Intro After moving to the US, I had to submit a tax report (called a tax return) for the first time in my life. I found an intricate list of details, rules, forms and what not to deal with. It intrigued me... I later obtained certification for being a Tax Preparer in California. As an …
Author Archives: Ron
International Grad Student Tax Tips - Adjustments to Income
This page is part of a larger article on how foreign students can save on their taxes. Any comments, corrections and suggestions for this project are welcome. Feel free to contact me using my contact information in the About page. Disclaimer The text below does not constitute tax advice or recommendation, and does not replace …
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How valuable is your privacy?
How much money are you paying to maintain your privacy? How much should you get to let others pry into your private information? I recently attended a talk by MIT's Catherine Tucker about the cost of privacy, from the perspective of advertisers. Prof. Tucker and her co-author checked how changes in privacy rules in Europe, …
Why the quality of coffee is important to world peace.
When often being asked by locals here why I care so much about the taste of what I drink, it's hard for me to even explain. Luckily, smarter men have provided a good answer, to be found in this week's Economist, a letter to the editor: A friendly brew SIR – You told a tale …
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Cheating for a better world.
Is bribing or lobbying always bad for society? Consider the following scenario: Alice and Bob are competing for a job, and Chris is interviewing them for that job. The company at which Chris works has a very special interview process, designed to forecast how much each new employee will bring in in revenues each year. …
Cappucco? No prego.
This week I will be commemorating 7 months since I moved to the bay area. Life has been mostly splendid here, with sunny days, polite people, mostly-functional public services system (10 months to pass a budget? Com'on), and very bad coffee. Coffee here is so ridiculously bad that I actually thought about starting to prepare …
Rak Hayom! Rak Hayom!
Yes – I did disappear, and No – nothing bad has happened to me. I am alive, and kicking all sorts of equilibrium problems. According to the UC Berkeley Economics department, you have not been through a real Zubur unless you’ve been applying the implicit function theorem on anything you can, in very explicit ways. …
I am not a number...yet...
For some obscure reason, “The Prisoner” was very popular in Israel when I was a kid. Something that has to do with reruns and nothing to do on long summer vacations. I distinctly remember scenes with a giant white ball suffocating people trying to escape some place, and the main actor (No. 6), yelling at …
My Precious (Metals)
Every new week begins with a recurring anxiety attack – will I make it to the weekend? Will I collect enough of the precious commodities needed to survive in San Francisco? There are two very common commodities being used in the Bay Area – Plastic, and Quarter Dollar coins. Without any of them, you are …
History in the making
Today I handed in my first Marketing Strategy problem set. It is a historical moment. I haven't been kidnapped, neither by aliens, nor by the crazy party people on Halloween in the Castro district. I haven't gone too drunk from all of the MBA events, nor have I opened a business consulting service for electronic …