"I can go out into the woods and find an animal and kill it and skin it and cook it and eat it."
What animals?
If society collapses to that point, deer will be hunted to extinction in a matter of months, if not weeks, with smaller critters probably not getting hunted to extinction after that, but certainly to the point you won't find them readily anymore. There's still too many people with the skill to do that for you to survive.
Thinking that you can Davy-Crockett your way out of a societal collapse is underestimating the number of people who can still hunt, or overestimating the amount of resources actually available. The brutality of such an outcome would be well beyond what I've seen any survivalist even faintly dream of, because if they looked at the truth (such as, "city folk are not a homogeneous mass of morons who would instantaneously starve to death, there'd still be enough to move out and cause trouble") they'd realize that it isn't a matter of "ensuring survival" so much as "incrementally increasing my odds of survival from the low single-digit percentages to the high single-digit percentages", which is way less fun to fantasize about.
What this guy does is not scalable. wmeredith is exactly right. There aren't a whole lot of lessons to take away, except perhaps that we need less than we think we do, but that's hardly news anyhow.
You know, when I'm trying to get code to be scalable, making it need less (less memory, less CPU time, less bandwidth) is a pretty key technique. I think that's true of human life too: if we can get by on less, more of us can survive.
Actually, part of my point is about the firearm aspect of nonsurvivalists. # of armed people >>> # of survivalists. This is part of the reason I've not dedicated a whole lot of time to survivalism.
What animals?
If society collapses to that point, deer will be hunted to extinction in a matter of months, if not weeks, with smaller critters probably not getting hunted to extinction after that, but certainly to the point you won't find them readily anymore. There's still too many people with the skill to do that for you to survive.
Thinking that you can Davy-Crockett your way out of a societal collapse is underestimating the number of people who can still hunt, or overestimating the amount of resources actually available. The brutality of such an outcome would be well beyond what I've seen any survivalist even faintly dream of, because if they looked at the truth (such as, "city folk are not a homogeneous mass of morons who would instantaneously starve to death, there'd still be enough to move out and cause trouble") they'd realize that it isn't a matter of "ensuring survival" so much as "incrementally increasing my odds of survival from the low single-digit percentages to the high single-digit percentages", which is way less fun to fantasize about.
What this guy does is not scalable. wmeredith is exactly right. There aren't a whole lot of lessons to take away, except perhaps that we need less than we think we do, but that's hardly news anyhow.