to put them on the curb. But no, drivers would complain because having to give up any curbside parking whatsoever.

I was baffled when I first moved to NYC and found out that people just throw their garbage onto the sidewalk.

I have the wheely bin now, which is good, but it's insane that it took until 2025 to actually require it. Probably the only good thing Eric Adams did.

“Empire Bins, which can only be picked up by specially-designed side-loading garbage trucks, will be mandatory for the owners of buildings with 30 or more units in those areas to use. …

Anderson said expanding Empire Bins to more parts of the city is “not easy,” due to the expense of and time it takes to acquire the side-loading trucks, which are custom-built and have not been used in North America before. The trucks are assembled through a combination of American and Italian parts and designs.

“These bins and the trucks that service them did not exist two years ago,” Anderson said. “We are now building a new supply chain that stretches across the Atlantic Ocean to get those trucks here, built, and ready to use. That takes time.””

Had to go custom huh…

I absolutely could not believe the trash situation in NYC. For people that don't know, it's literally just piled on the sidewalk and street. Stuff like this is completely normal: https://preview.redd.it/manhattan-nyc-this-is-worse-than-usu...

> they are a source of toxoplasmosis

You are far more likely to get it from undercooked beef or shellfish than from a cat. Less than 1% of cats broadly are shedding it at any given time and that number is even lower for indoor cats. If, like me, you have a penchant for rare steak and beef tartare then there's a decent chance that you have it.

You just angered a lot of cat people

In my experience most people lovingly refer to their cats in negative-sounding ways. One of the terms of endearment we used for our most recent cat was "stinky little piss baby". I think most cat owners are well aware that they're unsanitary creatures.

dog person here : they're unsanitary how? they constantly fastidously clean themselves, from what i see. dogs roll in rotting anything for sport.

I suppose they're unsanitary in the same way all animals that aren't humans are: They don't was their hands? Cats don't strike me a particularly dirty creatures. They're not exactly clean and well groomed from nature, but no animal really is.

> they're unsanitary in the same way all animals that aren't humans are: they don't was[h] their hands

Raccoons say "hold my beer"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2GLuR7a-hPs

If you covered yourself in spit would that be sanitary?

you just made me wonder if the fact we sweat serves a similar purpose as your spit covering example.

(i don't know, but you triggered a thought!)

Nope, it's evaporative cooling (like a swamp cooler) for your body.

that's only the famous part of the story, though.

here's what i was thinking...presence of protein lysing enzymes in sweat as a protective mechanism.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S187439191...

check this out: it's super interesting, even the air is full of genetic material

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-026-01099-2

If your housecat stinks, it's likely unhealthy or you're not providing it with a clean litterbox or you have insufficient litterboxes for the number of cats you have.

Calling your cat stinky does not actually mean they smell bad

He got the nickname while he was dying of cancer. He had stopped grooming himself because of his medications.

So you aren't entirely wrong, but rest assured that we were agonizingly aware of the ways in which he was unhealthy.

> Cat's themselves are not very sanitary. Better than rats, sure, but they are a source of toxoplasmosis

Hyperbole and toxoplasmosis go well together.

In particular: it's a limited time window when an infected feline could transmit toxoplasmosis. It can be dangerous to pregnancies, or immuno-compromised individuals.

Most humans (and other beings) aren't pregnant or immunocompromised, but the drama of the topic gets clicks, so it's a meme of sorts, and it resurfaces every six months or so in the news as if a revelation.

> Most humans (and other beings) aren't pregnant or immunocompromised

Just because pregnant and immuno-compromised people are in the minority, it's not a big deal?

Additionally, I can't imagine being blase about gaining parasites just because you're not pregnant or immunocompromised.

no one is being blase : we're immersed in a biological world teeming with such critters...and we exist through evolutionary adaptation to such. for fun, check out mites around eyelashes, for an innocuous example.

You’ve likely already got many critters living in an on you.

Not all of those give you brain lesions.

The solution isn't get rid of cats, it's don't lick your hands after changing the litter box. Especially since cat feces isn't the most common source. Under cooked meat is.

it's a big deal for some, but not for all individuals, is the point clearly made.

Well you wrote "Hyperbole and toxoplasmosis go well together". It's not "hyperbole" to care about others, however few they are, even though you yourself might not be at risk, right?

But I don't mean to be confrontational. I understand that it is probably annoying to hear toxoplasmosis talked about like it is black death.

A third of the entire human population is infected with toxoplasmosis, in some places nearly every human.

If you put humans in a sterile bubble you get a different set of diseases, to a considerably greater degree because your immune system evolved in an environment where you actually got infections.

By that logic, we shouldn't be fighting malaria in Africa either.

