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 2,795 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
Humble: Microservices and Kubernetes do not guarantee high IT performance
“Implementing those technologies does not give you those outcomes we talked about. We actually looked at people doing mainframe stuff. You can achieve these results with mainframes. Equally, you can use the, you know, Kubernetes and, you know, Docker and micros…”
Rachleff: Wealthfront's main competitor abandoned pure software for human advisors
“So even our closest competitor, which was pure software, has given it up, and they now have married advisors or planners to their software.”
Tomaino: Blockchain forks created significantly more value in 2017 than ICOs
“You know, we hear so much about the ICO boom, but in terms of, kind of, like, total value created this year, there's actually been way more value created by forks than ICOs.”
Lee: Animal farming lobby is much bigger than the NRA
“Animal farming, in my case, is arguably the most well-funded lobbying organization in the United States, much bigger than the NRA, by far.”
Benet: High-throughput blockchain scaling implementations will be live within two years
“So expect that to happen over the next year or two. Already there's a bunch of academic results that show this is not only possible, but it's provably so. So now people are building those Implementations, and we'll see them live in the next two years or so.”
Benet: Catalan government used IPFS to bypass Spanish censorship
“Yeah, so, Catalonia tried to declare independence and tried to vote for it. The Spanish government censored the website, and so then the Catalan government Put their website on IPFS and distributed it that way. So it was pretty cool to see the Catalan presiden…”
Ducey: Restrictive regulations in other states drove AV testing to Arizona
“The New York Times front page of the business section recognized that self-driving vehicles were coming to Arizona today. To learn. And that was actually a result of other governors pushing them out and saying, we're going to hit you with permitting fees. We'r…”
Nasdaq proposes allowing stock issuers to opt out of National Market System
“One of the things that we are preparing, and we've wrote in our blueprint, is to create, give an issuer a choice. They should be allowed to choose which market structure they want to embrace, so they can choose to be in the national market system, or they coul…”
Ehrsam: Bitcoin created the world's largest supercomputer network by 4 orders of magnitude
“And years later, we have a seventy billion dollar cryptocurrency, a whole ecosystem of companies, users and investors involved and the largest supercomputer network in the world by four orders of magnitude.”
Protocol Labs bypassed Turkish censorship by hosting Wikipedia on IPFS
“So recently Turkey decided to block Wikipedia and it was very easy for them because all they had to do was intercept, you know, the connection between all Turkish users and the Wikipedia servers outside of Turkey. And so that was like very trivial blocking, bl…”
Sutton: Proximity to a toxic coworker dramatically increases job loss risk
“What this research shows is if you're within 25 feet of a toxic person, so what I would call an asshole, the chances you're gonna become toxic and lose your job go way up.”
Smith: China Shock Displaced US Manufacturing Workers Into Low-Wage Service Jobs
“What Otter, Dorn, and Hansen found is that the adjustment of the average worker in competition with Chinese workers was much, much slower and worse, and they found that, you know, the average displaced manufacturing worker in the eighties and nineties who was …”
Smith: US Manufacturing Jobs Plunged After China Entered WTO In 2000
“Total manufacturing employment has shrunk since 2000 dramatically. So at the exact same time trying to enter the WTO, total manufacturing employment in the United States, which had been at a stable level for decades and decades, starts to plunge.”
Allison: 12 of 16 historical power transitions have resulted in war
“I find 16 cases in which a rising power threatened to displace a ruling power. In 12 of the cases, the outcome was war. In four of the cases, the outcome was not war.”
Allison: Measured by PPP, China is the world's largest economy
“International economies, and I believe the best yardstick is purchasing power parity, which is also the yardstick that CIA and IMF think is the best yardstick. By that yardstick, China is currently the largest economy in the world.”
Allison: China uses trade leverage like banana imports to coerce foreign governments
“The Chinese Not only have economic power, but they exercise economic power. So when the Philippines behaves in a way they don't like, they say, I think your bananas that you're importing to China may be suspect. So they just leave them on the dock till they ro…”
Gleicher: The statistic that 60% of cyberattacked small businesses fail is baseless
“There's a statistic that's been going around. It was used in a couple of cybersecurity bills recently. It was used on the Hill. And the statistic is, 60% of small businesses that get targeted with a cyber attack go out of business within six months. And in cas…”
Harris: Open Justice data showed African Americans were 25% of in-custody deaths
“With open justice, we found African Americans are six percent of California's population, and we're almost 25% of in custody deaths.”
Senator Young: Only 10 of 80 federal social programs rigorously studied
“There are roughly, depending upon one, how one counts the different social support programs, 80 federal social support programs. Only 10 have ever been rigorously studied using the gold standard, randomized controlled trials across multiple sites. Can you imag…”
Andreessen: U.S. new company creation has fallen for 40 years
“Generally what's happening is the rate of introduction of new companies in the economy has been falling for 40 years and is showing no sign of resuming. So there's more economic stability as measured by company creation and destruction than there has been in, …”
Andreessen: Software developers will earn higher salaries due to AI productivity
“If anything, actually, what's gonna happen is the programmers are gonna get, the programmers are gonna be higher paid because they're gonna be higher productivity.”
