300% Price Hikes Push Disgruntled VMware Customers Toward Broadcom Rivals (arstechnica.com) 109
After closing a $69 billion deal to buy virtualization technology company VMware a year ago, Broadcom wasted no time ushering in big changes to the ways customers and partners buy and sell VMware offerings -- and many of those clients aren't happy. ArsTechnica: To get a deeper look at the impact that rising costs and overhauls like the end of VMware perpetual license sales have had on VMware users, Ars spoke with several companies in the process of quitting the software due to Broadcom's changes. Here's what's pushing them over the edge.
For some, VMware prices more than tripled under Broadcom Broadcom closed its VMware acquisition in November 2023, and by December 2023, the company announced that it would stop selling perpetual VMware licenses. VMware products were previously sold under 8,000 SKUs, but they have now been combined into a few bundle packages. Additionally, higher CPU core requirements per CPU subscription have made VMware more expensive for some reseller partners.
"As on-premises virtualization projects move from [enterprise license agreements] and perpetual licenses to new bundling, socket-to-core ratios, and consumption models, the costs and pricing can increase two or three times," Gartner's 2024 Hype Cycle for Data Center Infrastructure Technologies report that released in June reads. Numerous VMware customers I spoke with said their VMware costs rose 300 percent after Broadcom's takeover. Some companies have cited even higher price hikes -- including AT&T, which claimed that Broadcom proposed a 1,050 percent price hike. AT&T is suing Broadcom over perpetual license support and says it has looked into VMware alternatives.
For some, VMware prices more than tripled under Broadcom Broadcom closed its VMware acquisition in November 2023, and by December 2023, the company announced that it would stop selling perpetual VMware licenses. VMware products were previously sold under 8,000 SKUs, but they have now been combined into a few bundle packages. Additionally, higher CPU core requirements per CPU subscription have made VMware more expensive for some reseller partners.
"As on-premises virtualization projects move from [enterprise license agreements] and perpetual licenses to new bundling, socket-to-core ratios, and consumption models, the costs and pricing can increase two or three times," Gartner's 2024 Hype Cycle for Data Center Infrastructure Technologies report that released in June reads. Numerous VMware customers I spoke with said their VMware costs rose 300 percent after Broadcom's takeover. Some companies have cited even higher price hikes -- including AT&T, which claimed that Broadcom proposed a 1,050 percent price hike. AT&T is suing Broadcom over perpetual license support and says it has looked into VMware alternatives.
What are the alternatives for enterprise scale? (Score:5, Interesting)
Anyone facing this issue where they work? What have you looked at?
(fingers crossed first post).
Why not Docker/Kubernetes? (Score:3, Insightful)
Anyone facing this issue where they work? What have you looked at?
(fingers crossed first post).
We've always been on Docker. I haven't heard of anyone in my circles using VMWare for almost 20 years now. I was actually wondering who still uses them. Is it just legacy apps...like those folks who still use IBM Mainframes or DB2?...or are there good reasons for choosing VMWare for hosting servers?
Re:Why not Docker/Kubernetes? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Microsoft themselves are eliminating Microsoft Exchange and AD on-prem and forcing customers into cloud with containerized extensions for on-prem functionality.
The vNext versions of Windows Server/Exchange etc are all required to be integrated with your Azure instance so basically the local stuff is just a proxy for Azure.
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Microsoft is now on the path to hold every business in the world by the balls.
I just wait for the day when Microsoft suddenly becomes unavailable due to an intrusion.
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So what are people whose data centers are on air-gapped networks supposed to do? (Serious question.)
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I jest, as I know what air-gapped really means, but for taking it literally, there's always this [hackaday.com].
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You can run multiple containers across different hosts and use a load balancer? Like literally any other networked service?
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If you think all existing software can work like that then you are an idiot. To add to the what containers can't do can you snapshot your "container" before making a change to get a rollback position in the same way you can with a VM.
If you are starting on a green field then containers are probably the way to go. Most people are *NOT* starting on a green field and moving to a fully containerized solution would be along, difficult and expensive process.
