Want to feel like a real frontiersman? Are you tired of being oppressed by “The Man”? Do you not even know who “The Man” is referring to? Then you gotta live off the grid! It’s like being a pioneer, only with the Internet and packets of instant Starbucks. It’s a lot of work, but here are 10 reasons it’s awesome.

No Junk Mail

Image Source

Companies can’t mail you crap if you don’t have a registered address. So what if the mailman can’t find you? UPS and FedEx goes anywhere you pay ‘em to. No more circulars, phony timeshare offers or “Urgent News! Must Open!” Salesmen coming to your door? Not a chance! And you’ll never have to look your neighbor’s kid in the eye again and refuse to buy band candy or girl scout cookies.

You’ll Always Be in Fashion

Image Source

Making your own clothes out in the middle of nowhere means never having to apologize for how you dress. Hell, why even wear pants? It’s not like you’ll be living near anyone. If you are, it’ll probably be in a small community where the rules of fashion are either uncared for or invented anew.

If the Apocalypse Comes, You Won’t Notice

Image Source

Let the Rapture scoop up all the Christians. Let nuclear war or the zombies rape the cities of New York and Los Angeles. While civilization goes down like a bitch, you’ll be comfortable and warm out in the middle of nowhere. And once the dust settles and word reaches you of the primitive, radioactive Hellscape, you can return to rule the mutants, being the last person alive to know how to properly stoke a kiln. Class wars, riots, and any kind of societal uprising/turmoil will no longer concern or effect you. Living off the grid can give you a feeling of safety that all the laws in the world cannot.

No Utility Bills

Image Source

Before the first plumbers and his butt crack, God just left water everywhere in these things called “streams” and “creeks” and “rivers”. With a little practice, a fire and a pot, you can make clean drinking water for free. You’ll probably even be able to build a system of pipes that can deliver water straight into your home. Need some electricity to fire up your laptop? Once you master how to hook up a generator to a standing bicycle, you’ll get exercise and all the porn you need to survive. And solar panels get better and better every year; what’s better than getting free energy from the sun? Just be wary that evil corporations may try to infringe on your land and force you to pay for energy from their company. One man, William Williams, faces multiple penalties and fines for cutting down utility lines — that the company planted on his private land!!

The Cops Can’t Find You

Image Source

Living off the grid is especially handy if you also happen to be living a criminal lifestyle. In today’s police state, it’s becoming increasingly harder to obey the law because it infringes on personal lifestyle choices that are irrelevant to the rest of the world. If you’re tired of constantly looking over your back just because you smoke pot, refuse to go to jury duty, don’t want to pay outrageous parking tickets or simply enjoy being naked in your own home, living off the grid may be the right choice for you. Let’s face it, when civilization collapses, it’s probably wise to be somewhere where the last guys with guns can’t find you.

The Law Becomes Very Murky

Image Source

When the cops can’t find you, you can pretty much make up your own rules. It’s kind of like floating in international waters, but without the bad Cruise food and second rate entertainment.

No Insurance Payments

Image Source

If the mail and the cops can’t find you, neither can your insurance company. In fact, why have one? If you get severely injured, you’re just going to die anyways. No sense paying $500 a month so the EMT’s can’t find you. On the up side, if you can build a car or some kind of post apocalyptic facsimile, you can drive it however you want. Helmet, no helmet, seat belt, no seatbelt, brakes, no brakes, on fire, not on fire, it’s all up to you. Just keep in mind that showing up at the hospital without health insurance may be worse than not going at all — oftentimes, the doctors will literally just let you die.

Your Food is Free

Image Source

The woods is like an all-you-can-eat buffet. The food is fresh if you can catch it and you’ll never have to deal with a snooty waiter ever again. If you like salted, smoky meat, off the grid cuisine is right up your alley. At no point will your wife turn to you and say, “Honey, you’d better not eat that, your cholesterol.” She’ll more likely say, “Give me that meat! I haven’t eaten for three days!” Honing your farming skills before moving off the grid is a good idea; you will then be able to harvest your own (completely organic, chemical and modification free) food — which is an incredibly useful skill to have, especially if the rest of the world is plunged into another depression. Growing and catching your own food is also incredibly less wasteful than buying products with unnecessary amounts of paper, plastic, and metal packaging.

Your House is Free

Image Source

If you can build it, you can live in it. The United States is actually a big empty place and Montana has less than seven people per square mile. For a mere couple of thousand dollars of wood and your labor, you can build a house that is at least as good as anyone else’s. You won’t be close to a Starbucks or a Wendy’s, but hey, at least you won’t be near a Starbucks or a Wendy’s.

