That's weird, I'm brazilian and last time I checked, books (and possible other printed materials) weren't taxed when imported. It's why I tend to buy books at amazon.com.
If you ever imported _anything_ in last 10 years (which i doubt) you surely knew this is not the reality.
Eerything you import, even those things that are explicitly not taxed, gets abusive taxing. Brazillian Customs sets tax according to their mood, and if you ask for a tax analyse, consider your tax doubled.
In brazil, the product price plus shipping (yes they tax shipping too) gets taxed 60% (import tax) plus 20% (ICMS, another tax).
Bullshit. I import goods at least once a month, and this is not the case. Printed material, such as books and magazines are NOT charged an import tax. Software is also exempt from import taxes.
The tax for imports over the mail are very clear: 60% over the value of the goods and shipping. The 20% ICMS charge only counts if you're importing with a courier such as FedEx or UPS. Regular mail does not get charged the 20%.
If the package does not accompany an invoice, or if the invoice's value is obviously fraudulent, then the customs official has can attribute a value which he believes is fitting. If you disagree with this value, you can challenge his value, but this will entail a lot of effort and you will most likely lose. You may also not import used goods, or prohibited items (such as firearms, explosives, live animals and organs).
Customs officials are corrupt bastards if you have to deal them in person (for instance, if not importing through the mail), but I've never had them charge me anything other than 60% over mail order items. In particular, I've imported at least US$ 5000 in books over the last 10 years, and I've never been charged an import tax.
Now if only some honest printer manufacturer would embrace this sort of thing - I'd gladly pay a lot more for a printer with easily replaceable heads and nice, big refillable ink reservoirs that the printer can't lie about and doesn't waste excessively. I don't expect to ever see that happen, though.
Get an HP Officejet K5400. It has replaceable heads (which are NOT part of the cartridge, unlike all other HPs), and you can also install a $50 CIS kit. It prints faster and cheaper than any laser in its price range, with the quality of a color inkjet.
I've used it exclusively in every one of my machines since it got into the stable kernels (whenever that was -- I don't remember), and never had any problems. A few months ago I switched several partitions to ext3 (which was my first experience with journalled FS other than ReiserFS), because I wanted full selinux support. I like ReiserFS, and it's a shame it will probably disappear.
Exactly. I design instrumentation for the power industry. We're talking about equipment which has to run at up to 70 C during the day, every day, with a target lifespan of at least a decade. That can get tricky, specially in humid environments (think of power substations installed deep in the jungle), but it can be done and has been done for the last 50 years.
0-50 C gets close to consumer grade. As long as you choose power efficient designs, use a decent safety factor for the power supply and buy good parts (meaning no cheap electrolytic capacitors built with stolen formulas), there won't be any problems.
Price is dictated by the market. As long as there are people willing to buy Vista, Microsoft has no incentive to either lower its price or improve its quality.
It won't matter who is elected by whatever means, all the candidates have run campaigns of such breathtaking shallowness there is no way you have any idea exactly what policies any one of them will implement.
No. Ron Paul, Kucinich and Gravel ran competent campaigns based on the preservation of civil liberties, respect for the Constitution, and the total revision of current economic and foreign policies.
However, Americans are too indoctrinated and too dependent on the mass media to tell them what to think. The media marginalized these 3 candidates, relegating them to footnotes, and here we are.
If the put option expires and the price is >= $90, then he loses money, because he now has to buy the stock for the "seller" of the put option for more than he payed for the contract.
He only loses the money he paid for the contract. In this case he'll just let the option expire and not exercise it. This is an OPTION, so he's not obligated to sell for $90.
Here's a part I specially liked:
On Thursday, three Republicans joined 220 Democrats to support the contempt resolution, including Rep. Walter B. Jones of North Carolina, presidential candidate Rep. Ron Paul of Texas and Rep. Wayne T. Gilchrest of Maryland, who was defeated this week in a primary.
Read my other post in this thread. I'm not blaming China for anything: they're doing what every self-serving totalitarian state since the beginning of civilization has done... screw everyone else and profit by their loss. Why this is not obvious to more people is a cause for some concern.
These things are never obvious to the masses. The majority of the population is moved by their perception of well being, and is concerned only by immediate occurrences (both in time and regarding their social network).
