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 721 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: Reduced global crop production will lead to famine in a year
“That means there's going to be less production over the next year. That means famine hits us in a year.”
Friedberg: Russian export controls will almost certainly cause widespread famine in 2022
“That are not just about sanctions, but also about export controls by Russia that are creating swings in food markets like we've never seen, and will almost certainly lead to widespread famine by the end of this year at this point.”
Friedberg: US West Coast will reopen for business around April 7th or 8th
“New York is going to be fucked for a little while, but I do think that the west coast and with some travel restrictions is going to be able to reopen for business probably around April seventh or eighth, because we're going to see a dramatic decline at that po…”
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: China's 3nm semiconductor technology will reach full production in 2026
“China, one thing that's not talked about, which I'll add in, seems to have developed three nanometer semiconductor manufacturing technology, which is going to go into production in Q three of 20, 25, and will end up being in full production in 20, 26.”
Friedberg: Coastal Commission cited Musk's tweets to block SpaceX launches
“I will comment on the California Coastal Commission ruling that was based on Elon's political tweets, which is why they stopped additional launches out of Vandenberg.”
Friedberg: Trump effectively secured the 2024 election after the assassination attempt
“I think the first thing I thought after I saw the video and saw that he was okay and that his ear was bleeding was that's it. It's over. Trump's won.”
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: Turkey faces risk of being challenged in NATO in 2024
“I think there's a risk that Turkey gets challenged to leave NATO. That a lot of what's going on right now where Turkey is siding with Hamas, this has obviously been talked about and rumored about for a long time. There's no real mechanism, by the way, for kick…”
Friedberg: TED hosted zero talks explaining why people voted for Trump post-2016
“And what disturbed me the most was that in the three years after he was elected, every TED conference had plenty of subjects, plenty of talks, and plenty of conversations about why society is falling apart, why Donald Trump is a key root cause of that, why so …”
Friedberg: Federal government will launch structured lending program for CRE sector
“My prediction is the federal government is going to help to monetize that debt, and they're going to help to support that commercial real estate sector through some sort of structured lending program.”
Friedberg: Moderna vaccine myocarditis risk up to 30x higher in young people
“The incidence rate is still typically less than two out of every 100,000 people that get the vaccine. But as you saw in the paper you just shared and others have validated it can be as high as 30 times more likely to happen in young people that take the Modern…”
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: Dutch government fired shots at protesting farmers
“The government started shooting at them. They got shot.”
Friedberg: Study shows COVID lockdowns had no effect on US reproduction rate
“A recent paper showed that lockdowns had no effect. On the reproduction rate in the United States”
Friedberg: Delta variant will not crush US hospital system or cause massive fatalities
“There are enough people, people vaccinated in the United States at this point that this Delta variant is not going to crush our hospital system. It's not going to cause massive amount of fatalities, which is the reason we went into lockdowns in the first place…”
Friedberg: Zero documented cases globally of fully vaccinated individuals transmitting COVID
“Besides the statistics on this you know, there is no documented proof that someone was fully vaccinated and transmitted COVID to someone else out of four hundred million total vaccinations globally.”
Friedberg: California spent $100M on a no-bid vaccine website contract
“There was a hundred million dollars spent on Accenture to build the vaccination website. No bid contract.”
Friedberg: California EDD paid $30 billion in fraudulent unemployment claims
“There's a hundred and fourteen billion dollars in unemployment claims paid since COVID. This is an insane statistic, but it looks like roughly 27% or thirty billion dollars of fraudulent claims were paid by the EDD.”
Scientific organizations have definitively shown that glyphosate is non-carcinogenic
“A lot of scientific membership organizations very definitively and clearly show that glyphosate is non-carcinogenic.”
Friedberg: High asymptomatic rate means actual COVID-19 fatality rate is much lower
“If you take that high level, you take that low level, call it somewhere between 25 and 86%, maybe even as high as 86% of patients are asymptomatic, which means that the actual fatality rate is much, much lower even in a large cohort that gets infected here.”
Friedberg says IPCC forecasts in Al Gore's climate movie were disproven
“Al Gore published a movie called Inconvenient Truth. And he used these IPCC forecasts that as of now have been disproven, and many of the assumptions in those forecasts were not correct.”
Friedberg: New tech cuts AI power cost per token by 10,000x
“There are technologies now that are reducing the cost of power per token of output by 10,000 X.”
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: 53% of young conservatives support government-run grocery stores
“53% of self-identified conservatives under 40 support government-run grocery stores.”
Friedberg: 10% tax on $50M+ individuals funds only 3 months of spending
“The total net worth of all people that are worth over fifty million dollars is only 23 trillion. You could take 10% of their net worth and it would only cover three months of fiscal spending, today's fiscal spending.”
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: College administrative staff grew from 10% to 60% in 30 years
“We've seen administrative staff grow from 10% to 60% in the last 30 years.”
Friedberg: At least 15 Fortune 500 companies left California since 2019
“Since 2019, at least 15 Fortune 500 companies have moved out of California, moved their headquarters out, not to mention all the local franchises and everything that moved out. 2100 companies that are mid or large size have moved out of California since 2019.”
Friedberg: OpenAI has 900 million weekly active users
“Open AI, even if they're not at a billion, they're still at nine hundred million weekly users, which is well ahead of whatever Claude is at.”
Friedberg: Study links picloram herbicide exposure to 3x colon cancer risk
“The odds ratio is like three X. It's very strong.”
Friedberg notes Representative Ro Khanna has traded 600 million in stock
“Ro Khanna has traded six hundred million dollars of stock.”
Friedberg: Tech group raising $500M for California political coalition
“So there's a group of people trying to raise five hundred million dollars to create like a tech slash business coalition to go to Sacramento, which arguably is something that everyone's left and avoided doing forever because no one wants to spend time in freak…”
Friedberg: Google will replicate Anthropic Cowork within 90 days
“I will also say that it's only going to take 90 days for Google to flip on a virtual version of co-work.”
Friedberg: US stock market is down since pre-COVID when measured in gold
“You can see that the stock markets in the United States over the past years, so this is about seven and a half years going back to the pre-COVID era, is actually down, down pretty substantively. From the pre-COVID era.”
Friedberg: California wealth tax initiative will not make the ballot
“I don't think it's gonna make the ballot. I mean, look, I think it's not, I'm not saying a hundred percent, I'm saying slight overweight, but it's not gonna get there.”
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: Majority of Americans live on government checks
“I think the majority of Americans today live on checks from the government, through the government”
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 predicts economic growth will produce the world's first trillionaire
“And I think that some folks will see people go from being billionaires to hundred billionaires to the world's first trillionaire.”
Friedberg: SF municipal statistics show crime down 30% citywide
“The city's publication shows crime down 30% citywide and down 40% downtown.”
Friedberg: China publishes majority of papers across most scientific fields
“If you look at papers being published across mainstream scientific journals, the majority of papers today across nearly every scientific domain are being published out of China, and this ranges from physics to chemistry to material science to biotech”
Friedberg: Harvard researcher's Tylenol testimony was thrown out in 2023
“The paper that was published by this guy Baccarelli from I don't know if I'm pronouncing his name right, from Harvard, it's actually been challenged because in 2023 he was called as an expert witness in a lawsuit against the maker of Tylenol. And in that lawsu…”
Friedberg accuses CNN of double standard in reporting on acetaminophen risks
“When it was announced at the Trump conference yesterday, they said Trump links autism to acetaminophen used during pregnancy despite decades of evidence it's safe. And then if you read back, so this is 2017, 20 16, Acetaminophen during pregnancy may increase r…”