What NYC can say that the United States cannot
The asymmetry this project keeps circling: the UN graph is national-level, so a city can only be placed against countries — and for 130 of the 442 usable SDG indicators the United States reports nothing at all. On those, NYC vs the US is not a weaker comparison than NYC vs the world. It is the only one available, and the US is not in it.
Built the worksheet:
us-silent-latest ·
python3 probe/us_silent.py
The number is 39, not 67
The briefing has said 67 since the corpus was first screened — 130 US-silent indicators, of which the scope classifier judged 67 city-scoped. Building the worksheet showed that number is inflated, and why.
28 of the 67 have a country as their subject, not a place. "Extent to which countries have laws and regulations that guarantee full and equal access to sexual and reproductive health care" is not a quantity New York City can hold a value for; the question is whether a national legislature passed something. Eighteen of the 28 are that one family — the SDG 5.6.2 legal provisions — and the matcher paired every one of them with NYC's Local Law 37/2011 Temporary Housing Assistance, on the token "Law".
The scope classifier could not have caught this. It reads an indicator's topic — health, water, education — and judges it municipal, which for 5.6.2 it is. What it cannot see is that the sentence measures a legislature. So that filter is now a lexical rule rather than a classifier: "extent to which…", "countries that…", "proportion of countries…" are excluded, and "extent of human made wetlands" is not. A rule you can read and argue with beats a score you cannot.
39 survive. 38 have a peer group of 15+ reporting countries, and 26 also have an NYC candidate above the noise floor.
The real answer is waste and water
Twelve of the 39 form one coherent group, and it is the group the briefing predicted:
| Countries | Indicator | Years | NYC candidate |
|---|---|---|---|
| 133 | Municipal waste collected | 2000–2023 | Recycling Diversion and Capture Rates (0.63) |
| 107 | Hazardous waste generated per unit of GDP | 2000–2024 | Wastewater Co-digestion and Biogas (0.53) |
| 97 | Hazardous waste exported | 2000–2024 | DSNY Disposal Sites Used by Facilities (0.52) |
| 97 | Total waste generation | 2000–2023 | DSNY Waste Characterization (0.52) |
| 94 | Total wastewater treated | 2022 only | Watershed Water Quality – Wastewater (0.54) |
| 93 | Hazardous waste treated or disposed | 2000–2024 | Dewatered Solids and Biosolids (0.51) |
| 88 | Proportion of hazardous waste treated or disposed | 2000–2024 | Dewatered Solids and Biosolids (0.51) |
| 85 | Hazardous waste imported | 2000–2024 | DSNY Disposal Sites Used by Facilities (0.49) |
| 84 | Groundwater bodies with good ambient water quality | 2017–2023 | Watershed Water Quality – Limnology (0.52) |
| 84 | Total wastewater generated | 2022 only | Wastewater Co-digestion and Biogas (0.59) |
| 72 | Proportion of wastewater treated | 2022 only | Dewatered Solids and Biosolids (0.52) |
| 55 | Extent of human made wetlands | 2021–2025 | NYC Wetlands (0.50) |
These are DSNY and DEP series. NYC genuinely publishes them, and 133 countries report municipal waste collected while the United States reports none of it. That is a comparison NYC can make and its own country cannot.
Three of the twelve carry one year. That supports a level comparison and not a trend — the same finding that removed road safety as our headline demo, and the worksheet marks it rather than letting a reviewer discover it after choosing the indicator.
What corroborates it
Two results from the last two days point at the same set from opposite directions.
The corpus smell test found that sweeping all 689 indicators rather than the 442 usable ones adds almost nothing — but the 40 that do hold data are almost entirely e-waste and municipal waste import/export.
The inverse crosswalk found e-waste and hazardous waste per capita among the 123 indicators no municipal dataset comes near — nobody publishes them at city level either.
So this band of the framework is thinly reported by everyone: the US skips it, cities mostly skip it, and it is exactly where a city that does publish has something unusual to say.
The screen held
screen.py decides does the US report this from entityCoverage on a six-country panel — a
proxy we have flagged as a proxy. Checked all 39 against the actual country observations:
not one has a single United States datapoint. The proxy and the data agree completely.
That is the second independent confirmation of that panel this week; yesterday's --all sweep
showed its NO-DATA grade predicts global emptiness 84% of the time.
Where it is still weak
- 12 of the 39 have no candidate above 0.45, the floor below which a proposal is noise. They are listed with the candidate in italics rather than silently dropped.
- Some above the floor are still wrong. Malaria incidence per 1,000 population at risk → Projected Population 2010–2040 at 0.48 is a false match, and NYC has no malaria.
- It is a worksheet, not a crosswalk. Under spec v0.1 a grade is a human judgment, so every
row is
graded: false. Nothing here is a mapping until a person says it is.
Also today
The platform went fully public this morning. python3 probe/launch_diff.py: 57 series, 12
variables and 689 corpus indicators, zero drift against yesterday's pre-launch baseline, and
mcp/smoke.py 8/8. No public hostname resolves yet — undatacommons.unicc.biz and
datacommons.un.org both still refuse — and the deployment we have always used is still answering.
The demo is safe.