Lower Taxes

Image Source

Think about all the money you’ve ever paid for taxes. Now imagine that it’s all back in your pocket right now. That’s how much you could have if you live off the grid. What “the Man” can’t find, the Man can’t tax. And with an overhead as low as yours, a $30,000/year gig means you’ll probably have close to $30,000 at the end of that year. If only someone had told Wesley Snipes sooner. This, however, is fraud. The taxes on an off-grid house, though, are significantly less than on any other house.

Bloom Energy, which produces the solid-oxide fuel cell known as the Bloom Box, just made off-grid electricity more accessible. The Bloom Box, previously only available to people and companies willing to fork out $800,000 for it, is now also part of a service called Bloom Electrons. When you sign up for this service, you can lock in electricity rates for 10 years, and only pay for the electricity you consume, according to the press release. You don’t have to pay for Bloom Box hardware or maintenance. The cell is delivered to your site, you sign the contract, and voila, electricity. The New York Times has more:

The launch of the program answers whether Bloom would put out a more-affordable option for its fuel cell anytime soon, a question that has lingered since the Kleiner Perkins-backed company made a splash last year on a 60 Minutes segment. Customers like Adobe, Google and eBay spend between $700,000 and $800,000 for one Bloom Box, a fuel cell roughly the size of a parking space that Bloom claims can power up to 100 American homes. Each Bloom Box is filled with stacks of razor-thin discs each of which that, when infused with a source of fuel like natural gas, can put out enough electricity to power a light bulb, using technology CEO KR Srihdar initially developed at NASA. But Bloom has also said it would develop a cheaper, $3,000 version of the box that could power an individual home.

The Bloom Electrons program requires a 10-year contract, with customers paying only for the cost of electricity consumed, taking away the upfront capital costs and, Bloom says, saving them 20 percent on electricity bills. The company will initially deploy 200 systems, or 20 megawatts’ worth of fuel cells.

The more off-grid options, the better, not just from an energy conservation standpoint, but for competition, too.

Corporate raider Carl Icahn used to chair Imclone, act as a director of Blockbuster, and meddle in Yahoo. The man is no stranger to contentious companies, so perhaps it shouldn’t come as a surprise that Enron-embroiled Dynegy Group is his latest conquest. Icahn is planning to buy Dynegy, one of the biggest coal power producers in the US, for $665 million. From Bloomberg:

Dynegy Inc., the third-largest U.S. independent power producer, said its board has unanimously approved a $665 million offer to be acquired by Icahn Enterprises LP after the company’s shareholders rejected a lower bid from Blackstone Group LP.

Sale of the company at more than $4.50 a share within 18 months of Blackstone’s November offer will trigger a $16.3 million payment to Blackstone, according to an agreement with Dynegy.

Dynegy had an Enron-like business model in 2000; one year later, it was even on the verge of taking over the crooked E when all the accounting scandals unraveled. Dynegy did manage to nab a lucrative natural gas pipeline after Enron’s collapse, but had to sell that to Warren Buffett and a few other investors after hitting its own accounting scandal in 2002. The company skated around bankruptcy in following years, restructuring in order to focus on coal and natural gas company. Still, since 2008, Dynegy has been on a steady decline, making it ripe for private equity investment.

Carl Icahn’s fat portfolio of holdings, meanwhile, is heavier on oil than coal or natural gas. Dynegy will put the world’s 24th richest man into yet another industry–and round out the contentious-company sector of his empire.

Today, a tragedy in New Zealand proved that Chile was an anomaly. 29 coal miners had been trapped in the South Island’s Greymouth Mine for five days when an underground explosion “extinguished hope of survival,” according to the Guardian:

Nothing had been heard from the 29 men since the initial explosion, from which two of their colleagues escaped, but many relatives had stayed hopeful, in part because of the good safety record of the country’s mining industry, with 181 deaths in 114 years before today. They were also buoyed by the rescue last month of 33 men from a Chilean copper mine after 69 days underground.

The local mayor, Tony Kokshoorn, said the families had been cheered at news that robots carrying cameras had entered a narrow shaft drilled into the section of the mine believed to contain the missing men. Police then had to inform them of the second blast. “They were screaming at them. It was absolute despair,” said Kokshoorn, himself breaking down. “When the news came everyone just cracked up. People were openly weeping everywhere.”

After last month’s victorious rescue of Chilean copper miners, this news is very, very sad. And it comes from a country, and mining company, with a solid mining safety record. This is a reminder that mining is dangerous, even in the best of conditions.

