The contents below are paid advertisements. Their appearance does not imply an endorsement by The Oil Drum.
“It's difficult to get a man to understand something if his salary depends on him not understanding it.”
—Upton Sinclair
Search The Oil Drum with Google
User login
Contact
- Content: editors at theoildrum dot com
- Tech support: support at theoildrum dot com
Personnel
- Editors: Prof. Goose, Heading Out, Stuart Staniford, Nate Hagens
- DrumBeat Editor: Leanan
- Contributors: ace, Engineer-Poet, Gail the Actuary, jeffvail, JoulesBurn, Khebab, Robert Rapier
- TOD:Local: Glenn
- TOD:Europe: Chris Vernon, Euan Mearns, Francois Cellier, Jerome a Paris, Luís de Sousa, Rembrandt, Rune Likvern, Ugo Bardi
- TOD:Canada: benk, Libelle
- TOD:ANZ: Big Gav, Phil Hart, aeldric
- Technician: Super G
Recently on TOD:World
TOD:Local
- Summer Streets a Success!
- Plan for Hydro-Fracture Drilling for Unconventional Natural Gas in Upstate New York
- Enjoying Life Close to Home: Fun Streets
TOD:Europe
- Freddie Mac/Fannie Mae bailout: Guess Who Wins
- UK Energy Flow Chart 2007
- Brown pretends to be tough on Russia
TOD:Canada
- Compressed Air Energy Storage - How viable is it?
- Oil Megaproject Update (July 2008)
- Weekend Energy Listening: Wind Power with Paul Gipe
TOD:ANZ
Peak Oil Primers
Blogroll
Energy Sites
- The Coming Global Oil Crisis
- Die Off
- Dry Dipstick
- Energy Bulletin
- From the Wilderness
- Life After the Oil Crash
- Peak Oil Crisis
- Peak Oil News and Message Boards
- Powerswitch
- Rigzone
- Matthew Simmons
- Wolf at the Door
Environment & Sustainability Sites
- The Daily Green
- EcoGeek
- Eco Street
- Green Car Congress
- Green Options
- green.alltop.com
- Gristmill
- RealClimate
- Sustainablog
- Treehugger
- WorldChanging
Blogs
- The Big Picture
- Casaubon's Book
- Cleantech Blog
- Clusterf
k Nation (Jim Kunstler) - The Cost of Energy
- Ecological Economics
- David Strahan
- Econbrowser
- The Energy Blog
- Entropy Production
- Environmental Economics
- European Tribune
- GraphOilology
- jeffvail.net
- The Mess That Greenspan Made
- Mish's Global Economic Trend Analysis
- Mobjectivist
- Peak Energy (Australia)
- Peak Energy (USA)
- R-Squared
- Resource Insights
Organizations
License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.
GAIA Host Collective
"Democracy is based on the assumption that a million men are wiser than one man. How's that again? I missed something.
Autocracy is based on the assumption that one man is wiser than a million men. Let's play that over again, too. Who decides?" - Robert A. Heinlein
Everyone who believes this is solvable tends to focus purely on the technical aspects of the problem. I fully grant that we have the technologies to solve these issues. What I do not grant is that the problem is purely technological. The problem, as Alan can testify, is political, sociological, and psychological.
Are we supposed to believe that every civilization that collapsed before us was vastly more stupid than we are? And yet they collapsed anyway.
Those who focus solely on technology may be overlooking the harshest problem of them all - homo sapiens himself.
Ghawar Is Dying
The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function. - Dr. Albert Bartlett
Actually, democracy is based on the assmuption that one million and one men are wiser than one million men, so you are back to that one man again.
Look up Condorcet's jury theorem. Suppose a man has a 55% of making the right verdict. Now suppose that all members of a jury of five has the same chance. What is the chance that a majority in the jury reaches the right verdict?
What happens if you increase the size of the jury to twelve members?
You don't need much faith in people to appreciate the wisdom of democracy.
I'd say that democracy is based on the idea that it is better to let citizens vote their interests directly rather than have a smaller group decide for them. In the US, we only do that for the occasional proposition or referendum. In all other cases, democracy is heavily filtered through the political parties, the electoral college, etc., leading to a small group of leaders.