Ticth the very next person who sends me the equivalent of those feared chain-letters of old.
No
I won’t ask 1, 2, 5 or 10 other people to pass on recipes, exercises, ideas , prayers, games or anything else.
1,000 reasons why not
Totally agree! I’ve just refused one with recipes - seems innocuous, but too reminiscent of those awful ones that used to worry some people and were just a darned nuisance 😡!
Remember the person doing it has probably fallen themselves for the emotional blackmail in these letters.
Spot on! When I let my friend know I wouldn’t be doing it she replied that she very much understood, but the person who started it was a dear church friend and she didn’t want to upset her ...
I've been getting them by the boatload, but now I'm just deleting them, no matter who they come from.
Apart from anything else, there's limited disc space on my Tablet, and I've got more important things to fill it up with, like pictures of my nephews' children and my nieces' dogs.
In most cases, when it is forwarded, it automatically sends it to your entire friends list. It isn't like someone is puposely deciding they will send it to you.
Also avoid any that have to do with money, bank accounts, credit cards, etc. The old-school chain letters often asked to send money to someone, who would purportedly send money to someone else, etc. There might be a list of the next people. The recipient might be promised that if they gave money, more money would eventually come back around to them. Kind of a pyramid/Ponzi scheme, in that form.
I feel Unloved - no-one ever sends Me chain letters or emails...
Except from Nigeria...
I received one this morning telling me that my McAfee subscription was expiring. Only I don't have a McAfee subscription. And I don't think McAfee has an email address that includes "plump pillow" as part of it. However, if you're feeling unloved I could forward it to you, but only on the condition that you forward it on to everyone in your address book.
There's an email doing the rounds saying payment missed on TV licences, please send details to ... It has apparently succeeded in cleaning out various bank accounts, so much so that there's a warning on my online bank account. I have received it several times, checked the payment had cleared, checked the online TV licence account and found a spam warning message. I sent the first few attempts to the TV licensing authority for them to sort out, as requested.
Cousin R cheered me up today, by phoning me, and telling me he was checking up on his Aged and Infirm Relations...I was second in line after His Old Mum...
If I may ask, how do folks there feel about them? How do they cope with it? We don't have them here in the US, and they seem very strange to me. And are trucks still sent around to surveil for unlicensed TVs?
I have a TV licence, but very rarely watch TV. The NE Man watches slightly more, but there are weeks in which we don't watch any TV at all, but we still require a licence. However I am an avid listener to radio. It's on in the background whenever I am cooking or cleaning. So generally I think that supporting the BBC is a Good Thing.
The supermarket algorithms that ejected me from the slot booking page just at midnight, while allowing others to log in before I got back and seize all the slots but one, and then eject me again when I clicked on it. After I had set my alarms to wake me up in time to book!
I'd much prefer a TV licensing system which gives us a great variety of free-to-air and ad-free channels, than pay-per-view TV only on niche channels or commercial TV governed only by advertising revenue.
There's a real debate as to whether detector vans ever really existed or whether the news and TV items about them were a publicity stunt to frighten people into paying up. Today the assumption tends to be that everyone has a TV and the onus is on you to prove you haven't! At least that was true a few years ago but it may not be now. You don't need a licence for radios but it's funded by the licence.
Another TV license approver; I watch history and science programmes on iPlayer all the time and would hate to see us losing such as valuable resource. I also listen to radio 3 and 4, and my husband and teenagers listen to radio 1.
In the days before iPlayer when we did not have a TV we did not have a license and got regular reminder letters. The inspector turned up at 6.30pm one day (presumably timed to catch people watching soaps) and I let him in; he heard the Archers playing in the kitchen, said that we clearly did not have a TV and we did not hear from TV licensing again for years.
I think the TV licence is a blunt instrument for funding the BBC - but then there are many cases of a blunt instrument being the best solution to a problem for which there is no better answer.
I think the TV licence is a blunt instrument for funding the BBC - but then there are many cases of a blunt instrument being the best solution to a problem for which there is no better answer.
Yup. It's probably the least worst solution out there. But it's currently under threat (for new readers, the Johnson government are of the impression that the BBC is full of lefties and so it needs to be cut down to size - and taking away its main funding mechanism or at least making funding dependent on keeping the government happy seems like a cracking wheeze.). But it seems to me that if you look a little closely, Auntie Beeb is making some discreet plans to keep going in a subscription / advertising based / pay as you view future:
- you now need to sign in to use the streaming services (iPlayer for TV, Sounds for radio) so they know who to bill if billing comes in
- cross promotion of streaming offerings on free to air services (to encourage us to use said services - and potentially also to limit the free to air services to broadcasting teasers for paid-for services)
- full ownership of UKTV (a bunch of subscription cable channels that carry advertising): increased commitment to UKTV producing original material
- participation in Britbox (a Netflix-type operation) along with the other UK terrestrial broadcasters
I strongly suspect that at the moment there will be a degree of subsidization from the licence-fee funded services (not necessarily explicitly, but maybe by selling the repeat rights to 'Dad's Army' to UKTV at a lower amount than they would offer to (say) Sky) but if the licence fee were to be run down there's the outline of a model for maintaining some semblance of the current BBC.