In the meantime, they could stuff everything into indivi
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Now only if there was a way to analyze the traffic going to a server, to make sure you can route and accept that same traffic at a load balancer or reverse proxy.
And you do know that you can map in filesystems from outside the container into the container? And those filesystems can be snapshotted? And networked storage is what you should be using anyway if you're not an idiot and actually care about horizontal scaling of services?
This is done literally every single day in thousands of organizations.
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Docker is a container, not a management platform
No. Docker is a set of tools for managing containers. It takes advantage of namespaces in the Linux Kernel to run the containers https://docs.docker.com/get-st... [docker.com]
Microsoft has no virtualization capabilities
Microsoft offers it's own Type II Hypervisor called Hyper-V. It's both their on-premesis virtualization solution as well as the base of the technology running their Azure hosted/cloud virtualization options.
I am pretty sure our Exchange server is hosting in Azure.
Mine isn't. Neither is our Active Directory. They're both on premises. I won't go into the pros and cons of moving Exchange or AD to Azure her
Re:Why not Docker/Kubernetes? (Score:4, Informative)
VMWare's enterprise solutions let you do things like migrate virtual machines between physical hardware. Docker isn't a substitute. My particular use case is when we host temporary servers for customers. We create a dedicated VMWare host. When we are done, we delete the host and the backups and send an attestation that we have done so.
There is probably a solution we could build using Docker. But the one we have is built using Puppet and Foreman and existed before Docker was a thing. There isn't really a reason to migrate to anything else. Or at least there wasn't, depending on the cost.
We host in our own data center due to it being much cheaper than using GCP. But our Puppet/Foreman setup can create hosts in GCP if the customer desires (such as if they insist on the VMs being in a particular region.) If VMWare were to triple our costs, it would suddenly become cheaper to get all of our CPU from Google and simply decommission our data center.
It's not quite the same as using IBM mainframes or DB2. Those things are ungodly expensive and ever use of them that I've seen has tried to migrate away and failed. But if VMWare really goes through with this price hike, you're right, that only the people who failed to migrate will be using it.
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There is still shitloads of it in Fortune 500 business that hasn't figured out how to get off Windows Server yet. Institutional inertia is very hard to overcome the bigger the business is.
Why not Microsoft Vitualization? (Score:2)
There is still shitloads of it in Fortune 500 business that hasn't figured out how to get off Windows Server yet. Institutional inertia is very hard to overcome the bigger the business is.
Makes perfect sense that they would have Windows Server for various reasons. I am not personally a fan, but see value in the Windows Server infrastructure (C# SQL Server, etc) ...it's a worthy competitor to the products I use. However, doesn't MS offer virtualization in their Windows Server products these days?
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It's called Hyper-V and it's been included as part of desktop and Server Windows since the days of Vista / Server 2008. If you have a Pro or Enterprise SKU of desktop Windows, it's a standard OS component.
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That's because management of today is burnt in with that Microsoft is the safe choice. The same as IBM was the safe choice in the 1980s.
Today IBM is a corner case company.
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After having worked with k8s, AWS EKS more specifically, for the past 6 years I can tell you that k8s is not good if you are I/O heavy. I would not recommend anyone to run a proper file storage, a database, or any old school service with high I/O on it.
If you run k8s in a public cloud you delegate all the I/O heavy stuff to the cloud services such as S3, DynamoDB, RDS, and only have stateless (or as stateless as possible) services in k8s.
Part of the issue is the way kubernetes and the linux kernel, handles
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Used to use it a bunch, because we were on Macs and occasionally would need a Windows application, or Linux. Now on Windows it is rare to need a MacOS application, and WSL works just fine for the Linux side, so VMs aren't that useful for me anyway. Though to be fair, WSL is a hypervisor which is related to VMs.
