What do you think about the legal monopoly that the U.S. government themselves directly backs that is the company behind every single airbag in every legal newly made car in America? I think I remember hearing that the company is based in Mexico that makes these airbags. They can never go out of business and have ZERO business competition. Anti-trust laws is what it’s called for Google going before the supreme court in regards to what many call a sort of monopoly… but what about the 1 and only airbag company?
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Its difficult. I‘m worried about my job. I‘m german, my government wastes money on everything. They are all in to spend our tax money to support companies which pay almost no taxes and are replacing its labor and contractors to cheaper countries. I don‘t care about monopolies, if I instead compete against engineers which work for 25% of my salary.
Even my coworkers think its smart to reduce costs by hiring non-western engineers. Meanwhile my children are in a self-organized kindergarden, because my government simply is not able to provide enough places. But we need to rescue this system…
I think you can probably fire 1/3 of all automotive employees for being helpless inefficient. But its ridiculous if you replace the productive part instead and keep the others to „manage“ outsourced developers. This system is rotten on multiple levels.
I try to have fun at work and I‘m trying not to become cynical. But I‘m seriously worried about this development.
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i believe capitalism cannot work as static sustainable enclosed system. it needs “earthing” which means it needs always new exploitation potential. it goes in waves but every wave probably improves living standard. but maybe next wave will do just opposite when it hits west from the other side since it has already encircled the globe 
Funny thing is both socialism and capitalism CAN work OK if both are managed well enough. How? Well, with socialism any and all corrupt government workers would need to be replaced, and frequent detailed citizen surveys would need to be given out to 100% all citizens that would be required to fill it out at least once (1 survey) per year. Surveys would be needed to see where the most need/allocation of resources and manpower is needed at any given time. And with capitalism, since capitalism works off of averages (average wage, average cost of living), the government would have to intervene within the financial system of their nation by simply lifting up those at the very bottom (poor/broke citizens like myself) to a ‘lower middle class’ level so needs are easily met for everyone, even if not wants. Right now, the system (my U.S. government) is not giving and loving enough! Capitalism works like the food chain does in nature. It naturally will balance out when/if chaos ever happens, or BIG opportunity ceases to be as lucrative as it once was (take the acting industry here in America, an opportunity that existed last century in the 1900’s but not past the yr. 2000). I like both systems, I guess. Right now, Europe is pretty much 50% socialist and 50% capitalist due to the many benefits/support each citizen gets in most nations over there.
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What do the last four posts have to do with “Good CAD programs?” This is not a political forum, take it somewhere else…
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I was going to find a connection to it but the lost motivation.Sorry. But sure there is little. I think it was initially replied to the question if good CAD apps can be expensive. And the argument was always that for larger corporations money doesn‘t matter. But this is not the case, and if you offshore our jobs to less expensive countries, those contractors there might either crack software to a great extend or work on remote desktops. You could say nowadays a good CAD app needs to support small screens and its easy to crack. And I bet almost everyone in this forum is affected by this development, except retired people maybe. So it should be relevant…
Says the guy from a neutral country 
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I was going to post a topic along these lines under ‘Meta’ but like Helve stated this isn’t really the place for it. It’s an interesting topic the fact that there are so many people using cracked software it’s definitely affecting the industry. As a freelancer I recently realized that I am at a huge disadvantage because I’m competing against people who use Autodesk’s top products for pennies on the dollar, where as I have to find ways to make cheaper software work for me. Cracked AutoCAD is probably the biggest reason nobody has simply been able to create a better general ‘CAD’/drafting program - not a lot of people will buy it when they can just crack AutoCAD.
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If you have employees you cant really use cracked software. You are just one disgruntled employee away from getting problems. I dont know a single arch office who uses cracked software.
Some (well at least one) of my ex employers probably had cracked versions (along with legitimate ones). For example, one had a serial number containing all the same character; something funny going on there. That company actually deserved to get reported but Canada generally isn’t really a whistler-blower friendly country. Playing ‘dumb’ also works wonders in this country. Autodesk has apparently busted one or two companies however. The work-around of course is to outsource work. The issue seems more along the lines of the fact that policing licenses in certain countries is either unfeasible or they just don’t bother. It could also effectively be a form of “predatory pricing” as the cracked software definitely affects other vendors ability to enter into the market.
you had too many words in your statement. I trimmed the unnecessary bits and left the essence.
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A wonderful example of the difference in viewpoint between the ivory tower world of the developer and the real world of the customer. 
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Is that like the ivory tower of the shopkeeper and the real world of their customers?
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I like to think that developers live in an intellectually higher ivory tower than shopkeepers, but yes.
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Another problem with outsourcing is, that you don’t need fancy CAD features to automate redundant drawing work. There is simply enough young flesh to do the stupid work, not matter how stupid it actually is. My experience is that in those companies usually 1 or 2 seats are legal, you need to get the official support from time to time. Not saying its always the case, of course there are perfect legal businesses and great experts in all countries. But its getting harder to compete with with stupid cheap, and often not-that-bad, service-contractors. And by-the-way, I experience this as a software developer in nearly the same intensity, as I experienced this 10 years ago for CAD work. Maybe its not unlikely that we see CAD software entirely developed in non-western countries one day.
Very true. Lots of them are quite amazing. That alone makes the freelancing hard enough. Competing with the cracked software makes it even harder if not impossible. Especially if the highly-talented freelancer is also using cracked software!!
I sometimes wonder if the also charge lower rates for software in developing countries. I’ve thought about using a VPN just to figure that out.
Here in Brazil it is pretty usual to have this kind of situation on small companies, where there is a single license and then 5~10 other computers with a network without web access for the other licenses.
There is no organization to report the situation to, and usually it relies on resellers to identify this and report to the software company to contact a lawyer or something like this to fight the company.
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