This honestly appears to be a very difficult problem to solve.
It seems that to be truly be effective in rat reduction at a city scale the fix may need to come from elsewhere and may have very little to do with directly working on exterminating the rats.
Fixes may be needed starting from urban planning through waste/sewage handling methods at a street level all the way up to the city.
Also not sure if there would be enough leverage and incentives for any candidate who is going to be hired for this job at their advertised $120K to be able to achieve that kind of a change!
Seems like another easy win for the rats at the tax payers expense!
Oh let me tell you the story of Worcester, MA. Now Worcester (pronounced woostah) is much smaller than NYC but still nothing tiny. It has city trash pickup but instead of taxing its citizens for this service it came up with the ingenious plan to charge people for usage. If you want to throw out some trash what you do is you go to a nearby convenience or liquor store and buy these tiny flimsy yellow bags for a fairly steep price (when I lived there it was nearly $2/bag), and then you just put your garbage in the bags and put it on the curb and it’ll get picked up. This way those who generate more garbage pay more and people would be encouraged to generate less garbage. Genius, right?
No, wrong. So wrong. As I’m sure you can already see, it’s far easier to just leave your trash on the street than to take a trip to the city-ordained liquor stores to buy the approved bags. And with the bags being tiny and flimsy you don’t have much of an option for anything larger to get tossed. Got a big pillow? A dirty paint bucket? A 2x4? Just leave that anywhere. It was honestly one of the dirtiest places I’ve ever lived.
Interesting, that’s basically the model a lot of Japanese towns use.
The difference is, if you leave garbage without the right bag/on the street your neighbours are going to dump it back on your front door.
Larger item dumping is still a problem though. Some places issues coupons for a certain number of trips to the dump/year for local residents that can help.
Taiwan does this too and as the German poster mentioned, this results in MASSIVE out-of-city illegal dumpsites. It also leads to a cultural quirk where every day at some set time your whole neighborhood stands partly on a corner, partly spilling to a road, waiting for the trash truck to come. Then when it arrives everyone lines up and sets their daily trash bag into the truck.
It's an important part of local culture cause all the old people like hanging out and hyucking it up together but I've got a TODO item to map public vehicle / pedestrian collision data against local trash pickup times to see how often scooters or cars are taking out the elderly that are walking into a second lane of traffic because the sidewalk is packed with people holding trash bags and the first lane is taken up by a trash truck. Bonus points if the second lane also had a slow moving trash motorcycle (some kind of separate private trash pickup entity I don't yet understand) that decided to simply park adjacent to the trash truck and directly in traffic.
Anyway plus side yeah in Taipei there isn't a rat problem like new york, so I guess in some ways it kinda works, definitely not ideal imo though. I don't think trash bins would work either here though, the alleys are too small, the road system too... improvised.
A massive out-of-city dumpster is only possible if the authorities are looking the other way, and this is valid for Taiwan, Germany or Romania just the same. Yes individuals are dumping the garbage but it's the society as a whole accepting it, maybe with minor moaning.
I think you're minimizing here the realities of policing, policy, law, law enforcement, and societal engagement and enforcement of cultural values.
There is no country on earth with no crime. All countries on earth thus have authorities looking the other way on crime. All societies on earth are accepting of crime.
See the absurdity? Thus I think your post is over generalizing.
EDIT: I'm realizing that you might be a person who would make arguments about "personal responsibility" that consider nothing about environment and instead place wholesale blanket judgements on people for situations they find themselves in. Stop me if I'm extrapolating too far and being unfair, but when seeing any overweight person, would you think to yourself, "that person is accepting of their weight" ?
When there is a big illegal dumbster, it would be trivial to stop it from growing.
One police patrol car(or a camera) and one serious fine would stop it. And it did indeed stop most of it. It used to be common, but is not anymore here in germany, because people like me really get upset about that shit and so there is that anger energy that makes the institutions act.
If no one cares, than the dumbsters would just grow again.
How do you explain that in other countries this works? Garbage is dumped by humans, it's not a natural catastrophe. All those policies and cultural values you are mentioning converge to the fact that outside Taipei there are huge dumpsters, while in other countries there are not. Why there are in Taipei, it's not for me to judge, you probably know much better the situation. But the reality is, again, in other countries these dumpsters are not there. You can accept the fact, like the culture you mention seems to do, or try to move something in your (perceived) right direction. Either way, I'm definitely not the cause why there are dumpsters outside Taipei.
Yes a lot of places (particularly in Europe) do this as well. What you do is have outrageous fines for dumping and actually enforce it and voila - no garbage.
I suspect it has more to do with a sense of ownership and community than any fines. US Americans tend to live in their homes, while in many other places people live in their city.
It's a natural consequence of American individualism.
Rotterdam, the Netherlands: if you leave a trash bag on the street, inspectors will go through the trash to find identifiable information. The fine is 300+ EUR.
The system pays for itself.
Edit: I looked it up, they've changed it to a three-strike system. 125/250 for the first two; your choice of 500 or 3 days community service (cleaning up litter) on the third strike.
Where do people keep getting these absurd ideas about "american Individualism" being the root fault of so many problems? No, dirty cities are not caused by American individualism. They're caused by a mix of factors that can vary enormously from one place to another and are present all over the world, not just in the U.S.
Have you even traveled much across this huge and deeply diverse country? Or do you just stereotype and generalize by pulling assumptions out of thin air?
There are also many, many very clean communities in the United States, and many people or groups of people who despite loving their personal freedoms and individualism, also take community spirit very seriously in many ways. The country has been famous for this for centuries.
Goddam how simplistic some of the U.S bashing on this site can be, much of it based on incredible levels of ignorance and caricaturesque notions from people who don't even live in the country. Many of them Europeans too, who should know a bit better about avoiding stupid stereotypes and simplistic depictions of complex cultures.
The U.S also consistently happens to rank as one of the world's most charitable countries on a per capita basis (not just in total dollar value donated, though in this too it ranks in the top spot). This ranking has been noted by many sources across many years. American individualism being a terrible thing again... (Yes, sarcasm)
This statistic is highly influenced by income tier, donations to religious organisations like churches, the tax code and as a form of a social safety net that might otherwise be missing.
And none of that changes the basic fact that they tend to donate a lot of money, goods and time to charity-related projects. It's almost like saying "yes sure they donate, but it doesn't count because of this random list of reasons that I don't like".
Also, another major myth of the U.S is that social safety nets don't exist. They're not as well woven as they are in many developed countries, but they're very present and heavily funded. In fact, the single largest annual U.S federal budgetary outlay, costing trillions per year is the whole range of social support programs managed by its government (see link below).
What's more, keep in mind that managing such a thing is much harder in a country of 320 million people than it is in your average European state, of which none have a population of over 90 million (Russia excluded). The U.S social safety net could be much better, especially if spending on other things were discounted, but it's not absent or even close to it.
Also, I partly exclude military spending, because though this viewpoint won't be popular at all here, the colossal U.S defense budget works as a sort of (very flawed) global safety net for many other countries in their relations with certain neighbors.
> Have you even traveled much across this huge and deeply diverse country?
Is this post a travel ad?
Do we pretend cities are overwhelmingly clean just because places like Dallas also exist? Are people supposed to first take selfies in NY and Philly, in Chicago, SF, LA, and Phoenix, to be permitted to say they're dirty?
Maybe on average it's not so bad, but "this place is diverse therefore the opposite is true" is worse than anecdata.
> Goddam how simplistic some of the U.S bashing on this site can be,
Nobody is bashing the states. And nobody said American individualism is all bad.
> Or do you just stereotype and generalize by pulling assumptions out of thin air?
Is individualism -> not my problem really a bad explanation? Even when people to try to explain why their hometown in the US is clean it usually starts with "no walled enclaves here/people don't live in little castles".
I think you might taking issue with the assumption that American cities are dirty in the first place, not my attempt at explaining it? It's hard to tell since most of your post is you being upset with me, making accusations, very little substance.
For European city dwellers, "where you live" and a sense of "ownership" extends far beyond the walls of your apartment/home - to incorporate your neighborhood to some extent.
For a lot of US folks in cities, this doesn't seem to be the case.
The post is wrong though. Tokyo isn't a nice city because Japanese people are mystically polite to each other, it's nice because it has good policies which you can copy yourself.
It is because of the culture of the Japanese people. In the World Cup and other stadiums they pick up all their trash when they leave and leave it pristine. They don’t have to worry about fines in the stadium.
They are rather polite, but they also have good residential trash pickup.
In this case, anyway. It's actually pretty difficult to get rid of some things, so people can build up a lot of junk at home - Marie Kondo's books in Japan actually have extra sections on how to get rid of it.
Maybe. It's equally possible that any particular policy won't stand by itself. That for the garbage policy to work you also need some large number of other policies that are endogenous to Japan.
I suspect it also has to do with the possibility that someone in the US who is antisocial enough to dump their trash in the street might also be armed and not afraid to chase you at gunpoint if you try to toss their trash back on their front porch... if you're lucky, that is; decent chance they'll just shoot you.
Made me think of this, a story about neighbors killing each other over perceived trash dumping offenses. America is big enough you can't say it won't happen
> Again, this is just another excuse, and part of the problem. The more Americans view interaction through this lens, the worse they are for it.
Literally people have died thanks to these laws because of trigger-happy arseholes thinking they're backed by these laws, even if there have been verdicts to the contrary like [1].
The problem is: there are way too many guns in circulation in the US, there are way too many vaguely written (or titled) laws that seem to allow this kind of use, and it sends shockwaves through the country regularly. Hell, it even has an impact on policing because police legitimately have to fear getting shot over as benign interactions as traffic stops [2][3], with the result of outright homicides by cops in return [4].
