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Please do not write below the line

bbctvlicence.com

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Re: Please do not write below the line

#51

Post by praptak »

Zak wrote: post #20
cooper_ganglia wrote: post #13

A "TV License" is one of those things I alway assumed people were making up to satirize the claims of over-regulation & bureaucracy in the UK. Finding out it was real was a mixture of hilarious and sobering.

Many European countries are worse about it than the UK; even people who do not own a television are required by law to pay. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Television_licence

I remember that in Poland electronic repair shops offered companies removal of the TV demodulator from TV sets used as monitors. That was necessary for the TV not to count as a TV receiver and thus not to generate the fee liability.

I think there also were some large cases where a company who owned a car fleet had to pay for the car radios.

Re: Please do not write below the line

#52

Post by madeofpalk »

cooper_ganglia wrote: post #13

A "TV License" is one of those things I alway assumed people were making up to satirize the claims of over-regulation & bureaucracy in the UK. Finding out it was real was a mixture of hilarious and sobering.

Yeah, it’s pretty annoying.

Publicly funded media is a great thing to have, and the intention of TV License is to fund it independently from interference from the government of the day. In Australia there’s frequently stories about governments cutting ABC funding, which TV License is supposed to avoid entirely.

But the implementation in practice just sucks. It’s baffling to think of how much money is wasted on administering this additional tax program, sending out all these pretty aggressive letters, maintaining the website, and paying the real “inspectors” to knock on peoples doors.

Re: Please do not write below the line

#53

Post by notatoad »

Zak wrote: post #20
cooper_ganglia wrote: post #13

A "TV License" is one of those things I alway assumed people were making up to satirize the claims of over-regulation & bureaucracy in the UK. Finding out it was real was a mixture of hilarious and sobering.

Many European countries are worse about it than the UK; even people who do not own a television are required by law to pay. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Television_licence

that seems fine to me. whatever they want to call it, if it applies to everybody it's just a tax and they're using tax dollars to fund some TV content and/or infrastrcture. that's all totally normal.

the absurd part is restricting that tax to only people who watch TV, and trying to do surveillance and enforcement to determine whether or not somebody is eligible for a TV tax.

Re: Please do not write below the line

#54

Post by ho_schi »

Zak wrote: post #20
cooper_ganglia wrote: post #13

A "TV License" is one of those things I alway assumed people were making up to satirize the claims of over-regulation & bureaucracy in the UK. Finding out it was real was a mixture of hilarious and sobering.

Many European countries are worse about it than the UK; even people who do not own a television are required by law to pay. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Television_licence

This fee is hot topic in Germany. Our French friends also enjoy ARTE[1] but seem not to suffer anymore from this ridiculous fee. Actually I’m surprised that the Swiss fee is even higher, despite everything in the Swiss is expensive.

[1] Big parts of our public television suck. But ARTE is awesome!

    * Borgen
    * Occupied
    * Mit offenen Karten
    * Karambolage
    * …
PS: ARTE is watchable outside of France and Germany in a lot of countries in Europe. Poland, Spain, Austria, Netherlands, Czech and so on.

Re: Please do not write below the line

#55

Post by Nition »

dijit wrote: post #8

Likeliest situation is all their stationary destined for send outs have the line; and in situations where the line serves no purpose it does no harm to leave it: so there is little use in having additional process around completely blank stock.

They could have told him that though if it's the case, and the mystery would be solved. But there obviously wasn't any desire (or more charitably - time) on their end to really look into the reasoning or even understand the question.

----

Edit: I will share what I think is a nice a little counterpoint story here, from a business that is clearly still interested in understanding. I sent Lego an email a while ago:

  I'm just wondering if you're able to tell me what the
  tune is that the Lego Primo musical camel plays in set
  number 2007. It's a set from 1998. We have the camel and
  it plays a nice tune, but no-one seems to know what it is!
They replied a day later:

  Thanks for getting in touch with us. 

  This is a really really really and I mean really interesting
  question you got there for us. I have checked with all the
  resources I have and come to a possible conclusion.

  The Musical Camel – which in Denmark actually is called
  ‘PRIMO Dromedar'. 1st theory is that, One DUPLO-designer
  says that the melody was composed by the designer that
  created the camel but no one remembers the name who created
  the Musical Camel. Another thing is, one of the engineer once
  had a musical box that had the same melody but he is no
  longer with us anymore and cannot provide us the answer.

  I am so sorry that, at the end of the day I cannot provide
  you with any name to the title. But I hope the facts can
  make a good story for you to tell your friends.

Re: Please do not write below the line

#56

Post by advisedwang »

As this website showcases there's a huge variety of these letters and they are clearly thrown together cheaply by people trying to make things official looking and scary. I wonder whether the line is simply an easy way to make things official looking. Or perhaps even they once did have something to return but the designers have continued to copy and paste it forward with not connection to any actual process.

Re: Please do not write below the line

#57

Post by moffkalast »

cooper_ganglia wrote: post #13

A "TV License" is one of those things I alway assumed people were making up to satirize the claims of over-regulation & bureaucracy in the UK. Finding out it was real was a mixture of hilarious and sobering.

Oi! Ave you got a loicense fer dat TV there mate?!

Re: Please do not write below the line

#58

Post by dcminter »

ajb wrote: post #24
gwbas1c wrote: post #16

Would be nice if the article had an example of the entire letter. The tiny sliver of image at the top of the article leaves very little context.

If you go to the home page, you will see they have collected scans of these letters for every year since 2006. Most likely they didn't expect anyone to go direct to this page

Yes, I submitted this sub-page as I thought the puzzle might interest (and amuse) the HN crowd. I'm sure the vast majority of people arrive at the site owner's main page though.

Re: Please do not write below the line

#59

Post by joemi »

On the main page of the site, there's a scanned letter shown for every month, but it ends on April 2024. Does anyone know what happened to the author? If it weren't just tv licensing, I'd say it were worrying that there's been silence for the past several months after receiving such threatening letters.
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