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 440 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
Arata: Severe fallout for minor infractions is a necessary cultural correction
“And in this period of time some men are going to get their heads chopped off metaphorically for misdeeds, regardless of the largesse or the minuteness of the infraction. And so that's an unnecessary thing that happens, but it's also necessary until the attenti…”
Siddar: China's rigorous system prevents erratic leaders like Donald Trump
“I'm more worried about Donald Trump being the president of the United States than any person who can be the Chinese president, because I know the Chinese system will not produce a crazy president.”
McGregor: SIM card infrastructure should replace representative government with direct democracy
“These individuals, a small percentage of people representing all of us, that methodology, whatever it is, is not working. What if we could use the SIMS to enable and understand all the good standing people in the world? And what if major issues could be voted …”
Weisbrot: OpenClaw is too destructive to exist and should be deleted
“I don't think it should exist at all. I think the code base should be deleted. I don't think people should have the opportunity to figure out how to make it safer because the opportunity for destruction is just way too great.”
Santos: CEOs Who Do Not Intentionally Create Problems Should Be Fired
“CEOs, if they are not intentionally creating problems for their organization to solve, they should be fired or retrained immediately.”
Jamison: Venture capital's heyday is over due to excess capital
“And also when it comes to venture, I think venture's heyday is kind of over, at least for now. I think there's too much money has entered the space, so too many companies that shouldn't have been funded have been funded.”
Corkadillo: Apple is foolish to build custom chips instead of using NVIDIA
“Apple tries to create their own, they're idiots. They should be working with NVIDIA at the highest levels to figure it out.”
Weisbrot: Asian workers struggle to express themselves and defer to Americans
“And I found that Asians are really bad at expressing themselves because they're afraid of being rejected. It's just, you know, plus they also defer to Americans.”
Miller: SEC used extreme, unethical enforcement tactics mirroring the show 'Billions'
“If you've seen that show billions, that, that New York AG in there, like they, there were some points of really extreme things that the SEC did that I'm not going to disclose. That is very similar to how they operate in billions. And it's quite unethical, but …”
Weisbrot: Zuckerberg Falls Out With Acquired Founders And Destroys Their Companies
“So every company he's purchased, the founders and him have a falling out afterwards. He pays well, but then he basically destroys your company from the inside out.”
Szamosszegi: Proof of Work is the best market incentive to fix methane
“Proof of work is the strongest capitalist incentive that we have in the economy to fix the methane problem.”
Bimani: General population in Tanzania expects handouts over hard work
“One thing I noticed in Tanzania was that they expect people to hand them money because they're poor, and they really don't want to work too hard to get ahead, as far as the general population goes.”
Naylor: Shark Tank producers leak pitch details to the Sharks
“There was a lot of comments and statements and questions that they shouldn't have known. Unless it was a hundred percent leaked to them through this confidence, you know, relationship you had with the junior producer.”
Garcia-Cotte: Western brands severely distrust Chinese startups for anti-counterfeiting solutions
“Like, obviously, a Chinese team would have a hard time convincing Western brands that they are trustworthy for anti-counterfeiting. It's sad to say, but it's the reality.”
Zhang: Many Bay Area software engineers are 'very spoiled'
“And quite frankly speaking, a lot of engineers in the Bay Area are very, in my opinion, spoiled.”
Siddar: Chinese infrastructure firms trade poor construction for African mining concessions
“Chinese infrastructure companies in Africa are very aggressive. They are getting these mining concessions. They say, look, we don't want to charge you. Just give us the mining concession in that gold mine. And we will build your bridges, roads, highways, airpo…”
Mercer: Corporations Are the Biggest Recipients of Welfare
“You know, you and I both know that corporations are the biggest recipients of welfare, and all my corporate leaders know that, and they might try to, you know, we may argue with it, but we know it's true.”
Weisbrot: The leaders of the world's biggest companies have psychopathic tendencies
“The people that run the biggest companies in the world are, have psychopathic tendencies.”
Fallows: Only commission-earning salespeople pitch whole life insurance
“The only person who is trying to sell you a whole life insurance is someone who's getting a commission on whole life insurance.”
Weisbrot: Investors are really good at ruining businesses and founders' lives
“Between you and me, investors are really good at ruining businesses and your life, but some people need investment money to be able to scale what they're doing.”
Jamison: AI Venture Bets Resemble Airlines With High Capital and No Moats
“If you take all the profits of all the airlines over time, it's negative for investors. Like shareholders have had a negative return for that because they've just kind of competed themselves away. There's no giant moat to get those monopoly profits. And it's a…”
Stuart Cohen: Crypto and Blockchain Have Produced History's Biggest Corruption
“And actually the biggest corruption Of all time has kind of come from the whole crypto blockchain world, you know?”
Weisbrot: AI Aims to Replace Human Functionality in Society
“I think AI's goal is to replace humans functionality in society. So our existence is a threat to its usefulness.”
Nikic: AI access to energy grids risks single-click critical infrastructure shutdowns
“If they're going to have access to these energy databases and centers, they can just with one click turn it all off. And we have no energy. It can affect food, transportation, and healthcare.”
