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New York claims a small victory in 'forever war on rats'
- b800h 2y agoDo you not have wheelie-bins in the US?
- greenavocado 2y agoNew York can hardly be called "the US" culturally
- Loudergood 2y agoNowhere in the US can be really. It's not as diverse culturally as "Europe" but it's more diverse than most countries by a lot.
- namaria 2y agoYeah how American is hip hop anyway?
- busterarm 2y agoHip Hop has shifted as much as America has. The only big 2020s hip hop artist from NY is Cardi B. Then you have to realize she's mostly a pop act -- a majority of hip hop heads don't listen to female artists.
- namaria 2y agoYeah Cardi B is pop music. And whoever heard of Lauryn Hill, Salt-n-Peppa, Erykah Badu, Eve, Lil Kim, Queen Latifah, Missy Elliot?
- busterarm 2y agoYou're talking about basically 30 years ago. That's an entire previous generation. Not speaking disrespectfully but none of who you mentioned have mainstream cultural relevance in _today's hip hop_. Kim and Missy come closest. If your argument is going to be that New York is the cultural center of hip hop, who from New York is representing today's hip hop? Who is selling the albums?
- namaria 2y agoMy argument was that one of the most American things ever (hip hop) is actually rooted in NY. The rest is a response to 'hip hop heads don't listen to female artists' so I mentioned a bunch of heavyweights. This can degenerate into 'no real scotsman' so whatever. There is today a whole lot of pop artists that use hip hop aesthetics, but as usual the real stuff is very much underground.
- tialaramex 2y agoThe fallacy is actually named "No True Scotsman" for whatever that's worth.
- namaria 2y agoC'mon really? In the Book of Fallacies they used the other word? Talk about pedantism.
- snovymgodym 2y agoThis just in: huge country has a pluralistic cultural identity
- busterarm 2y agoNative New Yorker now living in the real America vouching for the accuracy of this comment. The majority of the US shops at WalMart. New York City doesn't even have one.
- MathMonkeyMan 2y agoBut we have many Target. The K-Mart closed :(
- busterarm 2y agoThe rest of America finds Target too expensive and also kind of overrated.
- kcb 2y agoWhy?
- gnkyfrg 2y ago[dead]
- wan23 2y agoIn the US, yes, but in New York we generally just pile up our trash bags on the sidewalk on garbage day. We don't have alleyways between our buildings and most of the street space is taken up by free car storage.
- jstummbillig 2y agoWhere do you store full trash bags in between pickups?
- MisterTea 2y agoIn trash rooms, hallways or alleyways if one exists (common outside of Manhattan).
- soared 2y agoStill on the sidewalk. NYC is perpetually full of trash bags in comparison to other major cities (or non major cities)
- snakeyjake 2y agoOn the street. Go to Google Maps, zoom in on New York City, then drop a Streetview pin randomly anywhere in the city. Chances are very, VERY, good that just by panning, not moving, you'll find a trash bag dumped on the sidewalk.
- SOLAR_FIELDS 2y agoAs sibling implied basically every other major city in the US uses bins or dumpsters. Except NYC.
- yostrovs 2y agoIn New York City, the trash workers union prevents dumpsters from being used, which would kill jobs. Remember: trash is not a problem to deal with. It's a solution to unemployment.
- macintux 2y agoWhere would the dumpsters go? Serious question, the impression I get is that there is no room in many places in the city.
- bobbylarrybobby 2y agoParking spots that currently house individuals’s cars could be used for dumpsters instead.
- DonHopkins 2y agoWhat if all cars were required to haul trash?
- rincebrain 2y agoIgnoring the political backlash around taking people's parking, I would instead point out the likely rate of hitting dumpsters in the street with how tightly packed people would park around them. NYC was, for large stretches, built without the alleys that lots of other cities would use to store such bins, and I don't think you can easily accommodate the volumes of trash that people want to turn over with just street storage without significant logistical problems with how much you disrupt the flow of people in the city. Even if we eat the cost of parking around residential locations, businesses have gotten used to using the space in front of their restaurants as additional seating, so cannibalizing that for dumpsters will cause massive backlash on that front, to say nothing of the nasty effects on people's desire to eat when sitting next to a dumpster. I agree that NYC is slow moving on a lot of things, but this is also a genuinely hard problem.
- kevin_thibedeau 2y agoThey had plenty of room for on street restaurant expansions in many parts of the city.