I never used VMs as a way to get multiple servers on a single physical server, since I don't do server or web stuff. But containers are much more suitable for those things, whereas VMs to me were f
Re:What are the alternatives for enterprise scale? (Score:4, Informative)
I have been at companies/orgs looking to get away from VMWare for about a decade now. What VMWare brings to the table is the best control plane out there, solid scalability, ease of use for their clustered filesystem (VMFS is a heck of a lot easier to deal with than GlusterFS), and a number of features, like fault tolerance where a VM can keep going even if the hardware it is running on falls over, as another shadow VM took over.
I'm seeing people move to Hyper-V, Proxmox, and XCP-NG. Some are moving to Nutanix, but that is more of a hardware and software stack than a virtualization platform.
Proxmox is getting there. It has been hamstrung for years by lack of third party development, but Veeam, Nakivo, and other backup program makers are supporting it, so it is starting to emerge as a solid rival to VMWare on some fronts.
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Unfortunately Veeam is now also on time limited licenses.
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I operate a MSP for small businesses. I started on ESXi and moved to a combination of Windows Server datacenter (Windows Server instances running on DC edition are automatically licensed, and I'd be spending that money anyway) and XCP-ng for my hypervisors. I have no major complaints about either product. I think you'll hear about Proxmox a lot in this thread as well, but it's a nonstarter for me because some people claiming to work for the FSF were condescending dickholes to me on IRC in 1994 and it'll be
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So you're not going to use an open source solution because someone was a dick to you in 1994?
But you'll use Microsoft products? They've been dicks to everybody going back previous to 1994.
Does not make sense.
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I'm not going to use the FSF solution because it turns out that there are many alternatives. Even when I was talking about Linux on IRC in 1994, I was specifically using either Yggsdrasil or Slackware at the time rather than Debian.
Regarding Microsoft, there's lots and lots of industry-specific applications that run on Windows and nothing else. The system I'm looking at this morning runs on a Paradox DB and looks like it uses Delphi libraries. The vendor says it needs to live on Windows Server 2016. Since t
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This is one of the dumbest things I've read all week. I can't imagine still being bent about shit that happened to me 30 years ago.
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I can't imagine still being bent about shit that happened to me 30 years ago.
you are not a woman.
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+5 funny!
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I think you'll hear about Proxmox a lot in this thread as well, but it's a nonstarter for me because some people claiming to work for the FSF were condescending dickholes to me on IRC in 1994 and it'll be a cold day in hell before I use anything that's derived from Debian.
It's too late to not post that comment, but it's not too late to read this while pretending someone else wrote it so you can gain some self-awareness.
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A mix of KVM (Proxmox) and container orchestration (sitting on baremetal or Proxmox).
Looking at Apache CloudStack for multi-tenant cloud provisioning.
Bare Metal (Score:3)
My friend worked at a hosting company that was all bare metal, or bare metal and containers. They standardized on Dell using OpenManage to automate installs and updates. He said the cost savings and performance gains made up for the cost of not being able to overprovision hardware. I'd imagine with the VMWare price hike, it's even more cost effective.
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TheForeman.org is great for that.
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Hyper-V over here.
Yes, there are things VMWare can do that Hyper-V can't. We don't use any of those features.
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Anyone facing this issue where they work? What have you looked at?
For large corps (100,000+ users) there are no alternatives besides cloud. And many of them are using VMWare in the cloud (yes it is a real product). Anyone claiming they have an alternative isn't worried about availability, backups, & DR...
Re:What are the alternatives for enterprise scale? (Score:4, Informative)
I have 250k+ endpoints on the network, we use Proxmox, works better than VMware, and is cheaper, it has things like live-restore. All the extra DR, vGPU, SDN and other stuff costs extra on VMware/HyperV if it is at all "validated" to work together. We had a cluster of VMware for decades apparently, a few years ago, there was a problem between the IBM SAN and the Cisco server hardware (firmware bug) that took out the entire cluster and VMware just pointed the finger at Cisco, then at IBM, then at Red Hat (which was the OS that the SAN management plane was installed on), then at the network (also Cisco), then finally after about 3 days admitted they were to blame. Off course we had another datacenter to fall back on, but it's really painful to pretend your datacenter burned down when it's VMware shit product. We have been migrating off VMware to Proxmox with the goal of moving completely before the current version goes out of support and we'll have to change the licensing models. We got the quotes for renewal, my CIO nearly had a heart attack, it cost almost as much annually as our last "perpetual" license (which is good for ~5-7 years typically), instead we're hiring a few more people.
