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Merrimack, New Hampshire is a unique town because they are the only municipality that has “elections” outside of First Tuesday of November and the Second Tuesday of March for Town Meeting or officially the “Deliberative Session” type of election or better known by “SB2”, the second article proposed in the New Hampshire Senate season* in the mid 1990s (’95 if I am not mistaken.)
*that is not a misspelling, I like to call the budget period a “season” and most of the issues debated last about 3 months, even if the General Court hangs into late May for budget matters on the odd years.
In today’s narrative, I thought, I’d share my thoughts with this alleged day in one of the largest towns in the state that’s not a city. More on the illegal use of “Election Day” in a few ‘graphs.
I’ve lived in Merrimack, New Hampshire for almost a decade; my family and I moved here for some specific reasons, a large selling value was the proximity of being close to Nashua and other areas east of the River. Merrimack, was historically known as a “big town” with a lower population than say Londonderry, which had one of the highest population centers.
When I relocated, the town’s population in 2000 was hovering around Londonderry, but an estimation in late 2010, put it at nearly 27,000 as a “projected” population count.
The rate of low income housing being built, and more housing, any attempts for open-space has gone out of the wayside.
Certain people in Merrimack have a certain distrust to the government. This is the majority of the town, because other than having a population second or third to Derry or Salem, the population is mostly “townies”. Worse people who have hyper-cynical beliefs that the town government is out to get Joe Doe from 127 Main St (we don’t really have a “Main Street”). In recent years, the anger amongst townies was Comcast. There was no facility for people to drop off dysfunctional set top boxes; and going across the river to just the other side of Hudson on 102 was too much for the people.
So the story ended with me in October in regards to the Cable TV Franchise Agreement. The ball was in the Town of Merrimack’s court (or should I say the 7 member board?)
I had some change in my personal life which while I did monitor emails, several instances occurred between early October to Mid November.
And why should I need to follow up? Comcast’s appointed rep of municipalities and the Merrimack Town Council should’ve been crafting a final agreement. It shouldn’t be taking this amount of time. While ten years ago the technology and consumer tastes were different, if someone who has worked in this field for over a decade, they should know the ins and outs of the processes, and if they don’t they should turn to the New Hampshire Collation for Community Media for help.
This also was the first meeting that was recorded in HD since the cablecast is still in SD, but still heavily compressed.
While the discussion of eliminating the requirement of cable systems providing franchise fees, the overall sentiment was the town is dragging it’s feet. While the department head had said they received memos from 3 residents, it’s unsure if those individuals were notified about feedback or being in part of the Ad-Hoc committee for the Cable TV Franchise Agreement and also exploring the unregulated Internet franchising, and possibly improving the apparently deficient Merrimack TV operation. There has been no communication received by me from them as of this writing.
While my cable TV services that my family pays won’t be impacted per se, it’s not good on leadership of our town government to stall negotiations with Comcast while it was known to me that it would be by this point the Town Council (of which is the government of Merrimack, NH again) would’ve had no more discussions and a contract would’ve been in place by the time January rolls along.
Our leaders are so insistent that “the consumer” will benefit from having “more choices”. While the resident in the red shirt said in the UK there is handful of long haul ISPs, and the consumers have more than a dozen “last mile” ISPs, England is different from New England. UK with the Brexit factor is a country of their own, and New Hampshire legally is not. It’s very apparent that locals here believe they live in a state of their own mind, a republic, a rebellious against the outsiders. But the harsh reality is New Hampshire is a state in the U.S.A. and we have to conform to Federal regulations. The Internet was granted no-touch approach from the early 1990s with the idea the public Internet would just only be electronic libraries and in the mid 90s out of plain magic, the electronic libraries were sold off to become malls, a community center, and other profitable places that thankfully no real library had to deal with. And since the government treated the Internet as an “information system” this is the end result.
People forget IP is just a driver for machines talking to machines, that the “Internet” is well known by public opinion for humans to talk to one another on the World Wide Web, and that most “clouds” use the Internet port 80 that used to be a commonly used ports to access “web pages” that once was accessed by Netscape. If that was too much, in plain English, the “Internet” is this magical, non mythical world that can work without any problems that the “consumer” will benefit.
Good luck to that. I don’t think other ISPs want to come to New Hampshire. And misusing funds for Cable TV to wire up the town with fiber for IP based services will have the hurdles of fake NIMBY complaints similar to the Tennessee Pipeline Company (or Kinder Morgan) had to go through by the same town 3 years ago.
This is one heluvla story that has shown the failures of democracy, the lack of the constituents’ interest, their lack of awareness of their own town government and the town government’s negligence to be fit to handle a contract that is becoming more technical legally than it should begin with.
In early October, the following was submitted to the Town of Merrimack’s Media Services unit with the intention that this memo would become some form of public information, pursuant to RSA 91a, the Right to Know Law.
For the exercise of privacy, the address is withheld for this post. The memo outlines things that would benefit the intelligence of the consumer, and should’ve got people in the position of power to question Comcast. Read on
Given the anger from the previous two meetings, one would’ve logically thought at least five angry men would come up and whine and bitch against Comcast. In fact no one came and spoke their minds!
