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 15 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
Thompson: Four Years After $42B Broadband Act, Effectively None Built
“We are four calendar years after the rural broadband provision was passed. No rural broadband effectively has been built. And of the 56 states and localities that applied for funding, only three of them even made it all the way through that 14 step process.”
Derek Thompson: California's high-speed rail project is dead
“If you're asking for my personal opinion, This project is dead.”
Thompson: 1970s Environmental Laws Now Block Clean Energy and Dense Housing
“The medicine of the 19 sixties and 19 seventies has become the disease of the 20 twenties. The very same policies that we used to stop the despoliation of the world 60 years ago now stop us from building dense housing, which is good for the environment, solar …”
Thompson: Modern Failures Stem from Refusing to Update 1960s Institutions
“Institutional renewal is the charge of every new generation. And when we fail to update on the systems that we built 60 years ago, it's not their fault. It's ours. We're the ones deciding to live inside a building. That was built half a century ago that we ref…”
Thompson: Bureaucracy Decentralizes Care at the Expense of Final Outcomes
“Bureaucracy is a means of decentralizing care in a way that deemphasizes focus on an outcome. And so what happens is you care so much about every single step that there is no outcome.”
Derek Thompson: Overloading bills with progressive priorities dooms legislation
“The attempt to pull every progressive priority into every piece of legislation in a way that makes it impossible for that legislation's purpose to be accomplished.”
Thompson: Ralph Nader Popularized Suing Government and Business to Halt Projects
“At the same time, you had Ralph Nader who created this revolution of adversarial legalism, where without simplifying it too much, he just made it cool. For liberals of a certain age to sue the government and sue businesses to stop things from happening.”
Thompson: Penicillin was barely used until US WWII industrial scaling
“Like five people have been delivered penicillin in all of human history, 13 years after it was discovered, and the two of them have died. Penicillin has done nothing, and it took a very concerted U.S. Effort to implement penicillin, to grow it in large vats, t…”
Derek Thompson: NIH awards funding to older scientists over younger researchers
“It funds older scientists, much more than younger scientists, even though, I don't have to tell you this, it's often young people who have the most earth-changing ideas, the best paradigm-shifting ideas.”
Thompson: Today's scientists spend 40% of their time on grant paperwork
“A remarkable statistics from the book is that today's scientists now spend 40% of their time filling out paperwork and filing for grants.”
Derek Thompson: Carbon Removal Might Be Most Critical Tech of Next 30–40 Years
“And then on top of it all, there's carbon removal, which might be one of the most important technologies of the next 3040 years, that's also incredibly energy intensive.”
Derek Thompson: Progress means eliminating pain and expanding human agency
“One definition that I've used for myself is, is that progress is the elimination of pain and the increase in power for the most people, right? How do you find a way to reduce pain and increase power? Which is another way of saying agency.”
Thompson: GLP-1 Drugs Linked to Lower Dementia Rates in Veterans Study
“I did on my podcast, Plain English, an interview with someone who, ah, did this observational study, this population research on millions of people in the Veterans Affairs system who have been on GLP-I drugs for their type one, type two diabetes, or on other d…”
Thompson: Operation Warp Speed reduced the 10-year vaccine development record to 10 months
“I think the record amount of time to go from part one to part Z, Was something like, or A to Z was something like nine, 10 years. We did this in, in 10 months.”
Derek Thompson: Vertical Farming, Cultivated Meat, and Desalination Require Massive Energy
“There's a lot of technologies, whether it's vertical farming, whether it's cellular meat, or mass desalination of water. So, you know, you turn on your faucet, and it's basically ocean water that's pouring out that you can drink. These are incredibly energy-th…”