Edit: After I posted this piece here, I linked it to /r/survival and asked people to tear me apart. As of this moment, only one person has, but damn did he ever do a good job of it. He pointed out several issues of both content and style. I don’t know if I can fix the style issues, but I addressed the content issues — hopefully adequately, but at least I improved them. This is an update to a piece I wrote years ago for Survivalblog.com. A few people disagreed with some of my points — but survivalblog isn’t much of a forum and responding to them didn’t wasn’t possible (in truth I didn’t even know about their comments until now). This is a complete rewrite, using only the base ideas from that article.