Why not extend this test to national-security information? I bet if you ask the military, CIA, NSA, etc. whether they would consider their own "meta-data" as less sensitive than the actual content of messages, they'd say no. The history of traffic analysis in military and foreign-policy applications is a pretty good indication of that.

But whether you'll observe consistent responses to stimuli will depend on whether you're (a) measuring the right responses and (b) using the right stimuli. In this case, the stimuli were video images. Other researchers have found personality differences when using real stimuli. Maybe there is something about video stimuli that overwhelms individual differences?

Where is this "scientific fact" that you speak of? The only "emotionally unstable" teens that I've read about...

If you search Google or Google Scholar for "teen brain development" you will find some relevant information. Like this or this or if you've got access, stuff like this.

A lot of scientific attention has focused on charting the ongoing physical maturation of the frontal lobes through adolescence and even into early adulthood. The frontal lobes are involved in executive functioning, which includes things like self-regulation and impulse control. The frontal lobes are also involved in self-monitoring, which interestingly ties back to the grandparent poster's statement:

I'm sure you didn't think you were emotionally unstable, teens generally don't, doesn't mean you weren't.

Do we really want to saddle ourselves with more debt?

The counterintuitive but economically sound answer is yes.

An economic downturn is precisely the wrong time to be balancing the federal budget. On a personal level, yes, right now individuals should absolutely be preparing for difficult times to come. But as a matter of government policy, the government should spend during bad times, to buffer the effects of a sluggish economy. The time to save (pay down the debt) is when things are going well in the private sector. (And if recession-era spending is done wisely -- for example, investing in infrastructure -- then the benefits will carry into later boom times without new money being spent.)

It would be a little easier to stomach spending now if our current president had been following this advice and running surpluses during the boom (like his predecessor did). But that doesn't change the fact that balancing the federal budget right now will make things worse.