Hey, there! Log in / Register

In a tiny town in western Mass., residents can get gigabit Internet service

Motherboard reports on how the town of Leverett (population 1,876) is supplying its residents with far broader broadband than we can get here in Boston.

Topics: 


Ad:


Like the job UHub is doing? Consider a contribution. Thanks!

Comments

Another great case of Boston Fail.

We need to open up the franchising of cable to any company who wants in (no exclusive deals).

Also need the City to partner up with Google or another provider to get fiber in the ground here.

F*ck Comcast.

up
Voting closed 0

Google is a nonstarter. They're not interested in old, complicated, expensive cities. Look at the places they've gone into - sprawling Midwestern places where it's easy and cheap to rip up streets.

up
Voting closed 0

I never thought I would see the day that this hilltown got anything faster than dial up.

Leland Olds would be proud. Way to stick it to the utilities!

up
Voting closed 0

to squash this anticorporate, socialist outrage.

up
Voting closed 0

.

up
Voting closed 0

They'll be able to get blazing-fast streams beamed from more interesting and demographically diverse burgs.

up
Voting closed 0

I'm sure they can't wait for their "burg" to be enlightened by the brilliant, erudite commentary of smug self-important douchebags like you.

up
Voting closed 0

*irony intensifies*

up
Voting closed 0

If only! Glad you were able to brush off the insult thesaurus for that one.

up
Voting closed 0

"I'm sure they can't wait for their "burg" to be enlightened by the brilliant, erudite commentary of smug self-important douchebags like you."

For those of you that value your time and think "TL;DR", "BTW... What's a galactophage?" sums it up nicely.

All I have to say is:

"
You swine. You vulgar little maggot. You worthless bag of filth. As we
say in Texas, you couldn't pour water out of a boot with instructions
printed on the heel. You are a canker, an open wound. I would rather
kiss a lawyer than be seen with you. You took your last vacation in
the Islets of Langerhans.

You're a putrescent mass, a walking vomit. You are a spineless little
worm deserving nothing but the profoundest contempt. You are a jerk, a
cad, and a weasel. I take that back; you are a festering pustule on a
weasel's rump. Your life is a monument to stupidity. You are a stench,
a revulsion, a big suck on a sour lemon.

I will never get over the embarrassment of belonging to the same
species as you. You are a monster, an ogre, a malformity. I barf at
the very thought of you. You have all the appeal of a paper cut.
Lepers avoid you. You are vile, worthless, less than nothing. You are
a weed, a fungus, the dregs of this earth. You are a technicolor yawn.
And did I mention that you smell?

You are a squeaking rat, a mistake of nature and a heavy-metal bagpipe
player. You were not born. You were hatched into an unwilling world
that rejects the likes of you. You didn't crawl out of a normal egg,
either, but rather a mutant maggot egg rejected by an evil scientist
as being below his low standards. Your alleged parents abandoned you
at birth and then died of shame in recognition of what they had done
to an unsuspecting world. They were a bit late.

Try to edit your responses of unnecessary material before attempting
to impress us with your insight. The evidence that you are a
nincompoop will still be available to readers, but they will be able
to access it ever so much more rapidly. If cluelessness were crude
oil, your scalp would be crawling with caribou.

You are a thick-headed trog. I have seen skeet with more sense than
you have. You are a few bricks short of a full load, a few cards short
of a full deck, a few bytes short of a full core dump, and a few
chromosomes short of a full human. Worse than that, you top-post. God
created houseflies, cockroaches, maggots, mosquitos, fleas, ticks,
slugs, leeches, and intestinal parasites, then he lowered his
standards and made you. I take it back; God didn't make you. You are
Satan's spawn. You are Evil beyond comprehension, half-living in the
slough of despair. You are the entropy which will claim us all. You
are a green-nostriled, crossed eyed, hairy-livered inbred
trout-defiler. You make Ebola look good.

You are weary, stale, flat and unprofitable. You are grimy, squalid,
nasty and profane. You are foul and disgusting. You're a fool, an
ignoramus. Monkeys look down on you. Even sheep won't have sex with
you. You are unreservedly pathetic, starved for attention, and lost in
a land that reality forgot. You are not ANSI compliant and your markup
doesn't validate. You have a couple of address lines shorted together.
You should be promoted to Engineering Manager.

