Every chart in the demo compared NYC to the United States. That was a limit of my framing, not of the data: get_child_observations over Earth / Country returns every reporting country in one call, and the response carries entityMetadata names, so no separate lookup is needed.

Each card now shows where NYC sits among all reporting countries in 2019.

Indicator	NYC	Rank	Nearest neighbours
PM2.5 (city aggregates)	6.60 µg/m³	#5 of 186	Finland, Estonia, Iceland
Homicide	3.63 per 100k	#85 of 137	Pakistan, Montenegro
Waste recycled	17.3%	#38 of 64	Bahrain, Greece

The homicide result inverts the story

Against the United States, NYC crossed below the national rate in 2013 and stayed below — a success story, and the one we put on the chart yesterday.

Against the world, NYC sits in the bottom half, 85th of 137, between Pakistan and Montenegro, with 84 countries reporting a lower rate.

Same number. Different comparator. Opposite conclusion. Neither is wrong. A tool that shows only the first is not neutral — it is flattering, and it is flattering by omission. This is the definitional-caveat lesson again, arriving through a different door: the choice of who you compare to is as load-bearing as what you measure.

Tier still governs. PM2.5 is Tier 1, so NYC is measured against other countries’ city aggregates — genuinely like-for-like. Homicide and waste are Tier 3: a city against whole nations, which is real context and not a peer comparison, since cities generally run above their national averages.

One year, deliberately

date: "latest" returns each country’s own latest vintage — Afghanistan 2023 sitting beside Aruba 2014. That is precisely the mixed-vintage comparison this project exists to catch, so everything is pinned to 2019, the last year with wide coverage across all three.

An impossible number in the authoritative data

Malaysia reports 147.7% of its municipal waste recycled in 2019. You cannot recycle more waste than exists. It is in the UN SDG database, and one bad figure was flattening the entire distribution on the chart.

We clipped it off the axis, drew it in red at the edge, kept it in the data and named it in the caption. Deleting it would have produced a cleaner chart and a dishonest one — a silent drop is how a dataset launders its own errors. Two countries also return empty names from entityMetadata; those fall back to their ISO codes rather than rendering blank.

For a room asked how do you hold the line on truth in a world flooded with synthetic data, a demonstrably impossible figure sitting in authoritative UN statistics is a more useful exhibit than anything we could have contrived.