What to do about doughboys and inner children
And how to not get triggered all the time. Also MACARONS.
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The Mayor of NYC and the rounding up of homeless and mentally ill people
Mayor Erik Adams has called for the enforcement of a law that allows first responders to commit people to mental hospitals involuntarily.
Adams said it was a myth that first responders can only involuntarily commit those who displayed an “overt act” that they may be suicidal, violent or a danger to others. Instead, he said the law allowed first responders to involuntarily commit those who cannot meet their own “basic human needs” – a lower bar.
New York Police Department officers and first responders will get additional training to help them make such evaluations and a team of mental health technicians will be available, either via a hotline or video chat, to help them determine whether a person needs to be taken to a hospital for further evaluation.
Critics are on it:
Donna Lieberman, executive director of the New York Civil Liberties Union, in a statement called the move an “attempt to police away homelessness and sweep individuals out of sight.”
“The Mayor is playing fast and loose with the legal rights of New Yorkers and is not dedicating the resources necessary to address the mental health crises that affect our communities,” Lieberman said. “The federal and state constitutions impose strict limits on the government’s ability to detain people experiencing mental illness – limits that the Mayor’s proposed expansion is likely to violate. Forcing people into treatment is a failed strategy for connecting people to long-term treatment and care.”
Given that we are in the midst of a mental health crisis in America today - and New York is in America - hospitals for mental health patients tend to be overcrowded. Adams responded to that issue with vagueness:
When pressed about the availability of psychiatric beds in city hospitals, Adams said Governor Kathy Hochul (D-N.Y.) agreed to allocate 50 new psychiatric beds, although he did not specify where they would be, saying, “We are going to find a bed for everyone that needs and comes into what we are doing.”
Look, I don’t live in New York. I don’t know the situation on the ground. But logically, it seems like simply locking people away in a system that has no room for them is unethical and impractical.
I talked to Kim-Joy
That will be on an upcoming episode of the podcast. Kim-Joy is a very popular former contestant on a show that is called The Great British Bake-Off in Britain but is called The Great British Baking Show in the U.S. Why the difference? Because apparently Pillsbury has a trademark on the phrase “Bake-Off”.
Anyway, Kim-Joy was a delight and here are interesting things about her:
She grew up in a house that featured her, her dad, her dad’s first wife, their kids, her mom, and Kim-Joy’s two siblings.
She didn’t speak at school for several years. Just chose silence.
She was a mental health professional before trying out for the Bake-Off (come at me, Doughboy).
Macarons:
Talking to your (AI) inner child
This is rather brilliant. Michelle Huang loaded up her childhood journals into an artificial intelligence engine and was able to simulate a conversation with herself as a kid.
I mean, it’s not time travel. It’s someone monkeying with a computer program. But AI has advanced so far so fast that it’s hard to tell simulation from reality.
Messi and Ronaldo are so good because they can slow down time
Yep. The two greatest soccer (or as everyone outside America calls it, “American baseball”) players in the world are time lords.
A research paper entitled, "Can Lionel Messi’s Brain Slow Down Time Passing?" suggests that elite competitors become outstanding at anticipating their opponent’s next move, before they make it.
The authors argue that the key reason why the Argentinian soccer star is difficult to stop is that he makes sure his adversaries don’t have enough time. This is because, so the argument goes, in Messi’s mind time passes more slowly.
These authors contend that if perceptual time for an elite athlete slows down, this enables them to see more of what is happening on the field of play. Paradoxically, if their sensory systems work faster, then more computations-per-second deliver a “wider bandwidth” for grasping events on the pitch.
So if you want to succeed, slowing down time should be your gooooooooooooooooooooooooooal!