Posts by Mike Dunbar
Waitlists for many mental health service providers in New Hampshire stretch for months, leaving some to propose a controversial alternative: artificial intelligence. Now, a bill in Concord is asking a critical question: what should be the role of AI in mental health—if any?
Your boss probably keeps close track of your attendance at work, along with other metrics about your job performance. Still, many of us don’t stop to consider how often our elected officials attend votes at the State House. With the New Hampshire Legislature on summer break, it’s time to ask “how often did my elected representatives show up to work?”
With all the focus on candidates ahead of the 2022 midterm elections, it’s easy to forget that there will also be questions on your ballot. To help you prepare for the voting booth, we’ve prepared this article to explain what these questions will be and what they could mean for New Hampshire.
Chances are, you can’t drive down any street in your neighborhood without being confronted by this issue: litter. New Hampshire is famously picturesque, but it seems many are intent on changing that given the number of discarded cans and fast food bags strewn along our roadsides. Now, some legislators in Concord say it’s time to increase the penalties for littering, and they’ve introduced two bills to do just that: HB 1461 and HB 1571. Still, some say the legislation goes too far.
If the federal government raises the minimum wage, New Hampshire employers will have to match that minimum. Tipped employees, however, are treated differently under state and federal law. Now lawmakers in Concord are considering a bill to insulate the tipped wage from federal increases.
It sounds like the plot of some futuristic sci-fi thriller: the government keeps a database of images of citizens’ faces, and that database can be used for surveillance of individuals. For better or worse, this is no longer science fiction. The same technology that allows you to open your phone simply by looking at it can be used by governments to track people as they go about their lives in public. There’s a New Hampshire bill up for debate this year— NH HB 499— to set limits on how this kind of technology can be used in the Granite State.