From my perspective, what's changed is that in the last decade the American industrialists (or what was left of them) and bankers/speculators decided to make a lot of money at the expense of everything and everyone. They became so engrossed with immediate profits that they effectively traded long-term stability for short-term growth. In contrast, the Chinese have a long-term game plan, and have secured year-long contracts with essentially all their major suppliers.
I'm a Brazilian citizen, and I'd certainly enjoy living in a peaceful free market society inspired by American principles (as defined by the founding fathers in the US constitution). Instead, we'll have cut-throat oppressive capitalism as perfected by the Chinese, with a backdrop of new world order American war-mongering.
It amazes me the number of different levels that the American citizen has been sold out by his government and the U.S. private sector, and how little he realizes it. Fact is, the United States is running on inertia now: we're living on our capital not our operating income. That is a recipe for economic disaster.
They don't even qualify as neutral, given the effect they're having on our economy and their ongoing pillage of the U.S. economy and education system.
Are you blaming China for your nation's fiscal irresponsibility? China's lending the US hundreds of billions of USD per year so Americans can buy products they can't afford. China not only gets payed for the products, but also gets interest on the loans.
I agree that the Chinese are pillaging your educational system, but it's up to Americans to demand change and provide top notch undergraduates to fill the ranks at graduate school.
The questions were cherry picked? The original thread was filled with garbage.
Slashdot readers in general have no idea of how screwed the US is. They have their priorities all screwed up, and instead of thinking about what it means to borrow $2-3 billion per day from Asia, they'd rather talk about the Best Super Tuesday Candidate for Technology. It's absurd to worry about NASA and space exploration when you can be held in prison without a trial, the government is involved in sabotage and illegal occupations overseas, and the military fights wars to prop up the dollar to prevent a financial collapse.
I firmly believe that Slashdotters are on average as politically stupid as the general population. Most fool themselves into thinking they're smart because they've had a few semesters of calculus in college, but their general lack of focus and screwed priorities show how clueless they are.
Actually the Chinese wouldn't let the dollar crash
That's what Americans have been saying for the last 10 years, but it's not a fact. Rather, it's what they hope for and is not backed by recent history.
Asia can no longer buy US treasury issues at a rate necessary to keep the dollar up. The US wants China and Japan to lend them more and more money, and there's a limit to how much they are willing to spend. Confidence in the dollar has fallen continuously over the last years, and it doesn't make sense to keep the music going.
I suggest you research this matter, and you'll see that the Americans are spending so much that the Chinese don't have a chance.
I've been hearing this and other similar doomsday scenarios for 25 years now. With all these doomsday predictions failing to come true every day, I'm beginning to think things might just be OK and the doomsayers might be wrong.
I know, and that's because for these 25 years Americans have been losing civil rights and have been printing money to cover their expenses. However, up of the mid-90's your GDP really did grow in pace with the expenses, so your debt was relatively under control. You've got to consider these are long term predictions. Such a huge economy can't fall overnight.
The last decade just awful from an economic and civil rights point of view. Note that I'm including Clinton's term, because the planning for this wave of sudden changes started in his administration and was executed during GWB's two terms.
Maybe this time it actually will be doomsday though.
At this rate, the US doesn't have another 10 years. Banks around the world no longer want to buy US Treasury notes, bills and bonds at the rate that's necessary finance the United States, simply because it's not worth the risk. Every major central bank is heavily diversifying their holdings out of the dollar, and for several years there have been more Euros than Dollars in the international markets.
Yeah, don't vote for the guy who authored more than 10 books on economics, foreign policy and civil rights and has by far the best voting record in the House of Representatives.
Americans say they want change, but it's all bullshit. When the time comes, they vote for variants of the same old corrupt politicians. Obama may be better than Hillary or McCain, but he's still in bed with big business and his concept of economic responsibility isn't nearly good enough.
When the dollar crashes and you're left with massive debt and no civil rights, Americans will act like this was a complete surprise, as if no one could see it coming. When in fact, the US has been borrowing $2-3 billion PER DAY from the Chinese, and your administration's idea of economic responsibility is giving $800-1200 dollars to every American without mentioning where the money's coming from.
So yeah, you can expect a huge "I told you so" from the Ron Paul people when the time comes. And it won't take 10 years.
Bush and his neocon buddies are completely opposed to Libertarianism. They've hijacked the Republican party, and they'd rather have Hillary Clinton than a libertarian like Ron Paul.
