This has been true in the USA since approximately 1965, at least. Analysis has shown the general public has absolutely no say in policy making; literally everything is for this or that influential “special interest.”
This is borne out in the erosion of what we now euphemistically call the middle class along basically every dimension that matters.
Some of the heat here is on account of members of this community are, or at least are used to being, special interests that have had a powerful voice in previous administrations and less of one in the current one. But let’s not pretend this is some sort of creeping fascism, it’s just a different faction of elites making their own plays.
Asynchrony, parallelism, concurrency, and even deterministic execution (albeit as a degenerate case) are all just species of nondeterminism. Dijkstra and Scholten’s work on the subject is sadly under appreciated. And lest one thing this was ivory tower stuff, before he was a professor Dijkstra was a systems engineer writing operating systems on hilariously bad, by our standards, hardware.
Some people get literally high when running. Some don’t. The get high types invariably posture as if they have more dedication or willpower. Funny stuff.
It still takes a lot of discipline to make yourself get out there, especially on days when you don't feel well. The "high" only comes after the exercise is well underway. You can definitely condition yourself to look forward to the high as motivation, but it's not a given and it will never be as appealing as booze, weed, or any other drug.
You're right, there is no such thing as willpower and we're all automatons moving through the universe like planets in orbit, helpless to affect our future or how we feel about ourselves or the world.
I think you are ironically correct about that! We (including our neurons) operate at the deterministic level of physics. Measuring subconscious areas of the brain also demonstrates that "choices" we make aren't as made-by-our-consciousness as we think. Robert Sapolsky's books (especially "Behave" and "Determined" are phenomenal reads if this topic interests you.
Now that said I don't think living your life as though you have no free will is a good life strategy. The illusion of free will is incredibly important. Fortunately we humans are masters at living with cognitive dissonance and inconsistent beliefs
I know all that stuff, I was just caricaturing the person's response because I felt it was a bit glib.
I definitely do not believe we have free will in the most traditional sense, but I am a sort of compatibilist: its clear we cannot make a different choice in identical circumstances for meaningful reasons, but identical circumstances never occur anyway. A person's psychology is a sort of accumulation of all their experiences into biases for future behavior and our "will" is really just a manifestation of those experiences. But to whatever extent we can curate those experiences to produce a long term psychology that we like, I think we should do it.
It took decades to gut American consumer manufacturing. Anyone who thinks it can be brought back without pain is deluded. But nevertheless, it’s worth that pain.
As the Chinese are well aware, every time in history a great financial power and a great industrial power have come into conflict, the industrial power wins.
Have you seen LOOP[1]? That example barely scratches the surface too.
As for being able to make words mean different things and break grammatical strictures; that’s called poetry when we do it in English. And yes there is bad poetry, but some is superlative.
This is borne out in the erosion of what we now euphemistically call the middle class along basically every dimension that matters.
Some of the heat here is on account of members of this community are, or at least are used to being, special interests that have had a powerful voice in previous administrations and less of one in the current one. But let’s not pretend this is some sort of creeping fascism, it’s just a different faction of elites making their own plays.
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