iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Jeremia Kimelman @jeremiak.com · 27/03/2026

I do love making bar charts that go _way_ up and to the right

A bar chart with the title "Meta spent more to lobby in California in 2025 than any previous year. By a lot" that shows the company's in-state lobbying expenses by year going from less than $1 million to lobby in 2024 to more than $4.6 million in 2025.

Jeremia Kimelman @jeremiak.com · 09/09/2025

Looks like Charles Munger Jr. is in for another $10 million, bringing his total contributions to California's Prop 50 opposition $30 million. So it's basically him and $5 million from a Republican SuperPAC cal-access.sos.ca.gov/PDFGen/pdfge...

A campaign finance report showing a $10,000,000 contribution from Charles Munger, Jr. to the No on Prop 50 campaign committee

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Jeremia Kimelman @jeremiak.com · 10/07/2025

And then like anything else in the attention/cable news economy, Trump is in a league of his own.

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Jeremia Kimelman @jeremiak.com · 10/07/2025

Used the Internet Archive's news chyron data to get a sense for how much MSNBC, CNN, Fox and the BBC were talking about different topics. Increase for Epstein, lots of discussion of Zohran after his primary win, Musk flits in and out, not nearly as much as I expected to see for "Intifada"

Chart of the number of minutes various terms were displayed on cable news chyrons. The terms visualized are "antisemitism", "Epstein", "Intifada", "Mamdani" (which also includes "Zohran") and "Musk" (which also includes "Elon").

Mamdani was far and away the most displayed chyron of the bunch.

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Jeremia Kimelman @jeremiak.com · 02/07/2025

I get that our society is obsessed with celebrities and the allegations (now convictions) against Combs are v. serious but it's THE headline for news outlets across the political spectrum on a day with a newly constructed Florida concentration camp and major legislation before the US House?

A screenshot of "News Spectrum," a website that collections screenshots of news sources with different political biases, that shows the Combs verdict is the top headline on:
The Huffington Post, NBC News, The Drudge Report, The Daily Beast, The New York Times, Fox News, NPR and the New York Post

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Jeremia Kimelman @jeremiak.com · 17/03/2025

Purim is a top-notch holiday - it’s a story of survival, the cookies are sublime, & ppl get wasted. I’m _always_ in for a “People tried to kill us, we survived, let’s eat” party! But, somehow, I never really knew that the story ended with a massacre of 75,000+ people

The rest of the Jews, those in the king's provinces, likewise mustered and fought for their lives. They disposed of their enemies, killing seventy-five thousand of their foes; but they did not lay hands on the spoil. That was on the thirteenth day of the month of Adar; and they rested on the fourteenth day and made it a day of feasting and merrymaking. But the Jews in Shushan mustered on both the thirteenth and fourteenth days, and so rested on the fifteenth

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Jeremia Kimelman @jeremiak.com · 15/03/2025

A few months ago I put Areas A & B (in pink, the blank space between makes up Area C) on a map of N. Cal to see if it helped me understand anything. It did - that traveling a distance such as Sac (where I live) to my parents in the Bay Area might require going through *multiple* military checkpoints

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Jeremia Kimelman @jeremiak.com · 14/02/2025

The current doge.gov site which is apparently set up so that anybody can change the text of the website. On a .gov domain

A screenshot of doge.gov that says:

Meet the US government
Trace your tax dollars through the bureaucracy.
This is a joke of a .gov site

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Jeremia Kimelman @jeremiak.com · 04/02/2025

One of our country's _most_ foundational geographic datasets has been either pulled down or otherwise configured to prevent access. Not sure it's possible to overstate the value of Census' free/publicly available TIGER files to research and journalism and, at least for now, it's gone.

The following message is shown for the URL: https://www2.census.gov/geo/tiger

"Forbidden - You don't have permission to access this resource. Additionally, a 403 Forbidden error was encountered while trying to use an ErrorDocument to handle the request."

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Jeremia Kimelman @jeremiak.com · 23/01/2025

Today the California Board of Parole Hearings released the results from hearings in Dec. and it looks like parole was granted in 13% of cases, up from 12% in Oct. and Nov. I have a lil' robot that scrapes and aggregates the data, which is available here ca-bph-hearing-results.netlify.app

Line chart showing the percent of each month's hearings where parole was granted, starting at 20 percent in December 2019, trending between 10 and 20 percent and has been hovering around a low of 12% in October and November 2024.