- BtM909 2y agoI once saw a rat trying to open a wheelie-bin and when it looked up to me, I could see it think: shit, I'm busted; they know we are smart.
- cwmma 2y agoNew York was weirdly built without alleys so there is a legitimate issue of where do you put the bins when it's not trash day that almost every other city doesn't have
- eru 2y agoWell, they find the space to store their trash right now. So they definitely have enough space. The amount of trash would presumably roughly be the same before and after this change. Eg they could sacrifice some street parking spots for the bins. They could even charge the bins the same amount of money they charge for street parking (and fold these costs into the costs for trash disposal they charge trash producers).
- hombre_fatal 2y ago> Eg they could sacrifice some street parking spots for the bins. Taking away curb parking is one of the most heated political issues in the US. It's controversial enough to take away parking to make the road safer for pedestrians and other drivers (new daylighting law in SF), so I can't imagine how hard it would be to do it for some trash cans.
- eru 2y agoSomeone should try to campaign on turning all NYC sidewalks into parking spots.
- cafard 2y agoWashington, DC, has had "supercans" for about forty years. But it still has rats, though I suppose many fewer than it might.
- asdff 2y agoEven that doesn't solve it because the truck is too powerful for the bin. Over time the lid breaks apart from the grabbing and flicking motion. Plus some trash inevitably slips proper placement. And animals are smart. People are trying to sterilize rats or give them birth control now vs kill them. If you kill a rat, you still have the environment that could support a rat and one is liable to more in from the populations nearby you didn't kill. If you sterilize the rat and release it however, it keeps other new rats from moving in potentially in the maintenance of its territory and it could be doing this job for you for years while you try and sterilize the rest of the area. And eventually these rats will die, and if the great bulk has been sterilized in some way then you may actually eliminate or push back sterile rat populations out of certain areas.
- gambiting 2y ago>>Even that doesn't solve it because the truck is too powerful for the bin. Over time the lid breaks apart from the grabbing and flicking motion. I feel like you and I live on a different planet. Here in the UK we have those wheelie bins, they get collected using an automated dumpster truck that tips them inside itself, and I'm yet to hear about one of these braking - they are made out of proper thick plastic. Unless by "over time" you mean like 20+ years? https://www.wheeliebins.co.uk/blogs/news/everything-you-wanted-to-know-about-wheelie-bins https://www.wheeliebins.co.uk/blogs/news/everything-you-want...
- ianburrell 2y agoSame here in Oregon. My bins are old (at least 16 years) and same as when I moved in. I would think that is the truck was too strong, that could be adjusted. Or if city bought weak bins, they could be replaced by proper ones.
- asdff 2y agoHere is the truck in action. I get only a couple years before the lid starts fragmenting at the corners and sometimes breaks at the hinge. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wXiywhZxZis https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wXiywhZxZis
- potato3732842 2y agoI live in a city that most of HN would look down their nose at. We have "wheelie bins".
- hansvm 2y agoMost of HN has seen San Francisco. I doubt they'd look down too much.
- gnkyfrg 2y ago[dead]
- grubbs 2y agoLiving in Baltimore was a mess with rats until the city issued the rat-proof trash bins. Now I rarely ever see them.
- wackget 2y agoThe year is 2025. New York takes the bold, unprecedented step of storing their waste in receptacles which cannot be easily chewed through by pests. Will this wild experiment yield results? Scientists remain skeptical.
- PedroBatista 2y agoWhile the design of NYC - plus economic pressures - never accounted for domestic waste storage ( in a global and universal way for all buildings/tenants ). The truth is no one ( with actual power ) did anything meaningful to stop this. It became some type of "culture" or "it always has been this way" type of situation. With a city budget in the billions and a VERY active and "enforce/fine" happy public sector there is no excuse of "people don't just follow basic sanitation rules", it's in the culture and I hope this finally starts to go away as there is no reason to be this way.
- newsclues 2y agoI guess there are no homeless or unemployed people in NYC who could be mobilized to work on the problem. Humans struggle in urban environments to resolve problems because “someone else should”.
