Hacker News Reader

Comment by Illniyar | Hacker News Reader

Apparently Israeli media is reporting that the price is so high that the government is requesting the founders will pay their taxes in USD and not Israeli Shekels in fear that such a large foreign exchange transaction will affect the exchange rate. ( Which is already unusually low and hurting exporters)

This would be the first time taxes are paid in a different currency in Israel history.

Pretty wild that it's such a large acquisition it can affect a nation's monetary policy.

View on HN

Average daily USD-NIS trading volume (per Bank of Israel: https://www.boi.org.il/en/communication-and-publications/pre... ) is on the order of magnitude of about $15 billion.

There are multiple founders getting billions of dollars each. It's not so unreasonble to fear what could happen if daily trading volume suddenly had a significant increase from them collectively dumping billions of dollars onto the market on the same day to settle the tax bill.

I was curious about this claim and dug up this article from (as far as I understand it), Israel's version of The Economist

https://www.calcalistech.com/ctechnews/article/hjggcekq11g

The name “Calcalist” is indeed a play on “Economist” (it is not a proper Hebrew word, but fuses the Hebrew word for economy “calcala” with the English suffix for a professional work “ist”.

However, it is just an expanded version of Ynet’s business/economy section, and Ynet is probably the closest equivalent to USA Today or The Sun.

Is it etymologically related to "calculate" or is it a coincidence?

Seems to be a coincidence - the Hebrew word comes from the Bible (old testament), and means "the feeding, and generally providing of needs".

The English word comes from "calculus", meaning, apparently, pebble, because original counting was done with pebbles.

(I had to look both up. Thanks for asking)

How can a word come from the Bible? It must have existed before the Bible in order to have a meaning inside of it. Or did you mean to write it came from Aramaic?

Hebrew is a reconstructed language. Whilst some roots will predate the Torah, most won't.

Several words, like the infamous "shibboleth" won't be inherited, or their meanings may wildly differ.

I mean that it already appears in the Bible, in old Hebrew (which is close to, but isn’t exactly Aramaic), with the meaning “to feed and provide” - and I did not find any documentation about how it formed (or came into) Hebrew.

Which means of course m, that it was already in use before the Bible was canonicalized.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com