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I once heard from a Frum historian that Yochanan Hyrkanos conquered and then enslaved the Idumeans and made them all Avodim C’Naanim. However, they allowed them to maintain some self rule. Hordus’ father Antipater was the ruler of the Idumeans, but still technically a halachic Eved.
Therefore Hordus was an Eved in Halacha but was viewed by the Romans as being of Noble/Ruling stock. As such when he took over he was able to get Roman support, but when all is said and done, Halachically he was an Eved.
ujm,
The claim to musk being a business genius is by your own admission based on his net worth. But approximately 2/3 of his net worth is either Tesla stock or Tesla options. His net worth is intrinsically tied to Tesla stock. And Tesla stock is absurdly overvalued at the moment. Yes Tesla sales are growing. But it is priced as if it is growing much faster than it actually is. Tesla is on track to sell approximately 1.3 million cars this year worldwide. Toyota will sell approximately 9.5 million. VW will sell around 8.7 million. So Tesla is still a relatively small player. Electric vehicles were unprofitable until the last couple of years when batteries got cheaper and new subsidies for electric cars started and restrictions on ICE cars got stricter in Europe and China. And the big auto manufacturers with a lot more production capacity and experience than Tesla were sitting around waiting for this. Now they are increasing production by a lot which also has the secondary effect of taking away Tesla’s emissions credit sales.
VW will likely produce more EV’s than Tesla worldwide in 2024. Stellantis in 2026. Toyota concentrates on Hybrids and PHEV’s rather than pure EV’s but including those (and for emissions credit and ICE restrictions they are mostly classified like electric) Toyota already produced almost 2 million in 2020 and increased that to 2.6 million in 2021. Ford F-150 Lightning easily beat Cybertruck to market. Same goes for Daimler/Freightliner eCascadia series vs Tesla Semi.
Now as to Twitter, I don’t know if Musk will drive it into the ground or not. And I suspect not but he agreed to a badly inflated price for a company worth nowhere near that much in what appears to have been an overconfident snap decision.
And the “why don’t you start a competing company” argument is completely silly. Auto manufacturing is a capital intensive business. Musk had money from his sale of his shares of Paypal when it went public.
ujm,
He nearly ran Paypal into the ground and was forced out by the other owners. And he later on admitted that Tesla almost went bankrupt during the Model 3 rollout in 2018, most of which was due to him meddling in the manufacturing process. Tesla did survive that by the skin of its teeth but it was mostly due to some masterful financial manuevering by then CFO Deepak Ahuja. And the less that is said about Boring Company or Neuralink the better – Boring company is pretty much a bust and Neuralink is about 10 years behind the actual leaders in the field.
On the other hand Tesla is finally profitable and SpaceX has done same amazing things, though as best as anyone can tell it is probably not profitable yet.
But don’t confuse stock price with business genius. Tesla is overvalued by at least 5X and probably closer the 10X. Its meteoric rise in 2020-2021 was mostly due to hardcore fanboys of the stock plus a strong tech bull market and a lack of serious competition outside of China. The tech bull market is over, competition finally arrived outside of China and BYD is eating Tesla’s lunch in China. And it seems to me from looking at Tesla stock message boards that many of the fanboy stockholders are both heavily leveraged and were also heavily invested in crypto, and may have to sell off some of their Tesla stock soon. Because of the hardcore fanboy investor base I avoided trading in Tesla one way or the other until late 2021 when its rise halted, but since then I have made decent amount on put options.
I am not as negative on Elon as some of his biggest detractors, but he is a mixed bag who has a tendency to make overconfident snap decisions with inconsistent results.
The whole “$1 Billion break up fee” and Musk wipes his hands of the deal is not at all correct due to the way this deal was structured.
Musk waived due diligence AND agreed to a “specific performance” clause which basically means that as long as his financing for the deal is still available (and since the relevant financial institutions signed commitment letters they can’t back out either) Twitter can force him to complete the deal. And since Twitter is incorporated in Delaware and since the Delaware Chancery Court has a long history of strictly enforcing “specific performance” clauses, he has almost no way out. The only way out is to prove that Twitter knew that the number of bot accounts was extremely far off of what Twitter claimed in public filings, and even that is a long shot due his waiving of due diligence. This especially true since as Matt Levine has pointed out he publicly claimed he wanted to buy it to get rid of the bot problem, so it is difficult for him to then claim that he doesn’t want to buy it because there are too many bots.
And note, Twitter’s claims about the number of bots is specifically based on “monetizeable daily active users” a term which Twitter themselves defines in their SEC filings. I would assume that even if the total number of bot accounts is higher Twitter chose a definition that best suited their needs without actually lying about the number of bot accounts.
So it doesn’t really matter what portion of twitter accounts are fake or bots. And the fact that Musk’s OWN LAWYERS in the filing to break the deal do not claim that they have evidence that there are more bots than Twitter claims. Rather they use the very curious language that “Musk BELIEVES” there are more bots. And this is after Twitter let Musk’s team have access to the “full stream” API. I know people who have access to the academc API and the amount of data there is huge but easily useable and the full stream API has even more data. Since his team of data scientists had access to the full stream and apparently couldn’t find anything then he has nothing.
Now I am sure the number of bots is far higher than 5%, but remember Twitter in their financial filings uses the very specifically defined “monetizeable daily active users” which I suspect is actually about 5%, since they created the definition which best suited their needs.
Because he is apparently someone who usually hangs out on EJMR, a website where a bunch of trolls who wish they were smart enough to get into an Economics PhD program like to pretend they are Economics PhD students and then spread rumors about which Economics departments are hiring which job market candidates.
Or in short, he is a troll.
If EJMR stands for what I think it does (and your reference to degrees as signalling implies this), then please just stop trolling here and go back to EJMR. We have enough trolls floating around here as it is.
Health,
Most of the RCT’s on that website for ivermectin have extremely small samples and/or data quality issues. There is also an issue that most of those studies come from less well known researchers in third world countries who face major publication bias issues (this is the issue that it is harder to get a paper showing no effect published). While it is sometimes possible to combine a number of smaller studies, various data issues preclude that for most of these studies. These reasons are why the two meta-analysis mentioned above used only a small portion of these studies, and the authors of at least one of those two meta-analysis have retracted their paper pending a re-analysis excluding the paper with fraudulent data.
Just because a study is an “RCT” does not mean it is a good or useful study. Indeed, a small sample size RCT is often worse than a much larger observational study with a large and high quality sample. A properly designed and handled large scale RCT will (almost) always be better than a observational study, but the key points are properly designed and handled large scale RCT.
provaxx,
A meta-analysis is only as good as the studies that it is using. If the studies are bad, then the meta-anlysis is also bad. If you look at that paper, it includes the paper that was retracted due to fraudulent data and since that paper had the strongest effects, the meta-analysis would need to be completely re-run. Indeed, the authors of another meta-analysis published around the same time in Open Forum Infectious Diseases have already retracted their paper and plan to reanalyze the data excluding the fraudulent studies.
More recently the ivermectin arm of the “Together Trial” in Brazil (I think 1,300 patients) was halted due to it not working and the patients were reassigned to other arms of the study. This was a very large scale trial done by researchers at a number of universities in Canada and Brazil. Admittedly it was tested on already sick patients so it does not tell us anything about prophylactic use, but it still shows that is is definitely not some magic bullet. The study did find that Fluvoxamine – an antidepressant which is cheaper than ivermectin and considered to be safer too – did have a significant effect, though I would wait until another high quality large size study of it comes out before jumping on that bandwagon either (there are couple such studies on Fluvoxamine currently underway).