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Toronto Declared War on Raccoons and Lost

In 2015, the Mayor of Toronto held a press conference to announce a new weapon. The city was going to spend CA$31 million on half a million new green bins with a rotating latch and a German gravity lock. Raccoons, the manufacturer explained, do not have opposable thumbs and therefore cannot turn a lever. Dozens of raccoons were tested against the prototype. Every one of them failed.

The mayor's line at the podium: "We are ready, we are armed."

Then the bins went out into the world.

Some raccoons worked out how to spin the latch anyway. Others found something better: the bins have a gravity lock that releases when tipped past 110 degrees — a deliberate feature, so that the robotic arm on a garbage truck can flip them and empty them. Raccoons discovered that they could simply push the bin over. The lock designed to make the bin work is the lock that made it fail.

The rest chewed through the plastic.

The city maintains, correctly, that with only a couple of dozen complaints against half a million bins, the programme is working fine. This position is technically defensible and has convinced absolutely nobody, because the videos keep coming.

The clock: Toronto sits at 79° west but runs on Eastern Time, a zone built around the 75th meridian. The clock is roughly eighteen minutes ahead of the sun.

You can watch it happen in the evening. Toronto's sunsets arrive noticeably later than New York's, even though both cities read the identical number off the identical clock. Same time zone, different sun. Toronto is simply standing further west, and has agreed not to bring it up.

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