The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
why aren't all 556 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 0 checkable ones are still open, waiting for their date. predictions held up or didn't; assertions are supported or contradicted. on every card: ▮▮▮▮▮ certainty · ▮▮▮▮▮ debate potential. speakers are clickable
Haun prosecuted Wells Fargo executives for stealing from deceased customers
“When I was a prosecutor, I prosecuted Wells Fargo's executives for taking dead people's accounts and draining them of money. They basically found out who hadn't used their account for, you know, many years, and then they would drain the money to their own pers…”
Fischer: Study of 19 Global Construction Projects Found Zero Feedback Loops
“So in a study of 19 projects from 19 different companies who just span the globe, and our research has shown that people don't have feedback loops, period. I mean, just informal. And then, and certainly not on a project, not from week to week, not on projects,…”
Arthur Brooks: The bottom 80% of earners experienced zero economic growth
“This blended, by the way, with the Great Recession in 2008, 2009, such that basically 80% of the income distribution, the bottom 80% has experienced zero economic growth.”
Sarandos predicts sports leagues like the NFL will go direct-to-consumer
“I think the winner will be NFL.com. That they'll just go direct to consumer, and there's plenty of people who pay an outrageous amount of money for a subscription for NFL, or NBA, or MLB, and ultimately the winners will be the league anyway, so.”
Collison: Bank credit card fraud models rely on 1960s-era neural networks
“And if you look at how the fraud systems that actually back your credit card work today, what happens is, you know, so you have a chaser bank for America or whatever credit card. And there's a set of neural networks that were trained and you're like, oh, cool.…”
Sinofsky: Only Samsung and LG can manufacture full home appliance suites
“God, that means that all of these companies are gonna have to make all of those parts, and there are only two companies that can do that, which is Samsung and LG.”
Morell: Russian networks posted en masse minutes after Clinton's 2016 collapse
“So within five minutes of Secretary Clinton falling in New York City on September 11th during the campaign, there were hundreds of thousands of social media postings coming out of Eastern Europe and Russia questioning whether she was healthy enough to be presi…”
Pope: US cities devote more space to parking than housing
“From my perspective, we have to remember that in every American city, with the possible exception of New York, more space is devoted to sleeping cars than sleeping people.”
Pope: The autonomous vehicle transition could be complete by 2025
“So it might start a little later than the optimists think. Might start in 2022, but it might be over by 2025.”
Pope: Driving is the largest U.S. profession and will be automated away
“We're going to lose the largest profession in the United States, which is driver.”
Andreessen: Moore's law has flipped from performance gains to price cuts
“Moore's law has now flipped. The dynamic now, instead of increased performance, has reduced cost. You now have this dynamic where every year, year and a half, the chip companies come out with a chip that's just as fast, but half the price.”
Sundararajan: Top platform earners make $1.20 per $1 bottom earners make
“They find that the top 20% of income earners are earning a little more through the sharing economy than the bottom 20%. But you look at that distribution, you compare that to the actual income distribution, and you see that it's redistributive, which is that P…”
Srinivasan: Generic blockchain hype will crash in late 2016
“I think the blockchain stuff is actually right at the top of the Gardner hype cycle, and I think it's gonna crash down, like, towards the second half, you know, of this year when people actually try to implement it.”
Srinivasan: Everyone will wear VR headsets within five to ten years
“So that's going to be kind of interesting in like five or 10 years, everyone's wearing these kind of things.”
Davenport: Basic income experiment recipients mostly spend extra time watching TV
“But in the experiments thus far, it appears that instead of doing, you know, highly meaningful activities, people just watch more TV.”
Dorado: Drone collision risk with commercial jets is once per 41B hours
“And then if you look at commercial jets, it's even smaller. I mean, it's, I think I got, I think the last number that we got was forty one billion years of continuous operation which is, you know, three times the Age of the universe.”
Evans: Smartphones will eat mass-market virtual reality
“Well, I think the basic story here is smartphones eat VR.”
Christensen: VC returns over the past decade have been nearly zero
“The reality is that the return to venture capital over the last 10 years overall has been nearly zero.”
Hinrikus: 'Free' UK Banking Costs Customers £200-£300 Annually
“Every customer who believes they have free banking in the UK, Ends up paying around two, 300 pounds in fees every year to the bank.”
Knott Craig: Watching a 7-second 3G video in South Africa costs $20
“If you spend it, if you watch a seven second YouTube video on three G at South African data rates, it'll cost you about 20 dollars, 20 US dollars.”
Hobson: Fox gave Lucas Star Wars sequel rights to hit quarterly earnings
“They gave him the sequel rights in order to make their quarter. To make their quarter. They were a million dollars off, which was George's fee.”
Evans: There are even odds Windows Phone disappears within a year
“It's, that, that, I would be, I think there's even odds that that product won't exist in a year.”
Evans: Smartphones will dominate VR hardware within five years
“On like a five-year view, it seems to me that this is all going to be about smartphones, because just Moore's law will drive this, and the graphics and the sensors will get there”
Standage: Uber poached Carnegie Mellon's entire robotics department
“We've just seen, for example, Uber has snaffled the entire robotics department for Carnegie Mellon.”
