That you'd be an entirely different person in another time and place? That's pretty obvious to anyone that has traveled anywhere other than the place they were born.
That's a fact. If you were born somewhere else you would be an entirely different person. You'd be speaking a different language, you'd be involved in different social arrangements and institutions, and you'd think the axioms of your reality were entirely different.
This is a common confusion. My argument is with profits and not with human nature because human nature is malleable. People can change their eating habits, they can change their transportation habits, they can change institutional arrangements that favor profits over well-being, they can change the forms of market transactions they find valuable.
This isn't anything deep. These are just basic facts.
Exactly what a devout believer of the market ideology would say. The market is a social construction. If you can't imagine a different social arrangement then nothing will change and the planet will continue to become less and less habitable for people.
It's not a perfect analogy but yes, we are like bananas. We should expect all future viral outbreaks to have similar effects. The moment Omicron was detected in the UK I knew it had already reached the US. There is no way to contain outbreaks in a global technocracy. Detection will always be too late.
World is projected to have 10B people by 2050 (I think). There are plenty of people. He should be more worried about the famines in Afghanistan and Madagascar if he cares so much about people.
This can all be done with GitHub repositories and signed commits. The workflow would be every "transaction" becomes a pull request that requires approval from several owners of the repository and the CI pipeline only passes and merges the PR to the main branch if the commits are signed by some minimum number of approved contributors.
There are also things like joint bank accounts that require approving transactions so this is all already possible with existing technology, all without having to put up with gas fees or any other blockchain nonsense.
This isn't regular ignorance. At this point there is enough data on vaccines and death rates for any sane person to see that the vaccine is a net positive. What's going on with some people is more than just ignorance. They're killing themselves just to "own the libs". The virus doesn't care if you're republican or a democrat, it's just a biological replication machine, it has no political agenda or allegiance.
Innovation hasn't slowed down. Individuals are just having fewer effective ideas. This is expected. The contemporary world is a complicated place so any kind of real innovation requires coordination among large groups of specialists. The development of the vaccine is a very good example of real innovation because it demonstrates what specialists can accomplish when they effectively cooperate across commercial and governmental institutional boundaries.
So if something is slowing down innovation it is probably the incorrect emphasis on the lone genius focusing on hard problems. This is no longer a sensible model for innovation and it probably never was in the first place.
Follow the science means gather data and see what works, it's not about philosophical differences about whether lockdowns are good or not from a philosophical perspective but whether they actually have their intended outcomes, i.e. reduction of infections and deaths.
It would be idiotic to think lockdowns don't make a difference for a highly contagious airborne virus. The fewer people there are out and about the less chances the virus has of jumping from one host to the next. That's not even following science, that's just basic logic. But people don't have logical skills anymore because they keep consuming nonsense from their internet connected pocket supercomputers.