Someone once told me that we are nothing as humans but the cumulation of the decisions we make and the people whom we choose to associate.

The problem comes when the decisions we've made in our past start affecting our future, for instance not taking school seriously, getting pregnant prior to being able to afford a child, buying into a bogus mortgage plan. The sad part is most the people who fall into these traps suffer from mediocre parenting which perpetuates an already prexisting problem.

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I don't think the word "should" is really appropriate. Past decisions, in most cases, WILL lead to a downward spiral. It's not permanent unless you keep making bad decisions or make one really, reallly, really, bad one.

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I wasn't born with enough middle fingers.

I agree with all that.
In addition, many life-shattering decisions are made while young... and it's also been proven that people do not gain their full capacity to understand risk until some time in the mid-twenties.

A lot of the kids that do make responsible decisions young do so because their parents instilled it in them. These decisions become natural for someone raised particularly that way, not for others.

I think we tend to, as a society, have unrealistic expectations of human cognitive abilities... and strangely put the largest burden on those least likely to meet them! Somewhere we need to balance the consequences of the past (which are necessary) with the ability to create a future (rather than the downward spiral that comes naturally with an early failure).

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That information is classified and to be given only on a need-to-know basis...

And I do not need to know.

In some cases this may be true, but there are decisions that seem to me to be like turning onto a long winding deserted road with nowhere to make a u-turn or turn off to head another direction. It seems that decisions like deciding to try meth the first time is like this. It is so ridiculously addictive that your chances of ever shaking off the addiction after just one try are very very slim. The road it sends you down is the freeway to hell and uturns and turn offs are very very few and far between.

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Not many people know this, but I'm really famous!

Back when Meth was new? Sure. I can see that. In 2008, however, I'm not feeling the pain!

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I wasn't born with enough middle fingers.

Then the obvious solution is to see to it that mediocre parents are not allowed to breed.

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Theodore Lamar Heiks
BA, History/Political Science, Western State College of Colorado, 1984
MBA, Entrepreneurship/Marketing, City University of Seattle, 1993

Stekim, why doesn't everybody possess your powers of common sense?

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Theodore Lamar Heiks
BA, History/Political Science, Western State College of Colorado, 1984
MBA, Entrepreneurship/Marketing, City University of Seattle, 1993

If everybody doesn't possess it, how is it common sense?

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That information is classified and to be given only on a need-to-know basis...

And I do not need to know.

I have my doubts as to whether people lack the capacity to understand risk until their mid-twenties; more like it, people don't care about risk until their mid-twenties because it has taken them that long until life has finally bitten them in the behind. Meantime, they knew all along that they were acting stupid; they just didn't care because acting stupid was so much fun!

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Theodore Lamar Heiks
BA, History/Political Science, Western State College of Colorado, 1984
MBA, Entrepreneurship/Marketing, City University of Seattle, 1993

This reminds me of a comic skit I saw once where the commedian was going off on a rant about how all the warning we put on everytyhing in America is interfering with natural selection and leaving us with a dumber population on average. For instance. had we not placed warning stickers on lawn mowers warning morons against picking the lawn mower up while the blade is spinning and the motor is running, we may be a little shorter on morons in our general population. At the very least there would be fewer pointing their fingers at us telling us what they know, like "you should vote for Obama". But I digress,
warning labels telling idiots not to do things the rest of us would never consider doing in the first place may be partially to blame!

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Not many people know this, but I'm really famous!