IMO, no.

> In the computer analogy, if the 'run time' always arrives at the same answer, because that is the answer from the calculation. Then was there ever a choice?

To me, there was a choice, but that choice was made by an entity which operates deterministically.

> I guess this and the other comments are really saying just because we have the illusion of free will from our perspective,

Kinda. I would only disgaree with the "illusion" thing. It's not an illusion: from our perspective we DO have free will, we ARE in control. Like everything else, free will is relative.

Realize that when we say "we", each of "us" is a facet of that deterministic universe. The universe is not some big external VM that controls us like zombies. It is us. We are the hardware, firmware, and software of the universe, operating and evolving with agency, modifying one another and the world around us. We're not sandboxed processes. You and I, we are two manifestations of conscious thought occurring in the same grand unfolding of physical phenomena. We see a clear boundary between ourselves and the universe, but that's a human point of view, not a physical truth. When the universe decides something, we decide something, and vice versa.

Maybe that's too far into woo woo land for your taste, but it's how I personally reconcile free will and determinism and it's resolved a lot of the existential dread I used to feel around this. ymmv

To use a computing metaphor, every animal has "buildtime" predispositions and "runtime" choice-making ability. That "runtime" decision making is based on exercising free will, but of course free will is a biologically built-in capability which executes on the deterministic "VM" that is our physical universe.

i.e., we have free will from the perspective of ourselves, but if you zoom out, that free will is just another predetermined physical phenomena.

Now, if I hoarded a bunch of stuff that other people needed and then charged them for access to it, that'd be rent seeking.

> Sure, you can come up with some obscure examples of rent seeking being immoral, like charging a dehydrated dying person $1000 per glass of water, but that's not what we're discussing here.

This is in fact what we're discussing, and your strawman example is ironically very on the nose. Except it's not water, it's housing. People are being forced to move away from my city or sleep on the street because the average unit rent is $3400 a month. The beneficiaries of this system are property owners who spend some money on development and upkeep (which they deserve to profit from) but largely just rake in passive income from having been lucky enough to buy when prices were low.

The theory of Georgism [1] suggests a way that we could eliminate rent seeking: by taxing ownership of all common resources at the value of the rent they would demand. That way, property owners, telephone operators, etc. would be rewarded for their labor in development and upkeep of the property, but would not be rewarded for ownership of the property itself.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgism

This is absolutely inane. Destroying and rebuilding is the opposite of eco-friendly. Building to last is eco-friendly.

Those tightly-packed brick and stone buildings in dense walkable cities last longer and also tend to have less need for AC, since they were designed before that existed. And their use does evolve, from meeting places, to storefronts, to family housing, to condos... old buildings can do it all.

Cookie-cutter suburban homes are the exact opposite. Expendable, inefficient, and inflexible.

You are correct that nobody says "22nd year" in this context, but nobody says "21st year" either. The former is awkward but the latter is just incorrect.

Phishing

Buggy generated code

Cheating in online courses

ChatBots that try to do too much and do it worse than real human service reps, like that one that wrongly assured a customer that their airline ticket was refundable

Deluge of low-value generated content taking attention and revenue away from high-value content creators

    def main():
        try:
            my_a = a()
        except ExA, ExB:
            my_a = None
        ...
         
    def a() -> A:
        ...
        my_b = b()
        ...

    def b() -> B:
        ...

BUT if b begins raising ExC instead of ExB, then that will break main at runtime. That is, main needs to be aware of what b could raise, even though it doesn't directly call it.

It's great that admins can fix the special cases, but the fact that they're special cases at all makes life harder for assumption-breakers. An action that took 10 minutes on the Web for Jim Smith living at 11 Place Road might be 3 hours on the phone for Hector Marίa Gonzalez López whose address is a P.O. box. Those hours add up and can really make folks' life hard for no good reason.

Do your users a favor and make as few assumptions about them as possible!

If I'm doing open source coding, whether professional or not, I'd always want that associated with my personal GH account.

Plenty of us are bipolar, do regrettable things when we're manic, and then own up to them and pay what's due when we're not manic.