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Unfortunately, a lot of people have the same confusion, and it's because politically minded people have fostered it. The science and medicine involved aren't so complicated that a layman couldn't grasp it, but unless you seek out the information or rely on expertise and reliable sources, you'd end up where you find yourself.

Ask yourself: is there an empirical way to determine the efficacy of a vaccine? How do vaccines work / what is the mechanism by which they act? Who has this information / where can I find it? Are there populations that are more clinically at risk from infection? What is the mechanism of that? Why do I not know the answer to these questions? Where would I go to find studies and experts in the field?

All of your questions have been asked and have clinical and scientific answers that an unambiguous and with exquisite detail. It's only political if you ignore the science and listen to the pundits and politicians.

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The COVID vaccines have a dramatic difference in the number of people who die, the number of people who get sick enough to go to the hospital, the number of people who are sick long term. That's basic statistics, well understood.

The people dropping dead and having heart problems? Those are statistically insignificant. It's a tragedy when someone drops dead 3 days after their COVID vaccine, but it's not statistically much more likely than people dropping dead for other reasons. Acetaminophen kills more people every year by a wide margin, but you don't hear people talking about banning that.

"Herd Immunity"? The virus is out-mutating that. Just ask all the people who have gotten COVID 3 or 4 times. Just ask the countries that tried that as a national strategy.

It's truly disheartening just how politicized the reaction to COVID-19 has been.

Awesome, thanks! And from UofU no less haha (I work at Utah State, the redheaded stepchild of Utah schools (as a redhead, I am allowed to say that lol)).

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>It doesn't seem to prevent people from getting sick which is what we were told it would do.

This statement is just incorrect. If you were under the impression that vaccines prevent people from becoming infected, you were mistaken. They prevent hospitalization and death. That has been proven in randomized controlled trials.

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Why would it not be sustainable though?

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You’re welcome! Glad I could provide some insight. This isn’t my specific expertise, so unfortunately I can’t really rattle off a bunch of good sources for you, but I gave this one a cursory glance and it seems to cover a lot of it, including those early “man the hunter” parts. Hawkes 2003

It can be, though the context of how the money is created matters.

Nailing down exactly what money is is a good starting point. Most economists define money by its functions:

• Money is a medium of exchange - you can buy things with it instead of bartering.
• Money is a store of value - you can earn money today and buy something with it tomorrow or next year.
• Money is a unit of account - you can use it to express the price of goods, and thus allow accounting.
• Money is a standard of deferred payment - you can use money to express the idea that someone owes you X money by Y date, rather than needing all aspects of the transaction to happen concurrently.

Keeping the monetary economy stable is broadly the process supporting those functions.

The management of the money supply primarily impacts the role of money as a store of value (though that in turn has implications on the other roles).
Importantly, money need not be a perfect store of value - and no currency ever has been. But it does need to be relatively stable.
If money is created without regards to managing this, it can cause inflation. If money is removed from the money supply without attention to this, it can cause deflation.

Specific forms of money creation, however, can have different degrees of impact. The example you gave - a loan has a diminished impact because the money is created in pair with a debt to be paid: in effect, an equal amount of negative money is created in the form of the debt. There will still be some impact - people value today money more than tomorrow money. This idea is called the "present value of future money," and the difference between the current value of the money and the value of that same money in the future is called the "discount rate." The nuts and bolts can be more complicated, but for the 1000 foot view, you can consider the impact of a loan on the money supply to be more closely related to the discount rate than the raw value of the loan.

This gets at the idea that there are different kinds of money supplies. Economics has terms for these kinds of currency. M0 is actual, hard currency. It's issued by the government only, and it's the most disruptive if produced recklessly. Pointedly, sound government's don't do that: that's why, for example, the Federal Reserve generally addresses the money supply by issuing treasuries rather making additional US dollars.

M1 is fairly close related: it's M0 plus most of what would seem like a normal bank account to most people. M2 also includes money market accounts and similar. Money creation here should still be fairly well controlled.

M3 & M4 starts working in terms of sovereign debt and commercial paper. This tends to be what we're talking about when people panic about "The Fed is creating money!1!!1!." But all of this supply is created in terms of debt obligations. Like your loan example, the impact is diminished by the negative value of the debt.

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There's a little ambiguity here, so I'll answer as best I can, but it might also be good to refine the question a little bit.

First, "history" started with writing, so "prehistoric" is anytime before writing, which means up until about 6 thousand years ago.

There are languages still spoken today that are that old (eg Egyptian, Sanskrit, Greek, Chinese). So just based on the fact that those spoken languages are practically prehistoric, then that would count as language elements from prehistoric times.

Further, even newer languages like English can trace words back to Indo-European. Looking at Wikipedia, Indo-European goes back 5k years, so I don't think it's a stretch to say that it retained some elements from prehistory.

There was a case in New Jersey where a black bear chose to winter in a small garage built into the side of a hill. When it was discovered, the authorities suggested it be left alone so as not harm it. The garage wasn't used for a car, just storage, so no big deal.
I've also read that bears do NOT reuse their dens for at least several years. And they typically don't use dens made by other bears.

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I still can't find a list of processes that violate the principle of least resistance

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This is neat, and I never knew this. Thanks for the facts!

Thank you for your great answer! That bit about overlap on tasks is basically what I had found in researching it myself (i.e. The roles of hunter and gatherer are not clear cut or mutually exclusive of either gender). I didn't know about the Grandmother Hypothesis but it's fascinating! Thanks for sharing.

Are there any scholars working on this kind of research that you'd recommend I look into?