(non-chinese) asian equivalent of whatsapp is still whatsapp, it completely dominates in some of the biggest asian countries like india, indonesia or pakistan along with a bunch of other smaller places

Reality doesn't match your claim, for example when one looks at European countries who have all of that.

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.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_punishment_by_country#...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_and_dependen...

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).

> by providing a non-essential service like salesmen...

Sorry to break this to you but if you think Sales is non-essential, you don't know anything about startups.

You didn't understand what I wrote.

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 not against specialization.

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.

Etc.

I am fundamentally against inequality.

> but as a builder you can do it yourself

One who can both build and sell is indeed a rare specimen (unicorn?). I know many builders and less than 10% of them can sell.

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.