I'm European and hell no I won't ever visit the US until y'all have your gun problems resolved (and your border control under control instead of employing rapists and other goons with a license to search your electronic devices, but that's another topic).
My former roomie had this lovely letter pinned on his wall, from the DA, or "Staatsanwaltschaft" as the locals say.
It states that witnesses reported him putting the box of his new LG tv, in with the paper rubbish.
It then states that a subsequent investigation proved, that it was indeed his LG cardboard box, with, o horror, the styrofoam packaging still inside! Don't laugh, it's a crime.
It concludes by politely offering a close to a 1000 CHF fine, lest he'd like to discuss the matter in front of a judge.
Total aside, just FYI it's 'on par with'; in this usage 'par' comes directly from Latin without passing French, where 'par' is not about equality. I think the French equivalent would be 'égal à'.
Interesting! I believe my English teacher in middle school always wrote it like this - but it's equally possible that I just memorized it wrong. I'll make sure to use it correctly from now on.
They learn to recycle in the proper places. Styrofoam, cooking oils, metals, glass by color (although all in the same recycling place), paper and carton gets picked from the curb in certain (different) days... they receive the yearly schedule and all necessary addresses in the post and follow it.
My point is that everyone makes mistakes at some point, no matter the "learning". Everyone. Punishing someone poor so disproportionately seems really harsh and unfair.
But, as someone else pointed out bellow, supposedly the judge also looks at the person's income, and, hopefully, the fine is commensurate with said person's income (i.e. not really reaching 1000 CHF).
So you wanted to move to switzerland, but not anymore because you refuse to learn recycling?
It is really not that hard.
And the fine is high, but if you don't enforce rules, the rules become meaningless and then for example the recycled paper worthless, because there is too much plastic in them.
Edit: but to be clear, I would not call the police on someone who did not do proper recycling. I would simply tell them directly.
> What happens to the people who barely scrap by but who receive this type of fines?
You never do it again, that's for sure. Switzerland is a very fine-heavy society. Sounds like a bit more research before developing that wish would have been beneficial for you... good for you that you didn't follow that wish.
> Sounds like a bit more research before developing that wish would have been beneficial for you
Yeah, I realise I dodged a bullet.
We did visit Switzerland and one of the main no-no-s for me was when I saw that the authorities can enter your house to check on you almost at will, if you live in Government-subsidised housing, that is. I did grow up in a Communist dictatorship, where all the housing was basically subsidised, and we didn't have to put up with crazy intruding stuff like that. But it is a very clean country, I'll give the Swiss that.
>What happens to the people who barely scrap by but who receive this type of fines?
Really it isn't that big of a problem. A judge would likely look at your income but if you want to compare there are better/worse things to look at, like healthcare might be one. It is after all avoidable by just recycling unlike needing healthcare.
I don’t know about other places but from what I observed and experienced in Worcester there were several problems that made it not work:
1. The cost of the trash bags relative to median income in some neighborhoods was too high. When a 5 pack of bags is $9 and you earn $7.25/hour before taxes, it is suddenly not that easy to justify doing the right thing when the free thing is possible.
2. People lived in apartment buildings and multi family homes so there is no easy identification of who exactly leaves a car battery or a mattress on the sidewalk at 3am. Having cops watch all the streets all the time for this wouldn’t work and neighbors don’t want to bother watching each other.
3. Because people didn’t earn that much relative to cost of living, high fines would just throw poor people in jail while those who can afford the bags can just buy the bags. So you’d still have trash on the streets but also cause people who can least afford it to lose their jobs by making them miss work.
4. Minor point but where you buy the bags matters. It was highly inconvenient that you couldn’t buy them at grocery stores. Instead you had to literally go out of your way to go to sketchy convenience stores and liquor stores instead.
Plenty of people used the bags but there were enough who didn’t that it made the city dirty. And once you get used to seeing trash on the street you are a lot less likely to think twice about contributing to it yourself.
i dont live in the US, but a small city in north india. so, we had this garbage problem (like you could see in new delhi today or a few years ago) on the streets with lots and lots of street garbage just everywhere.
over the past few years some changes were made.
1. a garbage truck ACTAULLY knocks on your door every morning, rain or snow and collects your home garbage. what used to happen was people earlier would fill their dustbins and once they were full, would take it outside to the nearest electric pole and just dump it there. stray dogs, straw cows would have a feast....
Now, the municipality took measures by giving garbage bins to everyone (for some tiny amount) and the garbage truck would take the days worth. that and the garbage collectors would double as street stray pickers so during their rounds if they found any random garbage, they would collect as they went. then they would manually sweep the streets every other day.
markets and other stuff, there is an informal "rag pickers" who take away business packing and other stuff because it is consistent and they get some income so that doesn't go to the streets. the municipality then goes around at night and does a manual sweep, every single day.
NO-ONE buys trash bags here. It is JUST TOO expensive like you said.
there is one part of the problem that still remains. Our city/region is still developing so there is constant constructions going on EVERYWHERE. the construction related wastage is neglected somewhat and people go at night and dump it here and there but otherwise i can safely say our city is MUCH MUCH cleaner than it was 5 years ago.
one of the good steps was the mandatory municipality fees which is only a few hundred bucks in local currency and that has helped a lot (plus the employees of the municipality nag people about leaving trash which helped in its own way)
We have this in the UK except for the enforcement bit which is only vary rare headline seeking click-bait and the consequences are obvious. Some remote spots have large amounts of industrial-scale waste dumped on regular basis, I walk past 3 of them every week yet the local council always feigns surprise when it happens.
The answer is, as you have, severe enforcement or provision of an affordable alternative.
I would argue the answer is twofold. Make it easy to do the right thing and make it very expensive to not do the right thing. Just making it very expensive doesn't work and will feel unjust when you get fined.
Yeah, some genius thought, "lets charge money to drop things at the dump to encourage people not to buy crap that ends up in the dump, it will save the planet!"
But the reality is, the dump which has disposal standards costs money, so let's drop trash in pristine wilderness because we won't get caught.
The other problem is a landfill or dump is miles and miles away. As you said, they charge money, and they also have rules.
You might not be able to throw out bags of household trash, for example. They also usually don't take certain kinds of waste like old tires, construction debris, appliances, paint, batteries, etc.
So people just dump it wherever they find empty lots.
Or they don't have a car and the city bus isn't going to allow you to bring a mattress on it! Your options then are pay someone $100 to get rid of it (which you likely don't have if you don't have a car) or dump it somewhere and hope for the best.
It took me a decade in Ireland to realize that crime is allowed. Literally. At all tiers of society. You can stomp on your girlfriend's neck and get a suspended sentence. You can blatantly violate GDPR and the Irish DPC will look the other way. You can plop a couple mobile homes on to your land and nobody will do anything. You can break any and all environmental laws (ripping out hedgerows in nesting season? Dumping massive amounts of waste? Cutting turf from protected bogs?) and people get nechaches they can't even nod and say "sure it's grand" fast enough. Never mind car crime - there isn't a footpath or bike lane in the country that isn't littered with vehicles. When I was in Dublin 2 we'd see people clamped for running out of time on the meter when they parked legally but other, more in-the-know people, would park on the footpath THE WHOLE WEEKEND with zero consequence.
I don't know what it is. Absolute, profound, laziness? The gardai are useless. Though I remember when I registered to vote at the Garda station (I had just been naturalised) the officer told me "whatever you do don't vote for the Green Party" (explains some of the above I suppose)
I think of myself as left but I must admit I'd be really interested in a politician who wanted to actually enforce the law.
> You can stomp on your girlfriend's neck and get a suspended sentence.
Physical assaults are really poorly handled by the courts.
For violent crimes, they even allow alcohol or drugs as a mitigating factor, and rarely follow up on the character references. Amusingly, for nonviolent crimes they are much stricter.
Worse - self defense is next to impossible. You can't own pepper spray or anything like that, and if you fight back you can also end up in the dock for assault.
> You can blatantly violate GDPR and the Irish DPC will look the other way.
The DPC is (deliberately) chronically underfunded. Some suspect this is to keep the country a friendly location for certain multinational companies.
> You can plop a couple mobile homes on to your land and nobody will do anything.
That doesn't violate the letter of the (backwards) planning laws.
> You can break any and all environmental laws
Enforcement of those is left to councils, who often are the ones breaking said laws (specifically, destroying habitats).
As for turf cutting, those laws were poorly thought out and likely will play a big part in the next election in rural areas.
Banning commercial harvesting is undeniably a good thing, but the hard and fast attempt to ban cutting for personal use has not been well received, especially in the current climate with regards energy.
> The gardai are useless.
Yes, they seem to have their priorities backwards a lot of the time. They are excellent at pursuing cannabis users and road traffic offenses, but pretty rubbish at everything else.
The easy out politically is to call for more Gardai to be recruited, but numbers aren't the real problem - quality and distribution are.
> the officer told me "whatever you do don't vote for the Green Party"
The Greens here aren't well liked for many reasons around the country - largely when they come up with policies, they ignore the objective reality of life outside Dublin, and tend to go right towards taxing the bollix out of you or banning things without providing an alternative. See also: turf.
Take for example, public transport. Outside urban areas, it may as well not exist. However the Greens won't advocate for expanded public transit in rural (or even commuter areas outside Dublin) because there is "no demand" and "everyone there will just drive anyway".
They are also entirely opposed to nuclear power, which is unfortunate.
They are often referred to as "Fine Gael on bikes" for a reason.
> I'd be really interested in a politician who wanted to actually enforce the law.
This would require systemic change of the Gardai. FF, FG, and the Greens have no interest in this.
It would also require probably some changes to the courts...
