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 218 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
Friedberg: Huawei will deploy undisclosed lithography to rival top chips by 2026
“My early prediction for 20, 26 is Huawei where I think that there's a lithography technology that exists in China that is not publicly discussed. That is going to be deployed in Huawei and all these fabs that they're building in mainland China. And Huawei can …”
Friedberg: San Francisco spends $5 million annually providing free beer in hotels
“Five million dollars per year out of the San Francisco city budget is spent on this program where you can walk into a hotel. They have free beer.”
Friedberg: Over 100M Americans directly work for or get paid by federal government
“So when you add this all up, there's over a hundred, hundred and twenty million people in the U.S. That are directly working for or getting paid by the federal government in the U.S.”
Friedberg predicts lack of energy resolution will trigger European civil unrest
“If there isn't a resolution in the next few weeks, there will be civil unrest. There will be a really cataclysmic concerning economic effect.”
Friedberg: Custom Peptide Cancer Therapies Cost $50K at Existing Clinics
“You can pay someone 50,000 dollars to do this for you today. There's a lot of clinics that'll do it, and it's not a special FDA-approved drug. To your point, J. Cal, it's a process. The process is, take the DNA sequence from my cancer, make a protein, put it b…”
Friedberg: Housing, college, and healthcare inflation significantly outpaced average 2.5% inflation
“The average rate of inflation in the last 30 years has been two and a half percent, but housing's gone up by at least five percent a year on average compounding, education over six percent, healthcare five and a half percent.”
Friedberg: Study links picloram herbicide exposure to 3x colon cancer risk
“The odds ratio is like three X. It's very strong.”
Friedberg: California faces $30B annual deficit and $1T in unfunded pensions
“In California we're looking at a thirty billion a year deficit, we've got five hundred billion of debt, and we have a nearly one trillion dollar pension obligation that is not funded.”
Friedberg: France's 1988 wealth tax triggered €200B capital flight
“In France in 1988, 1989, they passed this millionaire tax. Anyone with 1.3 million euro or greater net worth had to pay a tax of like one percent a year, one and a half percent a year of their total assets. And it raised four to five billion euro a year in new…”
Friedberg: Huawei will challenge Nvidia in 2026 using undisclosed lithography tech
“My early prediction for twenty-twenty-six is Huawei, where I think that there's lithography technology, that exists in China that is not publicly discussed, that is going to be deployed in Huawei and all these fabs that they're building in mainland China.”
Friedberg: California pension system is underfunded by $1 trillion
“The California pension fund system is underfunded by roughly a trillion dollars.”
Friedberg: Norway's 2022 wealth tax triggered a $448 million tax revenue loss
“Norway, 20, 22 passed a wealth tax. The wealth tax was supposed to raise one hundred and forty six million dollars of incremental revenue per year. Instead, what happened? Fifty four billion dollars of net worth left the country and they actually had a four hu…”
Friedberg: Fox News, CNN, and MSNBC are losing their audiences rapidly
“Fox News is losing an audience. CNN is losing an audience. MSNBC is losing an audience. I mean, their audiences are gone. Like, they're just vaporizing right now.”
Friedberg: China's factories can output millions of drones monthly
“China now has drone factories that can output millions of drones each month.”
Friedberg: 57% of Gen Zers want to be influencers as primary career
“57% of Gen Zers want to be influencers as their primary career now.”
Friedberg: Gen IV nuclear reactors physically cannot experience meltdowns
“Those new systems, the Gen four reactors cannot melt down. You cannot have an incident like you did with the Gen one and Gen two systems, and the Gen three systems are abundantly safe.”
Friedberg: SMRs are currently operating in China, Russia, and India
“There are SMRs operating in China, Russia, and India today. And there's about 65 being built at this moment, right?”
Friedberg: US debt could reach $40 trillion by end of 2025
“Plus, the Biden administration has proposed a 7.2 trillion dollar budget for next year, which will inevitably lead to another two trillion dollars of deficit spending, which means that by the end of 2025, we could be staring at 40 trillion dollars of federal d…”
Friedberg: Harris and Walz worked exclusively in government unlike Trump
“Kamala Harris and Tim Waltz have only ever worked for government. Trump and Vance have worked in private industry.”
Friedberg: China building 150 nuclear reactors at one-fourth US cost
“China's building a 150 nuclear reactors, and they're only spending about 2500 dollars a kilowatt. In the U.S., we're not building any, and our cost to build them is about 10,000 bucks a kilowatt, and China's about to build as much capacity as 20% of the total …”
Friedberg: Record Atlantic ocean temperatures will drive massive hurricanes by autumn 2024
“So if this does not taper off or level off, we will see record sea surface temperatures in the August to October timeframe, which will almost certainly push massive hurricane events out of the Atlantic, and they will find their way towards the continental U.S.…”
Friedberg: Snap paid employees 40x its 2023 free cash flow in stock comp
“They paid employees 40 times the free cash flow that was generated for shareholders during the year, which is also equivalent to 10% of the enterprise market value of this company.”
Friedberg: All US consumer sectors with 20-year price inflation feature government spending
“Everything that's gone up in price is something that the US government has a role in buying or paying for.”