Evans: Wintel Platform Share Will Decline to 10% of Computing Market
“The Wintel ecosystem now, as a percentage of total computing, so including tablets and smartphones and everything else, is now sort of 15% of unit sales, and it's going to go down, it's going to go maybe not 10%, but you know, it may go down to 10%”
Markoff: US productivity growth has been zero or negative since 2008
“Since 2008, you know, where you, The modern theory is capital's replacing labor. You should see that kind of productivity growth. We've seen no productivity growth. We've even seen negative productivity.”
Markoff predicts semiconductor scaling will permanently stop at 5 nanometers
“I believe, you know, based on talking to all the wise men I've been able to talk to in Silicon Valley, that there are three more turns of the crank. We go from 14 to 10 to seven to five. The industry can see its way to five.”
Markoff: Offshore call center jobs are returning to US data centers as software
“Because of falling cost of telecommunication, many of those jobs were outsourced to the Philippines and India. And now you have this Freakonomics reverse thing happening where those jobs are coming back to run in U.S. Data centers as software, not as U.S. Work…”
Digital therapeutics can outperform traditional drugs for diabetes treatment, says Vijay Pandey
“And I believe actually Modis had done this, and in this case, one can show actually that, that digital therapeutic is not just comparable to the drug, but in, and generally can exceed the capabilities of the drug.”
Cheney: Starbucks will be entirely barista-less by 2024
“I would likely suggest that Starbucks will be like barista-less in five years.”
Evans: Global annual photos taken likely reaches 10 to 100 trillion
“Even if you just add up the numbers from Facebook and Snapchat, Facebook and Instagram and WhatsApp and so on, you get to about eight or nine hundred billion photographs taken last year. And that's just, sorry, shared. So if there were eight or nine hundred bi…”
Chokshi: The Biggest Startup Hits Come From First-Time Founders
“If you really think about the biggest outlier hits and successes of the past 10 years, they're actually first-time entrepreneurs with no track record.”
DoD will soon stop launching traditional GPS satellites
“Pretty soon we'll, I won't be launching any more of those satellites.”
Granger: Excel is the world's most popular programming language
“The most popular programming language in the world is Excel. It is programming just like everything else is. And Excel is used by eight hundred million people every single day, right?”
Smith: Amazon will restrict same-day delivery to groceries and next-day elsewhere
“I don't buy that there's a lot of product demand for same day. I think that Amazon will do same day for grocery because it makes sense on fresh. I don't, I believe they'll do next day on everything else.”
80% of elite athletes would take a fatal drug for Olympic gold
“If you could take a drug that would guarantee you an Olympic gold medal, but you would die in five years, would you take it? And crazy percentages said yes. Like, 80, 90% said yes.”
Andreessen: Every person globally will own a smartphone by decade's end
“So the big thing happening in the world right now is the smartphone, and the significance of the smartphone is, for the first time in human history, we're going to get a computer in everybody's hands, and by everybody, I mean everybody on the planet and by eve…”
Andreessen: 5 to 7 billion people will own smartphones by 2020
“And this is the thing I've been talking a lot about that people occasionally get angry about, because they think it won't Can't possibly come true, but I'm convinced it's going to come true, which is I think everybody on the planet by the end of the decade is …”
Dixon: Enterprise applications will lead consumer adoption in wearable tech
“I think there's a reasonable chance that you'll see the corporate use cases leading Like, unlike what we've seen over the last 15 years in technology, which is the consumer has led the enterprise. You know, the stuff you have at home on your iPhone and Gmail i…”
Dixon: Almost all smartphones will capture 3D imaging within two years
“I think within two years for phones, almost all smartphones will be able to take three to three D imaging.”
Krugman: Only South Sudan and Venezuela have inflation over 50%
“So let me give you a comprehensive list of the countries that currently have inflation exceeding 50% a year. South Sudan and Venezuela. End of story.”
Chen: Autonomous EV fleets will drive most global miles within years
“In particular, I believe that in a handful of years, we're gonna be driven around in electric cars rather than driving around in our own gas-powered cars. In other words, most of the miles driven on the planet will shift to self-driving electric car fleets as …”
Pande: Omada's digital therapy demonstrates greater diabetes efficacy than metformin
“AMADA has a behavioral therapy, which is in a sense similar to areas like cognitive behavioral therapy, or CBT, derived from the CDC's Diabetes Prevention Program. And AMADA can demonstrate efficacy that actually exceeds that of metformin.”
Levine: Total connected computing devices will expand into the trillions
“I can imagine a world where there will be trillions of devices out there. So if you think about the challenges of management, security, data, all of the issues of distributed computing, that's now going to, it's the opportunity and the challenge of what we're …”
Horowitz: Market intermediaries are reselling GPUs for four times purchase price
“This is like, we're flat out, and people are reselling GPUs for
[514] Ben Horowitz: Four times what they bought them for”
Raghuram: Current AI memory demand requires three years of manufacturing capacity
“So the flagship conference for the industries, the one called Hot Chips, is going on in Stanford, and the leading memory ranger said the demand they have today will take them three years of capacity to supply.
[588] Raghu Raghuram: It's just today.
[589] Raghu…”
Gaybrick: Stablecoin remittance startup Felix handles 5% to 10% of US-Mexico corridor
“Felix Bogor Felix, I think is, is, as they're called now which started as a remittance company between the U S and Mexico, and now, you know, has other corridors as well. They built it on stables and a few years in, they're now between five and 10% of remittan…”