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Jeremia Kimelman @jeremiak.com · 20/01/2025

Lollll I’d give myself a C/C- on this attempt. The stick pile was like a 24 inch cube and this is all I got and some of it clearly turned to ash

A pile of semi burnt wood, some that has turned to ash and some that I hope as become charcoal

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Jeremia Kimelman @jeremiak.com · 20/01/2025

Attempting to turn a huge-ish twig and wood pile into some homemade biochar in my small, urban backyard and not sure I nailed it tbh Anybody have tips on how to achieve pyrolysis without special equipment?

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Jeremia Kimelman @jeremiak.com · 15/01/2025

Last night Sacramento City Council approved the contract for Interim City Manager Leyne Milstein (previously Asst. CM) with an annual salary of $352,000 But look who's back (or maybe just never left?): Howard Chan as "Special Advisor to the City Manager"

A LinkedIn post from Howard Chan made yesterday, January 14, with text that says "I'm happy to share that I'm starting a new position as Special Advisor to the City Manager at City of Sacramento!"

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Jeremia Kimelman @jeremiak.com · 14/01/2025

And here's the Palisades Fire perimeter imposed on NYC using my old office as a place marker

A map of the NYC area with the Palisades Fire shape imposed on top in light blue. In this case the fire stretches from west of Hoboken to the past Williamsburg in the east, south to Jersey City and north all the way to the Bronx

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Jeremia Kimelman @jeremiak.com · 14/01/2025

For example, here's the Palisades Fire perimeter imposed on top of the CalMatters office in Sacramento

A map of Sacramento with the Palisades Fire shape imposed on top in light blue. In this case the fire stretches from west of West Sacramento to the American River near Rosemont, south to Land Park and north all the way to Hagginwood.

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Jeremia Kimelman @jeremiak.com · 14/01/2025

Here's a screenshot of a neighborhood in Altadena with the data showing where homes were damaged & by how much Also drives home the point that fire perimeters are just that: perimeters - they don't mean that everything within them has burned

A map of a suburban neighborhood with significant damage from the Eaton Fire. Each house is classified by the damage level, ranging from "No Damage" to "Destroyed" which means that the home suffered at least 50% damage.

Many of the homes in this screenshot are marked as destroyed while others have been assessed as having "No Damage." Sometimes there's a destroyed house between two homes with no damage.

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Jeremia Kimelman @jeremiak.com · 14/01/2025

All the photos are stunning but this one really got me - I'm finding it nearly impossible to imagine my neighborhood reduced to ash & chimneys This photo, taken by Jules Hotz, shows only a fireplace remaining after a home was burned down by the Eaton Fire in Altadena on Jan. 8, 2025

Foreground: three people, one with their head in their hands
Background: a lone chimney that remains after the house it was part of burned down, with an active flame nearby and smoke hanging heavy in the air

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Jeremia Kimelman @jeremiak.com · 11/01/2025

Thinking of Aaron Swartz today & I’m stuck on this early YC photo - he & Sam Altman (both circled) each scraped 1000s of docs but one did it to make the knowledge free for all while the other did it to make $$$$. The US DOJ only came down on one of them & the other is feted by tech bros.

A photo of the initial Y Combinator class with Aaron Swartz circled in orange, standing right next to Sam Altman circled in green

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Jeremia Kimelman @jeremiak.com · 09/01/2025

I made an interactive lookup map for the story, use it to see how many of your neighbors are on the FAIR plan and how that compares to nearby areas. Try it out in the story!

An interactive map that shows California ZIP codes and how many residential FAIR plans are in each.

The headline is "Are more people in your neighborhood on the FAIR plan this year compared to last?" and the description text is "
In Pacific Palisdes, which has been ravaged by fire over the last few days, there are 1,430 residential policies with the FAIR plan, the state's insurer of last resort. That's nearly double the number of plans in 2023.

The change in the number of plans per ZIP code varies wildly across the state. The number of plans in the Colusa County ZIP code of 95912 went down by 67% while the number of plans in the 91915 ZIP code in San Diego went up by more than 700%."

The initial state of the map is focused on Pacific Palisades and says "As of Sept. 30, there are 1,430 residential plans in the Pacific Palisades ZIP code (90272). That's a 85% increase from the year prior."

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Jeremia Kimelman @jeremiak.com · 08/01/2025

Set up a scraper to grab soil moisture data from NOAA like 3 years ago then forgot about it - heard @weatherwest.bsky.social say how dry SoCal is & here's California since May '24 (the last time it rained in LA?) Dark green is wetter than avg, dark red is drier, & white is avg #palisades

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Jeremia Kimelman @jeremiak.com · 08/01/2025

A kvetch: I hate that the clerk does this during public comment. It can make it so freaking hard to see who is speaking

Screenshot of city council livestream that shows a very small feed of the speaker

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Jeremia Kimelman @jeremiak.com · 07/01/2025

I made an interactive map for the story that I'd love to hear folks' feedback on! My goal was to help visualize just how many people 187,000+ actually is by grouping Census tracts around a reader's ZIP code such that the highlighted area has a similar number of people in it.