I'm a green voter in Offaly, incidentally, and I ride my bike to the train (_some_ public transport exists out here!) and find a lot of people expect the greens to just give them free Teslas or something.
The officer not liking the greens on a personal level is fine. Telling someone not to vote for them, though, is appallingly unprofessional.
We chatted with the gardai because the neighbours (the ones with the multiple mobile homes who, for that matter, built their whole house without planning, but it's OK because all 17 of them will come and scream at any council worker who talks to them) left a dead crow in a bag by our house and one of them couldn't get why we might be freaked out by this.
In my city I have two 110 gallon trash bins that are picked up twice a week. Have more or something bulky? Put it next to the bin and it will get thrown in the truck.
I have the most amazing garbage collection. No litter, no dumping, the trash is picked up and taken care of.
Australia has hard rubbish collection for the big stuff - once or twice a year you dump your large items on the curb and they are removed, people salvaging from hard rubbish seems to be a popular pass time too (it’s mostly unwanted furniture / white goods in okay condition, so not as gross as it sounds)
That's what they do here in Switzerland, except you put the bags in dedicated dumpsters. The bags have different sizes up to 110 L, and for the big junk problem every couple of months you can throw away anything you can personally carry to a parked garbage truck :D
Eu country: where i am we sort our stuff. Rotate leaving it out every three weeks on a tuesday glass, paper, plastic, and every two weeks 'regular' rubbish gets put in an RFID'd large bin.
The bucketed glass, boxed paper, and plastic in a sack (one hundred each of which cost nothing ie €0.00, we just sign for them at the town hall, or - rather conveniently - a local bar) having been put out on a Monday evening are gone by 0800. These removals all cost about €180pa.
The larger bi-weekly bins are generally emptied by 1000, and we are billed by weight. As a single resident i get a hell of a discount on the total year, but i have to use the bin min 4 times a year.
I often end up borrowing rubbish from my neighbours, just to keep my numbers up.
We also have a local dump for when house cleaning, much stuff, electronics, poisons etc. That's included in the $180 and can be used whenever open, as often as you like and you can stil take plastic, glass and paper there.
All i 'miss' is a large-item collection service, that may exist - I've just never asked, as I've never needed it.
When the system was introduced, about 15 years ago, people were upset that the big dumpsters were taken away and cats etc would rip open the bags, and the rubbish in the street would be unsightly.
I really don't think anyone in the whole city would go back to the dumpster ways (though there are dumpsters strategically around - several many for where tourists are (regularly emptied smaller bins are gathered together).
Sounds like our system, maybe different numbers. We can call large item collections for free twice per year. Additional collections incur a small fee, but nothing too expensive.
But I know the feeling of being unaware of such details... Renovations and furnishing produces huge amounts of cardboard trash. Took us a half year and many car trips to the local recycling company to realize that our neighbors just put their huge cardboard boxes next to their bin on pick up day! Insert Picard facepalm
At least the recycler takes paper/cardboard for free, and is not too far away.
Dumpsters could be put and taxed, like in lots of cities around the world. Organizing trash collection is one of the first reasons to have a city council in the first place!
I understand it is difficult to raise taxes for this if they were not there in the first place. Aluminum collection, which has some value, could subsidize part of the tax. The other could come from some tax on real estate, since waste is supposedly linked to people (I know in Germany I pay for building trash collection).
With such prime real estate, it might be a problem to find the space officially (those trash bags are somewhere outside right now). Idk, maybe rats are part of Gotham city for now.
This is the exact same model plenty of Dutch cities use and this is absolutely not the problem they have. Sounds more like a city cleaning problem than anything to do with waste collection.
Wakefield council, UK, allows 2 pick ups of large items a year. Their website has a form you complete and they tell you when to leave it out. Old couch/fridge/overly opinionated family member, twice a year. Then there's the 3 x 110L wheelie bins for general household/'recycling' and garden waste. Works well for household. We still see fly tipping but its not rat inducing, thankfully.
In the UK you can drive to the dump and sort yourself the garbage for easier recycling (no fees involved). That is quite a good system.
Here, in Portugal, you can dump up to certain weight for free but you end up paying 30-40 Euros for a full van, for example. As a result people just dump garbage anywhere out of sight, specially rubble and other construction garbage. I find it shortsighted as the council then spends a lot of money cleaning up those places.
But we still have people who will pay £2k for a new TV who will simply not pay £15 to have the old one properly disposed of. Same for fridges, mattresses, sofas, etc.
Much easier to drive to a remote location when it's dark and dump it with 99% chance of getting away with it.
In NYC there are certain days at certain hours when garbage in black trash bags can be left at specific spots on the sidewalk/streets by the residential building supers.
There are rules to this, if garbage was left on the sidewalk everyday at all hours of the day then every block would have would lined up with garbage on the street.
I live in Tokyo: there's no dumpsters here either, nor alleys. Trash is left on the curb for the trash trucks to take on the appropriate day. Until then, the trash is kept inside usually; condo buildings for instance have trash rooms on the ground floor for storing and sorting trash. There are almost no rats.
I think the issue is just basic cleanliness. NYC doesn't have it. There's trash everywhere, so that breeds rats.
Sure. Which brings us back to the problem: NYC lacks the infrastructure to efficiently collect the trash and turn it into biofuel, because all the space is taken by cars. It's a bad balance of priorities between fuel production and fuel consumption.
Uneducated view from a single video, but this seems incredibly inefficient? How many of these have to be processed on a weekly basis? I'd expect for such a size of vessel, the truck is in and out in < 15 seconds.
There are a lot of them but they also hold a lot of trash. The big ones can hold up to 12m3 while a rolling container holds 770L or around 12 35L bags. [1]
Some are emptied on a schedule while others send a signal when they are full. It would also take a similar amount of time to pickup a long street full of rolling steel containers holding around the same amount of trash.
At ~USD 1.70 for one 35L bag people also recycle a lot.
It's not as if NYC is unique in its space problem. Most dense cities face the same issue. In SF each building has a trash room, with bins or dumpsters, the trash truck drivers pull the bins out, empty them into the truck, put them back. It's just that building owners need to devote about one apartments worth of space to a trash room. I suspect that is the challenge, getting property owners to do so.
On one hand, SF is probably 1/4 as dense as Manhattan. On the other hand, plenty of international cities have solved this problem. NYC just refuses to address it because they're NYC and nobody tells them what to do, politically.
From some quick googling Manhattan itself is also considerably denser than Tokyo or Hong Kong or London or Singapore. There are probably other international ones denser (21,646 people per mi2 for Singapore is the closest I found, but 72K for Manhattan), but a quick search suggests it's not necessarily that commonly easily solved. There are probably some sizeable specifically dense areas in those places, at least in the Asian cities (especially Hong Kong just from "feel"), but I don't have that sort of granular knowledge.
Seems unlikely that trash is the only source of food for the rat population, too. Or that dumpsters or bins magically keep out the rats from the trash. Rats can be crafty!
Yeah, honestly the density numbers are tough to find because "NYC" always includes Queens,etc....so you kinda have to go look at subsections of major cities.
The point is that Manhattan isn't particularly dense when compared to other world-class cities major population centers, and these other places have solved the problem of trash collection. NYC exceptionalism seems to be the fall-back explanation for why it "can't be done"....but to me it fails under further inspection....literally fails the smell test :)
Finally, you're correct that the trash bins aren't a panacea, but not allowing a literal rat buffet to fester on the sidewalks 3 nights a week is a good first step.
In New York you can literally watch the rats eating the garbage through the bags. Bins and dumpsters are indeed not perfect but anecdotally after living in both NYC and SF I can say the issue is far worse in NYC and I've seen lots of rats eating garbage in NYC because the garbage is literally piled up on the sidewalk for half a day or more, 3 times a week. In SF I see plenty of rats, but there aren't piles of garbage sitting out, so it's just far less of an issue. This is admittedly my own experience amd observation, I'm no rat expert.
Yep, this is exactly how it is in Tokyo. There's a giant trash room downstairs for people to deposit trash and sort it (cardboard, plastic, PET bottles, burnables, metals, etc., plus they frequently have a bunch of hand tools and stuff you might need to borrow). The building management puts the appropriate trash out on the appropriate day to be picked up, so it's only outside for a few hours.
For the same amount of surface space, dumpsters would take up less space than loose bags of garbage. Other cities with comparable population densities have no problem doing this.
They could definitely build in some trash compacting trash cans that have underground storage(built below the sidewalk); then just add the ability to collect and service those systems to whatever waste collection service the city gives the bid to. It would just be initially expensive and probably take a few years to bring online but would probably end up being an effective solution to clear the streets of waste as long as the waste management company doing collection was good at servicing the bins and people actually used them. The challenge in the US is often getting people to use the services that are provided...
I think it could be, as long as there is a political will within the city to fix the problem and the funds that would need to be allocated are there(which in NYC they have the money for this). I think it would be easier than you think, municipal waste management contracts are generally posted by cities every 3-10 years and they can very in scope of work whether it be collection, recycling services, landfill, compost... and within all of these services different cities will have different wants and needs and then generally companies post bids to compete for these contracts. Usually when a new contract is posted it is updated with the updated expectations of the cities; if the cities installs these new bins and expects trucks that can collect from them it will be done by the companies that make bids. These processes happen frequently and are B to B interactions so they get done a lot more efficiently than headaches with the city as an individual resident.
Fuck that, NYC already has raccoons and those little trash pandas can't get where the rats can and they are too busy eating pizza and other junk. Poison is also bad as its an indiscriminate killer that wipes out the pests predators.
