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No, the mail service isn’t protecting paedophiles as far as I know.
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Anecdotally it's 50% "France had the right idea" and 50% "God save the king" with very few people in between.
Why are so many people being hit with £5 fines for 'counterfeit' stamps?
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Re: Why are so many people being hit with £5 fines for 'counterfeit' stamps?
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Re: Why are so many people being hit with £5 fines for 'counterfeit' stamps?
#43Earlier quoted context omitted.
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You can probably guess - older demographics lean towards supporting the monarchy, younger demographics skew towards not being fans. There's a loose consensus that the royal family is a net positive for the countries finances, but I believe that involves some creative accounting where all tourism to royal-adjacent properties and the surrounding areas is attributed entirely to those properties still being owned by a li…
I’m only one voice but being in my mid-30s (so younger demographic I’d hope?) I don’t have a problem with the royals; I’m no royalist but nor do I seek their demise. I think most of my friends would fall into a similar category too.
Re: Why are so many people being hit with £5 fines for 'counterfeit' stamps?
#44"It is unclear at what point these ‘counterfeit’ stamps have entered circulation, and their source — or whether they are genuine and Royal Mail’s scanning technology is at fault." Given the precedents from the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Post_Office_scandal , I think the second option is plausible. My experience in the UK is that dysfunctional organizations try to hide issues by bullying their own customers…
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Re: Why are so many people being hit with £5 fines for 'counterfeit' stamps?
#45Earlier quoted context omitted.
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Well I (an American) agree with your sentiment, it appears that the British royalty don't actually rely on tax money, but instead they keep 25% of the money that the royaly estate /makes/ and the other 75% goes to the British treasury. But I might be wrong. https://www.bbc.com/news/explainers-57559653
Also an American and I like the British (and also Japanese) royals. Benevolent monarchs are a cornerstone of serenity and sanity.
And yes, I realize the irony as an American. I think on average Americans like the British royal family more than Britons do?
Re: Why are so many people being hit with £5 fines for 'counterfeit' stamps?
#46Here's an excellent blog post explaining the anti-forgery features of Royal Mail stamps:
http://www.jolschimke.de/briefmarken-und-ganzsachen/erste-ge...
What strikes me most is how crude the imitation stamps are - most aren't even trying to emulate the genuine printing techniques. It's all quantity over quality, trying to minimise the cost of producing counterfeit stamps whilst hoping to sell bulk loads of them to naive (or unscrupulous) customers.
It sounds like the biggest problem is the conflict of interest that the Royal Mail has, since they currently get to keep the fine payments as revenue. They have no direct incentive to stop the sale of counterfeit stamps, let alone deal with a tiny proportion of false-positives from their scanning machines.
Perhaps the answer is for the Royal Mail to be required to forfeit the revenue from fake postage fines, but be absolved of the responsibility to deliver these letters. Therefore, false positives in detection would simply be losses for their reputation, and they can decide, as a private company, whether or not this is an issue for their shareholders.
Personally, I would go the other way, requiring that the Royal Mail always deliver letters with fake stamps without issuing fines, but have proper independent investigations into both the origin of the alleged fakes and the reliability of the scanning machines. This isn't going to happen without an Act of Parliament, unfortunately.
Re: Why are so many people being hit with £5 fines for 'counterfeit' stamps?
#47The stamps have "unique" codes, but a genuine counterfeit must still have a code -- and to be useful it must duplicate the code on a real stamp. If the counterfeit gets used first, the stamp is marked as spent, and when the unlucky purchaser of the real stamp tries to use it, they're told theirs is "counterfeit" because it's flagged as "used" in the database?
That would be dumb. Nothing prevents attempted reuse of a genuine stamp.
Re: Why are so many people being hit with £5 fines for 'counterfeit' stamps?
#48Rather like how a person can lose their bitcoin stash by accidentally sharing a picture of a private key, can stamps now be 'destroyed' by printing out reproductions of the barcode onto bits of paper and depositing them in postboxes?
Re: Why are so many people being hit with £5 fines for 'counterfeit' stamps?
#49Earlier quoted context omitted.
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Well I (an American) agree with your sentiment, it appears that the British royalty don't actually rely on tax money, but instead they keep 25% of the money that the royaly estate /makes/ and the other 75% goes to the British treasury. But I might be wrong. https://www.bbc.com/news/explainers-57559653
The Crown Estate is where the sovereign grant comes from, and it's weird. It's "owned" by the current monarch, but only in their role as head of state (the Crown). Realistically it belongs to the country and to the public, and were we to abolish monarchy, would not become the private property of the Windsor family.
So while they don't rely on tax money (outside of the huge amount of tax money spent on their police protection, transport in military aircraft, etc. etc.), they do rely on money which rightfully belongs to the people of the nation.
Re: Why are so many people being hit with £5 fines for 'counterfeit' stamps?
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