New York City hiring top rat killer
a002-oom03.nyc.gov
a002-oom03.nyc.gov
I imagine simply requiring bins/dumpsters would absolutely devastate the rat populations.
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.
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.
As they say, the problem with incentives is that they work.
Instead, you should tax the consumption, and pay people who dispose of trash.
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).
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.
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 think the issue is just basic cleanliness. NYC doesn't have it. There's trash everywhere, so that breeds rats.
NY has simply learned to accept filth.
will take probably 100 years or so
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
EDIT: More on NYC's history with ferrets and the ban, https://observer.com/2015/01/new-yorks-most-misunderstood-ma...
[1]: https://nypost.com/2021/08/21/raccoons-terrorize-bronx-nypd-...
Worked out great! /s
This is what the new trash receptacles look like that businesses will be required to use: https://citibin.com/
The building next door has dumpsters... I see rats running back and forth to them.
But it’s probably too crowded I dunno. Maybe people should start eating the rats… lol
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/oct/15/urban-fo...
Honestly, I got no problems with the rats. They're kinda cute actually.
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
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.
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.
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.
https://www.npr.org/2017/07/26/539304811/how-new-york-s-roos...
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.
NYC is filthy.
NY can start by using garbage bins instead of the sidewalk. Even my suburban town collects garbage in an animal safe container.
This is the unofficial city byline: "New York City - where the rats always win."
Or like teams of trained dogs.
If your problem is hundreds of mice, get terriers. They just kill and move on, they don't play with the mouse or eat it.
Ratting dogs are certainly a thing, but it’s probably unsafe to release a bunch of dogs into the sewers.
(There are other issues as well, like the cats destroying local bird populations and getting sick when they kill poisoned rats.)
A bobcat on the otherhand... Depends how much you want to replace one animal with another.
--
ChatGPT
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.
More clever than cringe in my opinion.
>>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)
HN post right above this "Ask HN: Who is hiring? (December 2022)". NYC is!
Good luck getting him to leave Philly, though.
I still can't believe he went from someone I stumbled across on YouTube in a low-quality shaky-cam video 10 years ago (or was it more?) to making NYT headlines (and he deserves it): https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/30/science/mink-animals-pest...
His YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/c/josephcartertheminkman
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?
Most of us figured out that NYC is a (very expensive) cesspit and have no desire to live or work there. /s
- New York City Population [0]: 8,804,190
- Population of the United States [1]: 333,327,000
- Percent of people living in NYC: 2.6%
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.
Yet they are happy with a large pile of black plastic trash bags leaking all over the sidewalk in front 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.
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.
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
- 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).
> 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.
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.
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!
If the answer is no, folks we're just wasting our time.
(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.
> Proficiency with Microsoft Word, Excel, PowerPoint
"...even attempt to control the movements of kitchen staffers in an effort to take over human jobs."
from
"Rodents spread disease, damage homes and wiring, and even attempt to control the movements of kitchen staffers in an effort to take over human jobs."
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
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.
https://gem.cbc.ca/media/absolutely-canadian/s22e33?cmp=sch-... https://livewirecalgary.com/2022/09/21/calgary-filmmaker-alb...
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.
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.
Just about every city on the planet has rats.
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.
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...
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.
15th century London had better trash disposal, and those people threw their poop out of their windows. (or so I am told)
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.
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.
Coming this summer… Snakes on a Train
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.
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.
Rat killing is a field?
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/the_americas/alberta-ca...
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.
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!
There are other animals that do, but not sure people want hordes of foxes, for instance, in place of the rats.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perverse_incentive#The_origina...
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)
https://tenor.com/view/killer-upset-kitty-gun-meme-gif-86573...
"You.... dirty rat!"
Second, if the city hasn't realized they need to introduce containerized and properly sealed garbage collection city-wide by now, they never will.