MudMan

It depends. Chatbots are terrible at broad queries or parsing very detailed information, but they're surprisingly good with very fuzzy searches. If I want a link to a specific website I go to a search engine. If I want to ask "hey, what's that 80s horror comedy that's kinda like Gremlins but not Gremlins and it has one of the monsters coming out of the toilet in the poster?" I go to a chatbot.

EDIT: Heh. Just for laughs, I tried that exact query on Perplexity.ai. It got it right:

The movie you are referring to is "Ghoulies." It is a 1984 horror comedy film that features small, impish creatures similar to those in Gremlins. One of the iconic images associated with the movie is a Ghoulie coming out of a toilet, which is also featured on the poster.

Heh, drunken rebuttals are so much better when they're acknowledged as one. It really takes the edge off.

Alright, for one, I am not in the US or a US citizen, so a lot of my shock comes from there. For what it's worth, I have not engaged with these processes in the US at all and here not professionally, but I did learn them because of life reasons. And like I said last time, it is messed up here too, in that some of the reasonable terms and limits to restricting someone's autonomy and free movement do get suspended in a very weird grey area when precautionary measures, including for medical reasons, are established. Full judicial review can take years here, too, and cautionary measures can stand in place for that whole period. Just to ground the conversation a little.

However, over here before you get detained indefinitely for any reason, and yes, being suicidal counts, you still need that to get cleared by a judge. You can't just hold a person for two weeks on the mere suspicion that they may harm themselves and not have a doctor or a court make a decision on whether there is reason for that. So already I am way out of my comfort zone in terms of constitutional guarantees at play here. Once you find somebody dead while that process is happening we're in "maybe we need this to change right away" territory. When that happens a dozen times you mostly just set it all on fire and start over.

Now, on the specifics, I do have some questions for you, if you're drunk enough to still pay attention to this thread.

One is that I'm a bit confused about the dfiference between being held pending evaluation and having a checklist of evaluatory criteria. Because it seems to me that if the actual evaluation is taking so long to happen that people are dying in the process then the checklist is the de facto evaluation. What's the difference between that and letting the cops make the call? Which yeah, terrible idea, but... you know, if you just get there anyway through a loophole that seems like a problem.

For the record on the next thing, when I mean "whoever runs the institution" I mean whoever owns it, not the staff. I have no idea if this is all handled in public institutions (which is what I would expect here) or in private facilities (which is what I'd expect in the US, but maybe that's my socialdemocracy bias). While we're on this, I do take issue with the "don't sue because the system is already underfunded" point. Those are two separate concerns, and if the impact is on the underfunded medical system then that's a third problem. Asking victims (and this guy is dead, so... yeah, that's the right word) to not seek compensation because the negligence is the result of more negligence in underfunding the system is not it. Of course these are all entirely hypothetical lawsuits, so who cares, but still.

Honestly, if you ask me what I'd do in that scenario... well, I'd get involved in the politics of it, which is what I've done in life when I bumped with that sort of stuff. I mean, the way I'm hearing it the main problem is funding and staffing. The way I see it, this is the still literally richest country on Earth. So yeah, the reaction must start with voting for anybody who will fix that by any amount and continue along a line that ends with locked down airports and food courts, like the French are doing today. Or at least with thousands of marches, like the Germans did a few weeks ago. I get it, half the US thinks that public services are evil (somehow), but holy shit, man, the camel's back has to snap at some point.

Right?

Anyway, as a PS, you weren't that hostile. For online forum rants that was maybe a 3/10. I've had way worse on accout of far less. If that makes you feel better, you're a mellow drunken poster.

No, they should buy no car and instead buy a public transportation pass.

And a bycicle.

Again, I refer you to my previous post.

Yeah, man, so... maybe have that argument with someone who is having that argument?

I mean, cool, I get it, you're itching to make that case to somebody who is making the opposite case, but if you just blast it at people who are not saying the thing you're responding to it just... doesn't really work that well.

I refer you to my previous post, where I do the going on.

In what "role"? How is that more to the point? I never said "vans are better than pickups", I said "for the money of an expensive pickup you can get a hatchback and a van". So not that vans are better, but that you can cover the dual role of a very expensive "truck" that you also use as a daily driver for a thing that is a more practical daily driver and a work vehicle.

So no, the idea isn't that you're driving a van to take your kids to school like some deranged weirdo (again, I've been that kid, don't do it, it's a bad idea). The point is that using a work vehicle as your daily driver is expensive and inconvenient for everybody else in the road.