I have seen the licence detector vans a few times, usually around the corner from wherever I was living TV and licence free. I haven't had a TV for years and only started buying a TV licence ahead of it being required to use iplayer. For a while, iplayer was free on catch up. One theory I've heard is that iplayer starting being a sign in and licence required service to charge overseas viewers logging in by VPN. (You should see the current howls of rage that GB Sewing Bee is not airing internationally - which I am sure is more to do with local starions not buying it from the BBC and Love Productions.)
Having lived in Canada, where we paid the equivalent of the British licence fee roughly every other month for cable television*, I think the licence fee is worth every penny. I don't even mind the adverts: the quality of British adverts is better than the quality of most North American programmes. There would be three commercial breaks in a half-hour show, even on cable channels, so you really wonder what you're paying for.
* This gives you about 300 channels, but at any given moment 299 of them are likely to be showing cr@p - and many of them are duplicating each other.
I'm glad I bought my TV licence forty years ago. They were a lot cheaper then.
I've had me car tax thingy for forty years, too! Well worth the 5/- or whatever it was...
Er ... they do have to be renewed occasionally, don't you know? And you don't need your car tax thingy these days: you can store it with the starting handle.
Comments
No
I won’t ask 1, 2, 5 or 10 other people to pass on recipes, exercises, ideas , prayers, games or anything else.
1,000 reasons why not
Totally agree! I’ve just refused one with recipes - seems innocuous, but too reminiscent of those awful ones that used to worry some people and were just a darned nuisance 😡!
The are some fun limericks you might have sent.
Spot on! When I let my friend know I wouldn’t be doing it she replied that she very much understood, but the person who started it was a dear church friend and she didn’t want to upset her ...
Apart from anything else, there's limited disc space on my Tablet, and I've got more important things to fill it up with, like pictures of my nephews' children and my nieces' dogs.
Courage was summoned and I enquired of the last sender Why exactly it was thought that I might indulge....
The answer?
“ I knew you wouldn’t play! Plus I didn’t want to upset Ms X”
I am obviously known as someone who doesn’t give a .....
Going to accept that as a compliment
And
Shall continue in my civic duty of protecting the vulnerable.
Well done for calling the bluff - I guess most of those who send these things on 'don't want to upset X or Y...'.
For all its faults, Farcebark is proving useful during the current Emergency.
It's a hacker's dream to pick up clues to your passwords.
When Mr S was fixing friends' computers, he could almost always guess their passwords from their pets or grandchildren's names
And avoid any that purport to be from Nigeria.
I appear to have missed all the terrifying ones!
Admission
Mine are all very homemade and cuddly sparkly positivity ones.
It is just the Idea that I would inflict these on people .....Unasked For!
While I m about it
Ticth boy racers at midnight.
Except from Nigeria...
(O, and I also CTH all Roy Bacers, whether in cars, or on motor-bikes, no matter what time of day or night).
(And WTF does McAfee have to do with plump - or any other variety of - pillows?)
Cousin R cheered me up today, by phoning me, and telling me he was checking up on his Aged and Infirm Relations...I was second in line after His Old Mum...
If I may ask, how do folks there feel about them? How do they cope with it? We don't have them here in the US, and they seem very strange to me. And are trucks still sent around to surveil for unlicensed TVs?
Thx.
Round here in the Back of Beyond, I've never seen a TV Licensing truck (but then, when we lived in suburbia, I never saw one either...)
There's a real debate as to whether detector vans ever really existed or whether the news and TV items about them were a publicity stunt to frighten people into paying up. Today the assumption tends to be that everyone has a TV and the onus is on you to prove you haven't! At least that was true a few years ago but it may not be now. You don't need a licence for radios but it's funded by the licence.
In the days before iPlayer when we did not have a TV we did not have a license and got regular reminder letters. The inspector turned up at 6.30pm one day (presumably timed to catch people watching soaps) and I let him in; he heard the Archers playing in the kitchen, said that we clearly did not have a TV and we did not hear from TV licensing again for years.
Yup. It's probably the least worst solution out there. But it's currently under threat (for new readers, the Johnson government are of the impression that the BBC is full of lefties and so it needs to be cut down to size - and taking away its main funding mechanism or at least making funding dependent on keeping the government happy seems like a cracking wheeze.). But it seems to me that if you look a little closely, Auntie Beeb is making some discreet plans to keep going in a subscription / advertising based / pay as you view future:
- you now need to sign in to use the streaming services (iPlayer for TV, Sounds for radio) so they know who to bill if billing comes in
- cross promotion of streaming offerings on free to air services (to encourage us to use said services - and potentially also to limit the free to air services to broadcasting teasers for paid-for services)
- full ownership of UKTV (a bunch of subscription cable channels that carry advertising): increased commitment to UKTV producing original material
- participation in Britbox (a Netflix-type operation) along with the other UK terrestrial broadcasters
I strongly suspect that at the moment there will be a degree of subsidization from the licence-fee funded services (not necessarily explicitly, but maybe by selling the repeat rights to 'Dad's Army' to UKTV at a lower amount than they would offer to (say) Sky) but if the licence fee were to be run down there's the outline of a model for maintaining some semblance of the current BBC.
* This gives you about 300 channels, but at any given moment 299 of them are likely to be showing cr@p - and many of them are duplicating each other.
I've had me car tax thingy for forty years, too! Well worth the 5/- or whatever it was...
*Twenty-one shillings...21/-, or £1-1s-0d.
Or £2-05 in today's money.