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 12 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
Smith: Government-run grocery stores will drain public funds and crush bodegas
“So if you make government run grocery stores, it'll do two things. Number one It will outcompete all the little indie grocery stores and bodegas, thus like a meager source of capital and wealth accumulation for like poor people in poor neighborhoods... And the…”
Smith: AI productivity boom requires reorganizing production processes, not replacing workers
“Eventually we may like people will come along and say, you know what?
I could just organize my company entirely different to take more advantage of AI.
And I don't just have to replace my humans with AI.
I just have the humans do different things and the AI do…”
Smith: AI-vulnerable occupations continue rising as share of US jobs
“Returning to a measure reintroduced in two, 20, 23, we examine American data on employment by occupation, singling out workers that are believed to be vulnerable to AI. These are white collar employees, including people in back office support, financial operat…”
Smith: IBM fired workers for AI automation and had to rehire
“So we saw this thing where IBM fired all these people because it thought they could replace their jobs with AI and then had to hire them all back, had to hire like a ton of people back. Maybe not the exact same people, not doing the exact same things, but for,…”
Noah Smith: US Wage Inequality Has Decreased for Over Ten Years
“Right around the time that this thesis started becoming very well accepted and popular, wage inequality started to go down and wages started rising more at the bottom of the distribution than at the middle or top. And so we've seen that for now over 10 years. …”
Smith: China is manufacturing 100 nuclear weapons per year
“China's building a hundred nuclear weapons a year.”
Noah Smith: Trump immigration crackdown will have negative but modest economic impact
“I think the net impact of the Trump immigration crackdown will be fairly economically will be negative, but not huge.”
Noah Smith: Tariff-driven inflation threat will keep Fed interest rates higher
“The threat of tariff-driven inflation will lead the Fed to keep interest rates higher a little longer, as we just saw with Powell.”
Noah Smith: Tariffs and policy uncertainty will gradually erode US economic strength
“I think that, that those will erode our economic strength in ways that don't look like an abrupt crash, but they'll look like data getting, like, a little bit worse and a little bit worse. That's my prediction, but again, hard to say.”
Smith: Rising relative unemployment for college grads began in 2009
“Young graduates, relative unemployment started to rise in 2009 long before generative AI came along. So this trend long, long, long predates AI. It's been going on the relative unemployment of you know, college graduates relative to other people has been risin…”