- petee 2y ago> someone else should Isn't that kinda what you're suggesting here? Most piles of trash aren't caused by homeless, its residents, so why should they need to be responsible? Residents could just buy their own cans as its their own problem
- gnkyfrg 2y ago[dead]
- eru 2y agoThe homeless aren't exactly the best workforce. For many, there's a reason they are homeless despite plenty of support systems that helps people become more 'homeful'. Similar, but generally less so, for some of the unemployed. If you want to 'mobilize' people, just advertise jobs normally and use a normal hiring process. One that should, of course, be open to currently homeless or unemployed. For your proposal, compare https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_100,000 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_100,000
- notepad0x90 2y agodeploy remotely controlled small rat-like robots, where the public can sign up like a game to pilot those bots and kill rats to score points and make a small amount of profit.
- dyauspitr 2y agoThe public would kill people.
- notepad0x90 2y agoonly if the bots use poison. impact-based methods at worst would harm the feet of pedestrians, but the public would need to create accounts, receive payment,etc.. so tracking them down and arresting them would be trivial. Imagine kids on their switches hunting for rats using robots!
- olelele 2y agoI have a feeling the robots would lose...
- marcosdumay 2y agoI mean... if you make a robot capable enough to move in a non-plane sidewalk, cross streets, climb into guts, and etc, it will still lose to rats. I'm not confident I could win in a fight against a pair of rats, even if I have bats or guns or whatever.
- Loudergood 2y agoThis inevitably ends in someone breeding more rats.
- notepad0x90 2y agoif it costs $0.50 to raise one rat, then the fee for killing one can be $0.05. storing them somewhere, feeding them,etc.. surely costs some amount. if people are just throwing stuff rats can eat, then nothing is new, that's what's happening today.
- snapcaster 2y agoThis is great, i'm always so turned off by how disgusting NYC is and struggle to get past it to enjoy the other parts
- BtM909 2y agohttps://archive.ph/GlQNI https://archive.ph/GlQNI
- buyucu 2y agoHere in İstanbul we don't have a rat problem thanks to the huge numbers of cats in the city.
- Balgair 2y agoBit warmer there though?
- Two4 2y agoThat's generally better for rats, is it not? Year-round availability of food, with the downside of more endemic disease.
- fsckboy 2y agoa city rat mom can have 6 litters a year of 7 rats each, life expectancy < 2 years... so in theory, seasonality of food would have little effect on annual rat population. in practice, this is born out because NYC is very cold in winter, and it is swarming with rats. (og ja, nordmenn, dere kan takke meg for at jeg kaller det en byrotte)
- itisit 2y agoI guess there aren’t any cats in the Ak Saray.
- oniony 2y agoI guess you instead have a cat problem.
- kamikazeturtles 2y agoThat's like saying the Midwest has a squirrel problem
- adonovan 2y agoWe have over 200,000 stray cats in Brooklyn alone--as I learned recently when one cute but particularly insistent kitten tried to make its home in ours--yet somehow they are collectively terrible at hunting rats.
- ashoeafoot 2y agoOr the turing uplifting test for rats leveled up.
- aetherson 2y agoVery proud of NYC in leading the way to having trash cans, an advance that will surely spread to other less developed cities nationwide.
- vladf 2y agoYes perhaps one day cities like Tokyo will catch up
- cjbgkagh 2y agoNever been to Japan, but AFAIK they used to have trash cans but got rid of them due to a sarin gas terrorist attack in 1995.
- catlifeonmars 2y agoTokyo is significantly cleaner than NYC, or any major US city. I think this is GPs point.
- kibwen 2y agoRat populations mostly aren't sustained by the sorts of trash cans that passersby toss garbage into (or fail to). They're sustained by containers carrying large amounts of residential refuse. (Consider the proportion of garbage you, personally, throw into a public trash can compared to your own trash can, especially food waste.) And I'm not well-versed on the specifics of Japanese waste processing, but I'm fairly confident they have something analogous to dumpsters and residential trash collection, even if they don't have public bins.
- sdrothrock 2y agoMany businesses and residences typically bag their trash and leave it on the street curb. The main exception is when a building has a managed trash facility, which is a room that people leave their bags in instead of on the curb.
- Julien_r2 2y agoReminded me of this job offer from the city [0], 2 years ago! Seems it paid off then! Searching for this post, I ended up scrolling through the HN result of "new York rats" [1]. It paints quite a story! Couldn't imagine it was such an intense topic (running for more than a decade!) [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33819860 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33819860 [1] https://hn.algolia.com/?q=new+York+rats https://hn.algolia.com/?q=new+York+rats
- test6554 2y agoI have never really felt the allure of living in a big city. Higher cost of living, smaller living spaces, noisy neighbors, rats apparently...