An interactive map that has the following headline and lede:

Where do nearly 200,000 people live in your neighborhood or city?
According to the federal housing agency, there are at least 187,084 people without homes in California which is greater than the population of Oceanside in San Diego County.

👆 Move the map and tap on where you live or enter your ZIP code to get a better sense of what that many people looks like in terms of a place you know well.

The map highlights enough Census tracts surrounding a particular zip code to represent the same number of people, about 187,000.

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Jeremia Kimelman @jeremiak.com · 07/01/2025

This is what would've shown up if I was a better poster

Screenshot of the smoke from the Palisades Fire surrounding a residential community in Southern California

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Jeremia Kimelman @jeremiak.com · 05/01/2025

Hell ya, just got my first copy of the @sacobserver.com in the mail I wish there were more options for printed, local media in Sacramento. I have a digital sub to the Bee but the weekly print option is >3x the Observer. Support your local media folks! Or it might not be there next year

The cover of the Sacramento Observer for January 3, 2025. The tagline of the paper is "Serving Sacramento's Black community with excellence since 1962."

The feature is titled "'Mother Rose', a matriach remembered, literacy champion Georgia West, Mother of Sacramento's first Black Mayor, passes"

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Jeremia Kimelman @jeremiak.com · 04/01/2025

I had the cutest alarm clock this morning

A photo of a light brown tabby cat with green eyes sitting on a burnt orange comforter.

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Jeremia Kimelman @jeremiak.com · 24/12/2024

Happy holidays-ish from the CA Board of Parole Hearings (which released data for the last month yesterday). In Nov., parole was granted in 12% of hearings which is the lowest grant rate since at least Dec '19. I scrape this data monthly & have been posting to Mastodon: journa.host/@jeremiak/11...

A line chart with time on the X axis (starting in December 2019 and going through the present) and the percent of hearings granted parole on the Y axis and a yellow line representing the monthly grant rate, which topped out at just over 20% in early 2024 but has fallen and hovered around 12% for the last few months

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Jeremia Kimelman @jeremiak.com · 20/12/2024

Turns out Miso and I both love cream cheese (the bagel was black and regular sesame seeds). Why are cat tongues so cute?

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Jeremia Kimelman @jeremiak.com · 18/12/2024

My other colleague Natasha created this excellent data graphic for the story too. If you haven't been to Los Angeles before, pull this one up right alongside Google Maps and look for where the freeways are! You'll see that the elevated cancer risk looks just like a road map.

Chart title is "Diesel exhaust raises cancer risk in the LA basin"

Description is "In some areas of the LA basin, especially around freeways, diesel exhaust poses a risk of causing 300 cancer cases per million people exposed. The exhaust, which contains many toxic gases and fine particles, is known to cause lung cancer."

The graphic is a map of Los Angeles with dark pink showing elevated cancer cases along freeway routes.

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Jeremia Kimelman @jeremiak.com · 18/12/2024

Here's the highest paid city (not just Sacramento) employees across the state. Sometimes these huge numbers are because of one-time lump sum payouts

A screenshot of the state controller's website that lists all pay of public employees: https://publicpay.ca.gov/Reports/Cities/Cities.aspx?year=2023&rpt=1

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Jeremia Kimelman @jeremiak.com · 16/12/2024

Anybody know where/if this kind of corporate influence campaign would be reported/disclosed? In Calif. this would be called a "Report of person spending $5,000 or more to influence legislative or administrative action" and would be reported to the SoS on a Form 645. Is there a federal equivalent?

A screenshot of coinbase.com with a pop-up message that reads:
"Email your senators, fight against an anti-crypto SEC Commissioner"

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Jeremia Kimelman @jeremiak.com · 16/12/2024

One my favorite things about building digital maps is that the person using it can just move the map to their hometown & have a completely different frame for comparison, like I did in this piece after redistricting calmatters.org/politics/2022/01/cal…

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Jeremia Kimelman @jeremiak.com · 16/12/2024

Here's a different kind of map I made to get an understanding of what large numbers of people mean - in this case what it meant for more than 40,000 people to be reported dead in Gaza. It groups California census tracts together to get a population roughly equal to 40k and highlights them in orange

A screenshot of a map of downtown Sacramento with a part highlighted in orange that stretches from the confluence of the American and Sacramento rivers east past the Capitol City Freeway and south to Highway 50. Above the map it says that "40,987 people live in the highlighted area"

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Jeremia Kimelman @jeremiak.com · 16/12/2024

Same map but zoomed. This is where I live in Sacramento, you can see even traveling between different neighborhoods might result in crossing a boundary. Imagine that traveling between the pink might mean crossing through military checkpoints, sometimes only open for a few hours a day.

