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
Gil: Google's Med-PaLM 2 outperformed human physician experts
“Google released a model, I think two years ago called MedPalm too, where if you compare the answers from that model relative to physician experts, it outperformed them. In other words, if you use physicians to train the model will get worse.”
Census Bureau Omits Two-Thirds of Transfer Payments From Household Income
“In measuring household income, the Census Bureau counts only about a third of all transfer payments as income to the recipients. It doesn't count food stamps. It doesn't count housing subsidies. It doesn't count Medicare. It doesn't count, and it doesn't take …”
Gramm: 88% of Government Benefits to the Poor Are Not Counted as Income
“So in total, for the people who are classified as being poor in America, 88% of the benefits that they get from the government are not counted as their income.”
Bottom Quintile Real Government Transfers Grew From $9.7k in 1967 to Nearly $50k in 2017
“In 1967, when the warm poverty ramped up counting all transfer payments as income received, and all taxes paid as income lost, the average family in the bottom 20% of income earners in America got 9700 dollars in real purchasing power dollars adjusted for infl…”
Gramm: US tax code is progressive up to $7.5 million
“But if you look at actual IRS data, the tax code is progressive up to about seven and a half million dollars a year.”
Gramm: Piketty's Inequality Data Excludes Transfers and Counts Asset Gains as Income
“All of his data is based on, when he's talking about inequality, he doesn't count any transfer payments as income, and he doesn't take into account taxes on the upper end, and he does the bait and switch on income on the upper end by saying, We should count th…”
Gramm: Prime-age poor employment fell from 68% to 36%
“When the war on poverty started, 68% of the poor people in America worked. That number is now down to, and that's prime work-age persons, ok? Now it's down to 36%.”
Gramm: Pandemic labor drop occurred because welfare reached middle class
“And in fact, the reason the labor force participation rate fell during the pandemic, even after the pandemic was over, was the benefits had spilled into the middle class.”
Gramm: Two-thirds of US households match 1967 top quintile standard
“Compared to 1967, 66.3% of all American households are now in the top Quintile of earners as compared to 1967. Two-thirds of the people.”
Lonsdale: Regulators destroyed PayPal's early competitors in Europe
“When we were building PayPal, I was a kid there Eliot Spitzer kept trying to destroy the company with regulation, and he came very close to doing so, and in Europe, there actually were companies that, that were destroyed by the regulators, so it's funny, like,…”
Joe Lonsdale Claims Massive Racial Disparities in Top-Level Math Achievement
“So I think right now, for example, between the races, maybe it's not comfortable, but Asians have 25% of them that score, you know, at the top level in math, whereas with Hispanics, it's two percent and blacks is one percent.”
Phil Gramm: China Destroyed Half Its Tech Equity Value Attacking Jack Ma
“When government can't stand someone like Ma, and they attack him and destroy half the equity value of the tech industry in China, You're going to have an impact on growth.”
Greenblatt: ADL represents assaulted Jewish students at Pitt, Michigan, and OSU
“In the past month, since classes started, we tracked, I think we've got about half a dozen assaults, anti-Jewish assaults. We're representing students at Pitt, at Michigan, I think at Ohio State, who've been victimized and assaulted in just the past four to fi…”
Greenblatt: DNI reported Iran is funding and organizing campus protesters
“The Directorate of National Intelligence, the arm of the government that coordinates the FBI and the CIA and the NSA, they reported Iran is providing money And organizing capabilities to these protesters.”
Greenblatt: ADL has never taught or promoted Critical Race Theory
“We never pushed CRT. We don't teach CRT. We don't have a we don't do CRT.”
Liautaud Claims IRS Audits Began After Supporting Mitt Romney in 2012
“The IRS audit started to happen at that time.”
Fryer: Paying students for inputs like homework was wildly successful
“When we paid kids to, so we did two types of experiments. One, we paid them for inputs, right? So we paid them to do specific behaviors or accomplish very specific things that we wanted them to do. Do your homework. Come to school. Don't beat people up. Stuff …”
Fryer: Paying students for academic outputs produced zero results
“On the other hand, when we designed experiments exactly as economic theory thought we should, which is you pay for the actual output, not the input, we got nothing.”
Fryer: Houston charter-practice experiment closed the racial math achievement gap
“We took those five things and we put them in a randomized experiment in Houston in the worst 20 schools there.
And what we showed was that
In three years in the secondary schools, you could close, ah, the racial achievement gap in math, and in five to seven ye…”
Fryer: Pre-market skills account for most Black-white wage disparity
“And what they found out was that that 33% went down to seven percent.”
Fryer: Black-White Median Wage Gap Is Unchanged Since 1950
“If you have the 90th percentile, there's been a lot of convergence between blacks and whites in the last 30 or 40 years, right? But if you're at the median, there's been no, the black white wage gap at the median is the same today as it was in 1950.”
Ross: Trump Taj Mahal's $800M Mortgage Bond Never Paid a Single Coupon
“Merrill Lynch and Bear Stearns underwrote an eight hundred million dollar mortgage bond for a company that was a startup. Trump had a couple million dollars in it, and that was about it. Well, it never paid one coupon. As you know, the coupons were every six m…”
Ross: CCP party secretaries are the most powerful figures in Chinese companies
“Well, if the state owned enterprises, especially, but even a lot of private ones, The party secretary appointed by the communist party is the most powerful person in the company. So it's, he's not under all the regulatory supervision cause it's just party secr…”
Ross: University Survey Found Plurality of Youth Believed US Invented Slavery
“There's a university, I think it's University of Wisconsin, surveys people, 18 to 25 each year, with a bunch of macro questions. And the two most interesting ones on the last survey I saw, the first one was, where was slavery invented? You know what the most p…”
FBI assesses Chinese espionage now surpasses Cold War KGB levels
“The FBI believes that there is more Chinese espionage against this country, both cyber and traditional, than ever during the first Cold War with KGB trying to infiltrate our country, right?”