Are there any benefits to toxoplasmosis besides some people finding the vector cute? The alternative isn't living in a sterile bubble.

Without infections your immune system gets bored and starts attacking you. You need to have something for your immune system to do on a regular basis. Toxo is to a very large degree asymptomatic. You are full of and covered with organisms. Being paranoid about infection isn't helpful to anyone. Ok you don't like cats, that's fine, but are you as passionate about rare steak which is a much more common vector?

Malaria... is not asymptomatic.

You will have plenty of exposure to microbes simply by existing outside of a sealed sterile chamber, and microbes != pathogens. There's no need to encourage exposure to and infection by pathogens, and this idea often results in increased risk or severity of disease. See: "chickenpox party" intentional exposure of children to varicella, putting them at risk of shingles as adults, with the risk increasing the younger they are at the time of infection.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hygiene_hypothesis?useskin=vec...

>There's no need to encourage exposure to and infection by pathogens, and this idea often results in increased risk or severity of disease.

Here's research into intentional infection with a parasite to treat autoimmune diseases

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5401880/

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

That's not a great comparison. Malaria is dangerous to almost everyone it infects, while T. gondii is harmless to the vast majority of the human race.

> A third of the entire human population is infected with toxoplasmosis, in some places nearly every human.

So if it is often harmful to some extent in people who do not show severe symptoms, then it is a terrible disease that causes widespread harm. There is evidence it causes lesser, but possibly significant harm, in far more people than is generally recognised:

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2526142/

You don't get toxoplasmosis from touching a cat. You get it from touching cat feces and then ingesting it. The most common avenue of infection (in the US at least) is consuming raw or undercooked meat. Considering when my wife was pregnant, she asked our Doctor about it. His recommendation was she should not be the one to clean the litter box. So yeah, avoid cat feces and if you can't wash your hands. We don't need to get rid of cats. Also make sure the meat you eat is cooked properly.

"We don't need to get rid of cats. Also make sure the meat you eat is cooked properly."

I'd rather not eat cats at all, so cooking them properly doesn't enter into it.

It is most likely to cause severe symptoms and obvious damage in pregnancy and to immunocompromised people but it may cause harm to others too.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2526142/

> Most humans (and other beings) aren't pregnant or immunocompromised

So we do not need to vaccinate against rubella either? most people are not disabled so we do not need wheelchair ramps? Most people are not sick at any given time so we do not need hospitals?

Cats spend between 30-50% of their waling hours to grooming themselves. Cats are extremely clean. Pick one up and smell its fur. What do you smell? Nothing.

> In particular: it's a limited time window when an infected feline could transmit toxoplasmosis. It can be dangerous to pregnancies, or immuno-compromised individuals.

> Most humans (and other beings) aren't pregnant or immunocompromised, but the drama of the topic gets clicks, so it's a meme of sorts, and it resurfaces every six months or so in the news as if a revelation.

I already addressed this. It's one thing if you keep an cat in your home and can manage the risks. It's another thing entirely as some unknown variable in a cramped public store.

The rats that the cats are keeping out of the stores are a much larger source of pathogen transmission to humans than the cats are. Not only do rats carry many more dangerous diseases than cats, but both can also transmit toxoplasmosis to humans. As it is transmitted through contact with feces, from which of the two are you more likely to encounter feces spread all over the store?

So, while I actually find both rats and cats endearing, I'd take the cats over wild rats in the stores any day.

I think we owe our civilization to cats - without them we would have never been able to stop being hunters-gatherers and settle into agricultural society as having food stores would have been impossible due to rats.

And Black Death, owing to Church persecution of cats, is another great illustration of cats' role.

Cats were not widespread in the ancient world until very late. Herodotus writes about cats as an Egyptian novelty. People had mass food stores long before then.

Herodotus' anecdotes vs. modern genetics:

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5790555/#:~:text=Ex...

"But recent genetic and archaeological discoveries indicate that cat domestication began in the Fertile Crescent, perhaps around 10,000 years ago, when agriculture was getting under way."

Edit in response to the comment below as i hit post-limit:

As it happens, we owe to weasels too.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_depictions_of_cats#An...

"Housecats seem to have been extremely rare among the ancient Greeks and Romans;[16] the Greek historian Herodotus expressed astonishment at the domestic cats in Egypt, because he had only ever seen wildcats.[16] Even during later times, weasels were far more commonly kept as pets[16] and weasels, not cats, were seen as the ideal rodent-killers"

The main point still stands though.

Even if we assume this is correct and Herodotus and others were simply ignorant of this, it's obvious that the Greeks of his time, including those in Anatolia where he lived, where food had been stored in massive quantities for centuries if not millennia, did not have cats.

Paris should take notes

I thought Paris's main problem was dog shit.

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