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Comment by permo-w | Hacker News Reader

this modern style of criticism is so tiring. if you philosophically disagree with something, don't try to abuse the defence of an oppressed group as a rhetorical technique to make it harder for people to argue with you, just say you disagree with it and why

even if you genuinely believe this is why it should be decriminalised, if women are being disproportionally affected, then clearly either there's some kind of bias in the process, which should simply be fixed instead of disbanding the whole process, or women are simply less skilled at dealing with situations like this and need more help. either way it's not an issue with the concept of the license fee

I actually don't disagree that the license fee in its current format is a problem, ideally it should just be impossible to access it without having paid, but I don't think it's feasible with the way freeview works

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Anecdotal, but out of my family I’m the only man who doesn’t pay the licence fee, and the only person who hasn’t had a visit.

They’ve visited my mother, sister and one auntie that don’t pay - they all live alone and are the sole name on the bill.

I’ve heard from friends similar experiences too, single men and households with men on the electoral register don’t get visits, or very rarely if they do.

I had the pleasure of answering the door at my mothers to one of these people and believe there’s an issue with the way they choose who to investigate. It’s predatory.

perhaps there needs to be an inquiry into the issue

I doubt Capita would have any fallout from an inquiry, it would be another headline for a day or two then get forgotten by the media. I’m all for it though, they should be held accountable, my first statement is purely cynicism from me.

depends who the government is really. I'd be cautiously optimistic that the current government would do something about it, ideally taking it out of the hands of a private company in the first place. this government is too nervous for that kind of thing, but I do think they could do something about it.

That’s got me thinking, who controls that? Do the BBC willingly employ Capita to enforce the licence, or are they mandated to enforce it in some way and Capita just so happen to be the vultures that were cheapest to hire?

I have no idea but my guess is that it's handled privately so that no one at the BBC has to get their hands mucky

i'm beginning to think i'm the only one that DOES pay it.

No, I do too, and I’m happy to do so. I’ve always felt it’s a useful brake on over-commercialisation of other channels, although perhaps less effective now than it once was. I do enjoy quite a bit of the BBC’s output as well.

I feel there's a huge problem in this debate, which is that the people who don't like it are extremely vocal, and the people who do like it and quietly use and enjoy it without necessarily adoring it, perhaps like you, who I suspect are a majority, are just not really represented in the conversation, and the people who love it, like me, do not really have a central reference point from which to draw power from unlike the people who don't like it, who have the entire right-wing media crowing about it at every opportunity

Not to mention the people who are extremely vocal about how horrible and woke it is for having too many minorities and that Mr Lineker also overlaps heavily with people who have watched it continuously for 50 years, wouldn't dream of switching over to newfangled channels like Channel 4 and don't know what an Amazon is...

I think I'm one of those, minus the last bit about channel 4 and Amazon.

You might be underrating my ardour on this as I've said my piece at greater length before.

I've always been in favour of (something like) the license fee to fund a non-commercial national public service broadcaster. Public service broadcasting is incredibly important otherwise it's all just commercial interests and you end up with the kind of nonsense you get in the TV landscape in the USA: low quality content, far too many ads, dominance of hyper-partisan "news", etc.

And if you look at what the BBC does - the TV channels, iPlayer, the national radio stations, local radio, news, the world service, the ground-breaking content they've created over the decades, and of course licensing/reselling content - it's incredibly impressive and, to me at any rate, represents incredibly good value for money as compared to other providers.

The TV license costs about the same as an annual Netflix subscription but the BBC is able to do so much more with that money than Netflix are. Doesn't even compare in my mind.

agreed on every point

If you believe in it, then pay. Just leave the rest alone that want no part of it.

It’s not really a topic of conversation that I’d bring up, but I know many people who do pay it so you aren’t the only one.

I don’t because I don’t use anything that requires me to, not from a moral standpoint. The BBC has given me a lot of fantastic content over the years but I’ve just stopped consuming most television over the past 5 years or so.

I don't pay it because I don't watch television anymore, live or otherwise.

However I do find the overreach of claiming I need to pay the license if I watch any form of live broadcast is ridiculous. If I wanted to watch the occasional live stream of a football game online via Amazon Prime then I would need to pay the license fee.

that's too far, agreed, although I would be extremely shocked if anyone has been prosecuted for that

People are prosecuted for this with zero evidence other than an ‘admission’, with the admission being as nebulous as ‘yeah the tv is on’.

How can you prove someone was watching TV in court? As far as I’m aware you can’t, but the court sides with Capita generally. Please don’t bring up the TV detecting vans as evidence.

none of this is evidence anyone has been prosecuted for watching live football from a streaming service

Suspect more obvious factors are that men are far less likely to be home during the daytime when inspectors visit, and also more likely to admit they've had a TV for years or let the inspector in if he asks nicely...

(FWIW I'm had a visit shortly after I'd moved in with five other guys before, and avoided prosecution by simply asking how to pay...)

I suspect it's more likely that the inspectors see women as a soft touch and lower risk and more easily intimidated and less prone to violence.

In the same way ticket inspectors on trains ask people in suits for tickets but avoid asking the 6ft tall roadmen.

This is my theory. My relatives wouldn’t have a clue whether they were lying about being some official inspector and saying they’re allowed to inspect, and they would probably be scared of either an official looking, or bailiff looking person telling them this.