A screenshot of a map of downtown Sacramento with non-contiguous but relatively large pink shapes on top of it. The pink is the boundaries of Areas A & B in the West Bank translated on top of Sacramento. The placement and rotation are purely for my visual comparison.

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Jeremia Kimelman @jeremiak.com · 16/12/2024

Here's the first map. Nobody ever explained how the West Bank was set up after Oslo to me. I took the boundaries of Areas A & B (the ones not fully under Israeli control), made them pink and transposed them on top of a place I know well: northern CA. (Distortion is due to map projections)

A screenshot of a map of northern California with non-contiguous but relatively large pink shapes on top of it stretching along the I-80 corridor from the Bay Area nearly to Lake Tahoe.

The pink is the boundaries of Areas A & B in the West Bank translated on top of Sacramento. The placement and rotation are purely for my visual comparison.

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Jeremia Kimelman @jeremiak.com · 15/12/2024

Been trying to find new glasses that evoke "NYC Jewishness at the turn of the 1900s" and _finally_ found a cute one at Mascot but it's >$1,500 when all is said and done and that's like my last few pairs combined :/ The marketing got me tho: "the Moyel" is described as "a cut above the rest" 😂

Screenshot of Mascot's Moyel frames in gold. They're a small round gold glasses frame

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Jeremia Kimelman @jeremiak.com · 14/12/2024

Another way to compare 2024 to four years ago is to look at general turnout. This data comes from the SoS and it looks like 2020 was a high water mark for turnout in at least the past 4 elections. But turnout last month was even below 2016 levels.

A line chart titled "California turnout in recent elections" with two lines, with an X axis of years from 2010 through 2024 and a Y axis of 0% at the bottom to 100% at the top. The two lines were "Turnout of registered" and "Turnout of eligible".

Year Turnout of registered Turnout of eligible
2010 59.59% 43.74%
2012 72.36% 55.47%
2014 42.20% 30.94%
2016 75.27% 58.74%
2018 64.54% 50.45%
2020 80.67% 70.88%
2022 50.80% 41.47%
2024 71.43% 59.97%

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Jeremia Kimelman @jeremiak.com · 14/12/2024

Gotta admit that "flipping counties" is sort of a journalist-y way of looking at elections. Even so, Trump won 10 Ca. counties in 2024 that he lost in 2020 usually by increasing his vote share. But you can see that he lost vote share in Inyo Co., Harris just lost even more relative to 4 years ago.

An arrow plot that shows the change in vote share for the 10 counties that Trump won in 2024 that he lost in 2020. The counties and vote share change are (positive means Trump's vote share increased)

San Joaquin +5.99
Imperial +11.55
Lake +2.44
Riverside +3.35
San Bernardino +5.15
Butte +0.76
Inyo −0.02
Fresno +4.89
Merced +6.33
Stanislaus +4.6

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Jeremia Kimelman @jeremiak.com · 04/12/2024

Chuckle-worthy party affiliation for RFK Jr on California's SoS website

A screenshot from California Secretary of State election results that abbreviates Robert F Kennedy Jr's party as "AI" which stands for "American Independent"

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Jeremia Kimelman @jeremiak.com · 04/12/2024

County website updated yesterday afternoon with "FINAL" results McCarty looks to be the winner and the next mayor of Sacramento, with a margin of 1,938 votes or 1.01% of the 190,928 votes counted.

A screenshot of election results for Mayor of Sacramento that shows Kevin McCarty with 96,433 votes (50%) and Flojuane Cofer with 94,495 votes (49%) with a total of 190,928 votes counted.

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Jeremia Kimelman @jeremiak.com · 03/12/2024

And the race for Sacramento mayor _keeps_ getting closer though the county's website says there are 0 ballots left to process (estimated). McCarty's lead of 1,941 votes is down from a margin of 2,632 at the last update, out of a total of 190,923 votes counted.

Screenshot of election results for Sacramento mayor showing Kevin McCarty has a lead over Flojaune Cofer.