What NYC needs is to overturn Ghouliani's ban on ferrets and release a ton into the subways. I'll also take reintroduction of least weasels or stoats. Unlike the omnivore raccoon, ferrets are an obligate carnivore. There's something like a 2500 year history of using ferrets to hunt for rats. One of a ton of old sources on it: https://www.gutenberg.org/files/42305/42305-h/42305-h.htm
I live in an area where raccoons are common and I'd rather have the rats. Those things live off of trash too and they're scary, aggressive and dangerous. And they're rabid. Rats run from humans. Raccoons attack them. Try to get between a raccoon and it's trash and good chance you come away with rabies.
Naw, they've tested them in Toronto: none had rabbies since 1997. A sick raccoon usually has distemper, which you have nothing to worry about as a human. It's the 2-3% of bats with rabies you have to worry about.
Many people have spent countless hours exposed to them and never gotten sick, and very few people get rabies from bats at all, so the risk appears very low. I suppose the people around them the most follow certain safety precautions that regular people don’t.
That link does make 5 cases up from 0 seem like a big deal, but… A chunk of that time was during quarantine time, and dropping from 1-3 to 0 isn’t so profound (though it’s far preferable, of course). M
In any case, I wouldn’t wish rabies on anyone. I suppose I just wish we were less afraid of bats and able to help them flourish. Apart from rabies, they are incredible animals that do a lot of good for their ecosystems.
Bats are uniquely dangerous to all other mammals because of how their immune system is different (due to the unique metabolic requirements of flight, they have evolved a system which allows viruses to remain active in the body instead of fully suppressing them). We knew this before COVID-19, COVID-19 is not the last bat-borne viral disease that will be a problem, and it is no coincidence that it came from bats.
Bats are amazing but the way to let them flourish is to leave them alone and maximize conservation. Humans should not be commingling with bats (or even researching them as nonchalantly as we have been) until we get MUCH better at biomedical engineering and immunotherapy.
That’s fascinating. I’m surprised I’d never heard that little detail about bats before. Or maybe I did, but didn’t realize the significance of it and it didn’t fully register.
I agree about staying away from bats. I mean, if there’s a risk of rabies at all, I don’t want to go near a single one of them. But like you say, letting them be and conserving (or even restoring) their habitats would go a long way in supporting them. Ideally there would be no human interaction element.
I suppose people worry that if bats flourish, we will encounter them more often. I’m not sure how likely that is at various scales. Say their populations double, would we see twice as many bats and see a doubling of rabies cases? I’m not sure.
Because you're trying to throw away your own trash, in my case. I don't even bother taking it out at night anymore, there are raccoons there half the time. And they do not respond well to me getting anywhere near that trash can.
The raccoons that visit my yard are pretty cool with me being around and I can watch them from fairly close. I don’t think they’d be anything like pets but I like seeing them around.
They’re curious about me, and as long as I don’t stare or move too quickly, they just dig in my garden (they mostly seem to eat these large beetle grubs) and wrestle each other.
I wouldn’t interact with them, but I’m glad they aren’t afraid of me anymore. Years ago I accidentally cornered one in my shop and it let out the most terrifying guttural noise I’ve ever heard from such a small body. These days I have a feeling they would be uncomfortable but not in attack mode. I was about 5 feet from one while putting trash in my bin a few weeks back and it just watched me from around the corner of my shed. When I moved here, I either wouldn’t have been given the chance to see it there or it would have scrambled up a tree.
Overall I think they’re pretty laid back animals, but we tend to scare the hell out of them.
Watching the babies wrestle in the grass is a real joy. It’s also incredible fascinating to watch they way their hands work. They aren’t as dexterous as us, or perhaps I should say not as generally so, but they have a kind of dexterity that is almost entrancing at times. There is a lot of spatial awareness and capability in their movements.
As long as they aren’t in my house, shed, or shop, then whatever. I’m happy to share some space. But yeah, definitely not pet material for me.
Indeed. I hear you. They are still wild animals. I have seen a couple of people have them as pets..fixed them and vaccinated etc. it seems a tad cruel to want to domesticate a wild animal.
I think so. I wonder if they essentially go crazy being cooped up. Dogs and cats are generally accustomed to it, but even they can become extremely depressed.
Come to think of it, I get depressed from being indoors too much.
Raccoons poop can be particularly nasty. Raccoon roundworm eggs are incredibly hardy. Thankfully human cases are incredibly rare, but I wouldn’t want to increase the population I am around.
Philly does the same thing. You put your trash out on the sidewalk the night before pickup (or morning). You can put out a bin, but since there's no room to lift them by machine, bags get pulled out of the bin and often get ripped open.
The building next door has dumpsters... I see rats running back and forth to them.
You're a little off my friend. To paraphrase MIB "No a rat is cute, rats are a ravenous public health nuisance that spreads disease, eats through and damages buildings and infrastructure and are violent beasts that drive people from their homes and corrupt their food."
Isn't it crazy that the richest city in the world can't manage trash properly. If they can feed all those people and take all their sewage. certainly there must be a way to remove all the trash they produce, without throwing it on the street
Eh, wasn’t it like Dubai or something that for the longest time didn’t even have working sewage? Like in the slightest. Was all pumped out by semi trucks instead & dumped… somewhere
They have all the money & this part of the city was literally planned IIRC. But yeah, no working sewage.
The USA is the richest country in the world despite many other countries having less inequality. Inequality isn't a measure of absolute wealth. Also isn't NYC home to the most millionaires in the world? That probably skews measures of inequality (that said it is famous internationally for having terrible poverty as well as wealth).
Why is the wealth to count "the richest" measures only by the net worth of the richest in the city and not by some other more sensible measure? If I were to find myself in what's allegedly the richest city in the richest country I would be shocked to see even a single homeless person, let alone trash and rats everywhere. I think the word "richest" is being used weirdly or perhaps even incorrectly to describe NYC.
I’ve been living in Tokyo and Yokohama since 1983, and I have seen rats a handful of times in Tokyo: once in a subway station, walking along the tracks; a couple of times in Shibuya in the early morning, picking through garbage; once or twice in residential neighborhoods. One sighting every five years is not a lot, I admit.
Twenty years ago, I knew someone who worked for one of the large, upscale department stores, and she said they spent a lot of money and effort to try to control the rats in their elegant but old and porous building—which, like most department stores here, had many food shops in the basement.
In some European cities an area the size of a parking space is a few chutes into an underground dumpster. It moves the trash (and the rats looking for it) out of sight.
> Honestly, I got no problems with the rats. They're kinda cute actually
Yeah, I know it can be an unpopular opinion, but I've always found them adorable, and after having gerbils in high school it's hard for me not to just think of bigger versions of them (obviously they do have other appearance differences, like the tail having less hair and the snout being more pronounced, but the way they move and act is surprisingly reminiscent of my past pets). Don't get me wrong, I'm not going to try to pet them like I would a domesticated pet rat, but they mostly just hang out in the background and don't seem to have any more desire to approach people than people have to approach them. I suspect that there are public health reasons for wanting to curtail the population, but people seem so disproportionately disgusted by them compared to other public health hazards that it's hard for me not to wonder if the political desire to get rid of them is influenced by that.
>It seems that to be truly be effective in rat reduction at a city scale the fix may need to come from elsewhere and may have very little to do with directly working on exterminating the rats
yeah, basically treat the root cause rather than symptoms of the problem. Hiring more rat killers is like taking pain killers instead of fixing whatever injury is causing the pain.
Realistically this problem would require some sort of position that has temporary authority across multiple departments where systematic changes need to be made to actually solve the problem. Instead you get more rat killers as a band aid solution
One underappreciated but is extermination generally leads to more rats. If you just kill off rats but do not make the area less hospitable to them, it registers as a good place to live due to less competition and they show up & breed.
This is currently a big issue in my city. Efforts are focusing on extermination only but since they can never get all of them it keeps making the problem worse in tbe areas of concentration.
Kind of like with weeds. Go ahead and pull them out, but as long as there are a few or some seeds remaining and a whole whack of substrate to grow in… They will be back in a hurry.
The rats can’t live there if food isn’t so readily available. I’ve seen the terrifying videos of them eating each other, but presumably even that could only last so long. Poorly managed waste seems to be a huge factor in this, and rats on a symptom.
Sorry for seeing nails everywhere as a robotics engineer but wouldn't it be awesome to have human-driven garbage trucks driving down 5th, 6th, 7th avenue while smaller https://www.nuro.ai/ sized autonomous vans go up and down the perpendicular streets picking up trash every day.
You increase frequency of trash pick up 5x at the same staff levels. Rats be damned.
Also seems like a constrained enough environment that you wouldn't get mired in autonomous driving corner case hell. It would be small bike sized vehicles driving in bike lanes.
I feel like the further I dig into automating anything, the more I find fucking everything has a huge margin for error and narrowing those margins is like a lifetime of engineering in itself.
Mind you I’m not an engineer at all, I just play one on the weekend. But really, some seemingly trivial stuff can become really complicated in a hurry. I can see automated trash pickup accidentally disposing of kids or something on the first day.
Like you though, I love the idea. I’m just more discouraged by my own incompetence.
Oh, picking-up trash is certainly one of those things that will take people-centuries to solve once somebody decides to solve it.
There are people-centuries of work applied to picking-up some much more controlled items on fabrics and warehouses. And the problem is just barely solved enough for the machines to be useful.
yeah no offense but I think robots aren't the right solution here. Roosevelt island has a pneumatic system that sucks garbage through underground tubes. It's not foolproof, but it's probably a lot simpler and more efficient than a fleet of robots
My take is that it's the sheer population density that enables it. Large, dense European cities like Paris and Barcelona also have a rat problem.
Rats travel within a 100 meter radius from their nest in search for food, so more humans = more waste = more food. Even if we keep everything tidy there's always this 1% of assholes who litter.