TSMC is considering completely exiting the foundational legacy chip business
“TSMC now that manufactures both advanced and foundational chips is considering getting out of the foundational chips business entirely because U.S. Government is creating this nice monopoly for them in advance.”
Alperovitch: US leads China in AI and space, but loses badly in green energy
“Well, so on those three, we're winning in the on those four technologies, we're winning the first three. We're losing badly in energy across the board, right? They're dominating batteries. They're now dominating AVs. They're dominating wind and solar and nucle…”
Lowery: US Builds Only Dozens to One Hundred Air Missiles Monthly
“I think our entirety of our short range air missiles that we can build per month are in the dozens.
Like, I think in the tens or the, or maybe end up to like a hundred.
But just orders of magnitude less than what folks can build with consumer electronics.”
Lowery: China Can Probably Build 100,000 Small Drones Monthly
“If you talk group one and group two, China can build probably 100,000 group one and group two systems in a single month.”
Lowery: US Border Experiences Thousands of Drug Drone Incursions Without Interdiction
“They have somewhere along the lines of a couple thousand drone incursions over the border, and all we're doing today is just watching them fly on by. That's all we're doing. We're not doing a thing to them, and they're coming in, and we know they're carrying i…”
Lowery: The US is not the world leader in hypersonics
“There are areas like hypersonics and others where we're not the best in the world”
Langone: Every Harlem Children's Zone Student Has Graduated and Attended College
“And now, every single kid that's going to our school has graduated from our school.
Every one of those kids has gone on to college.”
Hughes: Anti-white comments were routine at Columbia, but never heard antisemitism
“Every week, almost every day, you would hear a student make some offhand comment denigrating white people. In four years there, I'm not sure I ever heard a student make a denigrating comment about Jews.”
Hughes: Most slaves brought to America were enslaved by African tribes first
“Most, all the slaves that were brought here were already slaves in Africa. Okay. They weren't captured like Kunta Kinte. They were slaves enslaved by other African tribes and then sold for goods to Europeans.”
Hughes: Barnard banned Columbia student over viral pro-white civilization speech
“So this was caught on video, went viral throughout campus. He was actually banned from Barnard's campus as a result. Though it didn't actually happen on Barnard's campus.”
Pahlavi: Only 4,000 to 5,000 of Iran's 180,000 Clerics Supported 1979 Revolution
“There were approximately a 180,000 clerics in Iran at the time from ranging from the simple mullah all the way to the highest rank. Out of that 180,000, only four or 5000 were really part of the revolutionary groups. Most of them were opposed to what Khomeini …”
Pahlavi: US-Style Freedom of Religion Existed in Pre-Revolution Iran
“Freedom of religion, as it exists in America, existed in Iran before the revolution.”
Lonsdale: Leonard Leo Put Judges in Place to Fight Regulatory State
“He's put the judges in place to go to war against the broken parts of our regulatory state to fix our government.”
Leo: The Supreme Court is seriously considering overturning Chevron deference
“And so now we're, what we're faced with is a world where the Supreme Court's very seriously considering getting rid of this doctrine because it's been abused and it's violating the separation of powers.”
Lomborg: Top 12 global aid policies return $52 per dollar spent
“So we find 12 amazing things that the world should be doing. We find an average, they will give you 52 dollars back per dollar spent.”
Lonsdale: Boring Company built a station for $30M vs $300M contractor quotes
“When our friend's company with the digs tunnels, right, was gonna big, do a big underground station, they said, let's just use the top government contractor, because we don't do the giant underground station. And the government contractor they hired, It was, t…”
Lomborg: Cold kills 170,000 annually in US and Canada, versus 20,000 heat deaths
“Every year in Canada and the U.S., about 20,000 people die from heat. That, we should absolutely recognize that. But every year, a 170,000 people die in Canada and the U.S. From cold.”
Lomborg: Cheaper gas prevents 12,500 cold deaths annually in the US
“We estimate cheaper gas Meant that 12,500 people did not die from coal every year in the US.”
Michael: 99% of Uber Alumni Call It Their Best Career Experience
“99% of the people who went through Uber say it was the best experience of their life. What you read about is that one percent, and I think people are really longing for that culture again in business.”
Lonsdale: Facebook Team Worked 90-Hour Weeks, Refuting Moskovitz on 40-Hour Work
“I totally disagree with Dustin Moskovitz's thing where he's like, oh, you can work 40 hours a week and be just as successful. I'm like, I know they were working 90 hours on Facebook for the first several years.”
Emil Michael: Uber has paid roughly $100B to drivers over time
“Uber over time has probably paid a hundred billion dollars to drivers. A hundred billion dollars.”
Lonsdale: Marc Andreessen is spending $75M on D.C. tech policy lobbying
“I know Marc Andreessen and his team spending seventy-five million dollars for the first time hiring people in D.C. To fight for these values”
Lonsdale: 1920s German University Ideologies Contributed to Nazism
“If you go back to Germany in the 19 twenties, you had the top universities in the world. You had some really popular ideologies take hold there that ended up spreading and creating what we had with Nazism in Germany in the 19 thirties.”