Blog
Questions asked of public data: job postings, pay ranges, California beach water, rent and Santa Cruz County records. Every number links to the data behind it.
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California made companies post salaries. Here are the widest ranges.
We parsed 11,294 posted pay ranges from California-eligible job postings. The typical range is about a third wide; the widest spans $570,000.
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I checked 32,000 job postings: how many are ghosts?
One snapshot of 32,263 open postings on 324 public job boards. The median posting has been up 51 days, and 6.1% have been open for more than a year.
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The California beaches that fail after every rain
Across 280 state-monitored California beaches, bacteria samples fail 2.0× as often after rain. In Santa Cruz County the jump is 3.2×.
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How many hours of minimum wage does rent cost in your county?
A two-bedroom at HUD’s Fair Market Rent costs 251.7 hours of minimum-wage work a month in Santa Cruz County: #21 of 3,144 US counties and #1 in California.
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Why “avoid sketchy neighborhoods” apps keep failing, and how a vibes map can avoid that
SketchFactor, Ghetto Tracker and their successors failed the same way: they mapped people instead of conditions. Here are the design rules we used for CruzLens and CityLens, and why normalizing by exposure changes the map.
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In Santa Cruz County, deadly crashes outnumber homicides 3.5 to 1
From 2016 to 2025 the county recorded 217 fatal traffic crashes and 62 homicides. Fatal crashes outnumbered homicides in every one of those ten years.
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Every reported sewage spill in Santa Cruz County since 2007
Sewer systems in Santa Cruz County reported 497 spills and 1,133,891 gallons of sewage from 2007 through 2026. More than half of that volume came in a single year.
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I mapped 40 years of Santa Cruz crime data: here’s what it can’t tell you
Official totals say reported Part I crime in Santa Cruz County fell from 15,611 in 1985 to 4,644 in 2025. Mapping the incidents behind those totals shows how little of the record is actually public.