Iraq is a contractor's wet dream. Big government contracts are awarded to US companies, while soldiers die to protect American assets. This is exactly what libertarians oppose, and it pisses me off that you've tied the one group of people who've consistently opposed this war with the mess that is Iraq.
Iraq doesn't show that a free market needs government(*). It only shows that under a civil war and illegal occupation nothing works.
(*) Besides, libertarians aren't anarchists. Libertarians favor SMALL government.
I agree with everything you say, but the Thinkpad's looks don't seem to be very popular, at least in my experience. I've had people exclaim "wow, it has wireless internet?", thinking my T42 was some sort of museum piece.
I'd only trade my Thinkpad for another, newer Thinkpad. It's simple, lightweight, elegant and extremely reliable.
Exactly. Ron Paul is the only candidate who's willing to tell Americans the truth.
I'm not American, but I care about the outcome of US elections. I want Americans to enjoy freedom and prosperity, because the US influences the world both through good and bad decisions. The US is quickly turning into a police state. At the current state of affairs, financial collapse would most likely lead to a fascist government, catering to people who feel lost and humiliated, much alike pre-WWII Germany.
Notice how no debate moderator asks real questions about the national debt. If they did, they'd show the giant flaw in every candidate's platform, except for Ron Paul's. Their solutions involve maintaining a heavy military presence abroad (and in the case of the neocons, expanding it), and expanding government healthcare. The US can't afford these any of these things. It's broke at the current rate, maintaining its empire by borrowing money, the dollar is slipping extremely fast and these guys want to increase spending. It's absurd, and Ron Paul is the only one who points this out.
I have yet to meet a person with good knowledge of economics who doesn't appreciate Ron Paul. People who criticize him have no idea just how troubled the US economy is.
I think the SanctionThem was meant to be sarcastic.
With the US economy decelerating and the loss of confidence in the US dollar, the US can't afford to stop trading with China. This move would essentially crash the global economy, and the US has the most to lose due to its massive foreign debt.
Most people don't realise just how rotten the American economic policy is. Back in 71, Nixon realised that the US could no longer finance the Vietnam war without printing money like mad. But the gold standard prevented the Fed from doing that, so he unilaterally cancelled the Bretton Woods system that made the US dollar convertible to gold. This was a total surprise, because he neglected to consult international bankers, and became known as the Nixon Shock. So from that moment on, the US effectively started printing gold. Of course this move didn't fool the bankers around the world, so the Fed had to raise interest rates to 21%/year to convince them to carry on using dollars. Over many years, the markets sort of returned to normal, despite the fact that the US debt had risen to unprecedented levels.
In 2006, the Fed was printing so much money that it stopped publishing the M3 money supply data in order to hide this fact. So now no one really knows how much money the Fed prints. We just estimate that the US foreign debt grows at the rate of $3 billion per day, mostly due to overseas military spending and interest on the already existing debt. This is despite the fact that the US is creating money out of thin air to partially cover this debt. A consequence is that the dollar has fallen in value about 15% in the last year against the Euro.
It bothers me a lot when the Fed governors propose what they call "financial incentive packages". These are usually composed of tax rebates and the central banks injecting money into the markets. Again, it's more money that was created out of thin air, and the tax rebates reduce the government's capacity to cover that money or to cover the debt. It's a temporary fix to the longstanding lack of financial discipline.
The general population typically doesn't care, and this includes Slashdot readers. They think that economics is awfully boring and complicated, and that the government is capable of taking care of policy. But the opposite is happening, and the US debt is getting out of control. This spending obviously makes politicians and contractors a lot of money, so they'll keep doing it until the economy crashes.
Vote in the primaries for a candidate that cares about civil liberties and individual rights.
Of all the Republican and Democrat candidates, only Ron Paul and Dennis Kucinich care. The others range from being downright fascist (such as Rudy "9-11" Giuliani and McCain) to the run-of-the-mill Patriot Act supporters (everyone else).
What about runaway government spending, and the annual 1 trillion dollars spent with the American military overseas? And the fact that the US dollar doesn't stop slipping, and the US keeps borrowing money non-stop to cover its massive, quadratically increasing deficit?
I know this is Wired and one can't expect them to focus on the real problems, but I find it completely absurd to predict "Information Overload" as 2008's biggest problem.
