Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

TV detector vans once prowled the streets of England

hackaday.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

491–500 of 562 posts

Re: TV detector vans once prowled the streets of England

#491

Post by nmeofthestate »

saberdancer wrote: post #255
boffinism wrote: post #128

The BBC is currently dedicating hours of airtime a day to educational content to match our primary and secondary curricula because the schools are shut and lots of kids can't access online provisions. And still people complain about the licence fee in terms of whether or not they enjoy BBC gameshows...

What is the point of this license fee in this day and age? Everyone has a TV, so everyone pays the license fee. Wouldn't it be simpler to just use a part of the taxes already collected to go to BBC. My problem with this type of license fee collection is that it bring forward a number of costs associated with it that could be removed if it went directly from taxes and that today everyone has TV so it doesn't really "t…

The license fee is fairer than a tax, because if you don't watch terrestrial television you don't have to fund it. For example, if you just watch Netflix, you don't need to pay for a license fee. If the license fee were replaced with a tax I would end up paying more than the cost of a license fee for something I don't use - not keen.

Re: TV detector vans once prowled the streets of England

#492

Post by nske »

a) I think BBC produces good content, but not good enough to warrant the current cost of a TV license.

b) Even if it did, I still would not pay for a license, as a reaction to its overreaching approach, obligatory character and dishonest reasoning. They are claiming that you need a license to watch any type of content made available in public in real time, with Youtube LIVE mentioned explicitly as an example -no particular reason this wouldn't include even things like gaming video streams a school kid would share for fun.

I don't think BBC should profit from the consumption of content it has contributed nothing towards. I'm not sure if that's more absurd when that content itself is provided for free by its authors, or when it's content you have already paid for.

Re: TV detector vans once prowled the streets of England

#493

Post by mattmanser »

afavour wrote: post #471
laurent92 wrote: post #409

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What is absolutely clear from history is commercial media outlets fuel political bias, and it seems to be increasingly damaging to society. Public broadcasting fuels political division a lot. The most worrying is that you don’t notice it. It is increasingly worrying because when people are exposed to the other side, they immediately « catch fire », wonder why they have been lied to, and never trust public broadcast…

I regularly see the BBC criticised by both sides for being one sided. I’m not saying that’s a get out of jail free card but from your comment I genuinely don’t know which side you come down on, which surely says something. I don't mean to dismiss the complaint. Public media news is weird: it's funded by the government, but it should criticise the government. There's a tension there. But looking at the US news landsca…

I have read across the spectrum for years in the UK, the BBC is not especially biased, maybe a little liberal and it ignores poorer people, but almost all media does that in the UK. But the histrionics frim the Tories and Momentum about the BBC is wildly misplaced.

In comparison I never really watched the US "news" until the recent US election, occasionally watching a bit of CNN/ABC/Fox News. But I've been watching it these last few months, a mix of CNN, Fox and CNBC.

I was shocked at how CNN and Fox both present their often extremely partisan and biased opinions as news. They "report" on a story, but just constantly throwing in their own slant, not reporting the facts, but spinning it. CNN is not quite as bad as Fox, but it's still really, really bad.

That's not news to me.

The BBC does not do that. They don't have reporters sit their and rant about stuff, or label huge swathes of the population as X, Y or Z.

While there is bias by omission, or by the order in which they present the news, it's nothing like the 'news' I see coming from America.

Re: TV detector vans once prowled the streets of England

#494

Post by vaduz »

eplanit wrote: post #458
faceplanted wrote: post #443

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They're not law enforcement

So one can just tell them to f--- off and go away?

Unless they come with an actual search warrant (which is rare, but can happen [0] as I wrote in a cousin thread, sometimes with the police assist), yes, you can. Capital/TVL have no inherent power to enter your premises unless invited - but you can't just throw them out after inviting them in.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25835140

Re: TV detector vans once prowled the streets of England

#495

Post by 52-6F-62 »

andyjohnson0 wrote: post #400
saberdancer wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is the point of this license fee in this day and age? Everyone has a TV, so everyone pays the license fee. Wouldn't it be simpler to just use a part of the taxes already collected to go to BBC. My problem with this type of license fee collection is that it bring forward a number of costs associated with it that could be removed if it went directly from taxes and that today everyone has TV so it doesn't really "t…

> Wouldn't it be simpler to just use a part of the taxes already collected to go to BBC. That would make the BBC dependent on the government for its revenue, which definitely isn't desirable. The current system, where the BBC collects its own revenue under the authority of a royal charter, is intended to help insulate it from political interference.

It's how the CBC is structured. They receive funding from taxes and their own revenue streams: merchandizing, advertising, syndication, and so on.

It works. That is, it works until it doesn't.

The CBC is entirely "free" to every Canadian who wants to use it, and it is fantastic. I wish it were expanded in scope.

But there is an opposition that wants it dismantled and moved from government funding at all costs. Usually, the opposition is purely along political lines which is disappointing.

So, I suppose the argument against it being tax-funded is that it become yet another chip in the political game. An argument for tax-funded is that there are no additional fees awaiting those who cannot afford them.