This is another nudge for Americans to focus on better mining safety standards and corporate responsibility. Mining is one area of industry where I see government involvement as beneficial, given the state of the mining industry, current working conditions, and lobbyists’ power. Companies like Massey Energy get away with an awful lot, including fatalities, with minimal recourse. It would behoove us to pay attention to this issue before another tragedy hits our own soil. Which, eventually, it will.

Adam Glickman of Condomania, one of the largest speciality condom retailers in the US, said the price of condoms had risen 10-20 per cent in the past year and manufacturers were warning of further increases.

Pork, beef, and dairy are also expected to be more expensive in 2011, less so than tires, however. Also going up are XBox Live prices, shipment prices by UPS and FedEx, and most likely gold. The post office is trying to increase rates, too, but was shot down. In better news, natural gas has been down for a little while, so this winter’s heating bills might be lower.

As of last week, the words “Chilean miracle” have more to do with miners than with Milton Friedman. The odds of anyone surviving 2,000 feet under the earth, trapped in a sweltering copper mine for 69 days, are low. But the celebrated “Los 33″ Chilean miners managed to do just that. Thanks to solid leadership, support, and, depending on how you see things, a miracle, the miners are alive today.

The record-breaking Chilean rescue has rightfully turned the world’s attention to miner safety. Mining is one of the most dangerous jobs in America, and probably the world.

With current safety standards, however, coal miners trapped in the US would face a situation more like the recent Chinese tragedy, in which 37 coal miners died, than the “Los 33″ Chilean miracle.

Coal Coffins

A significant amount of US coal reserves lie in so-called low coal mines, in which the coal seams being mined are less than 48 inches high. The national rescue shelter volume specification for that kind of mine is 30 cubic feet, or roughly 6 feet long, 2.5 feet wide and 2 feet tall. In other words, a trapped miner can’t sit up in a government-approved rescue space, let alone perform first aid or maintain mental stability. US shelters are set up to let trapped miners survive for four days, with four days’ worth of water and food for each miner. Mines need to provide oxygen tanks and carbon monoxide scrubbers to keep miners alive for four days.

The space that held “Los 33″ is described as being about the size of a living room, with enough space for miners to sit, stand and move around in. Miners had enough space to perform first aid and segregate their eating and waste-disposal areas, even without the extra space gained when they were able to access a portion of a tunnel that had not collapsed. Even with this additional space, they showed signs of severe mental stress.

But, put bluntly, had this accident happened in a US low coal mine operating under legal specifications, the miners would have been trapped in a coffin-like space and very likely died.

The Chilean incident, though it happened in a copper mine under specific conditions, still underlines that, with the right resources, trapped miners can survive for an impressive amount of time. But US regulations simply don’t allow for this. Here, if trapped coal miners are lucky enough to make it into a rescue chamber, they wouldn’t have space to treat injuries or make repairs to the chamber. They wouldn’t even be able to sit up.

Lobbying Makes Politicians Lie Down

In 2006, after the West Virginia Sago mine explosion trapped 13 miners for two days, with only one survivor, Congress enacted the Mine Improvement and New Emergency Response (MINER) Act. The MINER Act, the first significant mine safety legislation since 1977, requires coal mine operators create a specific emergency response plan for each their underground coal mines.

As part of an effort to update regulations that protect underground miners, the MINER Act also required that the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) to submit a report to Labor Secretary Elaine Chao, who gracefully stated that American workers need to mind their personal hygiene. Chao’s job was to propose regulations after reading the report.

Perhaps expressing her distaste for grimy coal miners—and her comfort with squeaky-clean industry lobbyists–Chao decided the NIOSH report’s 85-cubic-foot per miner shelter recommendation was too big. One of her justifications was that the recommended size just didn’t fit very well in a low coal mine. Even though MSHA’s review of scientific research led it to conclude that activities like attending to sanitation and caring for injured miners are necessary for miner survival, Chao revised the size downward to its current coffin-like dimensions to the point where the performance of these activities would be impossible.

The minimum volume standard isn’t the only fatal flaw in Chao’s regulations. In order to use the complex rescue shelters effectively, miners need to receive hands-on training, according to the NIOSH report. The report cited research that 7 out of 10 miners who received hands-on training were proficient in the tasks for which they had been trained, compared to only 1 out of 10 miners without training.

But Chao did not include an effective hands-on training requirement in her final regulations. The net result? Miners who are ill-trained to effectively use shelters that are too small to ensure their survival.

When accidents happen in low coal mines in the US, don’t get your hopes up for another miracle.

Note: The United Mine Workers of America (UMWA) is currently challenging the shelter training and minimum volume regulations in the DC Circuit Court of Appeals.

