Thursday Links

• Homeless college graduates in the US.
• Limitations on US tight oil production (David Hughes via Jim Hamilton).  I'm not persuaded that rapid well decline curves can tell us how much oil will ultimately be produced.  Instead, they tell us that it will take many rigs to produce the oil and that we'll have to constantly keep drilling.  But as long as the overall ROI of the process is sufficiently high, we may be willing and able to build unprecedentedly large numbers of rigs.  So the real question is how much recoverable resource is actually there.
• John Michael Greer argues that Occupy Wall St failed because it - like many leftist movements in recent decades - tried to use consensus-based organization methods.  I'm inclined to a similar view.  I had extensive experience with consensus in cohousing communities in my twenties and early thirties and my conclusion is that it's a decent decision-making method for small voluntary groups with clear shared values, but it doesn't scale well at all.  As the group gets larger, it has a tendency to become decision-making by whoever has the worst personality disorders (and therefore has the most willingness to make a stink in meetings).  The larger the group, the more such people there will be and they all have the power to block consensus.  It's also incredibly time-inefficient at scale.  These kinds of problems have been around almost from the beginning - the Tyranny of Structurelessness from the early seventies women's movement is still an interesting read on related subjects.  Functional movements need to set up some way of electing leaders and use competence and commitment to the movement as the major criteria for selection.  
• There's a global strategic maple syrup reserve!  Who knew?  
• Good thing we have it given that the apocalypse will be tomorrow.  Hope your preparations are in order.  Personally, I plan to greet it with a nice glass of red wine by the fireside and I have already procured the wine and the glass.