Spring quarter has begun and we're about 25% in it. Spring itself, however, seems to be a crazy season here. The weather has been oscillating from warm shiny days to damp, rainy and even snowy days. The period of the oscillation can be measured quite accurately to 3-4 days. When the weather is warm everything looks very nice and indeed spring is beautiful here. D has posted some photos in her Flickr album.
Last weekend we also had our first ever guest here in Cincinnati! We had a friend of mine from New York over for the weekend. She had to rid herself from Passover sticky Seders (there are two here in the US, because diaspora Jews apparently celebrate each holiday twice) and fled to our sanctuary. She spent three days with us, which allowed her to experience the entire cycle of weather. On gloomy Friday (originally, Good Friday) we went to the Cincinnati Art Museum, which surprisingly was more impressive than what I had expected. The museum showed an exhibition compiled by the Israel Museum in Jerusalem on Surrealism and Dada works. This type of art is usually not my cup of tea, and indeed I could (and did) summarize some of the works as: hey, I can paint better than these blotches of paint on canvas. I did like the classic Alpha Romeo they put on exhibit in the museum: now this is art!
It cleared on Saturday and we went for a great walk in Ault Park, which is a lovely park minutes of walk from our house. Most of the photos in D's album were taken there (although a week earlier).
When it comes to observing the Passover tradition I'm glad to say that we didn't observe any of it. We didn't go to any Seder. We didn't eat any unleavened bread, on the contrary: we ate pizza. I think the only relation to the holiday's tradition was drinking wine on Seder. By the way, pizza and wine are our traditional way of celebrating this holiday, as we have done that in four of the last five years. Naturally, we also worked, studied and taught during the Passover week. So basically, we didn't feel any holidays spirit.
Today we made our first significant step into mutual recognition between us and the matrix, aka the State of Ohio: both of us took our driving test and passed. So now both of us hold a valid driver's license issued by the Bureau of Motor Vehicles of the grid. As stated in a previous post, we were required to pass all the driving tests administered, as if we haven't been driving for the past 17 years or so. At least now we hold a license that will - hopefully - enable us to be free of the passports we were carrying all the time: it is, after all, a valid ID. The driving test here is very short: about 15 minutes in total. The test has two parts: maneuverability test and actual driving. In the former one needs to drive from an original position through a rectangular area defined by 4 cones and then proceed either to the left or to the right of a fifth cone (called point), bringing the car to a stop with its rear at the line of the point, and parallel to the general direction of the area. Then, from this position one must reverse the car to its starting position (description of the test can be seen in this animation). The rules are that the motion forward and in reverse should be done without stopping and that the cones must not be driven over. Then, if one passes that part of the test, the second part of the test is a very short drive outside the testing center's parking lot. This proved to be very short and very easy. The funny thing, of course, that if we had failed the test, we would have simply get into our car, driving with our international license. Anyway, this is past us now, and thus, we have finally completed the work plan defined about a year ago for our relocation.
Showing posts with label Spring. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Spring. Show all posts
Wednesday, April 15, 2009
Tuesday, April 7, 2009
Spring Time
I have never lived in a country that has actual winter until we came here. Here was the first time that I saw snow and experienced real cold temperatures (though not as cold as the Northern areas experience). Here is also the first time that I see and understand the meaning of a real spring. Back home, the winter is a sort of autumn, autumn and spring are mild versions of summer, and summer is unbearable version of it. What I see here now explains why so many holidays are related to the spring, and why spring is a symbol of life. During the winter, all the trees were without leaves. It took the first days of precipitation in a liquid form (i.e. rain) instead of snow to convince them that the worst is over and that they should get back to life. All of a sudden the world, that used to be colored by shades of gray and brown has been recolored with all sorts of colors: green for grass and shrubs, white, pink, red, and purple for the flowers on the trees and on the ground. On a nice day, like the one we had on Saturday, everything looks so beautiful, and then the true meaning of the word spring emerges: the world springs to life.
Naturally, not everything in life can be perfect. Thus, the American taxes season is upon us, and all the tax return forms are due April 15. Taxes here are much different than the ones we had in Israel. Firstly, there is an income tax at any level: federal, state, and local (city). Each one of them requires a different set of forms to be filled. Not only that, there are several variations for each form, and it is almost impossible to know which form to fill. For example, on the federal level the same form has the following types: for citizens, for resident aliens, and for non-resident aliens. To make it even more confusing, the residency of an alien is defined differently by the Internal Revenue Service (the IRS) and the Immigration and Naturalization Service (the INS). It turns out that you can be a non-resident in the eyes of the INS while still being deemed a resident alien by the IRS (I think that the other way around is impossible, but not sure of that). Furthermore, since there is a huge variety of non-resident visas, and the IRS considers each one differently for residency purposes, it is even more confusing. And if that is not enough, there are other forms that need to be filled out if you didn't have any income or if you changed status during the year.