He has 96,432 votes (50%) compared to Cofer's 94,491 votes (49%). There are a total of 190,923 votes counted

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Jeremia Kimelman @jeremiak.com · 27/11/2024

Whole lot of super close elections this year including the Sacramento mayor's race! If Kevin McCarty wins with a final lead of 1.4% (current margin), it would be the the closest race for that office in more than 25 years - since _before_ Bush Jr beat Al Gore Here's the numbers I could find:

Table with election results for Sacramento mayor's races with the year, the winner, and their margin

2024 | McCarty** | 1.4
2020 | Steinberg | 63.6
2016 | Steinberg | 32.79
2012 | Johnson | 34.93
2008 | Johnson | 15.5
2004 | Fargo | 38.9
2000 | Fargo | 8.2
2000 (Primary) | Fargo | 1.6
** Not yet certified

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Jeremia Kimelman @jeremiak.com · 27/11/2024

And here's some super high level campaign finance stats as of about an hour ago: McCarty ($1.2m) raised slightly less than 2 to 1 (1.8) against Cofer ($680k) though she had more than twice as many individual donors. Screenshot from sacramento-campaign-cash.netlify.app

Screenshot from https://sacramento-campaign-cash.netlify.app of total campaign finance raised in the Sacramento Mayor's race.

Kevin McCarty raised a total of $1,216,335.14 from 704 contributors. Flojuane Cofer raised $679,479.92 from 1,507 contributors

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Jeremia Kimelman @jeremiak.com · 27/11/2024

And by Monday I of course meant Tuesday! Results today came in earlier than 5:15 and the margin has shrunk further. The two candidates are now separated by 2,632 votes down from 3,063. Next update is a week away - 5:15 p.m on December 3rd.

Mayor of Sacramento election race results. Kevin McCarty has 50% of the vote with 95,310 votes and Flo Cofer has 49% of the vote with 92,678 votes. 187,988 votes have been counted in this race

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Jeremia Kimelman @jeremiak.com · 23/11/2024

Results from this afternoon show that the margin in the Sacramento Mayor's race has gotten even smaller: just 3,063 votes down from 3,159 at the previous update. Next update on Monday at 5:15pm with less than 16,050 ballots left to process. It continues

Screenshot of Sacramento County's election page for the mayor of Sacramento race. Kevin McCarty has 94,330 votes and Flo Cofer has 91,267

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Jeremia Kimelman @jeremiak.com · 21/11/2024

I don't know much about specific lobbying firms in California but Politico reported yesterday that one firm (Actum) is acquiring another (Carter, Wetch & Associates) The combo of the 16th & 17th largest firms would've been the 4th largest, per payments in 2024. www.politico.com/news/2024/11...

A table of lobbying firms and the total amount they've been paid in 2024 so far as reported to the California Secretary of State.

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Jeremia Kimelman @jeremiak.com · 20/11/2024

Alexei also links to this story from @sfstandard.com about Newsom's recent move to a $9 million house in Marin. sfstandard.com/2024/11/15/g... Which has this _amazing_ scatterplot of home prices in Kentfield showing that the gov's house is, nominally, the fifth most expensive since 2000.

A scatter plot titled "Home sale prices in Kentfield, CA" with the Y axis representing the closing price and the X axis showing the closing date of the sale transaction. Newsom's is one of the most expensive, nominally. The chart description says "The Newsom family's $9.1 million house was the fifth most expensive purchase in town since 1999." The chart looks like a lot of yellow dots with a green dot in the upper right corner representing Newsom's house.

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Jeremia Kimelman @jeremiak.com · 20/11/2024

More votes dropped this afternoon for the Sacramento mayor's race and the difference has shrunk by just about 1,000: the candidates are now separated by 3,159 votes compared to 4,167 three days ago. Next update is Friday afternoon.

A screenshot of the election results for Sacramento Mayor as of 11/19. Kevin McCarty has 93,526 votes or 50% and Flo Cofer has 90,367 votes or 49%. It is estimated that there are fewer than 26,050 ballots left to process.

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Jeremia Kimelman @jeremiak.com · 18/11/2024

The kind of Monday I wish I was having

A tabby cat sleeping and wrapped in a white blanket on a green couch

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Jeremia Kimelman @jeremiak.com · 16/11/2024

Wow the #Sacramento mayoral race is wayyy closer than I expected based on the primary, where each major candidate got ~20% of the vote except for Cofer, who placed first with ~30%. As of the last update from yesterday, there’s about 4K votes between McCarty and Cofer with 60,000 left to count.

A screenshot of Sacramento County election results that show the Mayoral race between Kevin McCarty and Flo Cofer is close, 4kish votes out of an estimated 60,000 left to count though it’s not clear if those are all in the mayoral contest

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