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 26 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 26 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
Handmer: Desalinated water can be produced for $99 per acre-foot
“So I believe that it should be possible to produce water, desalinated water, for 99 bucks an acre foot, which would be transformational, right?”
Handmer predicts China will beat the United States to the Moon
“Relax the outer space treaty in 2017 with the outer space, so the Artemis Accords, so we can go and kind of make a land grab on the moon, and then it turns out China's going to get there first.”
Vogt: Next $100B company founded in 2025-2026 will have under 100 people
“I think the next hundred billion dollar company that's created, you know, in 25, 26 will be under a hundred people.”
Pichai: 40 million Americans will soon have Wing drone delivery access
“In some reasonable time period, like, forty million Americans will have access to a Bing delivery service, right? And I'm not talking years out or something like that.”
Taylor: SaaS sector will likely lose value over the next ten years
“Will these companies be less valuable 10 years from now than now? I think the answer is probably yes. Will that be true for every individual company? I don't think that's true.”
Pope: Model parameter counts will grow much faster than context lengths
“Really tied into this context thing, I think the context size will stay ballpark the same way it is, maybe a few times larger. But the parameter count will go up. Like, parameter count should grow much, much faster than context length, actually, just because o…”
Ben Thompson: The tech industry faces a massive chip shortage around 2029
“I think we're looking at a massive short, shortness in chips in 20, 29 or so.”
Handmer predicts Hyperloop will never happen
“Is Hyperloop ever gonna happen?
[79] Casey Handmer: No.
[80] Casey Handmer: I think I can safely say that now.”
AI data centers will inevitably scale on solar and batteries, not nuclear
“It seems pretty clear to me, I think two years ago, I've got a blog post on this saying that, like, we're going to have to go to solar and batteries for AI data centers at scale and back then everyone was still talking about, like, oh, we're going to build SMR…”
China's electrification will end its dependence on Strait of Malacca oil
“Do you think by 2035 China is still going to be as dependent on oil through the Strait of Malacca? I don't. At the rate that they're deploying right now, they could cut off that supply if they needed to.”
Sundheim: US electricity demand will grow 4% annually over 20 years
“Electricity demand in the United States grew at zero percent for the last 20 years. And so, if you think about the next 20 years, I think electricity demand will grow at four percent.”
Scaringe: Rivian steady-state vehicle sales will achieve 20% to 25% gross margin
“Vehicle sales, let's say that comfortably sitting it when we get to the right steady state, the 20 to 25% gross margin.”
Wu: Developers will stop using code as primary interface in 2-4 years
“I think that there will come a point, and my guess on this point is probably in the neighborhood of, let's say, two, three, four years from now, where we stop using code as the main interface.”
Wu: The transition to AI will create far more software engineers
“Funnily enough, I mean, I think, if anything, we will have way more software engineers, not fewer.”
Snap is about to reach one billion monthly active users
“We're about to reach a billion monthly active users, which is a big deal for us.”
Snap is on the verge of net income profitability
“We're also on the verge of net income profitability, which is really exciting for us, especially as we invest really meaningfully in hardware and our specs glasses effort.”
Langley: US crime rate is down and will continue falling
“It is down. I think it'll continue to go down.”
Staniszewski: Advanced voice AI will reach cars via cloud in 2026
“I think this year it should be in the automotive
Site two, or some of the applications.
John Collison: Okay, so you think we'll start seeing kind of great voice models in cars this year?
Mati Staniszewski: This year for their own cloud use cases, like on, on, …”
Cacioppo: Modernizing FedRAMP will increase divergence among compliance standards
“I don't think they will. I think you're just going to have even more divergence between these things. You're just like, less control overlap.”
Pope: MatX will sell AI inference chips first due to lower risk
“Our product is both training and inference, but I think the first sales will be an inference. That's mostly just a market effect where It's easier to buy, like, it's not as big of a risk to go to buy an inference cluster than as a training cluster.”
Collison: 60% of US small businesses use vertical SaaS platforms
“Today, 60% of all small businesses in America use vertical SaaS platforms to help run their business.”
Ben Thompson: The semiconductor market will have excess memory capacity soon
“We're going to believe it or not. We are going to have too much memory capacity in a few years because we have such a shortage right now.”
Bowman: 17% of UK taxpayers will pay higher rates by 2029
“By 2029, so in four years, 17%
Of taxpayers are going to be higher rate taxpayers.
So, fiscal drift, which is just holding the bands constant and letting inflation push people into the higher rate, the 40, the 40, but really forty-two-pee rate is, I mean, more…”