On the state level it is approximately the same thing, only that here you have an even more complicated task: if you moved from state to another you are considered part-time resident. Since we came here in September we are part-time residents. However, we arrived from out of the country, and this is a completely different story, which I don't know how the local officials treat.
Then you have the locality tax. In Israel the locality gets its money from the tax on your property (Arnona). Here it's another form of income tax (perhaps there is a tax on your property too, I don't know).
I have had my taxes withheld during the year. It means that I receive a salary after some of the money is put aside by the university as part of the taxes I owe to the federal government, state and city. Apparently, this is not like in Israel where the payments are accurate and usually you don't need to do anything at the end of the year. Here they take a "rough" amount and in the end of the year you fill out the tax return and learn how much you still owe the government, or how much the government owes you. It turns out that the government owes me quite a large amount of money, almost half my withheld taxes. Strange.
Thinking about all the forms and paperwork sent by April 15 to the federal and state services just makes me shiver. Let's assume that there are about 200 million tax payers in America, and each one prepares a single federal tax return, a single state tax return and a single locality tax return. That's already 600 million forms, each with multiple pages. There goes some forests...
Then, someone has to read these forms and make sure that no one tried to pay too little or get too much money back. Assuming that it takes 10 minutes per form per person, 6 forms are processed each hour, making it 100 million work hours. The checks from the government(s) usually come back within 5-7 weeks, according to their site. This means that between 15-20 million hours are done each week, or 3-4 million hours a day, or between 300-400 thousand people are paid to do it. That's not including hierarchy and supporting personnel (IT, HR, administration). It is a safe idea to believe that for every official that checks a form there is at least one that is either above in the hierarchy or support this person's work. Thus, 600-800 thousand people, not including the 10% of hidden unemployment, redundancies and undesired bureaucracy.
These people are paid, their offices have electricity, heating and cooling, plumbing, and other necessary working conditions. The offices themselves are in buildings, taking up place and real estate value, usually within the downtown of some major city. I guess that the costs of these services are about $100K per person (at the very least, probably as much as twice that amount). So, it must cost about 50-100 billion dollars just to collect, process and return all the tax forms.
Perhaps collecting taxes as it is done in Israel would be much more efficient. Everything is collected upfront. There is little need for additional tax returns at the end of the year, and those who venture it usually are turned away with nothing, which deters people from actually trying to do it. This could save dozens of billions of dollars to the American tax payer. Come to think of it: this could save money to me!
Naturally, not everything in life can be perfect. Thus, the American taxes season is upon us, and all the tax return forms are due April 15. Taxes here are much different than the ones we had in Israel. Firstly, there is an income tax at any level: federal, state, and local (city). Each one of them requires a different set of forms to be filled. Not only that, there are several variations for each form, and it is almost impossible to know which form to fill. For example, on the federal level the same form has the following types: for citizens, for resident aliens, and for non-resident aliens. To make it even more confusing, the residency of an alien is defined differently by the Internal Revenue Service (the IRS) and the Immigration and Naturalization Service (the INS). It turns out that you can be a non-resident in the eyes of the INS while still being deemed a resident alien by the IRS (I think that the other way around is impossible, but not sure of that). Furthermore, since there is a huge variety of non-resident visas, and the IRS considers each one differently for residency purposes, it is even more confusing. And if that is not enough, there are other forms that need to be filled out if you didn't have any income or if you changed status during the year.
On the state level it is approximately the same thing, only that here you have an even more complicated task: if you moved from state to another you are considered part-time resident. Since we came here in September we are part-time residents. However, we arrived from out of the country, and this is a completely different story, which I don't know how the local officials treat.
Then you have the locality tax. In Israel the locality gets its money from the tax on your property (Arnona). Here it's another form of income tax (perhaps there is a tax on your property too, I don't know).
I have had my taxes withheld during the year. It means that I receive a salary after some of the money is put aside by the university as part of the taxes I owe to the federal government, state and city. Apparently, this is not like in Israel where the payments are accurate and usually you don't need to do anything at the end of the year. Here they take a "rough" amount and in the end of the year you fill out the tax return and learn how much you still owe the government, or how much the government owes you. It turns out that the government owes me quite a large amount of money, almost half my withheld taxes. Strange.
Thinking about all the forms and paperwork sent by April 15 to the federal and state services just makes me shiver. Let's assume that there are about 200 million tax payers in America, and each one prepares a single federal tax return, a single state tax return and a single locality tax return. That's already 600 million forms, each with multiple pages. There goes some forests...
