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 380 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: 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: 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: 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 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.”
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: 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: 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 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 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: 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…”
Friedberg: Energy monetization ramp-up won't cover US deficit within 4 years
“But I'm not sure that the ramp up is gonna be fast enough to make up for the deficit over the next four years.”
Friedberg: FTC estimates PBMs extracted $7.3B in excess specialty drug markups
“The FTC has been investigating them and have several open cases between 2017 and 2022. The estimate that these companies generated 7.3 billion dollars in excess profit by marking up prices. On specialty generic drugs.”
Friedberg: Harvard charged 69% administrative overhead on federal research grants
“So at Harvard, you know what the administrative overhead was up until Feb. 15th? 69%.”
Friedberg: El Salvador's mass detentions cut homicide rate from 103 to 1.9
“And through that action, they were able to reduce the homicide rate per capita below two per 100,000, which is what it was last year, 1.9.”
Friedberg: China builds Gen 4 nuclear power at a tenth US cost
“Half the time, a 10th of the cost, and there's a regulatory path for Gen four reactors going up in China versus here.”
Friedberg predicts the Trump administration will reach a trade deal with China
“And I think that they're going to get a deal done given the position with China. I think that they're very likely to kind of get a deal done.”
Friedberg: Only three major accidents occurred across 440 global nuclear reactors
“There's 440 nuclear power reactors operating in 32 countries around the world. Since the time that we first had nuclear reactors, which has now been almost a century, there have been three incidents. Chernobyl, Fukushima, and Three Mile Island. At Three Mile I…”
Friedberg: No human-created energy system can form a hurricane
“There is no human-created energy system that can force, form a hurricane.”
Friedberg: 100-year storms will happen every two to three years
“And those continuously warmer oceans means that we're going to have what used to be called a one in 500 year storm, which is what Asheville is being termed at one in 500 year. These sorts of storm events can happen every couple years. And we're now looking at …”
Friedberg: Post-stimulus inflation unfolded precisely as Larry Summers warned
“He did make that declaration against his own party, Mark, and he said this is the wrong thing. As a Democrat, he said this is the wrong thing to do, and they went forward with what they planned to do for various reasons. Some would argue political, some would …”
Friedberg: Study finds 328 micrograms of microplastics per gram in human testicles
“Anyway, they got 23, 23 of these balls from these bodies, and they found plastics on average, 328 micrograms per gram of testicle in, in these balls.”
Friedberg: Google kept AlphaFold 3 proprietary instead of open-sourcing the code
“They've basically kept all the IP for AlphaFold III in Isomorphic. So Google is going to monetize the heck out of this capability. And what they made available was not open source code, but a web-based viewer that scientists for, quote, non-commercial purposes…”
Friedberg: No other country forces companies to amortize R&D expenses
“There's no other country in the world that does this. Every other country in the world tries to incentivize investment in innovation.”
Friedberg: Search ad revenue generates ~100% of Google's true operating profit
“And so the search margin, the ad revenue on search, Is, you know, probably a hundred percent of the true operating profit of the business.”
Friedberg: Major IP owners like Disney will license content to AI in 2024
“Rights holder is getting licensing deals for generative AI, or there's gonna be a couple of blockbuster deals this year. Where you'll see like Disney license out a chunk of their library.”
Friedberg: LP capital and startup funding will fall significantly in aggregate
“On a day to day basis, it means there's gonna be less companies that are going to get funded, but more importantly, it's gonna be less LP money going into venture. And there's going to be less capital available to fund startups in aggregate by a significant am…”
Friedberg: Five labs published modeling papers supporting LK-99 superconductivity
“Five different labs have now published papers that show that the way that this material is supposedly produced, it should create these pathways or these energy states with the electrons that theoretically could enable superconductivity at a very high temperatu…”
Friedberg: TikTok will be forced to spin off to US investors
“I think they're probably gonna have to spin this thing out. And if they hold any equity, if the Chinese parent company holds any equity interest, it'll probably be non-voting shares. And there'll be a mandate that the majority of the shares and some degree of …”
Friedberg: Ranga Dias falsely claimed raising $20M from Sam Altman and Daniel Ek
“And he actually had a talk that he did that was published on YouTube, a year later, where he said he raised twenty million dollars from Sam Altman and Daniel Ek and a bunch of other investors. And it turns out that also wasn't true.”
Friedberg: Study finds persistent spike protein in post-vaccine myocarditis patients
“The big difference that they found was that the people that had Myocarditis actually had a lot of the spike protein floating around in their blood, whereas the people that didn't did not have the spike protein floating around in their blood.”
Friedberg: Google Search ranking relies on significant manual intervention
“And it was always the secret at Google. How did the search results get ranked? And I can tell you, it's not just a pure algorithm that there was a lot of manual intervention, a lot of manual work.”
Friedberg: Generative AI will be Silicon Valley's next hype and bubble cycle
“My guess is the next hype cycle, the next bubble cycle in Silicon Valley will absolutely be this generative AI business.”
Friedberg: Alphabet will inevitably lay off 5% to 10% of employees
“It is inevitable. There's going to be some cutting. So I think that there will likely be some reduction five percent, 10%, 10, 10,000 employees.”
Friedberg: Saccharin and sucralose impair glycemic control unlike aspartame
“And what they found was that if you eat saccharin and sucralose, which we always assumed were better than sugar, they actually adversely affect your ability to control blood glucose. Saccharin and sucralose in particular drive up your blood glucose and makes i…”
Friedberg: Silicon Valley IPOs standardly include 4% annual evergreen share dilutions
“The standard in Silicon Valley today when a company goes public in an IPO is to have what's called an evergreen stock grant proposal. And evergreen basically means that every year the company is authorized, the board automatically authorizes the issuance of so…”
Friedberg: Global food crisis will hit Sri Lanka and Africa hard
“The United States is going to be fine. Western Europe will be fine. China will be fine. Sri Lanka is gonna be a mess. Northern and Eastern Africa is gonna be a mess.”