111–120 of 337 posts
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.
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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…
While we're here, does anyone happen to recognize the camel's tune? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JKpD-KkaBHc We never worked it out.
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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_.
Of course, that still doesn't make sense because to the best of my knowledge you don't need a license of any kind to listen to the radio.
Anyway, perhaps blind people want to listen to the TV. There are a lot of programs that could make sense even if you can hear but not see them.
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.
I've corresponded with the civil service a few times recently and the service now is shite.
[1]: https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2024/10/who-are-the-...
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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.
Well, first they wanted to tax everyone a bit to pay for the BBC. And then someone said that would let the government easily pressure the BBC by withholding funds. And then someone said let's let the BBC collect it's own tax then. And someone else said that would be illegal to make people pay for the BBC if they aren't actually receiving any services from the BBC. And so here we are. So they wrote in this provision t…
That's not true, according to https://www.gov.uk/find-licences/tv-licence.
> You do not need a TV Licence to watch:
> • streaming services like Netflix and Disney Plus
> • on-demand TV through services like All 4 and Amazon Prime Video
> • videos on websites like YouTube
> • videos or DVDs
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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.
This gets raised every charter renewal and they always find the administrative overhead of e.g. collecting Netflix subscriptions, etc. is pro rata higher than the overhead for the licence fee.
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Yes, but the UK is the only country with a license ridiculous enough to offer you a 50% discount _if you're blind_.
It sounds weirder than that to me: > colour TV: £169.50 per year; monochrome TV: £57.00 per year; blind people: 50% discount People who can't see their color TV at all pay more than people who can but have an old black-and-white one?
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
Now I'm forced to pay for old sitcoms, astrology shows, soccer stuff and other useless things I don't watch anyways...
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While we're here, does anyone happen to recognize the camel's tune? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JKpD-KkaBHc We never worked it out.
I assume none of the Shazam-alikes can make any sense of it?