Re:What are the alternatives for enterprise scale? (Score:4, Informative)
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Re: What are the alternatives for enterprise scale (Score:2)
Azure, Windows 365 and Hyper-V are being rolled out in a large scale at the 80k employees company I work for. All the systems from the 90+ worldwide locations we can move out to the cloud are going that way, those staying are being upgraded to newer Windows Server OS versions and put on Hyper-X. On a positive note, countless duplicates are being converged to multi-tenant systems as well - and a lot more trust being put on the Azure and SDWAN availability across multiple units worldwide.
Broadcom has killed a
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Anyone facing this issue where they work? What have you looked at?
At my workplace, which would probably be classed small to maybe medium-ish (around 50-60 VMs and a user count in the mere hundreds), we use SCALE Computing's HyperCore [scalecomputing.com] product. It is KVM-based, though pretty customized by SCALE. We previously used VMware but were already moving onto SCALE well before the buyout, and at this point we are 100% SCALE.
While it certainly has its limitations (in particular no hardware passthru, so you're not getting any virtual USB or serial devices), it has worked well for o
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We are using their hypervisor.
So far, wonderful.
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HotLink Supervisor allowed third party hypervisor to be managed by vCenter - vCenter could not distinguish between vSphere and the HotLink agent running on KVM, XenServer or Hyper-V. McAfee was a big customer.
The company has since closed, but Iâ(TM)m trying to get the code so I can maybe release it as open source if thereâ(TM)s enough interest.
( i am the inventor and co-founder of HotLink).
The HotLink.com domain was sold, but use archive.org to find details from before 2019.
Richard.
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My employer is currently in the process of migrating off VMware due to Broadcom's licensing bs. Our costs nearly quadrupled overnight.
We looked at Nutanix, Proxmox and Hyper-V. Each has some shortcomings compared to VMware, but each of them are significantly less expensive or free so that's a win.
Nutanix might be the most comparable option to VMware\ESXi\vCenter, but their storage integration has some things that wouldn't have been ideal for us. If they can quickly improve their storage integration and c
Acquisitions always... (Score:5, Insightful)
...make the product worse for customers.
Just say no to software subscriptions
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You could always support some product that is vaguely open source, like something based on Linux KVM or anything from RedHat.
Vendor lock-in (Score:1)
Nutanix (Score:2)
From the VARs we've spoken to the only "real" approximate replacement is Nutanix. No way around it really, companies love the opex expenses of the cloud vs capital, even if they are getting reamed.
We dumped it. (Score:3)
We just took a few months and made it the top priority to get rid of it. We did it. It's gone.
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What did you replace VMware with?
XCP-ng: Clustering [yes], Live Migrations [yes]... (Score:4, Informative)
At my office we use XCP-ng, though it lacks support for nested virtualization with Windows guests, which breaks WSL2, Docker on Windows, etc. They are supposed to be working on a fix. See [https://github.com/xcp-ng/xcp/issues/105](https://github.com/xcp-ng/xcp/issues/105).
Generally, setup is easy, clustering is a thing, you can live migrate VMs to other hosts, and you can live migrate VM disks to other storage arrays as well. There is also support for vTPM in the upcoming 8.3 release and it the current LTS 8.2 supports secure boot.
AT&T should hire staff and fix the nested virtualization issue and release their work as part of the open source setup. Maybe REALLY screw over Broadcom that way.
-Mike/NewsRx
Proxmox VE (Score:2)
For my homelab, my pile of junk aged out of ESXi on CPU features at the end of 6.7. I moved to Proxmox VE, and picked up native LXC containers and live migration, which wasn't supported on the free license ESXi. But I deliberately keep my networking simple, and use BSD/ZFS based TrueNAS, don't dabble with Ceph, etc... So far, it gets what I need to do done. But I can't say how well it scales beyond 30 - 40 VM's/containers.