At the same time the denser the city, the more difficult it is to conduct waste disposal services because even the nicest garbage container is going to smell, so you want it appropriately far from buildings and garbage trucks are large vehicles, which struggle in narrow alleys.
I can't imagine there being a solution to rats in sewers. NYC is a sprawling city and the sewers are necessarily large and must be put in place where they can be dug up and replaced. I feel like the more sustainable option is above ground, but I don't know NYC that well.
My mom has told me that the rat problem in NYC used to be a lot less. The rat population exploded when buildings were no longer allowed to incinerate their garbage for air-quality considerations.
My parents' poor excuse for a terrier just sat there and stared at mice taking its food away at night. Mini fox terrier instead of rat terrier though. Maybe they're just only interested in foxes.
I suggest Jack Russells with some Yorkies for the bigger ones. If you have some lions causing trouble then a few of your Border Terriers is indicated along with a pack of Rodesians.
There were a lot of rats in that fairly small area of that large field in which they were digging.
Were they digging in some specific place they knew would have an especially high rat concentration (a nesting area perhaps?) or is the whole large field that dense with rats and that's just where they happened to be working at the moment?
We have gophers in our field. There is one single feral cat in my farm that’s is rather good at catching the gophers. Chihuahuas too do a great job.
We set up some owl shelters and raptor poles. Snakes, cats, raptors are all predators. All of them unavailable in cities where rats don’t just survive, they thrive!
Gophers are a big problem. As it’s an organic farm, pest control options are limited. A few years ago, someone came to test their sonic gopher eradication system. Using sound waves. I don’t know if that would work for other rodents.
Squirrels are just rats with a bushier prettier tail. We love squirrels. Weird.
N=1, but my neighborhood in NYC has both feral cats and rats. Maybe not as many rats as other neighborhoods in the area, but enough that it doesn’t seem to be a real solution.
(There are other issues as well, like the cats destroying local bird populations and getting sick when they kill poisoned rats.)
There are a few different ways to address the problem of rats in New York in a creative way. One approach could be to implement a city-wide composting program, which would reduce the amount of food waste available for rats to eat. Additionally, the city could invest in more effective waste management infrastructure, such as sealed trash cans and improved sanitation systems, to make it harder for rats to access food sources. Another creative solution could be to introduce predators, such as birds of prey or snakes, into areas where rats are a problem. This approach would help to naturally control the rat population without the need for harmful pesticides. Ultimately, the key to addressing the problem of rats in New York will be to implement a comprehensive, multi-faceted approach that addresses the root causes of the problem.
I actually find it pretty cringe - trying to insert movie/cartoon tropes into real life. Definitely written by someone raised on too much TV and internet.
I wouldn't say cringe, it's just a form of content marketing. If it were a standard dry job post would we even be talking about it? It drummed up interest for the position while simultaneously showing a humanized NYC government who takes the rat problem seriously.
I don't know. This entire job listing smells of a PR role created to communicate how the New York government is getting the job done rather than actually getting the job done.
Thanks for making my day! You described exactly the picture i had in my mind...well plus he was from London and looked a bit like Sherlock Holmes (just for the interview of course).
>>New York’s Citywide Director of Rodent Mitigation.
That could be also the Director for IT security ;)
Being from Europe, is that whole thing New York City humor? It's incredible funny:
>>New York City’s rats are legendary for their survival skills, but they don’t run this city – we do.
Y'all know me. Know how I earn a livin'. I'll catch this furball for you, but it ain't gonna be easy. Bad rodent. Not like going down to the sewer and chasing mice and raccoons. This rat, swallow your whole pizza slice. No shakin', no tenderizin', down it goes. And we gotta do it quick, that'll bring back your stock traders, put all your businesses on a payin' basis. But it's not gonna be pleasant. I value my neck a lot more than three thousand bucks, chief. I'll find him for three, but I'll catch him, and kill him, for ten. But you've gotta make up your minds. If you want to stay alive, then ante up. If you want to play it cheap, be on welfare the whole winter. I don't want no volunteers, I don't want no deputies, there's too many CEOs on this island. Ten thousand dollars for me by myself. For that you get the head, the tail, the whole damn thing.
(I like that "island" still works because Manhattan)
He has actually started to drown them lately. You can do a lot at once, and there is little cleanup necessary. Most importantly, you won't hear their screams.
A subreddit full of literally cherrypicked examples of men badly writing women characters doesn't say anything about the general case, never mind any particular case.
Well I was *hoping* you'd pick up on many of the tropes of male-written femme characters brought out in that sub were applicable to the character mentioned above.
But here's an article to list some of the tropes out more explicitly:
I admit I'm not very familiar with the Monkey Island series but literally the first paragraph of the Wikipedia article for it points out that the primary purpose of this character is to be the primary love interest of the (male) protagonist
Bonus, here's some really fun visualizations that I think you'd enjoy regardless of whether you agree with me or not :)
Thanks for the last three links; it's interesting to see data analysis like that, even if I disagree on some of the presentation and the claim in the first link that even women readers dislike the presentation of women characters in books. Straight romance books saturated with tropes, in many cases far more explicitly than even porn, are massively popular among adult women.
My point is that if you comment "A female character written by a man" as an inherent mark against something, that's still a fallacy no matter what statistics say. If you had comments about Monkey Island in particular, then it would have been best to just say that, rather than directly say that no man could ever write a good woman character.
Living in NYC with rats, I'm always reminded of Neal Stephenson's Baroque Cycle, where Jack Shaftoe is in Paris in the late 17th century and meets St-George, the city's preeminent rat-catcher. St-George explains how no one is never going to exterminate _all_ of the rats, so he instead only kills the bad kind of rats and lets the "good" rats live, in a sort of multi-generational rat breeding program. St-George says that he has been doing this for many years, and his father before him, and his father before that. Jack asks, "how do you know the rats aren't breeding YOU?"
I had a similar thought today when feeding some crows. Usually they don’t like it when other people show up, and they leave or hide for a bit in a tree or some such. So by proxy I don’t like having people around since we all have to wait. It’s a nice bit of converged purpose I guess where I adapt my behavior as well. Most people who go there are usually oblivious of any birds. They just don’t see it.
I have found that they like dry, unsalted popcorn. They also like small kibbled dog food, and really go nuts over dried cranberries and unsalted almonds. If there are sunflower seeds in the mix, they are always the last to be eaten.
An expert recommended it above most things. They like some insects above all, but sunflower seeds mostly. They pretend to like bread, but they usually hide it in a stash and don’t eat it unless they really hungry.
There's just something absolutely enchanting and quaint about being friends with crows, and learning what your local murder's favorite foods are absolutely let's you get in their good graces faster.
The only reason this is a problem is because the city refuses to use containerized trash collection (such as dumpsters). Turns out, dumping trash bags on the street for 12 hours 3-6 times a week is basically a free buffet for rats.
The reason the city doesn't implement containerized trash collection is because that would mean giving up a few free parking spots every block.
It got worse during COVID-19 because the city temporarily suspended collection/extermination, which caused the rodent population to explode, and it's never recovered from that. But eliminating the regular meals for rats would be an easy, no-brainer way to fix it.
An anecdote: My NYC neighborhood has seen a building boom over the past decade. As far as I can tell, every new building puts its trash out on the street.
Some particularly memorable examples include a 75 story residential tower with absolutely record-breaking trash piles, and a ~25 story residential tower with a trash collection point on the onramp to the Williamsburg bridge. Garbage trucks have to stop in the road to collect trash, manually, bag-by-bag, at every stop.
This is the policy for trash in NYC, and rats will remain a problem as long as it stays that way.
Go look at the absolutely massive piles of trash bags outside 20 Exchange Place in the financial district (huge office tower retrofitted to rental apartments) for an example of this. There's nowhere to put dumpsters and obviously no alleyway...
The only reason this is a problem is because the city refuses to use containerized trash collection (such as dumpsters). Turns out, dumping trash bags on the street for 12 hours 3-6 times a week is basically a free buffet for rats.
The US confuses the hell out of me sometimes.
How do you get to the moon and invent the internet, but can't figure out how to collect refuse in arguably your most prominent city?
> The only solution are distributed dumpsters/large containers, which are not popular because nobody wants a dumpster in from of their building
That's not been the sticking point, empirically. The issue is that the politicians who can implement this don't want to give up the free parking spots.
It's the loss of free parking that's the motivator, not the dumpster itself.
Some cities in Europe use underground containers. (An arm on the collection truck can lift them right out of the ground. It's pretty neat.) I wonder if that is feasible for NYC.
This would be prohibitively expensive due to the number of underground utilities. In Manhattan, there isn't even a map of all pipes/etc. under a given street or sidewalk, because they were laid so long ago - every time digging is done, they need to carefully dig it up and see what's even there and document it.
So there's no way to even figure out how this could be done without doing all the digging, etc., and at that point the expense is prohibitive.
Not to mention that building that system would require giving up parking spots for the construction, which would cause the same political pushback from the same opponents, so at that point you might as well just do above-ground collection for a fraction of the price, since you'll be fighting the same political battles either way.
I once stayed at a flat in Berlin and there were rats living in the building trash container. They would literally be scurrying on the top of the pile when I opened it up to throw trash bags away. Hands down my worst experience with rats, even coming from NYC.
This was in Kreuzberg and there seemed to be a lot of rats there because of some abandoned buildings and construction + fields of dirt for them to burrow in
They could adopt Taiwan's musical garbage trucks with zero investment in new garbage containers or loss of parking. Garbage bags go directly from properties into the truck, spending no time festering on the sidewalk.
Great, then removing parking will also reduce the homicide rate, in addition to starving the rats, speeding up the bus service, and keeping everyone from getting cancer and dementia. Really, is there anything that banning cars doesn't solve?
