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In Manhattan at least, trash is picked up every single day. And yet there's still tons of garbage on the street. It's a problem of scale.

Honestly, I got no problems with the rats. They're kinda cute actually.



You're a little off my friend. To paraphrase MIB "No a rat is cute, rats are a ravenous public health nuisance that spreads disease, eats through and damages buildings and infrastructure and are violent beasts that drive people from their homes and corrupt their food."


Isn't it crazy that the richest city in the world can't manage trash properly. If they can feed all those people and take all their sewage. certainly there must be a way to remove all the trash they produce, without throwing it on the street


Eh, wasn’t it like Dubai or something that for the longest time didn’t even have working sewage? Like in the slightest. Was all pumped out by semi trucks instead & dumped… somewhere

They have all the money & this part of the city was literally planned IIRC. But yeah, no working sewage.


Is it the richest city in the world? In the USA i think it has the highest income inequality https://www.mytwintiers.com/news-cat/infographic-shows-new-y...


The USA is the richest country in the world despite many other countries having less inequality. Inequality isn't a measure of absolute wealth. Also isn't NYC home to the most millionaires in the world? That probably skews measures of inequality (that said it is famous internationally for having terrible poverty as well as wealth).


Why is the wealth to count "the richest" measures only by the net worth of the richest in the city and not by some other more sensible measure? If I were to find myself in what's allegedly the richest city in the richest country I would be shocked to see even a single homeless person, let alone trash and rats everywhere. I think the word "richest" is being used weirdly or perhaps even incorrectly to describe NYC.


> Honestly, I got no problems with the rats. They're kinda cute actually.

Wait, are you the one posting all these pro-rat posters? [1]

[1] https://ibb.co/CV0CWcm


These are hilarious, but they're clearly meant sarcastically, no?


> ... clearly ... , no?

:)


From the poster: "They carry disease and parasites so you don't have to"


I wasn't sure until I saw that and the logo of the sanitation company on the bottom right of the left poster.


It’s not a problem of scale because it doesn’t happen in Tokyo which is a more populace city and I’ve never seen a rat there.


I’ve been living in Tokyo and Yokohama since 1983, and I have seen rats a handful of times in Tokyo: once in a subway station, walking along the tracks; a couple of times in Shibuya in the early morning, picking through garbage; once or twice in residential neighborhoods. One sighting every five years is not a lot, I admit.

Twenty years ago, I knew someone who worked for one of the large, upscale department stores, and she said they spent a lot of money and effort to try to control the rats in their elegant but old and porous building—which, like most department stores here, had many food shops in the basement.


Yeah, I mean they do exist, and maybe you’re right , more effort goes into it. But the black trash bags smashed open lying around New York is not cool


The issue is that it even lays on the street.

In some European cities an area the size of a parking space is a few chutes into an underground dumpster. It moves the trash (and the rats looking for it) out of sight.


> Honestly, I got no problems with the rats. They're kinda cute actually

Yeah, I know it can be an unpopular opinion, but I've always found them adorable, and after having gerbils in high school it's hard for me not to just think of bigger versions of them (obviously they do have other appearance differences, like the tail having less hair and the snout being more pronounced, but the way they move and act is surprisingly reminiscent of my past pets). Don't get me wrong, I'm not going to try to pet them like I would a domesticated pet rat, but they mostly just hang out in the background and don't seem to have any more desire to approach people than people have to approach them. I suspect that there are public health reasons for wanting to curtail the population, but people seem so disproportionately disgusted by them compared to other public health hazards that it's hard for me not to wonder if the political desire to get rid of them is influenced by that.




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