Use some method of birth control (could be abstinence, if you object to other methods) consistently and correctly.
And especially if you think you don’t need to learn how to change a diaper. 
A few years ago I might have agreed with this, but then found myself into a situation where three of us had carpooled up to a festival (an hour and change from home), and the first thing that happened when we got there was my contact lens popped out and rolled between the floorboards of a vendor’s stall. At $100 per lens, no, I don’t have spares. I was also the only one of the three of us who knew how to drive. That was an effin scary drive home, let me tell you (the other two had to read signs out loud for me), and friend E was kicking herself that she hadn’t gotten around to taking drivers ed yet (at the age of 28 or so).
So yes, sometimes in an emergency, you just need to know how to drive.
Heck, changing a diaper turned out to be one of the easiest items on the OP’s list. Before our baby was born I read something to the effect of, “There’s a huge difference between somebody who has never changed a diaper, and someone who has changed one diaper.” I think that’ true.
If “find” includes creating your own job. 
Also, know the basic information about bank accounts, investments, mortgages, insurance, and taxes.
BTW, what is the point of this?
How to deal safely with common animals in your area, including wildlife and other people’s pets. Know when it’s too dangerous to deal with an animal on your own.
How to deal with other people in a socially acceptable way. This includes service employees.
How to recognize poison ivy and poison oak. Yes, even if you’re not an outdoor type- they can grow as weeds around a house or garden.
You should know that you can’t use dish detergent intended for washing dishes in the sink in a dishwasher. Yes, even if you don’t have a dishwasher, because they’re common enough that you’re likely to encounter one at someone else’s home.
Basic electrical safety. Don’t use electric appliances while in the bathtub, don’t stick tools into outlets, don’t work on electric appliances without unplugging them or shutting off the power first, that sort of thing.
Which things you have in your house are poisonous, and which might be poisonous in large doses. Which items in your household you should not handle without skin or eye protection. You should know if you have anything dangerous in your household, and what you should not do with any dangerous items you have.
That you should read the labels before using possibly dangerous products such as cleaning products, medicines, or insecticides, and follow the label instructions. That you should be careful about mixing products (like taking more than one medicine or using more than one cleaning product at the same time). If you’re taking medicines regularly, or caring for someone else who takes medicines, you should know what other medicines, supplements, or foods you or they shouldn’t take. You should know that more isn’t always better when it comes to medicines and cleaning products.
You should know not to drive when you’re drunk or too tired.
It could include running a business of your own. You should know how to do something that is legal and that someone will pay money for you to do.
I guess it’s of some benefit to historians, or Antiques Roadshow appraisers.
Thanks.
Also, I just found an answer from the Wikipedia article on Genealogy:
Use a Windows computer, at least to the point of being able to bring up a web browser or word processor. Even if you don’t have a Windows computer at home, you’ll encounter them in public places and in other people’s homes.
Left click, right click, and double-click. (Solitaire is good for training someone who doesn’t know these things, incidentally)
Use a browser to do basic things like read a page or order something online.
Use a search engine of some sort.
You should know that some states have sales tax that is not included in the listed price of many items, and that the amount of sales tax varies from state to state (and sometimes locally).
You should know how to write a check and use a credit or debit card, and how to read a bank or card statement.
I would argue not knowing how to drive a car is like not knowing how to ride a horse back when the horse was essentially the sole method of personal transportation.
Now, did many people get by not knowing how to ride a horse? Sure. You could pay to ride in a coach, you could avoid significant travel altogether (and of course if you go much further back than the mid-18th century 90% of humans didn’t travel much beyond their place of birth, from the dawn of the agricultural age up through the Enlightenment.)
However, it is true than and it is true now, that ability to take responsibility for your own personal mobility opened worlds to you that otherwise were very inconvenient and sometimes impossible.
Can you avoid ever owning a car or ever driving one? Certainly, it’s mind numbingly easy in a large city with well developed transportation.
Outside of that scenario it can be very difficult to get by without being able to drive. My grandmother did it because my grandfather could drive, but not everyone is married. How easy would it be to take a job in a place that wasn’t one of the major cities if you couldn’t drive at all? You could probably get by, but in some places you’d be adding 3-4 hours a day to your travel time; a lot of the country you can get roughly anywhere via public transit but you certainly can’t do it time efficiently everywhere. I’ve experienced the unfortunate annoyances of flyover state with no car, you can get most places via bus but their schedules are usually very spotty and with only a few runs a day it makes it hard to schedule around them. You can shell out money for a cab but it’s too expensive for an average person to use every day of the week.