Incidentally, you guys are being obnoxious enough about this that I today I walked past a Citroën Berlingo parked in a compact car spot on the side of the road and went "heh, look at that". That's what you made me do. I shouldn't care about this. This shouldn't even register. Stop making me notice practical vans.

I'd tell someone with a SmartCar to get a monthly bus pass instead. And a bike, maybe. And a sense of self-awareness.

But also, yeah, failing that get a bigger car with a backseat. For sure. Maybe the one Smart make, if that's what they're into.

What I'm fascinated about is the "these are not relevant based on my prior ownership" bit, because... I'm not talking to you. I never talked to you. You popped up in here saying that the problem with pickups is they weren't making small ones, as if that was a systemic issue and then somehow this became about a specific car that you want to have that they don't make. Like you personally. As if my tangentially related point was an affront to this purchase that you want to make specifically.

I'm not sure that's a specifically American thing, because people in social media do tend to think everything is explicitly about them in particular, but man, when combined with the pickup thing it does sound... you know, arch.

But no, we're NOT talking about those people. At least we're not just talking about those people. And a van that is not being used because you're taking a smaller car is, in fact, more efficient than a pikcup truck. The point isn't "buy a van instead of a pickup", it's "buy a sensible car instead of a pickup, and if you do need a work vehicle get one of those on the side".

The entire point is we're talking about how Americans in general apply this very specific kind of FOMO to determine whether to go for a thing they don't really need in the event they might need it, that was the point of the thread. Like, you know, driving a luxury work vehicle everywhere when you could just have a practical small car for people and a practical cheaper work vehicle for the same price. Then it weirdly morphed into how if you point out that this applies to pickup trucks people get mad at you on the Internet. And then people got mad on the Internet.

Also, second time in this bizarre argument somebody raises "vans are just built on pickup frames with a roof on them". The other guy who said it went to sanity check online and came back reporting that actually no, that wasn't the case, at least for the popular examples he was thinking of. I think that may be a US thing as well where one popular van was built like that and it became common to think that was the norm but the popular vans in places where vans are populars are not built like that. It's weird, I hadn't heard that one before until I accidentally pissed off pickup people the first time.

Well, see, the secret is you probably don't really need that truck bed in the first place, so if I was to guess, I'd say that's why there's a bit of resistance to that idea. The working hypothesis here is that if you bought a sensible car that makes sense as a car... and a separate van to work, then you'd never buy a van. Which is what most people do here, honestly. You don't so much buy a van as you know a guy who does own a van and will let you use it for the thirty minutes that you actually need it once or twice a year in exchange for a beer later.

Which is probably how you end up with fewer cars per capita than the US and still have work vehicles separate from whatever you use to take the kids to school or go get groceries.

Also, you send the kids to school in a bus and walk to the shop. That also helps, I bet.

Cool.

So why are we having this conversation, then? Because that's great for you, but as a "optimal use case" as opposed to the "maximal use case", I'd say "seats" tends to rank pretty high the list of car features. For... you know, most people.

Yeah, okay, but sue the goverment to shit, then. Or whoever runs the medical institution in question not providing adequate service. The people responsible not having the resources or the political will doesn't remove the rights of a patient. If I have a mentally ill relative that needs to be committed and they end up in jail for weeks I'd be pissed and extremely litigious even before they end up mysteriously dead.

And also, does "pending evaluation" suspend habeas corpus if there is no evaluation in place to deem them a risk? WTF? What's to keep a hostile actor from maliciously putting a person in this track instead of properly charging them if they're just trying to dump them in a hole for two weeks? How does that hold to any constitutional scrutiny in the US? Surely you're either deemed incompetent and you are involuntarily committed until you're not... or you have habeas corpus. The hell is this limbo in between?

I know even here there is a lot of grey areas in this subject and some shaky legal foundations to safety measures for people who can't look after themselves, but... yeah, this seems messed up. More messed up than the baseline level of messed up around this thing.

That's all fair enough. And let me just include the first part about North America in there and not also pick the fight about Canada being mostly in that same cultural bundle because this thread is already trolly and angry enough.

I think if this thread wasn't such a hassle it'd be interesting to pick some of that apart, because I do think the marketing is culturally bound, not arbitrary (if it was arbitrary it would have worked in the places where it didn't). I do think it's obviously hard to argue about the identitarian bit you mention, though, because... well, look around this thread.