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 396 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
Evans: US De Minimis Rule Gives Temu a Massive Tax Advantage
“There is a rule in the US that for orders of a value of less than 800 dollars, there's no import taxes or different, much less, or different import taxes. And so if you were running a store in the U.S. And shipping a shipping container full of garments to Amer…”
Evans: Social platforms previously blocked COVID lab leak and mask efficacy posts
“I mean, the kind of the case study here is when social networks decided to block anybody Suggesting that masks weren't very useful during COVID or block anybody suggesting that maybe COVID had leaked from a Chinese biology research lab. And I think now, I don'…”
Evans: Netflix outspends all broadcasters in top five European markets combined
“Netflix's content budget, which is what's the number? 15,000,000,016 billion dollars a year. Last time I looked, that was more than all broadcasters spent in the top five European markets combined.”
Evans: McKinsey finds 90% of managers tried AI, but few use it
“This is a study from McKinsey, which is, you know, how many people in big company management have at least tried this? And the answer is like, 70, 80, 90%, depending on industries. But people using it for work is sort of three, four, five, maybe 10%.”
Evans: Twitter cut 80% of staff and withheld contractual severance
“And meanwhile, Twitter fired 80% of the staff and an awful lot of them have said it's failing to pay them their contractual severance payments.”
Benedict Evans: Screen shortages will cap 2024 Vision Pro sales
“And so Apple will sell, pick a number, tens to low hundreds of thousands of them next year, but picking a number wildly out of thin air, apparently people in supply chain say they'll be very supply constrained on the screen.”
Benedict Evans: Meta Quest has only single-digit millions of regular users
“So Meta sold maybe twenty million. That you have survey data that says that maybe 10 or 20% of people are actually using them regularly, which is not a great number. So there's like single digit numbers of millions of people using this thing.”
Benedict Evans: Meta has spent at least $35 billion on Reality Labs
“Meta has spent, I think, at least thirty five billion dollars on this stuff. Because they spent like over thirty billion dollars on operating losses for the Reality Labs group, offset a bit by revenue from selling hardware and games. And they bought Oculus, an…”
Benedict Evans: Apple's laptop-grade silicon gives Vision Pro an architectural advantage
“Apple is using a high-end laptop SAC in this thing because they have their own, which has massively better performance per watt than anything from Intel. Guess what Meta has to use? They have to use a smartphone chip from Volcom.”
Evans: The iPhone 15 will feature a 3D video camera
“I think it's now blinding the obvious that the iPhone 15 will have a three D video camera so that you can create content that will flow into this.”
Evans: Meta spends billions inventing tech, unlike Apple's original off-the-shelf iPhone
“Meta is spending tens of billions of dollars every year on all of that Moore's law, because where Apple could basically sit on top of an awful lot of technology that already existed, like they didn't need to create ARM from scratch. They didn't need to invent …”
Evans: Apple appears set to launch pass-through VR, not AR glasses
“It doesn't sound like it. It sounds like they're planning to do that with a VR headset.”
Evans: Amazon's $38B Ad Revenue Surpasses Global Newspapers and Prime
“And thirty eight billion dollars is bigger than the global newspaper industry, which of course is now much reduced. It's also bigger than Amazon Prime.”
Evans: US Has 5 to 10 Times More Retail Space Per Capita
“Well, so there's a chart in my presentation of retail square, square foot per capita in, in which the U S has like five to 10 times more retail square foot per capita than anywhere else. And half of that is is, is malls in which the U S has basically massively…”
Evans: Google pays Apple nearly $20B for default iPhone search
“Google pays, Apple pays, Apple probably close to twenty billion dollars to be the default search engine on the iPhone.”
Evans: AI search answers will drain web traffic from lifestyle publishers
“But if I'm going to say, you know, write me an itinerary for hotels, restaurants, and architecture in Barcelona, I'm going to get, that's going to produce less click-through, and so that's going to be less traffic for Condé Nast Traveler, it's going to be less…”
Evans: ChatGPT passes the Turing test by producing C-grade answers
“ChatGPT can pass the Turing test. I mean, you may not think it's a very bright person. I mean, this is the thing. I was plugging in my questions. I remember from when I was at history undergraduate, like, yeah, these are all C grade D grade answers. They are a…”
Goldberg: Moore's Law has slowed from 18 months to five years
“Moore's law is slowing, right? It is not 18 months anymore. It's five years.”
Evans: 30% to 40% of top Amazon sellers are Chinese companies
“Something like 30 or 40% of the top Amazon marketplace sellers are actually Chinese companies.”
Evans: YouTube creator payouts rival major TV studio programming budgets
“And then of course they pay out 45% of the ad revenue to the creators, which makes, puts their budget somewhere sort of Makes them sort of top three, top four. If you count that as programming budget, comparable to the US media companies, that would put them s…”
Evans: Generative AI will create a massive flood of automated search spam
“You're going to have people generating content in response to what they think search traffic is automatically. So you will have automatically generated video with automatically generated voice targeting search queries at massive scale. There will be a new floo…”
Evans: Modern tech company returns occur mostly in private markets pre-IPO
“Tech companies of the eighties and nineties, like 80 or 90% of the returns to investors came in after the IPO. Let's say IPO at a hundred million dollars, and then they end up being a fifty billion dollar company. Whereas for something like Google or Facebook …”
Evans: One Medical holds no meaningful market power in US healthcare
“There's no possible basis on which you can say One Medical has any kind of meaningful market power in the US healthcare industry.”
