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 1,273 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 18 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
Hilton: California's 2016 Housing First law bans sobriety requirements for homeless shelters
“They passed a law in 2016, the only state in America to do it implementing in legislation this approach called Housing First. Which says that you've got to, the number one thing is, and it sounds like a sensible thing, of course, give homeless people housing, …”
Hilton: Developing 1% more California land would house 10 million people
“If we increase the development footprint of California from five percent to six percent, which would still put us really low in, in terms of other states, you could have housing for ten million people in single family homes on quarter acre lots”
Lonsdale: Competitors are weaponizing Reid Hoffman's politics against Joby
“One fund that put a billion dollars in is my friend. Michael Thompson, who he, you know, I feel like I'm friends with both sides, but I'm kind of on the moderate right, I'm on the right, and Michael is on the right, and his partner Reid Hoffman's on the left, …”
Lonsdale: Slow FDA review enables China to commercialize US biotech IP first
“We'll start something here that's based on a new breakthrough, a really important new target, and because the FDA is so slow, because it takes you a decade, and China only takes four or five years, they'll literally start something a few years after taking all…”
Thiel: U.S. military's DCGS software was a failed billion-dollar boondoggle
“There was this software program. This was once we moved from intelligence community into the broader military called DSIGs, which was just sort of this in theory was a system we were supposed to figure out ways to integrate the data across all these units in t…”
Thiel: Top tech CEOs express radically different views in private versus public
“There was a incredible felt sense among all the top CEOs I know in Silicon Valley that there's all the stuff you can't talk about. There are things they tell me behind closed doors that are very different from what they feel they can say in public. And the gap…”
Cotton: CIA joined FBI and DOE in assessing COVID-19 lab origin
“Right before the Biden administration left office, the CIA joined the FBI and the Department of Energy's intelligence unit, saying that it almost certainly came from the laboratory.”
Cotton: A Chinese spy targeted Representative Eric Swalwell and American mayors
“Probably the best example of that is Congressman from California, Eric Swalwell, who was targeted by a Chinese spy, apparently had a romantic relationship with her. She had similar relationships with mayors all across America.”
Cotton: TikTok algorithms suppress content on Hong Kong, Tibet, and Tiananmen Square
“And of course, why you can't see anything on TikTok related to say Hong Kong or Tibet or to Tiananmen Square or the Falun Gong. This is a tool of Chinese communist propaganda.”
Cotton: Trump and Hegseth are willing to order military strikes against cartels
“President Trump is certainly willing to do that. Obviously Pete Hexeth is too.”
Bookman: 1% of Oracle public sector clients sue and over half dissatisfied
“Some of the stats, Oracle, apparently, one percent of its public sector customers end up in lawsuits. And more than half end up, quote, fully dissatisfied.”
Stitt: Executive order banned DEI teaching in Oklahoma universities
“Obviously, I signed an executive order that banned DEI teaching in our universities.”
Gramm: Comprehensive Accounting of Taxes and Transfers Puts US Poverty at 2%
“If you count all transfer payments and taxes, only about two percent of Americans are poor, and most of those are people that have got a problem.”
Gramm: Real Top-to-Bottom Income Ratio Is 4:1, Not 16.7:1
“When you count all the transfer payments, you count all the income the census doesn't count, and you take into account taxes, the ratio of the top to bottom is four to one, not 16.7 to one.”
Phil Gramm: US Inequality Is Lower Today Than in 1947 After Transfers
“Actually, if you count all transfer payments and taxes income inequality is lower today than it was in 1947.”
Gramm: ProPublica fabricated income metric for Buffett tax calculation
“They took his actual taxes, but they didn't take his actual income. They made up an income by saying what would his income have been if he sold every asset he owned every year and paid taxes on it.”
Gramm: US Has the Most Progressive Tax System in the World
“If you look at the actual tax data based on how we define income, The tax system is very progressive, and it's the most progressive tax system in the world.”
Gramm: Confiscating All Billionaire Income Wouldn't Fund US Government for a Week
“If you took every penny of income of billionaires in America, You couldn't fund the 1920, the 2022 government for a week.”
Winston: Economic evidence shows antitrust actions rarely improve consumer welfare
“I went through all the evidence that economists had accumulated. I said, you know, where, where have they done well? You know, monopolization cases, collusion cases, merger cases. Where is there anything strong that shows, yes, consumer welfare, Has improved. …”
Lonsdale: British intel chief believed Iran tricked US into Iraq war
“And one of my mentors ran British intelligence and was involved before the Iraq war in the U.S. And he tells me that the Iranians are very, very clever, the regime and certain people there. And he says that, that he believes from the best intelligence he saw, …”
Orca Bio clinical data shows practically zero transplant-related patient mortalities
“Well, we'll see, but the data so far suggests that we can bring it down to practically zero, right? Zero transplant related mortalities.”
Lomborg: Education returns $65 per dollar versus roughly $2 for climate spending
“Should I be spending money, for instance, on education and get 65 dollars for every dollar spent? Or should I spend it on environment? And if we're very lucky on climate, you can get a couple of dollars back on the dollar.”
Solana: San Francisco Tax Dollars Fund Activists Who Shut Down Bay Bridge
“Taxpayers in San Francisco are being forced to fund organizations that, for example, are shutting down the Bay Bridge. That's just crazy, and nobody knew that until we went and Filed an information request and was like, they're getting paid by the city.”
