The Washington Post has a great graphic of the tax plans the two presidential candidates have in mind for the United States:

Most citizens are going to benefit more from Obama's tax plan than from McCain's.

You've got my Activision in your Blizzard!
No! You've got my Blizzard in your Activision!
Activision Blizzard: two old game companies with one new name.

Early this morning, Activision and Vivendi announced the merger of Activision Games and Vivendi Games into a new company called Activision Blizzard. I have to give their PR folks major props, because this is one hell of a merger, and quite honestly, a smart move to release the news on a Sunday morning. Most video game journalists are enjoying their weekend or two wrapped up in the whole Gamespotgate scandal and hastily putting out articles that just regurgitate the press release from Vivendi (in PDF), which is filled with a lot of financial nonsense, which basically says that Vivendi is buying into Activision with 52% ownership, but that Activision's CEO will remain in control of the company, and that at a premium purchase price of 27.50 per share that Vivendi will be paying, should ensure that the stock price of Activision (ATVI - closed at 22.15 on Friday) is supported during this transitional period.

Blizzard is a wholly owned subsidiary division of Vivendi Games, and if you read the press release carefully, you'll notice that while the name of the company will henceforth be called "Activision Blizzard", what Activision is actually merging with is not just Blizzard Entertainment but all divisions of Vivendi Games, which includes Radical Entertainment, High Moon, Swordfish, Massive Entertainment, Sierra, Sierra Online, and Vivendi Mobile. Not only that, but the board of directors for Activision Blizzard is mainly comprised of former corporate officers of Activision and Vivendi Games, not of Blizzard Entertainment -- so the name of the merged company should be more appropriately Activision Vivendi, but obviously the only marquee of any value in the Vivendi portfolio is Blizzard, as the more well-known developer of World of Warcraft.

When I was working for Blizzard, we were still under the same kind of corporate structure where Blizzard was somewhat autonomous, but the biggest cost in morale was that as a game company, operating underneath the Vivendi umbrella meant that no matter how successful a game was, the effect on general revenue for the parent organization was minor at best, because the when you're part of a conglomeration, the contribution from Blizzard, despite the success of the game titles in profitability, meant very little to Vivendi as a whole -- since they day they bought Blizzard from Cendant Corp, they've been trying to sell Blizzard (and the rest of Vivendi Games) but couldn't find a sucker to pay the $1 billion dollar price tag they wanted for all of Vivendi Games. It was rumored that Microsoft offered 100 million for Blizzard the last time Vivendi was selling off non-core assets in 2003.

I think that with the joint management from both Activision and Vivendi Games, things are going to be rough as they make the transition, but if they can keep the management of the Blizzard gaming division as "hands-off" from Activision as they've kept it from Vivendi, Blizzard will continue to make good games if they can stick to their philosophy. The question at this point is how Activision will handle the management of the golden goose.

BBC: Video game giants in $18bn merger

John Hodgman explains how the Canadian dollar has reached dollar parity with the American dollar.

Yesterday I went to the post office to mail off the latest movies I cleared off my Greencine queue. I couldn't believe the line that was going out the doors. This was not the standard amount of people that should be in the post office on a Monday afternoon. The cause of the line, I learned, was the Forever Stamp.

The Forever Stamp is a good idea for the US Postal Service, as whenever they raise the rate of postage, there's this scramble to find 1 cent or 2 cent stamps to augment the new postage rate. The Forever Stamp solves this problem by saying "Okay, you need a stamp to send mail, this stamp covers first-class postage no matter how much the cost of a first-class stamp goes up". It's something that probably should have been done a long time ago.

What a lot of people have been telling each other is to buy lots of Forever Stamps, but to hold onto them. They think they understand the economics behind the Forever Stamp. After all, if you pay 41 cents for a stamp today, and the cost of the stamp continues to rise, following every price hike they've made money on every stamp that they've bought, so doesn't it make sense to buy a lot more to lock in at the 41 cent rate?

Absolutely not, and here's why.

Over the last twenty years, the cost of the stamp has risen from 22 cents in 1987 to 41 cents in 2007, and there's been 8 price hikes. Let's imagine for a moment that Forever stamps had existed in 1987 -- and you bought $999.90 worth of them (4545 stamps), before Monday's rate hike (at 39 cents) that would have been worth $1772.55.

People say to themselves "That doesn't look so bad... It looks like I've doubled my money", right?

Except if in 1987 you had taken that $999.90 and adjusted for inflation, $999.90 equals $1772.20. Investing in the forever stamps will beat inflation, but just barely.

Presently the inflation rate is around 3.4%, but any decent savings account will give you at least 4 percent, and CDs are above 5%. These are guaranteed, and best of all, they compound. Putting the money towards forever stamps is better than having your money stored away under the mattress or in an sock, but it's not better than a bank. Not even close.

My passport was due to expire and with the new RFID e-passports on the way, I wanted to make sure I got an old-fashioned paper passport before they started issuing the first generation of RFID e-passports. If you're applying for the first time or if you've lost your passport, you've got to go in person. If you just want to renew, you can do all of it over the mail.

I was at the post office yesterday, and right next to the sign above the counter listing their prices for express mail and priority mail and the rest of the postage rates, I noticed their prices for Passports: $97, and an additional $60 for expedited service. Seeing as how I remember thinking it wasn't all that expensive to get it renewed, I took a closer look at their fees. The post office apparently tacks on an additional $30 for the privilege of standing in line to hand in your passport application, as that $30 is called the "acceptance fee". Inside the post office, you can get your picture taken for your passport too -- the fee for that is $15 (in addition to all other fees of course).

For as long as I can remember, it was my father who took our passport photos. He'd pull out his old Minolta, and tell us to stand in front of the blank wall next to the stairway and he'd take a couple pictures of each of us. Sometimes I got to shoot my dad, but most of the time, it was Mom taking his picture. Then he'd bring it to the store to get it developed and ask for reprints of certain exposures from the negative. He'd get out the paper cutter to size them exactly right. I always thought that was the way you were supposed to get passport photos done, and I'm positive that in those days, the cost of doing all that was far less than what it would have cost professionally.

Now, as far as those places that take professional passport photos go, a fee of $15 is not too bad, and it's definitely cheaper than buying a bunch of photography equipment, but if you've got a family or if you're shooting more than just yourself, then the savings in doing the photography yourself start racking up pretty quickly -- my Dad was saving $45 in photography fees every time us kids needed to renew our passports (under 16, you need to renew every 5 years), and $30 every ten years for himself and Mom. Add in the acceptance fee, and that's another $90 every 5 years, and an additional $60 every ten years, so if we look at the past 20 years, my Dad, by shooting the pictures himself and mailing in our renewals, saved the family around $720 (using current rates), which paid for his camera (which he used for other things too) many, many times over.

In the last ten years, digital photography has become consumer-level technology, and if you have a digital camera that takes hi-res pictures (5+ megapixels) and a good quality photo printer (300dpi), you can save that $15 (and have a picture you know you'll be happy with). If you can buy your own padded envelope and can stick stamps on it, you can save yourself another $20 to $25 (depending on how you mail in your passport application)

More instructions in the extended.

Earlier this month, employees were laid off from Northwest Airlines. As part of the literature that was given by the NEAS company, a 4 page booklet containing 101 Ways to Save Money was given to departing employees.

The complete list of 101 ways (in the extended entry) contains such gems as "#46: Don-t be shy about pulling something you like out of the trash."

NPR link