TIL about karoshi, or “death from overwork”. With that kind of culture, no wonder Japanese population is in decline. Why have kids if you are expected to work 12, 14, 16 hours a day? Who is going to nurture those kids?
Though such toxic workplace culture still exists, it has changed significantly over the past two decades.
The decline in population is a complex issue, and "time expected at work" is one of many factors contributing to it.
But most of the people live in countries with death penalties. All the top 6 countries by population have death penalty and only 4 out of biggest 17 countries do not have death penalty.
Mid-2000's were the pinnacle of the Western power in general and the American power in particular. First Iraq war, then the GFC punctured the halo from the 90's.
After that, the soil was fertile for the rise of populism. Bungled post-GFC recovery, algorithmic manipulations from social media, unmitigated immigration, COVID and its aftermath just fueled the fire further.
A lot of people complain about American FPTP system. But it seems that the French system, with a final round of top 2 in case no one gets clear majority, isn't any better. I am also familiar with the Indian system which gives rise to coalition politics which has its own problems.
The French system is a bit weird, but I think that parliamentary systems with proportional representation tend to work better, as they represent minority interests and basically force compromise, which is good for societal health (but on the downside, ensures that basically nothing controversial ever happens).
Of course you need to sell your product but as a builder you can do it yourself. It's not your specialty so you likely will be worse at it than a dedicated person and will have less time for actual building.
The key is that builders can exist without salesmen. But salesmen without builders have nothing to sell.
In civilizations, people used to primarily be farmers but as food production increased, this gave rise to the specialization or division of labor. In the nature of an evolutionary competition of companies, those that specialize into builders and sellers will do better than builders that try to do both, therefore the former paradigm will win out.
I am against some specializations getting paid per unit of work regardless of the market value of their product while other specializations get paid a cut of the market value.
I am against positions of power which allow people who don't produce anything to decide how much other people who do actually produce something get paid.
The difference is that people are protesting against ICE, writing op-eds openly across various forms of media and a prominent governor is trolling Federal govt's actions in public.
Good luck trying to do any of that in China. US and other democratic societies may have warts, but there is a huge gap between those systems and China.
> as long as your grass is not too tall or your house has approved color by HOA apparatchiks.
Freedom of speech, and overall first amendment, is about freedom from government restrictions. Doesn't apply to private organizations modulo some cases like civil rights.
> Or as long as you are not burning a US flag in USA, which will land you in prison.
> And I dare you use words "Mexican Gulf", then your glorious leader will personally ban you from entering White House.
Glorious leader can ban you from entering White House for whatever reason he deems fit. It is his residence and his office. Nothing to do with free speech. I can organize a protest outside White House and he can't do anything as long as it's a peaceful protest (again, right granted by 1A).
"District Judge Trevor McFadden on Tuesday said the administration's restriction on AP journalists was "contrary to the First Amendment", which guarantees freedom of speech."
He is also not allowed to impose tariffs as he wishes, but look what is happening. So whatever law experts thinks, does not matter. Glorious leader wills it.
"While 2023 was the hottest year on record and led to at least 2,325 heat-related deaths in the U.S., more than 21,518 people have died from heat since 1999, according to a study published Monday in JAMA, the journal of the American Medical Association."
"Heat kills more people in the United States than any other type of extreme weather, according to researchers. The study noted a 117 percent increase in heat-related deaths over the past 24 years, with a significant upswing since 2016."
"But heat-related deaths are hard to track. The C.D.C. relies on death certificates from local authorities but there is no consistent criteria to determine the contribution of heat to a death. The tally of deaths from extreme heat could actually be higher, with an average annual number of 10,000 deaths across the United States from 1997 to 2006, according to a 2020 study."
Sometimes you simply cannot control a screaming child easily and the only way is to let them be for a while. If you don't understand it, you are really immature and need to learn some basics about human society.
Let's push it a little farther than a screaming child. Something the parent can control is their child hitting the back of my seat. The only time I've ever said something to a parent on a flight was when that was happening, and after several warning looks over my shoulder that the mother ignored. And what I did wasn't shout. I basically turned around and hissed at them to control their child. That stopped it without drawing any excessive attention.
I’m a member of human society too. Me and 80% of the people on the plane can’t stand the selfishness but have the self-control not to say anything, because it’ll do no good anyway.
But if there were an airline that charged double for rejecting kids under the “shut up” age, I’d pay double for my seat and I bet I’m not alone.
> Me and 80% of the people on the plane can’t stand the selfishness
neither can I. But most of the people also understand that when a kid is crying, it is not out of parents' selfishness but rather helplessness.
> But if there were an airline that charged double for rejecting kids under the “shut up” age, I’d pay double for my seat and I bet I’m not alone.
The fact that no parent wants their child to keep crying is something that eludes you means you have very little social skills and you are amongst a tiny minority. If any airline ever proposes something like that, the backlash will be swift and massive.
> If any airline ever proposes something like that, the backlash will be swift and massive.
This is true. But it's not a condemnation of my position: if anything, it supports my level of frustration with the status quo.
Children are necessary and must be loved. At the same time, they (usually) don't need to be on airplanes if they can't be stopped from wailing for 9 straight hours (not an exaggeration- that's what happened on my Frankfurt flight).
There are medical flights and dying relatives and migrations and so on that are unavoidable. I was the wailing child on such a flight once, the pressure killing my ears. But that flight was entirely unavoidable.
And here's what you don't seem to get: people like me accept all of it if the parent is making any effort to stop it or console/distract the child, which is what my parents spent the flight doing.
Instead, we look at the parent sitting on their phone with earphones in while the kid is wailing next to them and curse society for normalizing this.