- echelon 2y agoMore restaurants, more music, more entertainment, more culture, "scenes", more romantic partners, more job opportunities, high energy, hustle, fashion, always something to do, etc. Cities are great when you're young.
- eru 2y agoThey are also good for business.
- tombert 2y agoThey are, but man the appeal does wear off, at least it did for me. I moved here when I was 24, and I loved it for the first 8 years. Almost overnight, when I was 32, I realized that I actually don't enjoy living in the city anymore. It's loud, expensive, I don't really do "indie" restaurants, I don't like most art, and I'm married so I don't really need more romantic partners. I still live in NYC, purely because my current job won't let me move, but I have been looking for an escape.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- debeloo 2y agoWhat would happen if we managed to get rid of every single rat on the planet. The great rat extinction. Would other species take it's place? Mice? Or would the planet just be a better place?
- eru 2y agoWell, if you have food scraps lying around, something will eat it. (Even if it's mold.) I'm not quite sure why you would want to do genocide on rats. Some people even keep them as pets, you know?
- tombert 2y agoMan I had a rat infestation in my house recently, and after that I think I could get behind a rat genocide. Those fuckers got into my pantry and started knocking jars over, they poop on everything, they make a lot of noise, they get into the air conditioning ducts, they will chew through pretty much anything that isn't thick metal or plastic, and they reproduce like crazy. We were able to get it under control and we hired someone to find and seal up the spots they were getting in from, but I gotta say that it wasn't an experience I want to go through ever again. The only "good" thing about rats vs mice is that they're decidedly not subtle, so it's a lot more clear that you actually got them all. Mice are smaller and sneakier and when we had an issue with them a few years ago it took quite awhile to know before we knew they were gone.
- Suppafly 2y ago>Some people even keep them as pets, you know? Weird people.
- chrisco255 2y agoSeeing as shrew-like animals are the oldest species of mammals and date all the way back to Triassic era, if you killed off one rodent species another would necessarily take its place. They also managed to survive several great extinctions in the last 250 million years and gave rise to our own species. Given the importance of them in the food chain, the world would most certainly be worse off without them.
- 486sx33 2y agoSteel cans provided by the resident are the best option for cost and sustainability. “Metal recycles forever”. Residents should be forced to provide their own metal cans with tightly fitting or latching lids. Garbage collection should not be provided 6 days a week to Harlem that’s wasteful. Once a week at most is more reasonable.
- Spooky23 2y agoThe collection thing is tough as there’s no alleys or anywhere to keep it. I agree 100% on the metal cans. Metal cans are cheap and effective.
- smelendez 2y agoEvery resident/household in NYC having their own metal trash can would mean the streets and sidewalks near dense apartment buildings would just be covered in cans. I’m not sure what the optimal pickup rate is but it should be more than once a week, especially in the summer. NYC apartment dwellers don’t have room to store full trash bags inside, and are generally discouraged from doing so to avoid attracting vermin, and you don’t want trash putrifying in the summer heat on the street for a week.
- eru 2y agoWhy does the frequency even need to be centrally decided?
- LanceH 2y ago> Steel cans provided by the resident are the best option for cost and sustainability. “Metal recycles forever”. Those two sentences together means buying the trash cans over and over again.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- portaouflop 2y agoInsane that one of the richest most developed cities in the world just dumped their trash on the street without using cans
- boringg 2y agoTheres a long story about noise complaints you should listen too. They had them then got rid of them.
- bearjaws 2y agoYup, if you live below the 20th floor in most buildings, the trash cans thudding at 2am is pretty jarring. I am sure there is an engineering solve to pad the cans and dump truck, not sure if it was looked into or not.
- viraptor 2y agoWell... There's another thing that they could learn from other cities. You can pick up the bins at 6am for example.
- yowzadave 2y agoYes, although then you have a lot more traffic to deal with. A typical garbage truck moves slowly down a city block, preventing a line of cars behind it from moving. Every change will upset some constituency, and their various needs need to be balanced. Life in the city!
- m3kw9 2y agoNever seen a rat any city I’ve been even NY. Serious
- LeafItAlone 2y agoThat’s quite the accomplishment. I saw three separate ones just on my way home today out of the corner of my eye.
- eclipseo76 2y agoMayor is still there though.
- jrflowers 2y agoThe fact that they say it has reduced rodent sightings just makes it seem like the rats are in the bins now
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]