I take it you're talking about removing street parking altogether? If they just remove a few parking spots on each block for dumpsters, I can only see that leading to more tension and disputes over the even scarcer parking spaces. Why anyone would want to drive in Manhattan is beyond me.
I was watching a Disney+ documentary on the making of Disney World and was impressed that all the garage cans use pneumatic tubes to empty in a central dump not visible to guests. Is such a solution not possible at NYC scale?
> I was watching a Disney+ documentary on the making of Disney World and was impressed that all the garage cans use pneumatic tubes to empty in a central dump not visible to guests. Is such a solution not possible at NYC scale?
There is one portion of Manhattan where that is done, yes.
That would be cost-prohibitive in most of the city due to the amount of digging required, and the expense of digging in NYC (an old city which has extensive underground piping and infrastructure that was laid before these things were regularly documented, so there's no way to know which water/electricity/etc lines are in an area before you actually dig there).
The qualifications for the role are very poor if you're looking for someone to be effective:
> Bachelor’s Degree required, preferably public policy, or related design fields, plus 5-8 years of
full-time professional experience in a field related to this position
> Swashbuckling attitude, crafty humor, and general aura of badassery
Wouldn't you value someone who actually knows how to control vermin populations at scale in an urban environment? Why would you value someone who has a "public policy" degree. What even is that?
And why does this person need to be a funny pirate? In essence, Jack Sparrow with a public policy degree appears to be the ideal candidate.
To me it sounds like they're more interested in giving off the perception of doing something about the problem while entertaining the public about it, rather than actually solving the problem effectively.
You see a lot of private companies add silly qualifications like this as well. So I don't really think it indicates anything other than the dept in question trying to be more "hip".
That being said, it seems clear now that everything from the Adams administration should be treated as "giving off the perception of doing something instead of solving the problem" until proven otherwise.
>Wouldn't you value someone who actually knows how to control vermin populations at scale in an urban environment? Why would you value someone who has a "public policy" degree. What even is that?
Probably because the real solution (not putting trash directly onto the streets like it's 1780) isn't going to happen, so a degree in public policy will help make it look like you're actually going to do something.
It's a management role. They want you to understand and navigate the bureaucracy involved in being a middle manager in city government. Negotiating with Czar of Trash in order to make that real solution a reality, is probably more important than being an expert trap maker. But you definitely want that person on your team!
The nature of the description makes more sense, given that. It sounded mis-targeted at first, but I was assuming they wanted someone who would actually be waist deep in filth and killing. They want someone to put a hip and sanitized face to those people, but who is also unconventional enough to respect them. They put a line in a about being hands on, but presumably that's a photo-op type/learning thing.
We put trash on the streets in Tokyo and it's fine; there's no rats here. The key is only putting the trash out the morning before pick-up (so it's only out there a short time; putting it out the evening before is not allowed), and also just keeping the city generally clean, which is NOT something NYC does.
Also, to facilitate this, most buildings (esp. multi-unit dwellings) have large trash rooms for collecting and sorting trash before management puts it out on the correct day for that type of trash.
“The rats are absolutely going to hate this announcement. But the rats don’t run this city. We do” has become a top tier audio meme. I think I hear this in my head about as often as I see “(x) Doubt” or “This is fine (dog engulfed in flames)”
NYC really did a great job with the marketing on this.
I think the real reason TikTok was successful is it popularized the audio/video meme and the means for them to go viral.
Whatever it popularized is the exact opposite of what entertains me. I was recently sent a link to tiktok that was a video set to random music of a single screenshot of a single tweet.
me and a friend were just talking yesterday about the insane trash day behaviors in NYC. How is it that piles of bagged garbage on the sidewalk has been accepted as normal as if a plastic bag is any barrier to a rodent or any other determined creature.
My grandmother had an island. Nothing to boast of. You could walk around it in an hour, but still it was, it was a paradise for us. One summer, we went for a visit and discovered the place had been infested with rats! They'd come on a fishing boat and gorged themselves on coconut. So how do you get rats off an island? Hmm? My grandmother showed me. We buried an oil drum and hinged the lid. Then we wired coconut to the lid as bait and the rats would come for the coconut, and they would fall into the drum. And after a month, you have trapped all the rats, but what do you do then? Throw the drum into the ocean? Burn it? No. You just leave it and they begin to get hungry. And one by one they start eating each other, until there are only two left. The two survivors. And then what? Do you kill them? No. You take them and release them into the trees, but now they don't eat coconut anymore. Now, they only eat rat. You have changed their nature.
I had a mouse problem and asked people online for help. A former Russian sailor told a similar story. They tried this method of making a rat killer. Well instead they just bred bigger stronger rats on their ship. Ones that ate cats now.
Then they tried buying really stinky cheese in a port and baiting and ambushing rats on one of the cargo decks using bats to kill them. Got over 100 that way but the next morning a rat literally ran over the captain’s breakfast table. Clearly this didn’t work.
So finally they caught one rat and sealed it in an empty aluminum can with a microphone inserted into it at one end. They then lit a torch under the can to make the rat squeal. The mic was connected to the ship’s PA system. As the rat screamed all the other rats took heed and thousands of them jumped overboard. He said it was a scene out of a horror movie but they didn’t have rats on that ship again for years (cats managed the population after).
I don’t know how true this is but I suppose it could be and he certainly made it sound believable.
Unfortunately, the thing that makes me competent Civilization player is that I spend a lot of time playing Civilization instead of working. I'd be happy to take a job on that basis, but I'm not sure I could keep it.
It has been a long time since I've played a round of Civilization[1], but to this day I still default to framing almost every long-term decision in terms of "building tall" vs. "building wide". And then there's EU4, which has drilled into me an obsession with staring a ledgers all day[2].
[1]: Yaddah, yaddah... "Given the opportunity, players will optimize the fun out of a game"
[2]: An unfortunate habit, given the heightened difficulty of pausing IRL time
Has any city ever had success reducing the rat population by a significant amount and keeping it down over a long term? My memory from reading some book about rats a long time ago is that they haven't, though of course that could be wrong. This job may be more about managing a losing battle.
There is a fascinating history of rats in New York City provided in the book, Rats: Observations on the History & Habitat of the City's Most Unwanted Inhabitants.
The author, Robert Sullivan, delivers the influence of rats and ratting on the American Revolution. It goes so far as to draw a connection between rats and the Boston Massacre, IIRC.
It made me look at rats in a new way, I highly recommend this book.
Clean up the city and rats will disappear by themselves. At the moment you can't walk through NYC without running into large piles of garbage on every sidewalk. No shit there's a rodent problem.
The garbage situation in Manhattan is ridiculous. Mountains of garbage appear every night. It’s not surprising that they have a rat problem. Plenty of other cities have addressed this problem directly. As far as I can tell, NYC simply does not have the political will.
It’s frankly an embarrassment. We advertise to the world the idea that NYC is one of America’s best cities, and the first thing that people see upon arriving is mountains of trash.
Yes, having thin plastic bags of food waste out on the street for hours every single night is quite clearly the fundamental issue. To me, there's an obvious path forward in removing a few free parking spaces on each block and replacing them with rat-proof containers, and reorganizing the sanitation department support collecting from bins rather than bags on the sidewalk.
The political will is key here, since to effectively fix the issue someone will need to stand up to the sanitation union, who will be concerned that this new paradigm will require fewer workers, as well as to the thousands of seething car owners who will fight tooth and nail to keep their free parking spaces. So far, nobody has wanted to take on this challenge, and so the residents live with filth as the rats continue to feast!
> seething car owners who will fight tooth and nail to keep their free parking spaces
I was going to say that despite the objections from car owners, we did get Citibike... but if I use that word, I know they'll just replace the bike stations with trash containers. "Cleaner city and no parking spaces lost," they'll say.
> To me, there's an obvious path forward in removing a few free parking spaces on each block and replacing them with rat-proof containers
Putting garbage in containers is the kind of thing that sounds like a great idea at first glance. And maybe that's for the "greater good". But what's this comment about losing parking? The devil is in a lot of very specific details, but I'd have some concerns about the side-effects of losing parking spots being significant to some people.
For instance, in many areas of NYC, reducing the number of legal parking spots means more people having to drive around for 30-60+ minutes trying to find a legal spot, which certainly has an impact on the city's cleanliness, not to mention the safety of the roads (increasingly agitated people wheeling around trying to find one of the increasingly vanishing legal spots). And not to mention the impact on people in stressed economic situations. Does a low income earner who needs his car for work now have to choose between spending time and money driving around for an hour plus trying to park legally, or does he risk a ticket that he can't afford now?
I can see some creative solutions that might kill multiple birds with one stone, but I'd just like to point out that reducing parking has a real world impact on people and isn't something to be undertaken lightly.
> Putting garbage in containers is the kind of thing that sounds like a great idea at first glance
Also at second glance, and a third if you go look at other cities in the USA and around the world. It works great! It solves this problem! NYC should just do it.
Yes, it solves this specific problem, but what about the problems it potentially creates?
The comment I responded to mentioned losing parking on every block as part of the proposed solution. That's a hell of a large negative for quality of life in New York. There's a lot of details here that are being completely hand waved away.
Now, maybe it's still worth it, and maybe there's good rebuttals and counterpoints to the points I brought up, but the negatives aren't even being brought up and weighed. That's not how you fully evaluate some idea. There's no solution to a problem that doesn't have some unintended cost.
You forgot the guy in the $2M one bedroom apartment who now has a supposedly rat proof dumpster parked in front of his window. He’ll be thrilled.
Also, Inevitability, homeless people will figure out how to pop the sealed rat proof door open, throw the trash on the sidewalk, and setup shop inside. The NYPD will laugh, and some judge will grant an injunction forbidding eviction of the resident pending a hearing.