Slashdot Mirror
I've never been charged an import tax ON BOOKS.
I pay the 60% tax on other things all the time.
Software and printed material aren't subject to a customs tax, so this can't be it.
The tax for imports over the mail are very clear: 60% over the value of the goods and shipping. The 20% ICMS charge only counts if you're importing with a courier such as FedEx or UPS. Regular mail does not get charged the 20%.
If the package does not accompany an invoice, or if the invoice's value is obviously fraudulent, then the customs official has can attribute a value which he believes is fitting. If you disagree with this value, you can challenge his value, but this will entail a lot of effort and you will most likely lose. You may also not import used goods, or prohibited items (such as firearms, explosives, live animals and organs).
Customs officials are corrupt bastards if you have to deal them in person (for instance, if not importing through the mail), but I've never had them charge me anything other than 60% over mail order items. In particular, I've imported at least US$ 5000 in books over the last 10 years, and I've never been charged an import tax.
Now if only some honest printer manufacturer would embrace this sort of thing - I'd gladly pay a lot more for a printer with easily replaceable heads and nice, big refillable ink reservoirs that the printer can't lie about and doesn't waste excessively. I don't expect to ever see that happen, though.
Get an HP Officejet K5400. It has replaceable heads (which are NOT part of the cartridge, unlike all other HPs), and you can also install a $50 CIS kit. It prints faster and cheaper than any laser in its price range, with the quality of a color inkjet.
In my experience, ReiserFS is quite stable.
I've used it exclusively in every one of my machines since it got into the stable kernels (whenever that was -- I don't remember), and never had any problems. A few months ago I switched several partitions to ext3 (which was my first experience with journalled FS other than ReiserFS), because I wanted full selinux support. I like ReiserFS, and it's a shame it will probably disappear.
Of course, this is only one guy's experience.
Exactly. I design instrumentation for the power industry. We're talking about equipment which has to run at up to 70 C during the day, every day, with a target lifespan of at least a decade. That can get tricky, specially in humid environments (think of power substations installed deep in the jungle), but it can be done and has been done for the last 50 years.
0-50 C gets close to consumer grade. As long as you choose power efficient designs, use a decent safety factor for the power supply and buy good parts (meaning no cheap electrolytic capacitors built with stolen formulas), there won't be any problems.
That's easy.
Price is dictated by the market. As long as there are people willing to buy Vista, Microsoft has no incentive to either lower its price or improve its quality.
It won't matter who is elected by whatever means, all the candidates have run campaigns of such breathtaking shallowness there is no way you have any idea exactly what policies any one of them will implement.
No. Ron Paul, Kucinich and Gravel ran competent campaigns based on the preservation of civil liberties, respect for the Constitution, and the total revision of current economic and foreign policies.
However, Americans are too indoctrinated and too dependent on the mass media to tell them what to think. The media marginalized these 3 candidates, relegating them to footnotes, and here we are.
Tell that to the guards in Guantanamo Bay.
On the other hand, the government can do whatever it wants to you, given that you're legally dead.
Until Americans reinstate habeas corpus, all bets are off.
If the put option expires and the price is >= $90, then he loses money, because he now has to buy the stock for the "seller" of the put option for more than he payed for the contract.
He only loses the money he paid for the contract. In this case he'll just let the option expire and not exercise it. This is an OPTION, so he's not obligated to sell for $90.
Here's a part I specially liked: On Thursday, three Republicans joined 220 Democrats to support the contempt resolution, including Rep. Walter B. Jones of North Carolina, presidential candidate Rep. Ron Paul of Texas and Rep. Wayne T. Gilchrest of Maryland, who was defeated this week in a primary.
Read my other post in this thread. I'm not blaming China for anything: they're doing what every self-serving totalitarian state since the beginning of civilization has done ... screw everyone else and profit by their loss. Why this is not obvious to more people is a cause for some concern.
These things are never obvious to the masses. The majority of the population is moved by their perception of well being, and is concerned only by immediate occurrences (both in time and regarding their social network).
From my perspective, what's changed is that in the last decade the American industrialists (or what was left of them) and bankers/speculators decided to make a lot of money at the expense of everything and everyone. They became so engrossed with immediate profits that they effectively traded long-term stability for short-term growth. In contrast, the Chinese have a long-term game plan, and have secured year-long contracts with essentially all their major suppliers.