Do you really expect your delusional and incoherent ramblings to be
read? Everyone plonked you long ago. Do you fantasize that your
tantrums and conniption fits could possibly be worth the $0.000000001
worth of electricity used to send them? Your life is one big
W.O.M.B.A.T. and your future doesn't look promising either. We need to
trace your bloodline and terminate all siblings and cousins in order
to cleanse humanity of your polluted genes. The good news is that no
normal human would ever mate with you, so we won't have to go into the
sewers in search of your git.

You are a waste of flesh. You have no rhythm. You are ridiculous and
obnoxious. You are the moral equivalent of a leech. You are a living
emptiness, a meaningless void. You are sour and senile. You are a
loathsome disease, a drooling inbred cross-eyed toesucker. You make
Quakers shout and strike Pentecostals silent. You have a version 1.0
mind in a version 6.12 world. Your mother had to tie a pork chop
around your neck just to get your dog to play with you. You think
that is the name of a
rock band. You believe that P.D.Q. Bach is the greatest composer who
ever lived. You prefer L. Ron Hubbard to Larry Niven and Jerry
Pournelle. Hee-Haw is too deep for you. You would watch test patterns
all day if the other inmates would let you.

On a good day you're a half-wit. You remind me of drool. You are
deficient in all that lends character. You have the personality of
wallpaper. You are dank and filthy. You are asinine and benighted.
Spammers look down on you. Phone sex operators hang up on you.
Telemarketers refuse to be seen in public with you. You are the source
of all unpleasantness. You spread misery and sorrow wherever you go.
May you choke on your own foolish opinions. You are a Pusillanimous
galactophage and you wear your sister's training bra. Don't bother
opening the door when you leave - you should be able to slime your
way out underneath. I hope that when you get home your mother runs
out from under the porch and bites you.

You smarmy lagerlout git. You bloody woofter sod. Bugger off, pillock.
You grotty wanking oik artless base-court apple-john. You clouted
boggish foot-licking half-twit. You dankish clack-dish plonker. You
gormless crook-pated tosser. You bloody churlish boil-brained clotpole
ponce. You craven dewberry pisshead cockup pratting naff. You cockered
bum-bailey poofter. You gob-kissing gleeking flap-mouthed coxcomb. You
dread-bolted fobbing beef-witted clapper-clawed flirt-gill. May your
spouse be blessed with many bastards.

You are so clueless that if you dressed in a clue skin, doused yourself
in clue musk, and did the clue dance in the middle of a field of horny
clues at the height of clue mating season, you still would not have a
clue. If you were a movie you would be a double feature;
_Battlefield_Earth_ and _Moron_Movies_II_. You would be out of focus.

You are a fiend and a sniveling coward, and you have bad breath. You
are the unholy spawn of a bandy-legged hobo and a syphilitic camel.
You wear strangely mismatched clothing with oddly placed stains. You
are degenerate, noxious and depraved. I feel debased just knowing that
you exist. I despise everything about you, and I wish you would go
away. You are jetsam who dreams of becoming flotsam. You won't make
it. I beg for sweet death to come and remove me from a world which
became unbearable when you crawled out of a harpy's lair.

It is hard to believe how incredibly stupid you are. Stupid as a stone
that the other stones make fun of. So stupid that you have traveled
far beyond stupid as we know it and into a new dimension of stupid.
Meta-stupid. Stupid cubed. Trans-stupid stupid. Stupid collapsed to
a singularity where even the stupons have collapsed into stuponium.
Stupid so dense that no intelligence can escape. Singularity stupid.
Blazing hot summer day on Mercury stupid. You emit more stupid in one
minute than our entire galaxy emits in a year. Quasar stupid. It cannot
be possible that anything in our universe can really be this stupid.
This is a primordial fragment from the original big stupid bang. A pure
extract of stupid with absolute stupid purity. Stupid beyond the laws
of nature. I must apologize. I can't go on. This is my epiphany of
stupid. After this experience, you may not hear from me for a while.
I don't think that I can summon the strength left to mock your moronic
opinions and malformed comments about boring trivia or your other
drivel. Duh.

The only thing worse than your logic is your manners. I have snipped
away most of your of what you wrote, because, well ... it didn't
really say anything. Your attempt at constructing a creative flame was
pitiful. I mean, really, stringing together a bunch of insults among a
load of babbling was hardly effective... Maybe later in life, after
you have learned to read, write, spell, and count, you will have more
success. True, these are rudimentary skills that many of us "normal"
people take for granted that everyone has an easy time of mastering.
But we sometimes forget that there are "challenged" persons in this
world who find these things to be difficult. If I had known that this
was true in your case then I would have never have exposed myself to
what you wrote. It just wouldn't have been "right." Sort of like
parking in a handicap space. I wish you the best of luck in the
emotional, and social struggles that seem to be placing such a
demand on you.