Lack of political will and corruption are NYC (and by extension NYS') biggest problems. It's incredible how little progress is made here, how expensive projects are, and how long it takes compared to even other union-heavy areas like France. In this case, it would likely require significant investment to create central trash receptacles on each block and require taking parking spaces. Both of which NYC politicans are too pathetic to push for.
They've recently hired McKinsey to conduct a 20 week study on the viability of containerization on the varying street sizes of Manhattan, and what that might look like [0]. My guess: they settle upon some aesthetically loud behemoth of a trash container that's neither well-functioning nor beautifying, and approve an attendant increase in the sanitation department's budget to deal with the new responsibility. But at least it will be better than the status quo ex ante.
In other cities, mountains of garbage pile up in alleyways or other just-off-the-street venues. Since there basically are no alleyways in Manhattan, the garbage goes in the street instead. I'm not sure the rats care very much either way.
In other cities they provide trash bins and dumpsters. Only in NYC do you just put a bag of trash on the side of the road. My city doesn't even take anything that isn't in a bin that you haven't specifically ordered pickup for (like a big couch)
Wait what are you on about? Are you serious that you just stick bin bags on the street full? Where are the bins? What?
I'm not from NYC or even the US, why wouldn't you just use bins that the bags go in? I don't understand, please help me understand this. I'm thoroughly confused.
The sidewalks aren’t wide enough for the kinds of bins needed for the amount of trash generated (NYC is dense) and nobody wants to give up free parking spaces to put the bins in the street as of yet.
This is actually just a building code issue. In other cities, ordinances mandate trash rooms or trash chutes for mulitfamily buildings to avoid these issues. One could argue "but nyc grew before sane building codes," but so did boston, or chicago, and plenty of other denser cities that don't have this issue because they have sensible ordinances in place regarding waste management.
I'm willing to bet landlords don't want to make these investments to their properties in nyc, and have more of a voice in local government than their tenants, who are probably mostly indifferent about the issue at this point anyhow.
I love Boston and will vouch for the general idea that MA is better than NY, but I’m pretty sure Boston just gets by using the advantage of a smaller population and less density in this case. Although maybe the rats have as much trouble navigating as every other visitor…
Buildings have trash chutes and rooms for collecting trash; the trash is held there and put out on the street before midnight and picked up the following morning 3x per week. They get fined for leaving trash out any other time.
The issue is the collection point, not the storage prior.
Many cities have a regular bin-sized contraption where you throw you stuff in and it gets compacted into a big underground container that is part of the sidewalk. They then either get lifted and emptied of sucked empty by a garbage truck.
The sidewalks are plenty wide for that, nyc doesn't even come close to how narrow some european cities without such problems are.
Are you referring to some sort of underground hatch that doesn’t take up any space on the sidewalk at all? That’d be very cool, just probably difficult to retrofit the whole city with.
You live in an apartment building that's 47 stories tall and has 350 units. Do you expect all of the residents individually to take bins out to the front of the building?
Buildings here have chutes and compactors. There aren't any alleys in Manhattan and the sidewalks are mostly quite narrow. The solution would be to eliminate some parking to hold bins that can be emptied by trucks but it hasn't been politically feasible.
If you have chutes and trash rooms already, then there's no point to bringing the stuff out to the street for holding. In my building the trash would be taken from the trash room directly to the truck. The chute would just drop into a dumpster that workers would wheel out and the truck would flip it into the bed. Seems like it takes less labor than having workers bring bags to the road and then have the trash workers spend time putting the bags in the truck by hand versus with a hydraulic arm.
> Seems like it takes less labor than having workers bring bags to the road and then have the trash workers spend time putting the bags in the truck by hand versus with a hydraulic arm.
You're getting to the heart of the problem. That would mean fewer workers and the sanitation union has a long and ironically sordid past of ensuring that less workers are never needed.
Well there are no alleys remember, so nowhere to pull up a truck other that on the street in front of the building. It’s also worth noting that the sanitation workers union fiercely opposes any mechanization in trash collection, the workers toss bags by hand. It’s absolutely ridiculous to see in person.
> And then New Yorkers have the gall to constantly make fun of Staten Island
Well to be fair, Staten Island used to be the literal garbage dump for NYC, and being incorporated as the fifth borough was actually the reason this stopped (because it's illegal to dump trash within the city limits).
Right, but you kind of lose the right to make fun of it when the garbage dump moved from SI to right in front of your door step, and everyone else's. One fond memory back when I lived in Manhattan is being at a small, classy, cocktail bar that served nice drinks with an excellent street view of garbage bags being piled up right in front that ruined it all.
I did live there and on a single family block in queens. Typically there was two pickups a week with people using metal cans in those days. There were plenty of rats.
Where people go, rats follow. If you think that your town/city/building doesn’t have rats, you are wrong.
HN commenters don’t have all of the answers. Garbage bags on the street are a nuisance, but not the problem.
>If you think that your town/city/building doesn’t have rats, you are wrong.
I've never even seen a feral rat in real life. Might make for an interesting Ask HN poll. Estimate how frequently you see rats.
- Haven't yet
- Once per decade
- Once a year
- Once a month
- Once a week
- Daily
Squirrels, yup, lots of them around. And I've seen plenty of mice in my life, and I'm assuming that's what the owls are eating. Beavers? Check. But no rats in 40+ years. YMMV.
They tend to avoid people from a visibility standpoint and thrive in denser areas. Outside of big old cities you typically find them around restaurants and shopping areas.
These places spend alot to control them. Google for “rat bait station”. You’ve seen those at any Walmart, grocery store or in the shrubbery on the side of retail buildings.
I’ve been to and lived in plenty of big cities. NYC is unique in it’s rat problem for sure. Other cities obviously have rats, but they’re nowhere near as common (or big!)
It’s 100% due to the garbage bags on the street. If you walk by one of the huge piles in Manhattan (e.g . outside the NYU dorms), try throwing something at it, you’ll see dozens of rats scatter.
My point was not that SI is a shining example of a garbage free paradise, more so that them making fun of it considering their own problems is hypocritical at best.
NYC is mainly a halfway house for immigrants passing through. It pretty much always has been. A lot of my extended family started out there (it’s got the largest Bangladeshi population in the country) but fled to Long Island or Texas or California once they got their feet under them.
When I got to NYC from Chicago for an internship I spent the first few weeks just marveling and taking pictures of the trash piles and sending them back to my then-girlfriend. “Honey, this one is even taller than the last one!”
Delivery logistics have advanced dramatically and is trending towards near-realtime. For everything that is delivered, some non-trivial percentage of that needs to be taken away as trash. But there is no incentive to improve trash pickup logistics.
Perhaps we could pass laws that require anyone delivering something (hi Amazon) to also take away some proportional amount of trash, removing the externality they currently enjoy. I am sure they would eventually be a lot more efficient at it than the current system.
"Clean up the city" in this case means to change the behavior of 9 million people and every single visitor. It would be easier to train the rats operate the subway system.
As someone who lives in NYC, we have a serious trash problem.
Like, being young and naive once I thought "that's just how cities are!" but having traveled the world, most cities are NOT like New York.
In my neighborhood there is trash pick up 3 days a week. Some houses on my block (2-3 family buildings) will throw out something like 6-20 bags of trash a week. YES seriously.
Very few cities dump their trash bags directly on the side walk for pickup. I can't think of anywhere besides NYC that isn't capable of using a trash bin/dumpster. Pretty sure if the city provided containers people would use them.
There are tons of rats in the subways, and until the MTA puts up a platform wall or something like that, they're not going away because they live off the food people throw on the tracks.
Rats can find food anywhere in many forms, so instead of poisoning them (which just removes competition for food from the rest of them), addict them to a substance you can control, distribute it everywhere freely and accessibly for a while - and then once a large enough population of them are addicted, you create scarcity in the substance, and they will starve themselves and fight each other and breed less frequently in pursuit of it. If the population starts rising again, release more of the drug to get more of them addicted to it and repeat the cycle.
Spray the sewers and garbage bins with nicotine or seized cocaine or some addictive equivalent. Killing them just kills off the weak ones and polarizes the population, whereas a method like this using managed addiction will keep their numbers down and actively managed.
There are three elements to reducing rat populations:
Removing access to food, destruction of their warrens, and killing the rats themselves.
New York City can not hope to begin on this while garbage disposal involves piling bags of trash on the sidewalk.
Other cities address this by improving their dumpsters and garbage cans, and while that doesn't eliminate rats, it drastically reduces their population, and limits their ability to spread as quickly.
After that it becomes possible to populations further by filling warrens and killing the actual rats.
You basically need to clean the city. I've been there in the summer - the place stinks to high heaven from uncollected rotting food, I don't know how the locals handle it.
You'll never be able to trap or kill your way out of this, rats are too smart, and breed too quickly.
That reminds me of the old movie Mimic, in which supposedly sterile insects are released to prey on other insects transmitting a disease to children. The infertility part didn't work and it got messy.
Similar systems have been tried in other places for rodents. You end up getting breeding farms and then when the project is inevitably canceled, all the farmed rodents are set free as the rodent producing factories are abandoned.
It's been tried many times, the results are effectively the same and the programs end up getting canceled (such as Chicago's 1977 program)
Almost like marketplaces of individualistic privatized incentives are a really terrible bad fit for collective societal problems.
This won't stop people from doing it though. If you've got municipal authority and don't know this history, you're probably the type that considers themselves brilliant for coming up with such a creative market-driven solution and don't anticipate the eventual consequences which have repeated themselves quite a number of times.
now you're incentivizing crime vigilantism without specific people involved. These have long histories of fraud and people abusing them for personal grievances along with all the issues related to human trafficking. That's why bounties are for specific people or relating to specific crimes as opposed to some thing where you can just, say, capture supposed prostitutes and turn them in for rewards.