…Except for one gentleman from another part of town who is apparently self employed and is “enthusiastic in telecom” to only find his LinkedIn account at the time, the only “telecom” reference professionally was telephony at the help desk level. He said publicly he’s a “systems engineer that works at home” full time. This individual who identified himself as “consumer” stood his ground that the cable TV franchise system was so broken he called the franchise fees “a tax” not only that but pissed on the quality of the PEG programming. While it may be true, he compared the PEG channels to a mid 2000s TV series being shot on filmy DSLR. I thought the Betacam, SVHS and all the digital tape stuff was supposed to destroy the medium that made media fake in my opinion. (Conjecture at best on this topic… Broadcast video grade at 60fps is the only medium I’ll support :))
He even suggested the programming should be reduced to a single channel for the “technically inclined” viewers. A bit snubby at best. He spoke and gave “ideas” (i.e. non-concrete, risky and not proven outcomes, and providing suggestions with very little knowledge on the subject.) He gave a bunch of talking points supporting his argument, and even had the audacity to attempt to make a followup comment after the hearing concluded!
Your’s truly came up next.
I am going to not talk about myself but relay what I learned in those questions that if I didn’t come up, the public would be left in the dark of the black smoke known as Democracy in Doubt.
The Town Council is the Franchising Authority of the Cable TV Franchise Agreement
Because the Town Council is the government of the Town of Merrimack, N.H. (noticed how I got lost?)
How the hell that 7 elected members can be a government and it’s legality – the video can speak for itself.
The Town Manager’s employer is the Merrimack Town Council. How does that look on a resume?
The Town of Merrimack’s executive management was apparently unaware that could serve as a mediator after consumers would contact Comcast prior. This has been an S.O.P. for years in other towns!
Accounts receivable to Merrimack meant Comcast had gave back money because of some interest involved.
I defended the Public Access, but not only that requested that it should be fully funded at the 5% max and suggested if they invested in themselves, the quality of content would improve, since social media is leading to Too Big to Fail Culture and now content creators must pay to play to get seen especially in the civilian content such as Facebook and YouTube (the meeting minutes erroneously stated Hulu which I didn’t say, as that platform doesn’t allow freelancers or independents a platform.)
The handouts also had some bad spelling referring to Harron Communications, spelled in the form of the big bird (Heron instead). I hate to be so obsessed about minor details, but if they don’t catch spelling errors, then what else is going in at the Town Hall?
At this point, the Town Council closed the public hearing. However, letters and emails could still be received by October 10th. The following day, the public notice on the town’s website disappeared, leaving a vague signal if missed the chance to speak even further?
In New England, we have bragging rights to municipal services that other parts of the country don’t have or have deficient quality of services. In this situation, it’s Cable TV Franchise Fees to be used to fund cable TV for communities.
I’ve posted recently being a man who hates men. Men are disgusting. Men lack compassion, men lack empathy, men like to show off their dicks when they can, they like to have power and control and abuse it without any repercussions.
Men in general lack these skills and they have been in careers where they are known to abuse vulernable people, ranging from the disabled to mostly women. Men like to blame everyone else for their lack of empathy and compassion. Men like to use manipulative practices to get what they want, often in a criminal threatening manner.
Men in power, as we can tell from the Harvey Weinstein scandals, to Matt Lauer’s sexcepades, to even hyper local issues, like the former police chief whoring international media attention for trying to capture the Groundhog that allegedly gave us 6 weeks of a rough winter in February 2015, to April where i had a personal run in with him that resulted in a disgusting social media to real world exchange where I finally found out he defamed me behind my back in a false police report. Of, that the town manager who has mannerisms of a man didn’t care and treated your’s truly like shit and the “Chairman” who may be a tranny treated me like garbage too. Both women acted like dick-flashing men who don’t care for details and want to control other people like government officials having power over people.
Worse is in information technology. NOW I know men who are in this field and are well mannered, but many are angry Caucasian men who like to blame users for everything. They have a narrow minded bigotry like thinking, and will often verbally assault “end users” because they are not as smart or have a larger dick then them!
They say the great minds had Asperger’s Syndrome? What about Bill Gates, Larry Page, that freakjob named Eric Schmit (who probably looks like someone who shouldn’t be an elementary school teacher), Mike Bloomberg, Steve Jobs, etc? They abused women. Most likely treated them like trash, and forced their views on them, to the point where they probably took a stapler to their head. That’s what men in high technology do. High technology is on the rise. They are abusive to the most vulernable, exploit them and because they have a dick, they can get away with it. Google encourages abuse to people’s rights. Facebook think’s its OK to monitor specific users because they think they can. Do we need to talk about our current Federal administration?
For research purposes, I found this site, The Lone Sysadmin is also whose borderline anti-female, anti people, etc. Attacks “end users” like they are dumb sheep, and preaches that narrow minded bigotry called “change” and indirectly attacks users with:
Can I say sysadministrators are just angry ol pricks who can’t understand that not everyone is nerdy or hell even techie? And that changes is a nature of being a goddamned human race?
Men in power, especially in technology do abuse women, and they are nerds, and there’s a reason why society doesn’t accept them. THEY ARE GODDAMNED DANGEROUS!
I have to close it with this. I hate men as a man. I feel sorry for other people who are abused strictly because an Adam’s apple and a dick gives them entitlement to do whatever the hell they want.