Originally published at Notes From The Bunker. You can comment here or there.

Well, I woulda posted yesterday but I was up to my elbows trying to install a new gas range in the kitchen. For the mount of money the bloody thing cost you would think that they’d send couplers that were the correct size <Belushi> but noooooooooo!</Belushi>. Instead, after sitting on my tuchas for most of the day awaiting that “we’ll be there in a half hour” delivery  mantra, I had to make the obligatory two or three trips to Home Depot to finally finish the stupid thing. On the bright side, the house didnt blow up so I guess I used enough pipe dope. Either that or it’s all pooling in my basement waiting for the hot water heater to kick in and put my house into a low earth orbit.

So, back to our regularly scheduled somewhat on-topic content………

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I found this old post at ITS Tactical about price vs. value in choosing critical gear. I was especially interested by this statement:

Your brain is programmed to NOT do decision matrices. You read that right, the human brain is actively designed not to do that. Instead your brain wants to use pre-determined neural patterns to influence your decision; it does NOT want to list out positives, negatives, and mitigations. So we have to beat it. How? The decision matrix. List out all of the needs you previously defined in columns on the top. Next, list out all of the products in rows going down the left. The fun begins by ranking, numbering, or otherwise quantifying the ability of the researched products to meet the pre-defined needs.

And then theres a sample of such a decision matrix which is quite fascinating. Anyway, I recommend reading the whole post. While I appreciate saving money as much as the next guy there’s a hard truth: for the stuff that may mean the difference between life and death, going with the bargain basement stuff might be unwise. Go read, it’s a great post.