I'm a Brazilian citizen, and I'd certainly enjoy living in a peaceful free market society inspired by American principles (as defined by the founding fathers in the US constitution). Instead, we'll have cut-throat oppressive capitalism as perfected by the Chinese, with a backdrop of new world order American war-mongering.
It amazes me the number of different levels that the American citizen has been sold out by his government and the U.S. private sector, and how little he realizes it. Fact is, the United States is running on inertia now: we're living on our capital not our operating income. That is a recipe for economic disaster.
I know, and this will hurt all of us.
They don't even qualify as neutral, given the effect they're having on our economy and their ongoing pillage of the U.S. economy and education system.
Are you blaming China for your nation's fiscal irresponsibility? China's lending the US hundreds of billions of USD per year so Americans can buy products they can't afford. China not only gets payed for the products, but also gets interest on the loans.
I agree that the Chinese are pillaging your educational system, but it's up to Americans to demand change and provide top notch undergraduates to fill the ranks at graduate school.
The questions were cherry picked? The original thread was filled with garbage.
Slashdot readers in general have no idea of how screwed the US is. They have their priorities all screwed up, and instead of thinking about what it means to borrow $2-3 billion per day from Asia, they'd rather talk about the Best Super Tuesday Candidate for Technology. It's absurd to worry about NASA and space exploration when you can be held in prison without a trial, the government is involved in sabotage and illegal occupations overseas, and the military fights wars to prop up the dollar to prevent a financial collapse.
I firmly believe that Slashdotters are on average as politically stupid as the general population. Most fool themselves into thinking they're smart because they've had a few semesters of calculus in college, but their general lack of focus and screwed priorities show how clueless they are.
Actually the Chinese wouldn't let the dollar crash
That's what Americans have been saying for the last 10 years, but it's not a fact. Rather, it's what they hope for and is not backed by recent history.
Asia can no longer buy US treasury issues at a rate necessary to keep the dollar up. The US wants China and Japan to lend them more and more money, and there's a limit to how much they are willing to spend. Confidence in the dollar has fallen continuously over the last years, and it doesn't make sense to keep the music going.
I suggest you research this matter, and you'll see that the Americans are spending so much that the Chinese don't have a chance.
I've been hearing this and other similar doomsday scenarios for 25 years now. With all these doomsday predictions failing to come true every day, I'm beginning to think things might just be OK and the doomsayers might be wrong.
I know, and that's because for these 25 years Americans have been losing civil rights and have been printing money to cover their expenses. However, up of the mid-90's your GDP really did grow in pace with the expenses, so your debt was relatively under control. You've got to consider these are long term predictions. Such a huge economy can't fall overnight.
The last decade just awful from an economic and civil rights point of view. Note that I'm including Clinton's term, because the planning for this wave of sudden changes started in his administration and was executed during GWB's two terms.
Maybe this time it actually will be doomsday though.
At this rate, the US doesn't have another 10 years. Banks around the world no longer want to buy US Treasury notes, bills and bonds at the rate that's necessary finance the United States, simply because it's not worth the risk. Every major central bank is heavily diversifying their holdings out of the dollar, and for several years there have been more Euros than Dollars in the international markets.
Thank you. That was by far the most intelligent comment on this whole story.
Yeah, don't vote for the guy who authored more than 10 books on economics, foreign policy and civil rights and has by far the best voting record in the House of Representatives.
Americans say they want change, but it's all bullshit. When the time comes, they vote for variants of the same old corrupt politicians. Obama may be better than Hillary or McCain, but he's still in bed with big business and his concept of economic responsibility isn't nearly good enough.
When the dollar crashes and you're left with massive debt and no civil rights, Americans will act like this was a complete surprise, as if no one could see it coming. When in fact, the US has been borrowing $2-3 billion PER DAY from the Chinese, and your administration's idea of economic responsibility is giving $800-1200 dollars to every American without mentioning where the money's coming from.
So yeah, you can expect a huge "I told you so" from the Ron Paul people when the time comes. And it won't take 10 years.
Here are a few interesting graphs: http://financialranks.com/?p=33
(For the record, I'm not even American. I'm just pointing out what's absolutely obvious to everyone in the rest of the world.)
Bush and his neocon buddies are completely opposed to Libertarianism. They've hijacked the Republican party, and they'd rather have Hillary Clinton than a libertarian like Ron Paul.
