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 6,975 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 83 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
Horowitz: California essentially kicked Elon Musk out over automated manufacturing
“Most of the kind of issues that he's run into have been based on the fact that he is, you know, a modern manufacturing facility that's highly automated. And that's why California in particular has been You know, basically kicked them out of the state.”
Andreessen: For every active US dockworker, another is paid to stay home
“For every doc worker in the U S actually works on the doc doc, there's actually somebody sitting, there's a doc worker sitting at home doing nothing, still getting paid.”
Horowitz: SEC sues utility token issuers over alleged asymmetric information
“All of those under the Gensler regime are essentially illegal because or they're legal but you'll get sued by the SEC, by the US government, and the reason that you'll get sued is they claim that anything with utility is has asymmetric information attached to …”
Horowitz: Biden administration sued to block a16z portfolio's Sanofi drug deal
“We have a company with an incredible drug platform. They cured. A rare disease, like past phase one clinical trials, carried it, sell the drug to Sanofi because, you know, so they can get some of the money back to develop more things, and the Biden administrat…”
Horowitz: Big tech is lobbying to eliminate open-source AI in universities
“They're not only underfunded to do AI, but the, there's a push among the big tech companies to Enact legislation that would essentially outlaw AI in universities by eliminating open source.”
Andreessen: California high-speed rail spent $10B with zero ground broken
“The California high-speed rail project. Which is now ten billion, it's over ten billion in spend with zero ground broken.”
Andreessen: U.S. manual manufacturing jobs will never return without technology leaps
“Those jobs are never coming back if there's not a step function change in technology and in the ability to use technology to get leverage. And to be able to transform those jobs and transform the economics, like they're just, they're never coming back. It does…”
Andreessen: FDIC blocked private equity and bank bids to buy SVB
“There were both there were other big banks that wanted to buy SVB, and there were private equity firms that wanted to buy SVB, and basically do a private sector bailout requiring no, no taxpayer involvement, and the FDIC actually blocked those also.”
Horowitz: FDIC rejected SVB buyer to avoid creating another G-SIB bank
“One of the blocks was there was a bank that was going to buy Silicon Valley bank and by buying Silicon Valley bank, it would move up into the G-SIB category, which is globally systemic important banks. And they're like, no more G-SIBs.”
Horowitz: Car thieves are not prosecuted in almost any blue state
“One of the big things that's changed in talking to many police officers is like grand theft auto is no longer a thing. Like if you steal a car, you don't get prosecuted in almost any state. Certainly in any blue state, you're not getting prosecuted for stealin…”
Horowitz: Big Tech influenced Biden's AI executive order language
“Big tech actually got this, you know, some of this language into the Biden administration executive order.”
Horowitz: Big Tech is lobbying Washington to outlaw AI competitors
“So if you look at what big tech has been trying to do, they're trying, they're very worried about new competition to the point where they've taken upon themselves to go to Washington and try and outlaw their competitors.”
Andreessen: Anthropic is aggressively lobbying for regulatory capture in D.C.
“Anthropic is very much in the group of kind of big tech, you know, kind of new incumbent big tech, you know, lobbying very aggressively for regulation and regulatory capture. In D.C., and so I think it's sort of an open question whether Amazon is going to pick…”
Andreessen: All harmful AI uses are already illegal under existing laws
“As far as I can tell, every single use of AI to do something bad is already illegal under current laws and regulations.”
Huff: Nuclear waste disposal is a solved technical problem
“This is a technically solved problem. Right now, all the spent fuel is stored safely where it is.”
Casado: AI startups are the fastest-growing companies in internet history
“We're seeing the fastest growing companies we've seen in the history of the internet, including, by the way, the internet itself. And this is by measure for revenue or the number of users, et cetera, right?”
Cuban: PBMs exclude $700 biosimilar Usimri to protect drug margin revenues
“Humira is about 8000 dollars a month. Six to 8000 dollars a month. USIMRI is about 700 dollars a month. But they won't add USIMRI to their formularies because they don't want to use the revenue in the margin.”
Cuban: Big three PBMs pay independent pharmacies $0.50 for $12 scripts
“If you're dealing with one of those big three PBMs, it cost an independent pharmacy probably 12 dollars, give or take, on the location to fill a script. They're paying them 50 cents”
Horowitz: Biden administration uses extra-legal regulatory pressure to choke crypto companies
“We're seeing you know, this administration do the same thing. In something called choke .2, but this time with crypto companies and, you know, there's no law that they're following. There's no rule. There's no legislation. There's no vote. There's no nothing. …”
Horowitz: Harvard enrolls more Nigerian than African American students
“There are more Nigerians. I believe there's more Nigerians at Harvard than African Americans.”
Horowitz: Higher Share of Women Enter STEM in Kazakhstan Than Sweden
“Way more women go into STEM in like Kazakhstan than in Sweden.”
Andreessen: SAT score cap reduces demographic distinctiveness rather than unearthing talent
“It's capped at 800 because there's just constant pressure on the SAT to equalize itself by demographic group. And so the overwhelming priority at the company that does the SAT is to actually try to reduce group distinctiveness, right? As opposed to unearth tal…”
Andreessen: Congress could dismantle higher education funding in two minutes
“It's a small number of programs that pay for the whole thing, right? So it's federal student loans. It's federal research funding. It's a, and it's a couple of things in the tax law and a few other things. And so it's not like it would take, it would not take …”
Andreessen: American university faculty is radically politically polarized toward liberals
“It's an empirical observation that the faculty at American universities is now radically polarized on in, in one political direction. Radically, and we could also post a graph on this maybe, which is the numbers are like really radical. There's fields in which…”
Horowitz: Columbia University's diverse faculty retention is worse than regular hires
“The retention is terrible for all your diverse hires. It's way worse than your retention for your regular hires.”