Ferguson: Jewish students are intimidated and singled out at Stanford
“Jewish students are being intimidated and threatened, singled out in some classes on the Stanford campus.”
Lonsdale: China censors Hollywood films intended for US audiences
“They tell me there's two different looks that Chinese get for every one of their movies. One look is things where they say before it comes out, if you have to censor these or can't go to China, but the other look is things you have to censor for American audie…”
Lonsdale: US Pensions and Endowments Finance Chinese Military Innovation
“We have lots of U.S. Pensions, U.S. Endowments financing their military innovation right now still.”
Slat: Modern per-capita environmental impact is smaller than hunter-gatherers'
“So I think per capita, our environmental impact today is actually smaller than the hunter gatherers.”
Gerstner: ByteDance expects 90% content moderator reduction via AI in next year
“They suspect that they'll see a 90% reduction in content moderators over the course of the next year because that work can be more efficiently and better done by AI.”
Gerstner: Twitter cut headcount 80% while boosting product releases 70%
“Elon, with the work that he's done at Twitter, right, they reduced headcount by 70, 80%. And the product release cycle is probably gone up by at least 70%, right? It's incredible what they have in the pipeline there, and the fact that they're doing this with, …”
Andreessen: Key economic sectors have stagnated or regressed over past 50 years
“Like we we've been in this 50 year period of actually very low productivity growth and very low technological change throughout our society. Which is sort of the opposite of what a lot of people think they've experienced, but like just practically speaking, mo…”
Balaji: Silicon Valley Bank collapsed because it bought U.S. Treasuries
“Neither of those things are what blew up the bank. What blew up the bank is that they bought treasuries.”
Balaji: 2023 bank runs were caused by Fed policies, not social media
“The bank runs started before anybody tweeted, right? And the reason that they happened is because the Fed fundamentally undermined these portfolios.”
Jamie Dimon rejected Tim Geithner's demand to buy Morgan Stanley for $2
“Tim Geithner, who ran the New York Fed, called me and said, look I can't have Morgan Stanley go out of business. I want you to call Jamie Dimon and he will buy your company. No, we're desperate. I called Jamie and he said, John, I don't want your company. He s…”
Johnston: Cuba has better average health outcomes than the US
“Even Cuba has better health outcomes than we do.”
Lonsdale: Ophthalmologist Lobbying Delayed AI Diabetic Retinopathy Approvals for Years
“Yeah, we did the first AI treatment for diabetic retinopathy with the company, and it took You know, because you can scan the eye and see if the diabetes might make them go blind, which you can then treat very, very affordably with AI. And it took us years to …”
Glock: Cities building homes for every unsheltered person saw homelessness increase
“And yeah, San Francisco, Arizona, these other states and cities, they built enough homes for every single unsheltered homeless person in the street. 1015 years later, they have more homeless people in the streets.”
Glock: National Academy of Sciences found Housing First fails to improve health
“You know, as I often cite, the National Academy of Science said, there's no evidence that these housing first units improve the health of the homeless.”
Glock: 70% to 80% of Americans oppose unconditional free housing without sobriety mandates
“When you tell average Americans about this, we do the polls, do you think, ah, you know, basically free homes should be given out with no sobriety or mental health treatments to people on the street? Overwhelming. 70, 80% of people say, of course not. Again, a…”
Meyer: Four homeless people die daily in LA, exceeding military combat mortality
“Well, and so just San Francisco and LA alone, I mean, four people, four homeless individuals die on the streets of LA every day. That death rate is higher than the death rate in Iraq and Afghanistan for soldiers.”
Cowen: University of Virginia lobbies regulators to block GMU degree programs
“To create a new course, I actually need approval through a committee that is attached to the state of Virginia and exists in Richmond... And furthermore, like University of Virginia, our competitor will lobby that committee not to approve like a new degree pro…”
Weiss: Corporate leaders stay silent on ideology because they fear employees
“I was at an extremely interesting dinner the other night with the heads of a bunch of different companies and they all reported back the same thing. In private, they were saying, we're alarmed about what's happening. We're alarmed about the spread of this ideo…”
Kutcher argues architecture exists to bypass end-to-end encryption for CSAM.
“I think people need to realize and recognize that end to end encryption is great and valuable, but there's no reason why we can't create a carve out for this. And the architecture exists to create a carve out for this.”
Florence: Generalist's robotics model demonstrates emergent ambidexterity
“One that we continue to see which has been quite surprising, is that we can take the model trained on everything, the raw pre-trained model, and then we can train it on a new task, and for that new task we might only ever use the right hand when we are demonst…”
Florence: Generalist robots generalize to untrained tools for complex tasks
“Another one is the ability to have some, like, ingenuity around how to use tools in a way that was also not trained for the task. So basically we can ask the robot to do a certain type of task where we've only trained it with one type of tool. We can give it a…”
Florence: Generalist can train robot models on new tasks in minutes
“Yes, we are now starting to get into the modes where we can train a model on, on a new task in, in minutes.”
Florence: Gen-0 was the first model demonstrating scaling laws in robotics
“It was the first model to show scaling laws really exist in, in robotics in, in in really in, in any significant way, I would say.”