Charles Greenberg

@emilypont Oh this is cool! I made a dashboard to get gas prices and BLS cost of living data but it’s not nearly this granular…..I need better data! whatchanged.us

We are launching a big project today with MIT — The Electricity Price Hub! You can view monthly electricity prices per kwh and avg. bills for every major utility in the country going back to Jan 2020. electricity.heatmap.news

@vivavelo @JosephPolitano @jdcmedlock @oren_cass I pull data from govt APIs, it’s pretty accurate for what it shows. The only issue is that CPI and gas data don’t cover every metro area. So if you’re not in one of the main metros the fallback is regional data which is less accurate

@RobotWhatIsLove @JosephPolitano @jdcmedlock @oren_cass this is great. How reliable is it?

The problem with economists asking for a takesy-backsy on their predictions of tariff doom is that it implies they would have had favorable predictions about the tariffs had they known the full trajectory. Who thinks that, if you had told economists a year ago what was going to happen with tariffs, they would have said "sounds reasonable, growth will probably tick up and inflation down, manufacturing demand and productivity will rise and sentiment will improve"? Did I miss all of the economists who have been saying since June that now the tariff level looks OK? The reality is they missed even on the basic mechanisms: the dollar didn't appreciate; the retaliation didn't occur; the administration successfully leveraged tariffs into favorable deals and commitments. Of course the models spit out the wrong answer. Yes, it's embarrassing for a field when confident predictions fail. But it's way more embarrassing when the reaction of practitioners to the failure is to deny a problem exists.

ICE guards are betting on which detainee will kill themselves next. The AP just exposed the savage conditions of a detention camp in El Paso. The Associated Press got inside Camp East Montana. What they found should be on the front page of every newspaper in this country until it closes. About 3,000 people packed in per day. Loud, unsanitary quarters crawling with insects. Food so scarce that detainees steal from each other just to eat. Disease spreading through filthy rooms, showers, and restrooms that go uncleaned. People losing weight. People unable to see a doctor. People losing their minds. Staff made nearly one 911 call per day in the camp's first five months. One call captures a man sobbing after being assaulted by another detainee. Another has a doctor describing a man banging his head against a wall while expressing suicidal thoughts. A nurse calls about a pregnant woman in severe pain with coronavirus. Detainees suffering seizures, some resulting in serious head trauma. Ages ranged from a 19-year-old who fell from a bunk to a 79-year-old who couldn't breathe. And then there's the detail that should haunt this administration for the rest of its existence. Owen Ramsingh, a former property manager from Columbia, Missouri, who spent weeks in the camp before being deported to the Netherlands, told the AP he overheard a security guard talking about a betting pool among the staff. They were wagering on which detainee would be next to die by suicide. The guard said he had put $500 in. The total pot rode on the outcome. Ramsingh said the talk was particularly devastating because he had contemplated suicide himself. Guards are gambling on the deaths of people in their custody. People who are hungry. People who are sick. People who are begging for help through 911 calls that come in every single day. And the staff turned it into a game. This is not some rogue facility. This is the system working exactly as this administration designed it. Overcrowded by policy. Underfed by neglect. Understaffed by choice. They built a place where human beings deteriorate and then the people paid to watch over them place bets on who breaks first. The AP has the data. The recordings. The interviews. The court filings. This is documented. This is real. This is happening right now in El Paso, Texas, in the United States of America. Share this. Do not let them bury it under another news cycle.

@JosephPolitano @jdcmedlock @oren_cass I made a tool to see how much Trump has fucked every city: whatchanged.us

@oren_cass You're absolutely pathetic. Manufacturing employment is down, factory building has slowed, native-born unemployment is up, hiring is at the lowest level in a decade, and instead of questioning why your tariff policies aren't working, you're shadowboxing a caricature of economists

@jdcmedlock Check mine!! whatchanged.us

Very useful map

@jdcmedlock Hey I made a site to collect gas prices and CPI data, let me know what you think! whatchanged.us

I'm good with employers adjusting on the price margin rather than the employment margin, you end up with a sales tax financing a wage subsidy, which is quite progressive on net. Plus you avoid high effective marginal tax rates and employer capture of the subsidy.

A 14 cent price increase on a $4 burger in exchange for $20 minimum wage? Good deal.

Most Americans still haven't realized how the Trump administration has defunded every aspect of criminal law enforcement -- anti-terrorism, drugs, fraud, organized crime, human trafficking, etc. -- to go after immigrants with no criminal records.

It feels like we’ve reached a point where Donald Trump’s wild antics and outbursts have finally exhausted everyone, and he’s now being told a direct, unambiguous “NO,” nothing more. The humiliating groveling, the streams of flattery, the constant appeasement, the way people spoke to him like a spoiled, difficult child -- all of it only made his unhinged narcissism, volatility, and sense that the world owes him everything even worse. I suspect that as he continues to drag himself down with his own madness and mistakes, people will gradually stop taking him and his social media tirades into account at all.

europeans will ride a train going 200 mph through the alps while drinking wine and americans will sit in traffic on I-95 for three hours eating a gas station sandwich and say "at least i have my freedom" brother you are imprisoned by a honda accord

@osbornforne Here’s how much costs have gone up in Omaha since Trump was elected. We need CHANGE! check other cities here: whatchanged.us

A war with Iran will not make your life better. It will make your life more expensive. It will kill many of your fellow countrymen. It will not make you safer.

To bolster confidence I built a self-auditing tool that runs weekly, checking the website values against the APIs and against other data sources for 10 random zip codes: whatchanged.us/audit-report.h…

I built this in two weekends using Claude Code, accessing official government APIs. It’s open source if you want to see how it works or run it yourself: github.com/cgreenberg/wha…

I built a tool to see how costs have changed in every US city since January 20, 2025. Gas. Groceries. Rent. Unemployment. Here’s what a few cities look like 👇 See yours: whatchanged.us

@DanielLurie can you make it easier to have more food trucks too? How come there aren’t a dozen of them by ocean beach every weekend?

Flower stands are coming back to sidewalks in San Francisco! Today, I signed legislation to revitalize our city’s flower stand permit program, allowing for more small businesses to operate and deliver flowers from traditional stands Downtown to the Castro. For years, 120 flower stands lined our streets. But now, only four stands remain. Making it easier for these businesses to get permits and operate in our city is part of our PermitSF efforts and just one more step toward a thriving downtown. Thank you to my cosponsors @DannySauter, @mattdorsey, @RafaelMandelman, and Chyanne Chen for your support in making this happen. I can’t wait to see our streets with these iconic flower stands again. Let’s go, San Francisco!

Usually I try to just ignore this type of stuff and get on with my day, but I recently switched from spotify to apple music for reasons™, and the desktop user interface is so comically poor that I have to make a thread highlighting what I came across in one session, strap in:

The 4 people tasked with our nation’s security

This scene from The Pitt is currently causing MAGA to crash out

I remember when my Republican colleagues blasted Barack Obama over $400M tied to hostages and an old debt with Iran. Now, under Donald Trump, sanctions relief on 140M barrels of Iranian oil could net Tehran up to $15 BILLION — while the U.S. is at war. Where’s the outrage now?

@jonstewart @mehdirhasan lol @elonmusk only talks to people that praise him, he’s afraid of being criticized or even questioned to his face

Come on the show!! We’ll talk about how self deprecating we both are!!