Evans: Shein uses browsing traffic to trigger 200-unit manufacturing batches
“You know, there's all sorts of different narratives about this, but you know, at a very, at a minimum, they're ordering in very short, small numbers. They may not even have actually ordered that product before they list it on the site. They're making 200 of th…”
Evans: Shein surpassed Zara and H&M combined in US sales
“No, Ernest, which is this company that does credit card, aggregates credit card bills, sort of said it's now the same size as Zara and H&M, and now, at the end of last year, it's bigger than Zara and H&M combined in US purchasing”
Evans: Shein raised at a $100B valuation, surpassing Zara and H&M combined
“And Sheehan raised this week at a hundred billion dollars, which Company we talked about before and is now bigger than Zara and H&M combined globally.”
Evans: Russian daily jet losses exceed US losses in entire Gulf War
“Just today, I think the Russians have had half a dozen jets shot down, which is more than America had in the whole Gulf War.”
Evans: TSMC manufactures roughly 75% of current-generation semiconductor chips
“TSMC Really in the last five years moved from being one of many players in chips to dominating cutting into chip. So, you know, current generation chips are, I forget the number, three quarters TSMC.”
Evans: Leading-edge chip fab capex will climb from $20B to $40B
“Which is why Intel had this, you know, this capital project to build new chip capability in the US, and it was twenty billion dollars. And that's just this generation. And there's going to be 40, it's going to be forty billion dollars next year. And the number…”
Evans: China regulates algorithmic feeds while US and EU lag far behind
“So like, you know, very, very detailed thing on how algorithmic content moderation should work, and how algorithmic content feeds should work, which the EU and the US have not anywhere close to having. Like, now here's a law on how the news feed should work.”
Evans: 0.5% of iPhone users generate half of App Store spending
“Second observation is we know from the disclosures in the Epic trial that about 80% so Apple did fifteen billion dollars. Apple gives a number. They did fifteen billion dollars in App Store commission. 65, sixty-five billion dollars, I think, of total money sp…”
Evans: 0.5% of App Store Accounts Generated 54% of Billings in 2016
“Not .5% of accounts spent over 450 dollars in the quarter. Not sure if this is quarter or month, I have to go and check. Same point, really. And those users were 54% of total App Store billings.”
Evans: No large company will build its own data center anymore
“But clearly like no one is building their own data center. No big company is going to say, right, we're going to have our own data center now and Everyone, you know, the next generation is clearly the cloud.”
Cowan-Brown: Shein turns around fashion production in two to three days
“Unlike Zara or Asus, and most people have gotten familiar with their e-commerce model and being able to turn things around in two or three weeks. Shein is turning things around in two or three days, which is absolutely insane.”
Li: Sea, Grab, Gojek, and Rappi Credit Chinese Tech Rather Than US Giants
“See, which is like a super app in, in Southeast Asia credits a lot of its innovation and the way they think about app building to Tencent as do Grab, Gojack, and Rappi in Brazil. You know, they credit Chinese tech for, and the way of kind of, you know, buildin…”
Li: Chinese platform fines targeted exclusive vendor lock-in agreements
“So if you're a supplier to Alibaba, you can't go on Pinduoduo or JD. They would sometimes make you sign an inclusive, exclusive agreement with them, which would be very, you know, anti-competitive in most parts of the world. But they've managed to sort of have…”
Evans: The claim that Facebook sells user data is factually untrue
“I think the phrase Facebook sells your data is fascinating here, not primarily because it's just factually untrue, but because it's sort of an attempt to come up with a clearer way of describing what somebody thinks the problem is.”
Evans: US advertising as a share of GDP dropped 33% since 2000
“The chart that I've done of long-term US advertising since 1950, I did as a share of GDP, mainly as a way to adjust for inflation. But the interesting thing that it shows, it suggests, is that US advertising as a share of GDP has gone down by about a third sin…”
Evans: US text bot hype was fueled by false WeChat narratives
“And there was a moment three and four years ago when everyone in America was very excited about bots, text bots, and there was this whole narrative, well, that's how WeChat works, and WeChat's got hundreds of millions of users, so this must be a thing. It turn…”
Cowan-Brown: UK Has More CCTV Cameras Than Rest of Europe Combined
“The UK, the utter refusal of having ID cards and yet it's the country with the most CCTV cameras by far, I think you, if you put together all of the CCTV cameras of everyone else in Europe, the UK still has more.”
Evans: Ben Thompson is wrong, email open rates depend on algorithms
“I love Ben Thompson, but he keeps saying there's no algorithm in email, like, Ben, have you looked at your open rates? Because I've looked at mine, and yeah, there is a fucking algorithm.”
Evans: FTC seeks contradictory consent decrees on Facebook data APIs
“Today's FTC is demanding a consent decree that says Facebook has to open up Data APIs. And two years ago, they got another consent decree that said Facebook has to close down its data APIs.”
Evans: Covid pandemic compressed five years of e-commerce growth into two quarters
“We've had, you know, three, four, five years worth of growth happen in like two quarters.”
Cowan-Brown: There is no global definition of hate speech
“I mean, when I used to work at nation builder, we had also such a hard time of defining. And again, it's a little bit different there because it's not a platform that amplifies I'll come back to that in a second, but it's not a platform. You don't go there to …”
Evans: UK is two to three years ahead of US in tech adoption
“The UK is probably two or three years ahead of the USA on average in adoption of technology in things like adoption of smartphones, adoption of social media, particular adoption of e-commerce. Now that's the USA as an, it may not be ahead of California, but it…”
Evans: Typical large companies run 400 to 500 SaaS applications
“The typical big company today has four to 500 SaaS apps, and many of those are bought bottom up.”
Evans: Agentic Coding Has Driven Token Demand Up Multiple Orders of Magnitude
“And as hopefully everyone listening to this will understand, like in the last six months or so, the sudden product market fit of agentic coding means that demand for tokens has gone up by many orders of magnitude, and the model labs have been sort of scramblin…”