Seems like something of a tossup or...yet to be determined.

The added separation from political influence is big points, but it's rather moot when one group who've already made their mind up will just shout "conspiracy" and then the facts don't matter anyway. That happens here in Canada, to be sure.

Re: TV detector vans once prowled the streets of England

#496

Post by Zelphyr »

scotty79 wrote: post #390
flower-giraffe wrote: post #211

I think the funding and governance (by Royal Charter) of the BBC have historically provided a huge benefit to society in the UK. Advertising free children’s TV (and radio) may have delayed the onset or rampant consumerism fuelled by commercial TV elsewhere. The BBC microcomputer project is arguably the origin of ARM CPU’s. Initially the license fee was for radios, I can’t find a reference but I remember being told as…

I wonder if people will ever notice how socially and psychologically toxic is advertisement business and regulate it stringently.

I've been wondering this myself. Related to this; I was wondering the other day why the seemingly sudden rise of people who buy into conspiracy theories like Q-Anon? One possible answer could be that people are feeling like they are "less-than", purposeless, or not wanted. So then my next question was, why is that?

It occurred to me that with the rise of consumerism (apparently skyrocketing starting in the 90's) we've had more and more advertising telling us, "If you just buy this product or service you will [be loved | get more sex | be prettier | get more sex]"

When it was just TV and billboards advertising to you it was bad enough but at least you could look away and/or turn off the TV. With the rise of the Internet there was obviously another increasingly pervasive channel through which advertisers could reach you. But then came the smartphone and now it's like we're carrying a TV with us 24x7, flooding us with messages convincing us we're not good enough. Couple that with ad-supported apps that purposely try to be addictive and we are bombarded even more because we can't just be still anymore. Our constant need to be stimulated has become piggy-backed with messages telling us how inferior we are.

Re: TV detector vans once prowled the streets of England

#497

Post by cheph »

flower-giraffe wrote: post #481
cheph wrote: post #367

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> perhaps the license fee could also fund the infrastructure for something like signal Why like signal? Signal has no protections to avoid the same abuse as WhatsApp. While I would agree with the sentiment, I think that if EU funds anything it will just as likely be much worse than WhatsApp than better than it given their track record (e.g. stupid popups on every damn website that makes life just that extra bit worse…

> Why like signal? Signal has no protections to avoid the same abuse as WhatsApp. I think something like signal could reasonably have sufficient protections from both a technical and legislative perspective. And for that matter matrix too. I was not intending to highlight signal as the only possibility, by like signal I guess I meant a small a capable organisation with a clear non profit agenda.

Signal is centralized by design. If they redesign it sure, it can be something that is not centralized by design, but the problem is then it is hardly an open standard, because it is entirely up to whoever is running Signal.

Re: TV detector vans once prowled the streets of England

#498

Post by ouid »

Imagine that the police force had robots that took pictures through your windows and then employed sophisticated object recognition and semantic inference engines to determine what is happening inside, matching it agains a database of known crimes. Then explain to me how that's different from the police officer who looks through your window to establish probable cause for a "search warrant".

If your society is principled enough to require warrants to execute "searches", then it should be principled enough to recognize that this principle, by default, excludes any activity which has no measurable impact on society from criminalization.

The first piece of evidence in any investigation should come without a search.

Re: TV detector vans once prowled the streets of England

#499

Post by ouid »

afavour wrote: post #369
flower-giraffe wrote: post #211

I think the funding and governance (by Royal Charter) of the BBC have historically provided a huge benefit to society in the UK. Advertising free children’s TV (and radio) may have delayed the onset or rampant consumerism fuelled by commercial TV elsewhere. The BBC microcomputer project is arguably the origin of ARM CPU’s. Initially the license fee was for radios, I can’t find a reference but I remember being told as…

Strongly agreed. Having lived in the US for a good number of years now I can see how the idea of vans roaming looking for TV viewers is baffling, but the public TV offering by the BBC, while definitely not perfect, is miles ahead of both the public and network offerings on US TV (though credit to the likes of PBS and NPR for doing miraculous work with a fraction of the budget!). I even got my start in computing from…

Then pay for it with taxes on sales of television sets themselves.

Re: TV detector vans once prowled the streets of England

#500

Post by nitrogen »

scotty79 wrote: post #468
ballenf wrote: post #441

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's also worth noting that advertising is nearly a necessity in an industrialized society. Production of goods has high capital upfront costs and marginal costs that become negligible at scale. You can't get that scale without advertising or a government-mandated monopoly. Or, at least, you can't get that scale quickly enough.

For me economy is like a forest. Trees (companies) compete for sunlight (purchases) and adverisements are their trunks. They 'waste' enormous amount of energy on trunks not because longer trunks increase the amount of sunlight. They just lower the probability of being overshadowed by the others. If somehow trees could agree on how high the trunk should be at most they could limit this waste. Instead they literally gr…

Instead they literally grow trunks as long as the physical laws allow.

In some cases this was literally true, as fast food franchises would keep raising their logo signs higher and higher until municipalities set height limits.

Post reply on HN