Iraq is a contractor's wet dream. Big government contracts are awarded to US companies, while soldiers die to protect American assets. This is exactly what libertarians oppose, and it pisses me off that you've tied the one group of people who've consistently opposed this war with the mess that is Iraq.
Iraq doesn't show that a free market needs government(*). It only shows that under a civil war and illegal occupation nothing works.
(*) Besides, libertarians aren't anarchists. Libertarians favor SMALL government.
I agree with everything you say, but the Thinkpad's looks don't seem to be very popular, at least in my experience. I've had people exclaim "wow, it has wireless internet?", thinking my T42 was some sort of museum piece.
I'd only trade my Thinkpad for another, newer Thinkpad. It's simple, lightweight, elegant and extremely reliable.
Exactly. Ron Paul is the only candidate who's willing to tell Americans the truth.
I'm not American, but I care about the outcome of US elections. I want Americans to enjoy freedom and prosperity, because the US influences the world both through good and bad decisions. The US is quickly turning into a police state. At the current state of affairs, financial collapse would most likely lead to a fascist government, catering to people who feel lost and humiliated, much alike pre-WWII Germany.
Notice how no debate moderator asks real questions about the national debt. If they did, they'd show the giant flaw in every candidate's platform, except for Ron Paul's. Their solutions involve maintaining a heavy military presence abroad (and in the case of the neocons, expanding it), and expanding government healthcare. The US can't afford these any of these things. It's broke at the current rate, maintaining its empire by borrowing money, the dollar is slipping extremely fast and these guys want to increase spending. It's absurd, and Ron Paul is the only one who points this out.
I have yet to meet a person with good knowledge of economics who doesn't appreciate Ron Paul. People who criticize him have no idea just how troubled the US economy is.
I think the SanctionThem was meant to be sarcastic.
With the US economy decelerating and the loss of confidence in the US dollar, the US can't afford to stop trading with China. This move would essentially crash the global economy, and the US has the most to lose due to its massive foreign debt.
Most people don't realise just how rotten the American economic policy is. Back in 71, Nixon realised that the US could no longer finance the Vietnam war without printing money like mad. But the gold standard prevented the Fed from doing that, so he unilaterally cancelled the Bretton Woods system that made the US dollar convertible to gold. This was a total surprise, because he neglected to consult international bankers, and became known as the Nixon Shock. So from that moment on, the US effectively started printing gold. Of course this move didn't fool the bankers around the world, so the Fed had to raise interest rates to 21%/year to convince them to carry on using dollars. Over many years, the markets sort of returned to normal, despite the fact that the US debt had risen to unprecedented levels.
In 2006, the Fed was printing so much money that it stopped publishing the M3 money supply data in order to hide this fact. So now no one really knows how much money the Fed prints. We just estimate that the US foreign debt grows at the rate of $3 billion per day, mostly due to overseas military spending and interest on the already existing debt. This is despite the fact that the US is creating money out of thin air to partially cover this debt. A consequence is that the dollar has fallen in value about 15% in the last year against the Euro.
It bothers me a lot when the Fed governors propose what they call "financial incentive packages". These are usually composed of tax rebates and the central banks injecting money into the markets. Again, it's more money that was created out of thin air, and the tax rebates reduce the government's capacity to cover that money or to cover the debt. It's a temporary fix to the longstanding lack of financial discipline.
The general population typically doesn't care, and this includes Slashdot readers. They think that economics is awfully boring and complicated, and that the government is capable of taking care of policy. But the opposite is happening, and the US debt is getting out of control. This spending obviously makes politicians and contractors a lot of money, so they'll keep doing it until the economy crashes.
Vote in the primaries for a candidate that cares about civil liberties and individual rights.
Of all the Republican and Democrat candidates, only Ron Paul and Dennis Kucinich care. The others range from being downright fascist (such as Rudy "9-11" Giuliani and McCain) to the run-of-the-mill Patriot Act supporters (everyone else).
What about runaway government spending, and the annual 1 trillion dollars spent with the American military overseas? And the fact that the US dollar doesn't stop slipping, and the US keeps borrowing money non-stop to cover its massive, quadratically increasing deficit?
I know this is Wired and one can't expect them to focus on the real problems, but I find it completely absurd to predict "Information Overload" as 2008's biggest problem.