Not that this isn't tried constantly. Heck, we did it in the war on terror and it basically just resulted in kidnapping and human smuggling.
It's not that these market approaches for social problems are impossible - they just usually need markets on top of markets on top of markets to fix incentives and distribute money around in a complicated way with a bunch of administrative overhead. At the end you get at best mediocre results at exorbitantly high cost and enormous complexity. For example, the american health care system...
The real problem is, especially in the USA, some people just totally lose their marbles and become frothing lunatics if anything even looks like it has a remote resemblance to anything socialisty so cost effective reasonable proven solutions that have worked many other places for decades are off the table and we get these 7-layer wedding cake Rube Goldberg machines because we want to show how ideologically pure we are in our demonstration of market efficiency
I'm just joshing around. You make good points, and I appreciate your sincerity.
>we get these 7-layer wedding cake Rube Goldberg machines because we want to show how ideologically pure we are in our demonstration of market efficiency
This simply doesn't connect for me in this case, given that the the New York and Chicago rat problems stem from trash collection issues under the purview of public agencies.
hah, the problem is, and now I'm getting into neoclassical economics, at scale farming is easier than foraging. As in, the cost of rat reproduction < cost of (rat discovery + capture + disease risk) so there's no place to set a bounty since it's always more efficient and reliable to produce rats than to competitively find them.
Incentive programs works for say cans, because the cost of pulling them out of the waste stream is less then the cost of building a factory to produce them. But for hearty robust animals that eat garbage and have lots of offspring, probably not.
As far as a working system, we should look to Alberta (https://alberta.ca/albertas-rat-control-program.aspx) - lots of free resources and budget is set aside for rat proofing and removal - as in calling in exterminators and DIY rat killing things (such as poison) are free.
Call that socialism if you want, it's worked for decades.
Do we then track the confirmed kills with a blackchain? Perhaps we can have some kind of an exchange for pelts. Maybe even have a pelt token. I'll see myself out.
rat coin, ticker symbol RAT. backed by real world artisan rat pelts. each coin is actually an NFT representing the actual rat, in a goofy outfit of course. too bad blow guns are powered by the carbon dioxide emissions of people's lungs or we would have had the greatest stable coin the world has ever known
You start by taking recordings of their ultra sonic squeaks, in particular the mating calls. Then you play these recordings back over loud speaker. As the conga line of horny rats waltzes in, BAM! Guillotine.
Reimaging a system generally eliminates any remote access tools, but if the ACPI Windows Platform Binary Table (an executable that lives in PC firmware by design that recent versions of Windows loads and runs automatically without ability to disable) has been compromised through a malicious firmware update to automatically install a RAT on power on, you may need to go so far as to manually flash the chip holding the firmware to a known non-compromised version. This is a highly technical operation and not for everyone.
Not using ACPI-based Windows-intended hardware, which will unfortunately consist of most of the PC-based motherboards you can purchase on the market today, can help avoid this situation in the first place.
After retiring from the FBI, Neville Flynn (Samuel L. Jackson) takes a job as a motorman on an NYC subway. Meanwhile, the city hires the top rat exterminator in the country (Christopher Walken) who uses the unconventional technique of releasing thousands of vipers into the city’s sewers.
What is the deal with juvenile humor in business and government listings? That is an immediate red flag, "derp we're so fun here you're a team player that wants to be part of an inclusive and collaborative family where you can watch your career bloom". Pass.
> What is the deal with juvenile humor in business and government listings?
Humor in this listing meant the ad got publicity and was read more widely - it gives the Mayor some brownie points showing they're doing something useful. It also got the ad read by more potential candidates so the quality of applicants will be higher.
"Rat killer" is a funny headline but I hope (though I'm not that confident) that this person will not focus on directly killing rats. To state the obvious, for that to work you have to kill rats as fast as they reproduce (which is fast) and the second you stop the situation goes right back to where it was. To take a cue from what seems to work with pigeons, they need to provide less rat food and/or limit reproduction. The second one is easier with pigeons (you can build roosts for them, then replace the eggs with fake ones - this is really done).
Okay so New York is complaining about companies offering unreasonable salary ranges... And then they offer $120k - $170k! Like seriously that's a gigantic difference for the same one position.
3% of $120k is $3,600
20 years of $3,600 is $72,000
This is beyond the range stated.
Having worked for years in IT for a municipal service, our standard formula was a raise of 0% to 3% based on a performance rating, with 0% being "you're on a PIP and going to be fired soon" and 3% being a top-performer.
This is speculation at this point - but I would assume NYC works against a similar system.
I like how NYC is cleaning up its act lately. It’s like it got over Covid and suddenly realized it’s the greatest city in the world and better start acting like it.
This isn’t remotely accurate. Mayoral politics in NYC is eternally dominated by basic quality of life issues. It’s the single thing that dominates voting in the city.
I’ve been much more impressed with the city council than the mayor as of late. Our esteemed mayor seems to have more of a taste for cutting QoL projects (like compost collection, and bike lane expansion) than he does for cultivating them.
Hugely editorialized. DeBlasio routinely dismissed quality of life issues, instructing the NYPD to cease enforcement on the subways, cutting the sanitation budget, and a hundred other things. The homeless population and petty crime blossomed even before covid. Adams was elected literally because of the backlash.
What makes New York the “greatest city in the world”? People from New York like to say that but I’ve never understood why it’s true in any objective sense.
I find it funny that after all the talk about requiring reasonable salary ranges for jobs in NYC, the city itself is sort of skirting the rule by including a very wide range: upper range is >40% higher than lower range.
This a ridiculous title, or have I just read too many fantasy novels where they're just called "Ratter". Malazan and their ratter guild comes to mind.
The about section however is a pretty rad:
>Do you have what it takes to do the impossible? A virulent vehemence for vermin? A background in urban planning, project management, or government? And most importantly, the drive, determination and killer instinct needed to fight the real enemy – New York City’s relentless rat population?
Final though: I think it should definitely include terriers (the OG ratters). Those would be some happy dogs.
Why not ask all the nations shelters (especially the killing ones) to ship all their cats to nyc? Why is NYC above the age-old rat mitigation? Works for Istanbul.
Speaking of, the cars are the real problem - the rats proliferate on garbage, of course. So, to cut their food source, the garbage must be hidden from the rats until it is collected: This is axiomatic in my eyes. To hide the garbage, it makes the most sense to just place it inside a modular rat-proof container that is plopped onto a parking space. But it's politically very difficult in NYC to take away parking spaces, especially at a scale that would be required to house all the trash. It's also not possible to go underground like Europe does.
Thus, to truly solve this problem, NYC has to tackle the automobile problem head on and that hasn't been politically popular there for a long time. (Thanks, Robert Moses!) But I'm optimistic for change!
>It's also not possible to go underground like Europe does.
I belive you may be thinking of a couple of [well to do] places in The Netherlands, which despite being in Europe, does not represent it all (unfortunately).
Other European places would have the same problem as NYC regarding going underground...lotta wires and cables and pipes and tubes and tree roots down there.
One difference - cat corpses in the street probably make pretty good rat food.
Although, now that I think about it, the elevated risk of hitting cats in the street would probably make most drivers slow down in the city, which is aligned with my worldview.
Also, cute cats everywhere. I could pet them. It could be a form of utopia. Sorry birds. Although birds would probably do fine actually, they're extremely well adapted to take advantage of verticality in the city.
I'm in! Ship the cats from the kill shelters to New York so that I may pet all of them!
It might seem a rather simplistic and naive, but what if bins (do Americans call them trash cans?) were raised high enough with feet which literally resist climbing or jumping rats from getting to their juicy New York pizza?
The mafia will make billions by paying an army of crazy homeless people to feed garbage to the radioactive zombie rats and then charging the government to remove the rats - which will somehow end up in Mexico in dead government informants.
The NY government will then get in on the racket and make capturing radioactive rats illegal without possession of one of three rat disposal licenses that are auctioned to the highest bidder each year on condition that rat feed be purchased from the NY government, and any proceeds be split evenly with the MTA — which still spends $49 billion a year on overtime despite no workers, riders, subways, or buses having survived the initial nuclear strike.
I'm pretty sure the rat killing nature of cats is way overstated. Also, in an urban environment where they can much more easily find food thrown in trash, etc., they are unlikely to make an effort to kill rats to obtain that food. Finally, a sufficient cat population that could eradicate a rat problem would likely eradicate the bird population first.
Go read the other responder's article link. Cats can kill rats, but they generally don't bother, and are very inefficient predators of rats. Rats are just too large. Predators don't like to prey on animals that are a significant threat to them. Mice, OTOH, are easy prey for cats and they'll kill tons of them.
There's a group that does this, but supposedly has not made much of an impact on the city's rat population and the practice has stirred some controversy (content
warning: dead rats)
Those with toxoplasmosis are perceived more healthy and attractive, have more lifetime sexual partners[1], take more risk and start their own business more [2] . Seems like a symbiont to me.
"In addition, the documentary looks into the history of cat domestication, and how in the middle ages the church tried to get rid of cats due to their association with witches"
only difference is, now it's "toxoplasmosis and cat scratch fever" instead of witches.
Do you have numbers on the prevalence of those ills? As compared to well-known rat-borne illness?
Just in nyc week ago and dont recall seeing that many rats in one visit. Though I have never ventured to Hell's Kitchen before as I did this time. Still love NYC ..such a great vibe!
Amusing seeing this just below the “Who’s hiring” thread. C’mon guys, I know all about the recent tech layoffs as well as burnout, but switching careers to rodent mitigation is pushing it…
