The most baffling thing here is how the hell did the author get the organisation to respond, on topic, multiple times? In my experience conversing with various entities that are supposed to provide customer support, absolutely anything outside of an extremely narrow set of vetted topics with prepared answers and especially anything technical gets ignored and receives an irrelevant response at best.
Please do not write below the line
61–70 of 337 posts
Re: Please do not write below the line
#62A "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.
It’s not just a U.K. thing. Many European countries have something similar, although it might be called something else. It’s a form of tax that pays for public service broadcasting, including radio stations. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Television_licence#
Yes, but the UK is the only country with a license ridiculous enough to offer you a 50% discount _if you're blind_.
Re: Please do not write below the line
#63A "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.
> A Licensing officer may call at your property not to collect the letters but to check that you are not watching a TV.
Just the thought of this is funny. What kind of uniforms do TV Officers wear? Do they get to carry a weapon? What happens if they find you watching a TV?
Amazing.
Re: Please do not write below the line
#64A "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.
It's basically a whole parallel tax collection system, which is truly nuts. Like the administrative overhead alone surely outweighs any abstract concerns about independence from government, which doesn't really exist in the UK anyway.
The purpose is psychological to attach a monetary value to the government TV channels, which makes the viewer consider them valuable and therefore trustable.
Re: Please do not write below the line
#65A "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.
It’s not just a U.K. thing. Many European countries have something similar, although it might be called something else. It’s a form of tax that pays for public service broadcasting, including radio stations. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Television_licence#
In Japan there was an infamous political party focused on getting rid of the hated TV licence system:
Re: Please do not write below the line
#66Whoever runs this website is my personal hero. TV licensing enforcement practices are utterly ridiculous.
Re: Please do not write below the line
#67A "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.
> A Licensing officer may call at your property not to collect the letters but to check that you are not watching a TV. Just the thought of this is funny. What kind of uniforms do TV Officers wear? Do they get to carry a weapon? What happens if they find you watching a TV? Amazing.
They wear the same uniforms that police detectives usually wear.
Re: Please do not write below the line
#68A "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
When I was studying at the university, I shared a privately owned house with some other people. We did not have a TV license, but I wanted to buy a big screen TV to use as computer monitor in my room.
I found out that in my country you can have a third-party, approved technician come to your house to disable the tuner portion of your TV so that you would not have to pay any television license. Around this time analog broadcasting was already being phased out or had already completely shut down in my country. And although some kind of digital broadcasting over air-waves exists to replace it, most people do not use that. Instead, you'll typically buy a subscribtion via cable or via IPTV or via sattelite, all of which come with a separate box that plugs into your TV via HDMI instead of relying on the tuner in your TV, even if that tuner can decode digitally broadcast radio signals. So the tuner in the TV was not serving much of a purpose anyway, even if I'd ever want to use the TV as a TV.
I paid a technician a bit of money to come disable the tuner for me in my newly bought 55" LED TV. I was imagining that he'd be opening the TV and carefully removing some essential part. What he actually did was take a plier and break the input for the tuner and then put a small piece of tape over it. Simple solutions, I guess. Then, I think I also got them to write a letter for me confirming that the tuner had been disabled.
It cost me a little bit of money, but not too much. Less than paying the TV license fee for that and subsequent years I was staying in that house anyway.
These days, I still have the TV. I put it in my grandfather's house a few years ago so he could use it. He already pays TV license fee and has a digital receiver. It has HDMI out which goes in to the TV. So he is not inconvenienced by the broken tuner input of the TV either, just like I expected back then that this disabling of the tuner would never be a problem even if I ever wanted to use it as a TV.
It does seem kind of silly now, that I paid someone to come break the input for a portion of the TV that was never going to be needed even if you wanted to use it as a TV. But I still think it was worth it, and that it saved me from worrying about inspections. Even though no inspection ever happened at the house either back in the days where I was using it as a monitor for my computer.
Re: Please do not write below the line
#69A "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
As a UK resident and TV owner (who does not need a license), I wouldn't even mind that much if I was required to pay just for TV ownership. It's the "enforcement" system that's utterly broken (although I have no idea how it compares to other countries).
We have this ridiculous situation where I'm not required to pay (so I don't), yet the TV licensing people are allowed (required?) to send me junk mail week after week trying to trick me into thinking I do need to pay them.
Re: Please do not write below the line
#70Earlier quoted context omitted.
It’s not just a U.K. thing. Many European countries have something similar, although it might be called something else. It’s a form of tax that pays for public service broadcasting, including radio stations. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Television_licence#
In Japan there was an infamous political party focused on getting rid of the hated TV licence system: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cZG95grO-vc
In Japan the vast majority of people stopped paying their TV license after a string of NHK scandals and there's no penalty for failing to pay either.
It's just not enforced. Also the party platform wasn't to get rid of the license system but to encrypt the broadcast signal so that only willing NHK viewers would pay for the license.