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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
>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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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…
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!”
"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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
"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?
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.
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)
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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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).
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.
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
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.
“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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
554 comments
[ 5.6 ms ] story [ 362 ms ] threadComing this summer… Snakes on a Train
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.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.
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.
I find it hard to believe that inexhaustible mountains of calorie-dense food would not affect the population of an organism adapted to that niche.
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).
[0] https://gothamist.com/news/nyc-orders-4-million-mckinsey-stu...
> "NYC recently hired McKinsey to conduct a 20 week study"
I mean, do I have to say anything else? The joke writes itself.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
https://www.bing.com/images/search?q=new+york+trash
Most cities in the USA have either individual trash cans (suburbs/low density, once a week): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UluH0QmnwfM (ONE HOUR???) or dumpsters/dedicated crushers (high density, can be once a day): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XDTrUs6TeNc
The sidewalks are plenty wide for that, nyc doesn't even come close to how narrow some european cities without such problems are.
Seems to work really well tbh.
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.
The issue is the collection point, not the storage prior.
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.
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.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fH5l9NYtNAw
Just about every city on the planet has rats.
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.
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.
https://www.boston.com/news/local-news/2022/11/15/somerville...
Here's the famous textbook example usually given: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Hanoi_Rat_Massacre
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.
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.
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.
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.
15th century London had better trash disposal, and those people threw their poop out of their windows. (or so I am told)
https://tenor.com/view/killer-upset-kitty-gun-meme-gif-86573...
"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?
[1] https://peerj.com/articles/13122/ [2] https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rspb.2018.082...
https://labs.openai.com/s/ytPYSwCC18wZnN2VSJEOZZgb
https://excitedcats.com/can-cats-kill-rats/
of course, the cats can induce the rats to move somewhere else. But if it's a big city, they're not going to move out of town.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/dec/19/new-york-cit...
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
I dont want to be the director of rat extermination, but i wouldn't mind working for whoever writes copy on the nyc gov job postings.
>>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)
More clever than cringe in my opinion.
HN post right above this "Ask HN: Who is hiring? (December 2022)". NYC is!
Good luck getting him to leave Philly, though.
https://old.reddit.com/r/menwritingwomen/
But here's an article to list some of the tropes out more explicitly:
https://baos.pub/what-happens-when-men-write-women-b89bf325c...
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 :)
https://pudding.cool/2020/07/gendered-descriptions/
https://pudding.cool/2017/08/screen-direction/
https://pudding.cool/2017/03/film-dialogue/
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.
Vouchsafing the violently vicious and voracious violation of volition?
I'm choosing to believe this is a v for vendetta reference
And a Ratatouille reference too!
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.
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.
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?
These absolutely were problems during the Giuliani and Bloomberg administration. People have been complaining about them for decades.
It got markedly worse in spring 2020 because sanitation services were temporarily reduced, but it was an issue long before that.
The only solution are distributed dumpsters/large containers, which are not popular because nobody wants a dumpster in from of their building
The Taiwan solution (garbage truck comes at the same time every day, stops briefly, you throw your rubbish in) seems to work well.
That requires
- not running trash collection overnight/early morning when people are sleeping
- guaranteeing that the truck arrives at a consistent and predictable time
- forcing people to be at home at a certain time to throw out their trash
All of those are absolutely non-starters in NYC.
Much better to use the solution that every other city in the developed world uses (putting trash in dumpsters)
Yet they are happy with a large pile of black plastic trash bags leaking all over the sidewalk in front of their building?
Trash bags don't block parking spaces. That's what the elected officials blocking this actually care about.
Couldn’t they put smaller dumpsters in the same space the trash bag piles currently occupy?
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.
Most of us figured out that NYC is a (very expensive) cesspit and have no desire to live or work there. /s
1: https://www.census.gov/popclock/
1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0JtoSafhvLM
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.
Still great! No smell, less sidewalk space wasted, and garbage trunks can be less frequent since the containers are a huge underground volume.
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
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BMQ1NfjPauw
- ensuring the truck arrives at or around the same time every week
- forcing people to be at home to throw out their garbage
Both of those are complete non-starters in NYC.
Much easier to use the system that nearly every other large city in the developed world uses (containerized trash collection).
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).
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perverse_incentive#The_origina...
They also like vol-au-vent or other canapé.
They also liked dog food, but they would always dip it in water first.
Other bird feeders just dump out some seed, you are chefs!
Second, if the city hasn't realized they need to introduce containerized and properly sealed garbage collection city-wide by now, they never will.
Actually I think...a lot...of jobs could be filled that way?
[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
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.atlasobscura.com/articles/h...
The Great Hanoi Rat Massacre of 1902 Did Not Go as Planned (2017) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30050420 - Jan 2022 (4 comments)
The Great Hanoi Rat Massacre of 1902 Did Not Go as Planned (2017) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27264816 - May 2021 (85 comments)
The Great Hanoi Rat Massacre of 1902 Did Not Go as Planned (2017) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19864148 - May 2019 (18 comments)
The Great Hanoi Rat Massacre of 1902 Did Not Go as Planned - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14499431 - June 2017 (1 comment)
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.
https://www.indy100.com/viral/rats-dont-run-this-city-we-do-...
My younger self had higher hopes for humanity.
God damn NYC.
You’ll start on the low end and get a 2k bump per year for a decade or two, eventually hitting the cap.
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.
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.
> Proficiency with Microsoft Word, Excel, PowerPoint
(Silva's opening monologue in Skyfall)
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.
Rat killing is a field?
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/the_americas/alberta-ca...
If the answer is no, folks we're just wasting our time.
"You.... dirty rat!"