And when you subscribe to 1 or 2 rotating streaming services and only torrent for personal archiving purposes, you aren’t even depriving the streaming services of any revenue.
You are right, but it’s not just poor developed countries and not just windows either.
Back in the 1990s, copy protection in general was weak and companies wishing to expand market share did not prioritize combating piracy.
They always just focused on making the big companies pay through licensing audits and kept prices high to ensure revenue.
The whole industry just accepted that students, researchers and tinkerers would pirate their software.
Photoshop, Office, Visual Studio and even enterprise software like Oracle had this dual strategy: let piracy help spread market share among those who can’t or won’t pay, while maintaining high prices and security audits to drive revenue from companies.
When it comes to costs, yes, but there is also another angle.
Sometimes doctors will prescribe expensive, patented drugs when cheaper, better, out-of-patent alternatives exist.
This is not to the benefit of the insurance companies.
Rather the pharma industry and regulators act in a concentrated rap battle: the regulator covers their ass by only approving in accordance with the latest, most comprehensive studies (“evidence based practice”) and the pharma industry only bankrolls new studies on their most profitable medications.
I fear the medical profession is also going down this path.
Government and lawsuits are totally regulating everyone to death. Doctors used to be knowledgeable and creative (and they still are) and had the freedom to prescribe whatever they thought would be the best.
Now, they can only follow conventional wisdom and the exact recommendations of the regulators. If they deviate just a little to find the perfect fit for your case, they risk themselves and their livelihoods.
That really is the problem. Both sides suck in this war.
On the one side we have a colonial apartheid regime that tries to steal every inch of land while imprisoning the native population in ghettos and restricting their economic and human development and trampling their human rights.
On the other side we have a desparate population seething with righteous rage at their oppression that has rejected every attempt at compromise and is only willing to stop once they have fully driven off every last invader off their land, but realistically they don’t have the power or international support to achieve that, and they also never owned every inch of the land, either. So. Their ambition is neither realistic nor righteous.
While most Israelis are European colonists who could migrate to either Europe or America, not all of them are and it would not be fair to those whose ancestors lived in the region for hundreds of years to become refugees.
So anyway. I think the EU, UK, USA and Arab league need to come up with a reasonable plan - in consultation with the Israelis and Palestinians - and just force Israel and the Palestinians to accept the most reasonable plan. Both groups are fully dependent on their benefactors, while their domestic politics prevent them from solving it without external pressure.