That said, in a larger environment, I would probably look at Nutanix. Redhat's beh
The market finds a way / Demand destruction (Score:2)
Demand destruction
"Demand destruction is a permanent downward shift on the demand curve in the direction of lower demand of a commodity, such as energy products, induced by a prolonged period of high prices or constrained supply."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demand_destruction
The market finds a way
If the high prices are prolonged, it incentivizes others to find a solution to meet the needs of the users who are unwilling or unable to afford a product or service.
Broadcom sucks (Score:2)
No exceptions. All their products I have ever used were bad on the engineering side, and that very much includes the RP. Designed by incompetents with components from cretins.
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What's the logic behind this?
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The logic is that Broadcom has a habit of buying companies, cutting 90% of the workforce, and jacking up prices 300% (or more).
By the time hapless customers migrate to another provider, they'll have paid enough (coupled with the newly lowered operating cost) to let Broadcom make what they paid for VMWare back, plus a healthy profit (an they'll still have a not-completely-worthless company left at the end).
But not sure what this has to do with Trump (would help if I could see the parent post).
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That's the connection I'm trying to find.
Re:300% price increases push me towards Trump (Score:4, Insightful)
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We specialize in putting the blood into turnips and then selling them to customers who want to do some blood extraction. On the internet there's a market for everything.
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There's an election next week and it opens the door for some dialogue with a not-like-minded group. There's a lot more eloquent people in here that just need a little prod to dump their wisdom. That's really the logic. Dialogue, some humor, maybe we learn stuff, maybe not... Setting's inappropriate I realize but if the group doesn't like it then it'll get modded away. Sort of like X's community notes. A great idea Slashdot invented (did they?) that I think works really well.
Re:300% price increases push me towards Trump (Score:4, Informative)
The inflation was baked into the system when President Biden took over from President Trump. Trump signed Congressional legislation effectively printing money to give to businesses and later to give to households to try to stave off a massive recession brought on by his inept handling of COVID-19. Inflation would have been there regardless of who was elected in 2020. And since he's tariff happy, it would probably be much worse today if he had been elected in 2020. And will be again if he's elected this year.
Free trade may be tough on high cost labor places like America, but it's great for prices. The trouble is tariffs may help out one particular labor sector - and the emphasis is on may - but the retaliatory tariffs that get imposed on our exports hurt many other labor sectors. Look up how much the soybean farmers were bailed out due to retaliatory tariffs. If you are buying a foreign product that is hit with a tariff, you pass on the costs. You may have long term contracts you can't break. You may have greater quantity or other specialized requirements that American manufacturing can't meet, at least immediately. Regardless, to get your products out the door, you frequently can't just shop American. Your input costs go up, and since the American way is to keep profit margins consistent, you raise prices.
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Re:300% price increases push me towards Trump (Score:4, Informative)
I agree, and I hadn't forgotten. However the total of Trump's virtual cash printing was a bit higher than Biden's if Google isn't failing me. Regardless, I've posted elsewhere complaining about both. Sorry I wasn't clearer.
I also don't disagree in principle with what they did. It probably was a reason we came out of COVID better off than most other countries at the cost of a huge spike in debt. All payments should have been targeted better so that those who didn't need them didn't get them, but that would be expecting much more out of Congress than we probably should. But better handling of COVID by Trump might have lessened the need for any bailout.
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I suggest you look at https://www.longtermtrends.net... [longtermtrends.net] and you will see that inflation did follow in 2008, but the size of the M2 inflation in COVID times was huge compared to anything in recent history, and produced a larger spike.
Re:300% price increases push me towards Trump (Score:4, Informative)
What you say is true, but a lot of people want to drop the inflation blame on Biden, and Biden alone.
They're forgetting or consciously choosing to not remember that inflation was already on the way up before Trump left office (4.4% in Dec 2020).