Chinese National Offshore Oil Corp., or CNOOC, is buying a $1.08 billion (or 33%) stake in Chesapeake Energy Corp.’s Texas Eagle Ford shale project. It is the biggest Chinese acquisition of a US oil and gas company to date, according to Bloomberg, which has the story:

The sale gives Cnooc its first energy asset in the U.S., five years after it dropped an $18.5 billion bid for Unocal Corp. amid political opposition. China’s third-largest oil company has spent at least $3.8 billion on overseas acquisitions in the past year as the nation’s energy demand surges.

The Cnooc purchase was the second announced in one day for drilling rights in the Eagle Ford shale, which lies across a swath of southern Texas. Statoil ASA of Norway agreed to pay $843 million, or $10,900 an acre, to set up an equal joint venture in the region with Talisman Energy Inc. Cnooc is paying $10,800 an acre, which includes the upfront cash and drilling costs in the basin, McClendon said.

The CNOOC acquisition basically represents a Chinese government purchase of privately-owned American resources. CNOOC is one of three Chinese state-run oil monopolies, and China’s biggest natural gas supplier. In 2005, CNOOC tried and failed to buy Unocal. The Eagle Shale purchase may be a NOC company first–of many.

I wonder whether the US has considered just leasing out vast portions of federally-owned resource land to China to pay down the national debt.

In a blow to environmentalists, California voted down a ban on single-use plastic grocery and pharmacy bags starting in 2012, followed by convenience and liquor store bags in 2013. The move would have stopped Californians from using roughly 19 billion bags per year. From the CS Monitor:

The plastics industry is working hard to defeat the measure. “This bill is bad for the economy and bad for the environment,” says Keith Christman, managing director of plastic markets at the American Chemistry Council (ACC), which is heading the opposition.

The loss-of-jobs complaint is offset by the opportunity for small companies to create reusable bags, says Environmental Defense Fund senior analyst Wade Crowfoot. Christman counters that the majority of reusable bags are already made more cheaply elsewhere, whereas plastic bags are made in the US.

I have no sympathy for the industry on this one. According to this source, plastic bags make up 10% of the debris that washes up on the US coastline. They kill 200 different kinds of species, thanks to ingestion and suffocation. They use oil: One estimate says China will save 37 million barrels of oil a year by banning free plastic bags. Another, by the Australian government, says that “The amount of petroleum used to make a plastic bag would drive a car about 11 metres.” Polyethylene, from which the bags are produced, is a suspected carcinogen. Too boot, plastic bags are terribly inefficient to recycle.

That’s a heck of an impact for a product that’s easy to replace with a reusable alternative. Still, California lawmakers concluded the ban would infringe on personal choice (ABC):

California lawmakers rejected a bill late Tuesday night that would have made the state the first in the nation to ban all plastic shopping bags. Opponents of the bill argued that the ban went too far to regulate personal choice. Republicans and some Democrats opposed the bill, saying it would have added an extra financial burden on consumers and businesses already facing tough times.

Keith Christman of the American Chemistry Council said that more than 500 organizations and companies were against the ban. He said groups were concerned about the cost the ban on plastic bags would put on working families, specifically $1 billion per year to buy paper bags.

I’m not sure these guys give a flying squirrel about the working poor, but nice rhetoric, I guess. This reminds me of something I heard on a David Cross comedy routine: “Americans have a long and proud history of voting against their own best interests.” Here we go again.

How much did bad decisionmaking have to do with the Gulf oil spill? The Wall Street Journal took a closer look at the decisions BP made before the oil rig explosion that threatens to cripple the Gulf Coast.With their drilling behind schedule, BP made shortcuts and oversights in the rush to finish the job. From the WSJ:

BP…cut short a procedure involving drilling fluid that is designed to detect gas in the well and remove it before it becomes a problem, according to documents belonging to BP and to the drilling rig’s owner and operator, Transocean Ltd. BP also skipped a quality test of the cement around the pipe—another buffer against gas—despite what BP now says were signs of problems with the cement job and despite a warning from cement contractor Halliburton Co.

Some of BP’s choices allowed it to minimize costly delays. “We were behind schedule already,” said Tyrone Benton, a technician who operated underwater robots and worked for a subcontractor. He said that on the day before the accident, a Monday, managers “hoped we’d be finished by that Friday…. But it seemed like they were pushing to finish it before Friday.” He added: “They were doing too many jobs at one time.”

Sloppiness, rush jobs, and incompetent management are an all-too-common scenario in the business world. But in a high-stakes business like oil drilling, they shouldn’t be considered an option. If and when the Gulf oil spill settles down, I’d like BP to demonstrate how it’s tightening management of its rigs to prevent more oversights.