So yeah, you can get by without ever driving a car but I do think you’ve closed down some of the world to yourself because of it. I like new experiences and new things, I’ve lived in places so remote that some people would have lost their sanity and I’ve lived in some of the largest cities in the world (including a stint in Seoul.) Some people only like one type of living, and that’s fine I guess, but I think it odd to close off so much of life because of the comfort of the known.
That being said, if you’re going to drive you better know how to change a tire. I have a AAA membership and I’ve still been in situations in which I was either walking for 30 miles in one direction for help or waiting for indeterminate amounts of time for assistance.
Knapp stone tools, produce usable cordage, make clay pots and grass baskets, brain-tan leather, fell trees and carve wood with stone tools, hunt turkey, deer and buffalo, make a birch bark canoe, light fires with sticks or stones, grow squash, corn and beans…
Make change just by counting.
Protect yourself from sexually transmitted diseases. If you do get one, take responsibility. Let anyone who might have given it to you or gotten it from you know, so they can get tested.
I don’t think I need to do a point by point refuting of your list as so many others already have, but aside from a handful of decently important skills, most of them fall into a few categories:
– Nice to know, but not necessary to know
– Nice to know, but only if you care about the specific hobby
– Completely unimportant to know in the year 2010
– Totally silly “skills” that wouldn’t show up in my Top 1000
Every adult American needs to know how to . . .
DA da DA da DADA da DADA
DO do DO do DODO do DODO
DA da DA da DADA da DADA
DO do DO do DODO do DODO
di DI di DI di di DI di DI
di DI di DI di di DI di DI
di DI di DI di di DI di DI diiiiiii
DO TH’ HUS-TLE!
Now, despite my defense of driving, I actually disagree with most of the OPs list.
My list of things everyone should know how to do would be:
[ul]
[li]Feed yourself.[/li][li]Appropriately dress in different social and occupational situations.[/li][li]Vote (how to register, etc)[/li][li]How to read (voting/voter registration is harder without this…so is almost all aspects of daily life.)[/li][li]How to do basic math.[/li][li]Recognize that food is spoiled or undercooked (if you eat meat.) Even if you don’t ever make food for yourself and exclusively eat at restaurants, knowing this can prevent you some serious pain in life.[/li][/ul]
I can pitch manure. *
- Not really. Actually I’m not even sure what it means.
In light of Kaio’s and Martin Hyde’s comments, I’ve found myself reconsidering my thoughts on driving a little. It’s true, I suppose, that not driving can be a major hassle to anyone living outside major urban centers - at the same time, though, I think there’s a certain level of social preconditioning here. If you’re someone who doesn’t live in one of these areas and never has, odds are that you’ve known how to drive from the youngest age at which driving was legally an option for you. I wonder how many people find themselves abruptly transplanted from a major city into a rural area and come up short fending for themselves in terms of transportation.
My other point pertains to what Martin Hyde says about how “you can get by without ever driving a car but I do think you’ve closed down some of the world to yourself because of it.” That’s true, but at the same time, I’d argue that in a lot of cases if you’re someone to whom the need to drive yourself, or the opportunity to drive, has never presented itself, life’s opportunities are probably closed off to you in other ways. If you can’t afford a car at all, let alone its upkeep and insurance, how many chances are you going to have to pop off to the mountains for the weekend?
I don’t want to sound like I’m being unduly stubborn on this one - I’ll concede that driving is an important skill for most Americans, but I can’t see my way to thinking it’s a skill in the class of knowing at least rudimentarily how to treat/recognize a life-threatening wound or situation.
I have never been involved in a life-threatening situation (I’d imagine most Americans haven’t). Yet, I’ve been driving everyday for the last 12 years. I imagine this puts me in the company of the vast majority of Americans (like close to 90-95%).
Driving is probably the most important skill for an American to have.
Well, the point is, you don’t need to be transplanted from a city to a rural area for such a thing to come up. All three of us live in a city; for the most part I don’t drive, preferring my bike or public transit for day-to-day getting around. We just happened to take a day trip to another town, and as this is America, there’s no public transit between our city and that town. There’s pretty much no public transit outside of intra-city, and major city to major city at all. Unless one refuses to ever, ever leave city limits, which is impractical at best (moving house? the nearest IKEA is 45 minutes away by highway), sooner or later one will need to know how to drive. America is too bloody big and spread out for other solutions to be practical.
It went way beyond “major hassle.” We could not get home in any other way than driving. Had I refused to drive, we would have been stranded in a small town with nothing but the clothes on our backs. It was a damn good thing I only lost one lens, because my range of focus without correction is about two inches beyond the tip of my nose.