Jumping other cars

Yes. Positive to positive, and negative to negative. It is 1987 and newer GM vehicles that have a very poor generator design that is easy to develop problems that are often unfairly blamed on jump-starting another vehicle.

I have a bit of a different opinion on this. Today's alternators are very sensitive to overloading. They are designed to maintain a battery's charge but not recharge a fully discharged battery. When you jump start a car you are asking the donor alternator to not only maintain the donor vehicle but boost a fully discharged battery also. Today's alternators are just not built to withstand that kind of surge and will often fail during the process. Whenever you buy a new alternator these days you will find a warning in the box telling you to fully recharge the battery before starting the car with the new alternator because you can ruin the new alternator.
Jump starting is basically a thing of the past and using a jump box or battery charger is the recommended method now.

This is actually the second time I have heard this. I just bought a new battery for my 2014 truck that had been sitting all winter. The salesman refused to take my old Dodge battery for a core. He said I should charge it at a slow rate for three days, then retest it. Sure enough, it has been working fine in another vehicle.

The first thing to be aware of is a 2003 Chrysler alternator is still of the older design that has no electronic monitoring inside it so I would not worry about jumping another vehicle, ... However, as brother Wrenchtech said, you do not want to be trying to start the other engine on your alternator. Instead, let your car charge the other guy's battery for five or ten minutes. That way it is his battery that will be doing the hard work. That applies to older cars too because a starter can easily draw 200 -300 amps for a second or two until it gets up to speed. You will never get that kind of current through the tiny teeth on the jumper cable's clamps.

I also did not stop to consider the condition of the drained battery. I regularly sit outside to piggyback on local wireless internet systems to have these conversations, and I often run my battery down to the point I have to walk home ten miles! When I bring another car to jump-start my drained one, that battery is not totally drained, so the load on the assisting car's charging system is minimal. In fact, the last time this happened, when I got back four hours later, the drained battery had recovered and the truck started right up without needing a jump-start. I should have just walked to Walmart and use up those four hours.

When the other guy's battery is totally drained and has been that way for weeks, it takes a good ten to fifteen minutes on a charger before that battery will start to take a charge. It can take that long for the acid to become conductive, then the electrons will begin to be stored in the plates. This is where you will be putting a really heavy load on your alternator if the other guy tries to crank his engine right away. If your charger has an amp meter, you will see it stays near 0 amps, then gradually rise to about 15 - 20 amps fifteen minutes later. Current will drop after a few hours when the battery is fully-charged. For most of my experience working in the battery room at a mass merchandiser in the 1980's, that is five amps indicating it is done charging.

If you really want to help the person with the drained battery, meaning someone who left their lights on in the parking lot, but you are worried about overloading your charging system, connect the cables to charge his battery for ten minutes, then either take the cables off or stop your engine, then have them try to start their engine. If you leave the cables connected with your engine off, the only load on your car will on the battery, which is what it is for.