Mensch: Mixtral matches Llama 2 70B performance at one-sixth the cost
“Mixtral is actually on par with Lama-to-seven TB while being approximately six times cheaper or six times faster for the same price.”
Robbins: Meta-studies show 60% of depression patients receive zero treatment benefit
“60% of the people that go in, according to meta studies, for treatment of depression with drugs and or therapy or both, 60% make zero improvement.”
Horowitz: Native American reservation system acts as an ineffective $65,000 UBI
“We have UBI for Native Americans. It's called the reservation system, and it's horrible. And, you know, it's 65,000 dollars a year a piece, and it does not do anything.”
Andreessen: More People Globally Have Smartphones Than Electricity or Running Water
“Sitting here today in 2023, the following is true. More people in the world have computers in the form of smartphones specifically and internet access than have electricity or running water in their homes.”
Andreessen: Most US industries operate as government-captured cartels, not free markets
“We don't in America today in most industries actually live in what you call a free market system. We live in more of a captured kind of Big business cartel ecosystem, and you look just across sort of sector after sector after sector, what you see are sort of t…”
Horowitz: Native American reservation system is essentially UBI paying $65K yearly
“And the reservation system is essentially UBI. It's 65,000 dollars a year, I believe, per resident.”
Horowitz: Vinod Khosla tweeted that AI will replace human musicians
“Our friend Vinod Khosla, I think, had a tweet that got him in a lot of trouble where he said, like, you know, there won't be any more human musicians because the AI would just program whatever feeling, however you want to feel, they just program it for you.”
Andreessen: Albert Einstein held pro-Soviet and pro-Stalinist views
“Einstein, unfortunately, and I know Einstein's, a lot of people consider Einstein to be a hero, not just scientifically, but morally, and the movie paints him as a, both a scientific and a moral hero, which is kind of the received wisdom. A little bit of an is…”
Horowitz: Social justice and cancel culture concepts stem from Soviet communism
“It's striking as you said that how many of the communist terms have come back social justice, cancel culture, you know, they're all you know, they're all concepts from the kind of Soviet era communism and everybody's cool with it, which is you know,”
Panigrahi: Multi-sensor suites outperform camera-only autonomous driving systems
“Does the combination of these sensors position you better than individual. The answer is yes. We can show you that there are situations in which camera will be insufficient.”
Andreessen: China's AI strategy combines internal surveillance with global export
“With respect to AI, they basically have two, basically, they essentially have a two-stage plan. So stage one is to develop AI as a means of population control within China. So to basically use AI as a technology and tool for a level of Orwellian authoritarian,…”
Luckey: John Deere Tractors Have More AI Than Any Fielded DOD System
“There's more AI in a John Deere tractor than there is in any system that the U.S. DOD is fielding.”
Luckey: Silicon Valley execs used anti-defense protests to mask China dependence
“I could give a whole talk on how the executives of Silicon Valley used the vocal minority of their rank and file as a smoke screen for their dependence on China, but that's a different talk for a different day.”
Weiss: NYT profile of Sam Bankman-Fried omitted political donations and fraud comparisons
“You have this 2000 word profile in the New York Times that doesn't mention the four hundred million dollars that he donated to Democratic candidates, that doesn't mention, you know, Madoff, Enron, like the kind of things that he's being compared to.”
Andreessen: Technology never creates unemployment, only creates jobs
“Technology never actually creates unemployment. Technology only ever creates jobs in that.”
Andreessen: Tesla deploys live autonomous software without federal testing, improving safety
“Tesla has been climbing the ladder on self-driving car functionality capability. They do new software releases, push live to car at night anytime they want. Those new releases are not being tested by any federal, the federal, you know, it's a, whatever it's no…”
Neal Stephenson: AR and VR are not required to build the metaverse
“We absolutely do not need AR and VR in order to build the metaverse.”
Ukraine depleted three years of US missile inventory in three weeks
“We shipped the Ukrainians what we thought was three years of inventory of stinger and javelin missiles, which are shoulder mounted, really cheap missiles that can take out a tank or something. So for providing that to a human force in Taiwan or the Ukraine, it…”
Balaji Srinivasan: Euthanasia is Canada's sixth leading cause of death
“In fact, it's like the sixth leading cause of death and candid, like you can kill yourself, but you can't take an experimental drug.”
Balaji Srinivasan: The FDA is holding back tens of trillions of dollars
“Once we can get a zone outside the FDA, once we can exit the FDA, people don't understand how bad the FDA is. Your entire life, it's like tens of trillions of dollars of values being held back by FDA. It's like incalculable how bad they are as an agency.”
Gluchowski: Optimistic rollups cannot support Validium extensions due to game theory reliance
“There's another Type of roll-ups called optimistic roll-ups. They unfortunately cannot do this. They do not rely on math and cryptography. They rely on game theory and validators, and they cannot have this extension.”
Lim: 21-day water fast and plant diet cleared advanced lymphoma case
“Here's an example of a forty-two-year-old woman with advanced stage lymphoma. Her CT scan shows that before treatment, her lymph nodes were significantly enlarged. After a 21 day water only fast, you can see that her lymph nodes shrank pretty dramatically. She…”
Levine: No Open-Source Company Has Been Fully Displaced by Cloud Providers
“Can you name a single example of a company that's been fully displaced by a cloud provider? And the answer is no. And so I think that our concerns around large cloud vendors coming in and just co-opting an open source project and putting you out of business, t…”