Friedberg: U.S. banks hold $3 trillion in unadjusted commercial real estate debt
“The three trillion dollars of debt that we just mentioned that sitting on all the bank's balance sheets is all being held at par. They're not discounting it at all, and they're not marking it as being impaired in any way.”
David Friedberg warns common chemical sunscreen ingredients act as endocrine disruptors
“Oxybenzone. I don't use any products with oxybenzone. That's like the most common sunscreen ingredient. Octinoxate is the other one. Homo salate and the parabens. All of those product categories. Which are the most common products used in sunscreen. They're ab…”
Friedberg: Record VC dry powder will force unprecedented deployment within three years
“The total VC capital raised last year, I think was a record high. That means there's a lot more cash that needs to kind of be deployed in the next 12 to 36 months than has ever been deployed in, in the history of venture.”
Friedberg: US economic contraction and higher unemployment are now inevitable
“There's a, there's an inevitability now that unemployment is going to rise. There is an inevitability now that the economy is going to contract.”
Friedberg: Paul Pelosi bought Nvidia stock four times in 12 months
“Over the past year, He has bought Nvidia four different times, each time in the same kind of volume range... He's also bought Apple in the last month, Microsoft, sorry, he sold Apple, he bought Microsoft he bought Alliance Bernstein earlier in the year. He's m…”
Friedberg notes the U.S. incarcerates 2.3 million compared to China's 1.7 million
“In the United States, where we have a population of let's be generous and say, four hundred million people, 2.3 1,000,340 1,000,340 million Americans, 2.3 million of whom are incarcerated. In China, with a population of 1.4 1000000001.7 million Chinese are inc…”
Friedberg: France lost more revenue than it gained from its wealth tax
“Between the year 2000 and the year 2016, 25% of millionaire households emigrated out of France during this period. And the amount of tax revenue that was lost during that period of time Was greater than the new revenue generated from the wealth tax that was in…”
Friedberg: US cities will not experience NYC-style second wave
“You're not going to see that in Dallas. You're not going to see that in Houston. You're not going to see that in San Diego. You're going to have more of the slow, steady burn as some risk is taken in the environment. Some risk is taken by frat parties and peop…”
Friedberg: Government scientific research ROI has declined eighty-fold over time
“Over time we have seen a significant decline in the effectiveness of dollars deployed against scientific research in the U.S., an eighty-fold decline in return on every dollar invested in government research.”
Friedberg: Tort lawyers are among the largest U.S. political donors
“The tort lawyers are one of the largest donors in political elections in the United States. They donate largely to Democrats in local elections and Republicans in national elections, and then they are the largest donor class to elections of judges.”
Friedberg: China published 50% more scientific papers than US last year
“10 years ago, China published 50% of the number of scientific research papers and peer-reviewed journals as the United States. Last year they published 50% more than the United States.”
Friedberg: AI recently ranked as most unfavorable term on survey list
“AI recently ranked as the most unfavorable term of a list of terms, including President Trump.”
Friedberg: California faces nearly $1T in unfunded public pension liabilities
“California has nearly a trillion dollars of unfunded pension obligations to its public retirees or public employees that are going to retire.”
Friedberg: Germany recorded 84k speech crimes and France 6k hate crimes
“84,000 politically motivated communications crimes in Germany, 6000 defined hate crimes based on speech in France.”
Friedberg: Gemini reached 15 percent AI traffic as OpenAI share dropped
“A little over a year ago, they were at 90% plus market share in generative AI traffic. And today Gemini is at 14, 15%.”
Friedberg: San Francisco car break-ins drop to a 25-year low
“And all the car break-ins are down to a 25 year low.”
Friedberg: Florida farms pay $5-$10 over minimum wage without attracting Americans
“In the case of Florida, they're paying five to 10 dollars over minimum wage for farm workers, and they cannot get any Americans to work on the farm, and they're being forced to pay five to 10 dollars overage.”
Friedberg: Harvard takes a 60% administrative cut on federal research grants
“Historically at Harvard, that administrative topper is 60%. So if a researcher gets a three million dollar grant at Harvard to work on cancer research, 1.8 million dollars of administrative fees are paid to Harvard University.”
Friedberg: Iran exports $60B annually, with $55B going to China
“Iran exports sixty billion dollars a year, and about fifty-five billion of that goes to China.”
Friedberg claims Mamdani won college-educated NYC primary voters 61 to 39
“But if you look at the results, Zoran won, 61 to 39 with college educated. Young people voted for him. Old people did not as much. White people voted for him because they went to college. Non-white people did not as much.”
Friedberg: US government owns 500 million acres and controls 3.2 billion subsea acres
“The federal government owns five hundred million acres of land, and they have control Over 3.2 billion acres in the outer continental shelf, which is the land under the ocean around North America.”
Friedberg: China launched a $37 billion investment in 3nm chip technology
“Last year, China announced and began a thirty seven billion Dollar investment in developing their own three nanometer chimp technology.”
Friedberg: Inner Mongolia thorium reserve could provide 60,000 years of energy
“There is this discovery, which I think we put on the docket for the Science Corner today, of a giant thorium reserve in Inner Mongolia, which can be used to make a thorium molten salt reactor, and there's enough thorium in this reserve in China to produce enou…”