Then, someone has to read these forms and make sure that no one tried to pay too little or get too much money back. Assuming that it takes 10 minutes per form per person, 6 forms are processed each hour, making it 100 million work hours. The checks from the government(s) usually come back within 5-7 weeks, according to their site. This means that between 15-20 million hours are done each week, or 3-4 million hours a day, or between 300-400 thousand people are paid to do it. That's not including hierarchy and supporting personnel (IT, HR, administration). It is a safe idea to believe that for every official that checks a form there is at least one that is either above in the hierarchy or support this person's work. Thus, 600-800 thousand people, not including the 10% of hidden unemployment, redundancies and undesired bureaucracy.
These people are paid, their offices have electricity, heating and cooling, plumbing, and other necessary working conditions. The offices themselves are in buildings, taking up place and real estate value, usually within the downtown of some major city. I guess that the costs of these services are about $100K per person (at the very least, probably as much as twice that amount). So, it must cost about 50-100 billion dollars just to collect, process and return all the tax forms.
Perhaps collecting taxes as it is done in Israel would be much more efficient. Everything is collected upfront. There is little need for additional tax returns at the end of the year, and those who venture it usually are turned away with nothing, which deters people from actually trying to do it. This could save dozens of billions of dollars to the American tax payer. Come to think of it: this could save money to me!
Sunday, March 8, 2009
Weekly summary: signs of spring
The last week was very busy. On Tuesday I had a presentation at the Dayton-Cincinnati section of the AIAA (that's the aerospace counterpart of the more famous IEEE). It felt like attending the Israeli aerospace conference: you drive an hour north, the conference has many small rooms with little attendance, and everyone tries to be polite. It was a new experience for me, being my first conference ever, and I'm not sure if I liked it.
On Wednesday I had my birthday. As always, this is a good time for reflections on the previous year. I received a lot of emails and posts on my wall in Facebook with birthday wishes, and thanks for everyone. D and I didn't have time to celebrate, as both of us are extremely busy at the moment with end of the quarter tasks. D wished me a happy birthday, bought me two books, and we promised that when the quarter will finally be over we will have more time to celebrate.
A positive development is the vast improvement in the temperatures. The last few days have been warm, above 20 degrees (Celsius of course), and yesterday's weather was very nice. I wish I had not been so busy with work and laundry yesterday so that I could have enjoyed it, like some of my neighbors did. On my way to the laundry room and back I saw a few of them hanging outside in the parking lot, playing music and getting some rare rays of sunshine. Today is a different story. It is still warm, but we have already had two sirens warning us from the risk of a severe thunderstorm, which could develop into a tornado. And since the buildings here are basically built as boxes of cardboard and wood, a tornado can simply lift everything up and crash it down. We can hear the wooden beams attached to the roof stretch when the wind blows. The trees have not started blooming again.
Others signs of spring follow also: the infamous spring break (that's when all the young American students fly to resorts in Mexico, get drunk, naked, and wild) is just around the corner. Today started the daylight saving time ("summer clock" as it is referred to in Israel) in the US. So now, not only that we are 800 Km west of where the Eastern clock is (meaning that the sun rises and sets late relative to the East coast), now it will happen even an hour earlier. So, again, we will wake up before the sun.
On Wednesday I had my birthday. As always, this is a good time for reflections on the previous year. I received a lot of emails and posts on my wall in Facebook with birthday wishes, and thanks for everyone. D and I didn't have time to celebrate, as both of us are extremely busy at the moment with end of the quarter tasks. D wished me a happy birthday, bought me two books, and we promised that when the quarter will finally be over we will have more time to celebrate.
A positive development is the vast improvement in the temperatures. The last few days have been warm, above 20 degrees (Celsius of course), and yesterday's weather was very nice. I wish I had not been so busy with work and laundry yesterday so that I could have enjoyed it, like some of my neighbors did. On my way to the laundry room and back I saw a few of them hanging outside in the parking lot, playing music and getting some rare rays of sunshine. Today is a different story. It is still warm, but we have already had two sirens warning us from the risk of a severe thunderstorm, which could develop into a tornado. And since the buildings here are basically built as boxes of cardboard and wood, a tornado can simply lift everything up and crash it down. We can hear the wooden beams attached to the roof stretch when the wind blows. The trees have not started blooming again.
Others signs of spring follow also: the infamous spring break (that's when all the young American students fly to resorts in Mexico, get drunk, naked, and wild) is just around the corner. Today started the daylight saving time ("summer clock" as it is referred to in Israel) in the US. So now, not only that we are 800 Km west of where the Eastern clock is (meaning that the sun rises and sets late relative to the East coast), now it will happen even an hour earlier. So, again, we will wake up before the sun.
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