Best Business Commentary

File your taxes, calmly

It’s tax day, and “you have less than 24 hours to make good” with the IRS, says Eileen Ambrose in The Baltimore Sun. But if you haven’t already filed, be careful to avoid sloppy mistakes in your rush to meet the deadline. Some common “landmines” are math errors, transposed numbers—either in your figures or Social Security number—wrong filing status, forgetting to include tax documents, or not signing the forms. Also, if you mess up your bank account number for a refund, you’re in for some “double jeopardy” this year: the IRS could deposit both your refund and stimulus check in someone else’s account, and it would be your fault. Oh, and “don’t forget the stamp.”

Blockbuster’s shabby Apple knock-off

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Blockbuster’s bid for Circuit City has rightly been “panned from Wall Street to Hollywood as financially risky and poorly timed,” says Therese Poletti in MarketWatch, but it doesn’t make sense from a technological standpoint, either. In trying to sell the deal, Blockbuster CEO Jim Keyes brought out the overused buzzword “convergence,” and specifically “name-checked” Apple Inc. as his model. That “seems a bit like the perennial apples to oranges comparison.” Convergence works for Apple because it uses one product, iTunes, to sell everything else. Blockbuster and Circuit City own neither content nor the devices to play it on, and aping Apple is unlikely to work for low-margin “middle-men.”