Duffy: Older patients engage and perform better in digital health programs
“It turns out that age, the older you are, the better you actually do, which is a little bit counterintuitive. You know, I think that it would be easy to think, well, digital, of course, young people are going to do it. Young people are going to do better, but …”
Rando: Infusing young blood into old animals reverses some aging phenotypes
“What we really know these days is that it does seem that if you infuse Components of a blood from a young animal into an old animal. It actually can revert some of the aging phenotypes from an old state to a younger state, which is something quite different be…”
Dixon: No one, including Vitalik Buterin, can cut developers off Ethereum
“As a developer, you can now invest in this. You can build things on top of Ethereum with the knowledge that no one can, you know, Vitalik, who's the kind of the, you know, the leader of Ethereum, can't pull the rug out from under you, even if you wanted to.”
NASA placed male math grads in engineering and females in support
“Why is it that the men coming here with the same background I had, degrees in mathematics or applied mathematics, Were put in engineering sections and able to work on their own projects and write their own papers, and the females are put into computer sections…”
Rampell: Repatriated corporate cash will fund buybacks, not innovation
“Exactly. It's probably going to go to buybacks M&A and dividends. And a lot of that is just kind of like reshuffling as opposed to actually building anything new.”
Cowen: Productivity growth in the service sector is approximately zero
“Here, clearly, more and more people are involved in innovation, but if you think of the economy as a whole, most jobs are service sector jobs, and as best we can tell, again, it's hard to measure, but productivity growth in those sectors is about zero.”
Chen: The introduction of ATMs actually increased total U.S. bank teller jobs
“After the introduction of the ATM for banking, the total number of bank tellers in the country increased, right? Because what we did was we built banks with ATMs in convenient places and put tellers in them. So we expanded the reach of banks so that you're, yo…”
Kaditz: Annual physicals show no correlation with better patient health outcomes
“If you think about what the annual physical consists of, and actually if you ask most physicians and most research, there is actually no real correlation between outcomes and consistently doing annual physicals.”
Zipline's autonomous Rwanda drone delivery operations are illegal in the US
“What we're doing in Rwanda is illegal in the US, unfortunately.”
Friedrich: 80% of US antibiotics are fed to livestock, threatening medicine
“So, for example, in the United States, about 80% of all antibiotics that are produced by pharmaceutical companies, about 80% of them are fed to farm animals, which means that these bacteria are learning how to get around the antibiotics, and they may be usheri…”
Valeti: Cell-cultured meat products will reach the market within five years
“Our goal is it's very realistic to have products on the market in the next five years.”
Flournoy: US intelligence community agrees Russia directed WikiLeaks releases
“It's pretty accepted now from the intelligence community community that these leaks were directed by Russia.”
Huffington: The majority of Uber drivers work part-time to supplement income
“The majority of Uber drivers are part-time. And they have other jobs or they drive for other companies. Many are doing it to supplement their income rather than as their primary job.”
Buterin: Cumulative Value of ETH and ETC Exceeded Pre-Fork Market Cap
“ETH plus ETC is above sort of ETC before the fork, which is actually interesting”
Jordan: Premier networks like Facebook and WhatsApp skip paid user acquisition
“A lot of the best networks that are platformed here aren't spending anything on, on acquisition. I mean, it's just, it's kind of an interesting thing in marketplace. Facebook, no. WhatsApp, no. Medium, no. You know, just OpenTable, no. Just, you know, just, th…”
Andreessen: Cloud AI Supercomputing Access Will Cost $1 Within a Year
“You get what I think in a year is going to be very common. These sort of AI supercomputing chips with the AI algorithms in the cloud available to anybody for a dollar. Right, and so there's going to be this massive deflation of hardware cost on, on that side.”
Alex Rampell: Microsoft never restricted Windows software like Apple restricts iOS
“Microsoft, in my opinion, never really They never did the same amount of control. Like, they never said, hey, this software product cannot be downloaded onto your Windows PC.”
Andreessen: Sequoia prioritized market size over founding team quality
“Sequoia was legendary in prioritizing market over team, right? And so Don Valentine has, if you go online and Google Don Valentine's talks, he talks a lot about how the key to success of a startup is to land yourself in a giant market. Like, Land yourself in a…”
Andreessen: All a16z general partners must be former founders or CEOs
“We decided that the general partners at Andreessen Horowitz would all be people who had been founders or CEOs or both of tech startups”
Dorado: A two-kilogram drone causes human injury once per 187M flight hours
“And for a two kilogram drone, I think we found that there might be a human injury once every hundred eighty seven million years.”
Evans: Apple and Facebook will build full-stack VR while Google commoditizes hardware
“You'll have Apple and Facebook trying to do the full stack, and you'll have Google saying, well, we're going to provide the hard bit, and everything else will be a commodity around it.”
Bahl: Indian e-commerce is unregulated and FDI policy was merely a clarification
“E-commerce in India is Not a regulated space. There are different laws, whether it's a consumer protection law or a labor law, different laws we have to adhere to. But when something is regulated, I would say telecom is regulated in India. There is an authorit…”
Senghor: U.S. prison system operates at a 70% failure rate
“The prison system is the only big business that secedes with a 70% failure rate.”
Levchin: Affirm does not charge late fees to consumers
“And if you're late, we're not going to charge you a late fee because that's our fault. We didn't remind you correctly. And when we made the underwriting decision, we made the choice to take you on as a risk and that that's, we're going to have to stick with.”
Grant: Hiring for cultural fit boosts IPO odds but slows post-IPO growth
“Founders who hire on cultural fit are less likely to see their startups fail, and they're more likely to make it to IPO. And then after IPO, their firms grow at a much slower rate than the ones that hire on skill or potential.”