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 32 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: No competing AI app has more than 5% of ChatGPT's usage
“Go look at App Store ranking, or Google Trends, or usage data of any kind that you can get, and you see that basically it's ChatGPT, and then none of the others are more than five percent of that.”
Evans: Product search moved almost entirely from Google to Amazon
“What's happened in the last decade or so is product search has moved almost entirely from Google to Amazon.”
Russia cannot manufacture new tanks due to foreign semiconductor shortages
“So the Russians are fucked, because they can't even make new tanks, because they can't get the components.”
Evans: Waymo is delivering close to 1 million rides per day
“Waymo is doing close to a million rides a day”
Catton-Brown: All 10 Formula 1 teams recently became profitable
“In the last two or three years only, have all of the teams, for the first time in the history of Formula One, have the 10 teams across the grid been profitable. For 70 plus years, these teams were operating at a loss.”
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: 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…”
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: Average corporate audit costs have remained flat since 2003
“What I was wondering is, is there data on what the average company pays for an audit? And it turns out it is, there is, and it hasn't changed since about 2003.”
Brody: US high school senior dating rates fell 50% in 15 years
“In, in some of the math, you know, so the number of high school seniors in the United States who date has decreased by 50% over the last 15 years.”
Goldberg: 90% of annual chip volume uses trailing-edge 80nm+ processes
“The number of chips produced every year, or the wafers produced every year, 90% of them are what we would call trailing edge processes, you know, 80 nanometer and up.”
Evans: Germany is doubling its defense budget after decades of military underfunding
“Germans are doubling their defense budget. Having spent, you know, 30 years not spending, you know, nearly enough and leaving, well, not just not spending enough, but like, you know, there've been all these sorts of stories, like the German Air Force didn't ha…”
Amazon managed net income to zero for 25 years by continuously reinvesting
“What Amazon did was they, if you look at the P&L for the last 25 years, they basically managed net income to zero. It was always zero, even as the revenue went up.”
Evans: Tesla market cap roughly equals top 40 auto companies combined
“Tesla's market cap is roughly equivalent to The market cap of like the top 40 companies in the auto business.”
Evans: Barcode adoption grew US supermarket SKUs fivefold over a decade
“And there's this massive inflection point in the mid seventies when they deployed barcodes and the number of screws goes up by about five X over the next decade.”
Evans: Shein will do $40 billion in clothing sales this year
“Sheehan will do forty billion dollars in, in, in, in clothing sales this year.”
US original scripted series doubled from 900 to 1,900 in a decade
“Variety reckon that original shows, so this is not including scripted, so this is, so like news, news programs and things, script, original scripted series, Is now about, there are about 1900 shows in twenty-twenty-one. And in 2010, there were about 900.”
Evans: The Ukrainian government is attempting to raise a crypto bond
“So now, of course, if you are the government of Ukraine, and then you can raise a bit, they are trying to raise a crypto bond right now.”
Evans: More people use Snapchat than own a gaming console
“More people use Snapchat than have a games console. And so, I'm so true, you know, Snapchat has like, I think, four, four, Snapchat has four hundred million DAUs, and there's maybe a hundred and fifty million people with a games console.”
Evans: Roughly Two-Thirds of Major Fashion Labels Are Owned by Three Conglomerates
“Pretty much every major fashion label you could think of, or like, say two-thirds of them are owned by either LVMH, Kering, or Richemont.”
Evans: The Telegraph was once the UK's largest bed linen retailer
“About 20 years ago, The Telegraph was the UK's largest retailer of, like, bed linen or towels or something.”
Evans: Google and Facebook hold at least two-thirds of online advertising
“So something like half of online advertising is search, which means, mostly means Google. And then like another maybe 10 or 20%, I'm picking these numbers from memory, is Facebook. So Google and Facebook, between them, have at least two-thirds of online advert…”
Benedict Evans: US TV adoption surged from zero to 80% in three years
“US TV went from basically zero to 80% in like three years.”
Vodafone Still Processes 2.5 Million Paper Invoices Per Year
“Vodafone has two and a half million paper invoices a year.”
Evans: US non-grocery e-commerce surged to 29% before settling at 26%
“If you exclude grocery, it was 29%. Sorry, it was 21 and a half percent. It went to 29%. It's now down 26%.”
Evans: US physical clothing retailers saw their online sales double
“In the US online clothing sales, online sales by clothing retailers. Doubled. That does, that's not telling you anything about what's happening in Amazon. That's just telling you traditional physical stores that also sell online. Yeah. Their online sales doubl…”
Evans: Yelp launched in the UK with 'guns and sporting goods' category
“When the Yelp launched in the UK, probably 10 years ago, they had guns and sporting goods as a top level category for retailers.”
Devins: Vision Pro Headset Alone Is Slightly Lighter Than Quest Pro
“IFixit worked out that actually if you adjust for that, that, that, that, that, that this device without the battery, there's just a bit that you, well, your head doesn't have a battery, it's actually, we're slightly lighter than the Quest Pro, which does incl…”
Goldberg: Most chip companies had 20% to 30% gross margins in early 2000s
“When I started covering the industry in the early 2000, gross margins for chip, most chip companies were in the 30 percents, the 20 percents.”