But here's the thing that is most telling: the Trump campaign has totally shut up about the economy at this point, because they know there isn't an argument to be made there any more. Unemployment and inflation are both lower today than they were at this time 4 years ago. People's wages are higher today than they were 4 years ago. The only thing that sucks in the economy right now is that prices are still up, but they're coming down too.
This leaves their campaign with the following issues to demagogue about:
border issues / immigration
woke idiocy / culture war nonsense that changes absolutely nothing about people's day-to-day
The garbage truck with their campaign logo on the side of it yesterday probably wasn't the best optics.
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True story, last week my daughter got wacked in the head at school with a hokey stick and she got a concussion. I tried to get a dr apt the same day but couldn't. The following day i learned there is such a large influx of Hatian migrants the apts are getting hard to make. Believe me or not. It happened and it was unprompted. I just asked the nurse at reception if things were busy and she was very exasperated when she volunteered that nugget of info. This is mega small town America by the way, out in the
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Trump will fix it. Or at least I believe he WANTs to fix it.
Sure he does. He thinks a giant beautiful wall, and somehow rounding up and deporting 12 million people, will fix the problem. He also has a bridge for sale, if you're interested.
If you want an actual discussion instead of political snark: Why did Trump kill the border bill that anyone with actual direct knowledge of it supported it? I'm not claiming it wouldn't have 100% fixed the migrant problem, but it was something. It was a start. It was an actual honest-to-goodness bipartisan effort, not the political
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He also has a bridge for sale, if you're interested.
More left wing lies, Trump is only selling gold watches, gold sneakers, digital trading cards, bibles, the best bibles they have the best country song inside, my favorite parts are in there, sticks and stones may break your bones, I invented that they must have thought it was a good idea Immigrants are ruining your country and they want to take your bible away eat your cats, yes they're eating poor fluffy and the bridge is not for sale. The bridge is not for sale and I'll tell you what, if it was for sale y
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That's why there are insta-care, urgent-care, and if all else fails - emergency rooms. It's doubtful your doctor's office would have been the best choice anyway unless they had imaging equipment.
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So you're thinking he wants to fix it, when he is the single reason Congress hasn't already passed a bill to improve the situation?
Might want to take another look at the situation. You're letting "perfect" be the enemy of "better" when there's basically zero chance you're ever going to see "perfect."
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I don't want to hire people to 'process' migrants. I want to hire people to turn them away... Sorry if that's a harsh opinion but it's how I feel.
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I don't give a flying fig what "international law" says. International law has no bearing on domestically enforceable law recognized by courts in the United States.
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I don't give a flying fig what "international law" says.
Well, good thing you're not in charge of anything important I guess.
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I don't give a flying fig what "international law" says. International law has no bearing on domestically enforceable law recognized by courts in the United States.
Treaty obligations are frequently enforced by signatories passing them into law in their own jurisdictions.
https://www.law.cornell.edu/us... [cornell.edu]
That law and the very important history behind it doesn't give a flying fuck what you think either.
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Do you want border stations with equipment necessary to increase discovery and siezure of illicit material (read: fentanyl) from entering the country? Because that got blocked too.
Reference what I wrote above about letting "perfect" be the enemy of "better" because that's exactly what you're doing right now.
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I thought they were too busy eating the dogs and cats to go to the doctor?
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Haitian immigrants aren't illegal. Getting an appointment in a small town, or big town, is a pain in the ass all over America regardless of immigration. Illegal immigrants go to the emergency room where they can't be denied care, they don't go to general practitioners where they have to have insurance.
Emergency rooms have been crowded for decades. I had to wait longer than I wanted at the emergency room a month ago, and nobody in front of me in line was an illegal immigrant. Illegal immigration would go
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It's "hard to make appointments", yet you're there the next day... ok that's every doctor's office across America, seriously do you know how lame that sounds? If I go to my small town dentist with a cracked tooth someone else is getting bumped that day. You really think doctors sit around strumming banjos on their front porch waiting for patients to show up?