Weisbrot: Businesses claiming AI won't eliminate jobs are lying
“No matter how much anyone says AI is not going to be implemented into my business in order to remove humans. Yeah, no, you're wrong or you're lying because everyone, especially in this kind of a climate is going to fire people and look to replace them with hum…”
Weisbrot: East Asian face-saving culture causes founders to make unkept commitments
“If they're Chinese in particular, Chinese, Hong Kong, Taiwanese, Singaporean. There's this need to preserve face, and that may require you to say something or do something That makes you look good, even if it's not reality.”
Weisbrot: Pitching social causes is an emotionally manipulative way to fundraise
“I get scared when someone tells me that they're going to do something like that, because my, the first thing that comes to my mind is you're just trying to get to like some mushy side of me that just wants to like give you money because I believe in this and I…”
Robles: People who separate emotions from business partnerships are mostly narcissists
“I've met very few people that can separate that out. You know, I do believe that there are some, and most of them are narcissists.”
Bramlett: 99% of available copywriters are worthless
“If you type in, I need a copywriter. There's so many options and 99% of them are worthless.”
Joe Rare: Younger generations lack discipline and skills for high incomes
“These younger generation kids, they're not willing to pick it up and go somewhere cheaper. They're not willing to admit that they don't have the skill set. They don't have the discipline to go make the kind of money that they think they need to make.”
Weisbrot: Americans Subsidize Global Healthcare via High Drug Prices
“Pharmaceutical companies, for example, they specifically charge more to Americans to cover their ability to offer things for cheaper in other countries. So you might spend five dollars for a box of pills or a bottle of pills in Finland for the same thing in Am…”
Cohen: Tech startup equity is a lottery ticket destined to lose
“Equity in, in startup land for your little dinky web you know, startup and whatnot, even if you raise fifty million or whatever it is, is a lottery ticket. You're going to win or you're going to lose. You're 99.999999% going to lose. It's worth less than toile…”
Barr: Founder seed evaluation is a science, not power-law guesswork
“I don't think that, I think you can actually understand companies at a seed level and founders at a seed trait level and understand, do they have the communication? Do they have listening? Do you have the, all these things that are going to make them successfu…”
Weisbrot: VC-backed founders cannot pause to fix problems; they must inflate valuations
“When you've raised money from investors, you don't have time to stop and fix your problems. You have to just keep growing for the purpose of making your valuation look like it's going up so that your investors can get new LPs into their next fund.”
Weisbrot: Food in America is chemically formulated trash compared to Europe
“Everything in America is basically chemical trash. So it's quite difficult to do that because even when you want to make good decisions in America, your options are really bad, unfortunately, which is one of the reasons why I don't want to live in America. It'…”
Weisbrot: All VCs Should Be Forced to Start Companies First
“I think all VCs should be forced to start a company before they're allowed to be investors, because I think a lot of VCs who are just money people don't know what it's like to run a company, and so it's hard for them to align themselves emotionally with us, an…”
Reyes: Latin American workers happily work 16-hour days without striking
“You don't have the attitude of French people of like, oh, you want me to work more? I'm gonna go on a strike, you know? Like these are people who happily work 16 hours and are just happy to work.”
Love: CIA likely seized fraud investigation over Pakistani intelligence ties
“We think that CIA took it from us because the owners were Middle Eastern immigrants who had strong ties back to Pakistan.
And we suspect and don't know and can't prove, and we were just left to wonder
we think it was taken from us because interrupting that mo…”
Weisbrot: Chinese Society Discourages Young People From Questioning and Seeking Self-Knowledge
“I think the biggest problem is they grow up in a society that doesn't ask them to ask questions, that doesn't push them to want to know themselves.”
Weisbrot: Cognitive behavioral therapy is the only effective psychological therapy
“Cognitive behavioral therapy is the only therapy branch that I'm aware of in psychology that actually shows results. If you had gotten to like a talk therapist, you'd be still talking to them now years, years, years, years later, and you would probably still n…”
Weisbrot: Using medication as a primary ADD coping mechanism is wrong
“Now medication is one of the number one coping mechanisms for ADD, which I think is wrong”
Niedel: Big Pharma opposes Kratom because it treats opioid addiction
“Big Pharma doesn't like Kratom because it helps people get off of opioid addiction.”
Bramlett: Anyone Can Hit $300K Monthly E-Commerce Revenue Within a Year
“To be able to do you know, two, 300,000 a month in revenue is really, Achievable for pretty much anybody. It's just a matter of having focus and staying on track and within six months to a year, you can have that without having massive skills.”
Rosenstein: Early NFTs are the Picassos and Mona Lisas of digital art
“The early NFTs are the Picassos and Mona Lisas of this new movement, and people simply gravitate towards them because they're the most well-known. And because they're the most well-known, People want them. It's a simple thing that happens throughout the art cu…”
Weisbrot: Raising venture capital is often worse for startups than bootstrapping
“The more I've gotten into the interviews, the more I've been like, damn, you know, raising money from VCs is just like, people think it's a good thing, but I I'm starting to disagree. I think it's not beneficial to have all that money thrown at you.”
Wade: End-to-end encryption is a bandaid fix degrading messaging products
“I think at the same time, It's a bandaid fix for companies that we don't trust in that sense. And so I think we need to figure out our relationship with that because it's impacting the quality of the products that we're using.”
Weisbrot: Victims who stay silent enable abusers to continue patterns
“When you allow those things to happen to you without feeling it necessary to tell someone, maybe you're embarrassed that it happened, that you allowed it to happen or whatever. You're enabling that person to continue their pattern and you're enabling the cultu…”