Thatcher, may she burn in hell, was far better than Farage. She at least had significant political skill, and an actual plan for the UK.
Farage is a grifter of Trump's mindset, but a few more braincells.
Every time Thatcher sexily spoke about fiscal responsibility I got an inch and a half of blue steel in my sweatpants.
This reminds me of how Brits were always totally obsessed with all the regulations that the unelected EU bureaucrats were supposedly inflicting on us all the time, and then you’d go to France and see kids diving off a high-board into a shallow pool contaminated with battery acid with absolutely no lifeguards to be seen, and generally no-one seems to give a shit.
Yeah but you can't wear boxer style trunks otherwise they will shout at you. They have weird priorities over there
Not all of France is like Paris, and the Seine is not a pool. (Plus, battery acid would probably count as a good attempt to clean it up, not as contamination.)
French people let their dogs shit absolutely everywhere and nobody cares. That was the really surprising thing for me.
Paris is beautiful but you better keep an eye on where you're stepping.
Not true, it just sounds more like Kant south of the border, which I think makes us sounds more philosophical.
It’s just a way of funding the BBC that was devised before a TV was something that essentially everyone had. Since it’s delivered OTA it seemed easier to tax the device itself then it was to tax everyone unfairly. So calling it a “license” is fairly outmoded, it’s really a tax. You also don’t have to pay it if you don’t actually receive TV channels.
It should just be rolled into regular taxes now, but who is going to propose and approve a new tax in this day and age? So it’s easier not to touch it.
I wish we had a TV tax in Canada. The funding of the CBC is a political football, so I sometimes feel like CBC News has to walk a tightrope to avoid having the government slash the budget.
It's probably better that there's just a tax on the device. Sure the UK government could meddle with that tax to cut the budget of the BBC, but it feels like it would be less likely since people would rightly ask why they're meddling with it. People are less likely to ask questions if the government is cutting a budget because "gotta pay off the national debt!"
Queen's dodger can mean
Which is it?
Tell me about it, it's like, every time I want to get some grilled prawns there's always someone who goes "Oi mate, where's yer Barbie license?"
And in Australia doing the same it's "Oy wait up mate, where's your Ocker licence?" Luckily we don't need barbeque licenses, tong licenses, etc. we got away from the UK to escape all that bureaucratic red tape
And here's some reality of over a decade of right-wing rule https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b5aJ-57_YsQ
To watch tv in UK you need a tv licence
This was done as sort of a tax to fund public television without taxing people who don’t use it
The person then concludes that they should have voted for the nazis because liberals bad
I mean you do in the US as well, but it's called "A Netflix/Hulu/Disney Plus membership"
And it only funds one channel instead of dozens of TV, radio, web, apps, weather and news channels.
Also publicly funded TV tends to be way better. They have somewhat more accountability so especially news, politics etc tends to be much better. For leisure programs that varies a bit more by country, but obviously the BBC has produced a lot of great stuff.
It did well for a long time. The BBC produces a lot of excellent programmes. It was also unafraid of holding the government's feet to the fire.
Unfortunately, the Tories successfully gutted it about a decade back. It still produces excellent programmes, but is neutered politically.
As for the licence fee. It is effectively an extra tax. However, if you don't watch TV, you don't have to have a licence. It's not perfect, but better than just a flat tax. It also helped keep them semi independent of the government.
They're making fun of how Brexit was pushed on a platform of getting rid of overstrict EU regulations and bureaucracy (as well as a lot of overt racism) but it turned out a load of it was just homegrown British bureaucracy that had nothing to do with the EU but UKIP voters kept complaining that anything they didn't like about Britain was the fault of the EU anyway
Give it time. It won't be a licence though, it'll be a compatible bread subscription for a discounted toaster, with government enforced felonies for using incompatible bread
*Based on how the software and entertainment industries work
Sorry if I was not clear. I was not serious when I said that. I was referencing this debate.
I was not super serious either. I was referencing Corey Doctorow's recent book, a near future sci-fi
The book was Radicalized - a set of short stories, actually from 5 years ago :/
The specific story in the collection was "Unauthorised bread"