You're physically in a small town doctor's office being told it's busy because of immigrants, and ... the office was not obviously busy and full of peop
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The garbage truck with their campaign logo on the side of it yesterday probably wasn't the best optics.
I thought it was a great euphemism for his campaign. Him riding along with a truckload of his campaign nonsense off into the sunset.
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Trump's having trouble opening the door to the truck and swaying like he was about to fall before climbing in was even worse optics.
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This is the history of economics, at least during my lifetime. The current president gets all the blame. If a dam built 50 years ago collapses, then it's the current president's fault. Voters don't think these things through, ain't no one got time for that. With inflation, the current president has always been blamed. Carter inherited a huge mess from the Nixon (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nixon_shock) but Carter got 100% of the blame because he was the guy in power when the biggest effects were felt.
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but is not the one running for POTUS
He was hired and vetted by the campaign. And if some reports are to be believed, the "jokes" were pre-approved and put on a tele-prompter. The words didn't come out of Trumps mouth, but they were spoken on his behalf.
I'm certain he said many many many things that were far worse
Probably not at a campaign rally. Roasts are, in my opinion, generally hilarious. Telling roast jokes at a rally? Someone didn't think that one out.
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I think blaming inflation on Trump or, for that matter, Biden is the mark of your typical parochial American. The idea that either of them caused inflation in the UK, the rest of Europe, other G20 countries, etc., is a pretty wild conclusion. Two things have driven inflation, and they are COVID for sure, but mainly the dick head Putin in the Kremlin and his decision to invade Ukraine and there is nothing any one could have done about that. Oh, and if you think rolling over and letting Putin take Ukraine wou
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Although this response was about Trump on a primarily American site, I think you'll find that when something is perceived as going wrong in a country, the leader of the country is blamed - either directly in the case of free societies - or silently in the case of places like Russia, North Korea, China, or like places where dissenters simply disappear, are sent to prisons or gulags, or die in dubious ways. People tend to hark back to when they are convinced times were better, whether or not such is warranted
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By the time Putin invaded Ukraine, inflation had already hit 8% year-over-year according to the BLS. Note that Putin invaded in 2022, more than 1 year into the Biden presidency. The year-over-year inflation rate in January 2021, the month of his inauguration, was about 1.4% (according to CNN) and there were no signals that inflation/depression was about to get started in 2021, the Fed hadn't cranked up the rates.
You could say that Bidenflation gave Putin the money to invade Ukraine (cutting off US gas/oil s
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And oil and gas production are up under Biden, which I'm sure helped bring down inflation. But increased oil and gas production isn't a panacea. The world price of oil has a major impact on where and how much new drilling occurs. It isn't cheap to increase production. Depending on the formation, turning shut down pump jacks back on may or may not be possible, but is the cheapest solution if it can be done. Punching new holes to test new leases or expanding old leases with CO2/H2O injection or the like isn't
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This is what I call the complexity theory of politics. Things like economics or science are far too complex for the average voter to understand. But the average voter demands simplistic solutions to complex things. So a politician who says the causes of inflation are complex and the result of many factors gets ignored, that's just boring old politics from the past when nothing got done; but the guy who says he will fix it all, very simple, just a phone call will get cheered. Just promise a simple solutio
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Because they're eating the dogs? Eating the Cats?
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Not eating... Doing voodoo with.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
From the site:
"Offerings to the lwa, and to spirits of the dead, include fruit, liquor, and sacrificed animals."
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They do offer food animals to the Iwa. Then the celebrants eat the food. Tell me you learned everything you know about Voodoo from a Bond movie without telling me...
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Similar principle.
Dude you can't simultaneously try to take credit for the obviously juiced economy between 2020-2022 and not the resulting inflation. Have you even looked at inflation around the rest of the world? No, you haven't, because it would conflict with your feelz about the US economy. The money valves were all opened wide and Trump was the first person to sign up for that.
While you were crying about how "bad" the economy was doing in 2020, desperately wishing for a recession that never happened, I was raking it in