P.S.: You are hypocritical, greedy, violent, malevolent, vengeful,
cowardly, deadly, mendacious, meretricious, loathsome, despicable,
belligerent, opportunistic, barratrous, contemptible, criminal,
fascistic, bigoted, racist, sexist, avaricious, tasteless, idiotic,
brain-damaged, imbecilic, insane, arrogant, deceitful, demented, lame,
self-righteous, byzantine, conspiratorial, fraudulent,
libelous, bilious, splenetic, spastic, ignorant, clueless, EDLINoid,
illegitimate, harmful, destructive, dumb, evasive, double-talking,
devious, revisionist, narrow, manipulative, paternalistic,
fundamentalist, dogmatic, idolatrous, unethical, cultic, diseased,
suppressive, controlling, restrictive, malignant, deceptive, dim,
crazy, weird, dyspeptic, stifling, uncaring, plantigrade, grim,
unsympathetic, jargon-spouting, censorious, secretive, aggressive,
mind-numbing, arassive, poisonous, flagrant, self-destructive,
abusive, socially-retarded, puerile, and Generally Not Good.

Thu, 07/09/2015 - 23:36 | 6293527 ZerOhead
ZerOhead's picture

I'm sure he's been called worse.

BTW... What's a galactophage?

Thu, 07/09/2015 - 23:52 | 6293585 gmrpeabody
gmrpeabody's picture

He's obviously unhappy about something...

up
Voting closed 0

... what an erudite sojourn into the land of articulating vitriol. Splenic eruptions to bring joy to the inarticulate bourgeois plebeians.

up
Voting closed 0

Bourgeois and plebeians are two separate things, the way you want to use them didn't make sense.

up
Voting closed 0

... what an erudite sojourn into the land of articulating vitriol. Splenic eruptions to bring joy to the inarticulate bourgeois plebeians.

up
Voting closed 0

People live out there to get away from "interesting and demographically diverse burgs".

Part of the "benefit" of large rural lots is not having to put up with neighbors.

up
Voting closed 0

People live there because they are scared of brown people.

up
Voting closed 0

Maybe they just don't want the guy with the knife looking for Not Mary looking in their windows. Hard to tell his color because infrared light, because of science that you probably don't understand, tends to lack color definition.

Maybe they're not afraid of anything., they just live there.

up
Voting closed 0

Or perhaps I just get a kick out of how much people lose their minds when you poke fun at small towns in the Commonwealth. You should see the colorful language that follows any such post! *points at lbb's*

up
Voting closed 0

Poke Fun. I don't think those words mean what you think they mean.

"People live there because they are scared of brown people."

Hey, funny. So I guess I'll lose my mind over your harmless jibe. Or I could say that you've not spent too much time in a small N.E. town. Neither have I, but I wouldn't slander them.

" *points at lbb's*"

I don't often agree with ibb, but when I do, I drink Dos Equis. And vodak.

up
Voting closed 0

tend to be extremely, extremely homogeneous. that doesn't automatically mean they're bigots, but you can fairly easily look at the population distribution in this state and be fairly educated as to what the average town, lets say, outside 128, looks like.

this isn't to say there aren't any exceptions, because there obviously are.

and yes, i think its fair to poke fun at small towns for some things, similarly to how nobody on this blog has any issue poking fun at city problems, for example, our outstanding public transit.

it is also fair to poke fun, talk trash, bring to light, whatever you want to call it, the cities AND the small towns for the same thing. i imagine those that complain about some of the ridership of the orange line might possibly feel right at home in say, Orange, Massachusetts

up
Voting closed 0

You don't know what the hell you're talking about. Really, you don't, and seeing you display your ignorance is like watching someone pontificate while they've got spinach on their teeth. Stop while you're still not too far behind.

up
Voting closed 0

Contrary to what people may think, Leverett is not 'the boonies'. It is a short driving distance from Amherst/Northampton and has quite a few large houses with lots of land - wealthy/educated professors/retirees. The only thing I'm surprised about is that they're getting that before Amherst/Northampton

up
Voting closed 0

yeah, $/ft2 is a lot more favorable out when youre out there so there are plenty of large houses.

up
Voting closed 0

The creep who founded Yankee Candle lives there in a mansion/compound as does his thanks dad kid.

up
Voting closed 0

I don't even know the guy, but that's pretty harsh. What's the story behind that?

up
Voting closed 0

Yankee Candle used to manufacture in the Berkshire region, but the workers got sold out.

up
Voting closed 0

He sold YK in '98 - when did manufacturing move elsewhere?

up
Voting closed 0

He sold it in 1998. For $500 million. So, by then, it was a big going concern.
Here's a link http://inside.kringlecandle.com/our-heritage
"But by 1972 he’d managed to move the fledgling operation out of his parent’s garage and into an old one-time paper mill back in his native Holyoke. The $80 per month space he rented in the nearly 200-year old building lacked heat, running water and electricity. He carved out a serviceable work area and kept at his task, initially working alone but adding help as revenues permitted."

"In 1983 he took a great leap of faith, using an SBA loan to build a new retail outlet and factory complex just off I-91 in South Deerfield, roughly 15 miles north of Holyoke. The store and the company flourished, retail and wholesale revenues expanded rapidly, and Yankee Candle became an internationally-recognized brand by the mid-1990’s."

"In 1998 Mike sold 90% of the equity in Yankee Candle to Forstmann Little & Co., who brought the company public a year later. He remained on the Board of Directors until 2003 before fully retiring from the business."

I guess either they shut down USA operations, or didn't. Don't know. Self made, though, got to respect that.

up
Voting closed 0

I did some quick googling myself and didn't find anything that mentioned plant closings or massive layoffs like people have claimed. Maybe some layoffs happened sometime, but I couldn't find it. The company website says they make a majority of their candles here in MA.

The guys builds a company from nothing, sells it for a ton of money years later, and people have to hate on him because he's rich. (Nevermind that he sold it because he was diagnosed with Hodgkins Disease). That's not enough, so they have to pick on his kid for being a rich kid, for which he (the kid) really had no choice in the matter.

Hating on rich people is popular sport here at UHub.

up
Voting closed 0

people are just as willing to hate on somebody that makes 70k/year living in boston too, as if that puts them on the upper end of any sort of quality of life spectrum.

as i've lamented here many times, there is a considerable disdain here for those who aren't struggling for bare necessities.

up
Voting closed 0

70k a year for an individual Boston isn't even middle class. Cops, teachers, firefighters, and even BPS janitors make more than that. The people renting all the new luxury apartments are banking 100k+ a year

up
Voting closed 0

this is totes incorrect.

or as you like to say - citations please?

up
Voting closed 0

I kind of regret posting an unverifiable slam on someone as I prefer to slam people based on things they've said or done specifically (see: Walsh, Marty). That all being said, I had friends who worked at Yankee Candle 'back in the day' and they had to deal with some specific creepiness on a personal level from the guy. That's all I'll say.

Also, I have zero issue with his huge success and personal fortune. Good for him. However, from what I've read and heard about his post-sale actions, he's not my kind of people. Insert your personal favorite nouveau riche stereotype. For example, his kid bought a property (in Leverett) and closed down a part of the popular, long standing M+M trail, forcing it to be relocated. YMMV on property rights and communal spirit.

up
Voting closed 0

swrlly's up next

up
Voting closed 0

It's a combination of work by locals to make it happen, plus carriers who wrote them off, but decided that Amherst and Northampton were worth their while. IOW, they had no alternatives, and they had the skill and the will to get it done on their own.

up
Voting closed 0

You'd expect municipal broadband to be more common in towns that have local electric companies (Boylston and Belmont come to mind). The towns already own the poles, making it cheaper to run fiber.

up
Voting closed 0

[original body was oddly deleted - don't know why]

with it's own MLP that is considering this. I am on record as wanting to be its first customer and dump Comcast on its sorry ass, so long as I am assured and convinced that the public records law will not apply to internet traffic carried on a municipally owned ISP (I have no problem with the process/standard applying to criminal investigations).

up
Voting closed 0

I loved this little hill town when I was living in that area, especially the Peace Pagoda. Ah, those summer days I would sit there and listen to the frogs croaking about peace! :)

up
Voting closed 0

I'm very disappointed but not surprised at all to see people on here lashing out. Boston had their chance and lost it due entirely to political apathy and malfeasance. There are no technical hurdles preventing this form happening in Boston not also extant in Leverett. Boston could do it right now if they wanted.

up
Voting closed 0

indoor plumbing...

up
Voting closed 0

And will the Town of Sheffield get 7G before the rest of us?

up
Voting closed 0

...to be disappointed that Boston doesn't have this broadband, without also making snide (uninformed) comments about Leverett and its residents.

up
Voting closed 0