> if women are being disproportionally affected, then clearly either there's some kind of bias in the process, which should simply be fixed instead of disbanding the whole process, or women are simply less skilled at dealing with situations like this and need more help

Or they're more comfortable breaking that particular law (under the same conditions). I'm not saying that _is_ the case, but it is one of the possibilities.

It’s right there in the article:

>The ministry’s report admits the chief reason why so many women wind up being prosecuted is because they are more likely to open the door to inspectors.

Men literally or figuratively tell the inspectors to fuck off, women don’t. It’s not bias, systemic issues, or whatever. It’s entirely on how women handle the situation that explains the difference.

They need to figure it a different way to do enforcement that’s not as discriminatory. The current approach leads to disparate outcomes and is therefore inherently discriminatory

It's not necessarily discriminatory just because it winds up impacting one group more than another.

For example, if you have 2 groups of people and one of the groups is doing something wrong twice as much, and you enforce the law on everyone... it's fair, not discriminatory. (Ignoring the fact that what is labelled "wrong" can be done in such a way as to be discriminatory. I'm assuming a neutral view of what is wrong )

Right, but the post I was responding to was listing out reasons that women might be prosecuted more, including being targeted more. So, unless you mean that they are targeted more _because_ they are more likely to open the door to inspectors, my point stands.

> I actually don't disagree that the license fee in its current format is a problem, ideally it should just be impossible to access it without having paid, but I don't think it's feasible with the way freeview works

So you think that it should just be privatised like netflix. If you don't think public service broadcasting has a place, just don't try to hide it.

I don't get the TV license model myself. I think a government should collect taxes and provide services without adding elaborate schemes to pretend something else is happening.

the point is that it partially takes it out of the hands of the government of the day. if it were solely funded by taxes, it would be long since dead or privatised by now, and if it weren't it would be entirely beholden to pleasing the government. maybe in a more mature country it could work, but not here

I think the license fee, with a couple of tweaks, could be absolutely ingenious. the best of both worlds. the freedom of choice of the free market, and the lack of commercialism of the public sector, and no one has to pay taxes for it. however, it does restrict user choice somewhat by forcing them to pay for it to watch any live tv, even football on streaming platforms. I think there could be a discussion to be had about changing it to where users pay just to watch the BBC and not live tv in general

Seems like an awful lot for TV, and where most of the friction in the custom design is for the public.

All the other areas that republic misdesign hits have much larger budgets and much more corruption, but those topics are a bit harder for the public to engage with so a special program does very nicely at preventing any system corrections.

I enjoy the way you think and phrase your thoughts (are you on ketamine?), but I think that publicly-owned broadcasting, particularly (exclusively) the entertainment side of things, is the opposite of republic misdesign. it's a freak accident of something very very positive and joyful and broadly selfless rising above the waves of self-interest and corruption and misery.

I think the news part of the BBC should be removed, maybe spun off into a separate entity

I think you misunderstood my sub-point.. I think we both agree about the BBC as a wonderful result. I question the motives for a special system of protecting it in a government that doesn't seem to get any better at other sectors.

my understanding of the justification for a special system is that it's inherently more fragile and more tempting to attack than other government services, which generally provide tangibly vital, life-preserving services, rather than less tangible artistic and cultural ones, and the particular form of the service lends itself to being funded in a way that wouldn't work for other more vital services

healthcare is possibly one of the few that could (i.e. does in other Western countries) work similarly, but people including me would undoubtedly despise it. most things need some kind of mandated funding otherwise they would fail and people would die, go homeless, not have a military or live tangibly worse lives, and mandated taxed funding is generally better because it relies more on those with broader shoulders

overall I personally reject your notion that there's some kind of subversive justification for it

Of of the BBCs jobs is to scrutinise the government. Editorial independence is essential. You can argue how well it does this, but if the government has direct control over its funding, it clearly won't be doing that task any better.

If you want to change it to a BBC subscription fee, then you're just changing the BBC into Netflix. The whole point of the BBC is that everyone pays and everyone can benefit - same as the NHS, or libraries, or roads.

I think the only way that change could work while protecting the BBCs editorial independence and maintain its public service remit would be to have it as part of council tax. A £160 a year charge on a band D house (with appropriate discounts for Band A-C and excess for E-H). The default amount would be set as the license fee is now.

that's not the point of the BBC whatsoever, otherwise it would just be a tax like everything else publicly owned. it's precisely the opposite in fact. it's voluntary

It's never been changed to a direct tax to prevent direct interference from the government

The BBC has an obligation to serve everyone, not just subscribers. Netflix has an obligation to serve subscribers, at least well enough that they don't leave.

>It's never been changed to a direct tax to prevent direct interference from the government

that's half of the reason, and also feeds into the other reason. if it's not a direct tax and it's semi-voluntary it's harder for people to criticise as unfair. not that they don't find a way

>The BBC has an obligation to serve everyone, not just subscribers. Netflix has an obligation to serve subscribers, at least well enough that they don't leave.

this is an intrinsic property of Netflix being a private business, not Netflix being a subscription service. the BBC could comfortably move to a subscription model and still have the exact same ethos. the BBC's payment model is not so different from a subscription model that right now a private company would be serving license fee payers rather than everyone in general

I think if you knew me you would know that I am the absolute last person who wants to privatise the BBC. the privatisation of the BBC would be the end of my world. I think the public ownership of the BBC, and the BBC in general is the greatest cultural achievement of modern Britain.

I just think that instead of making it so that people can fuck up and not pay by accident or by laziness, it would be better if there was no way for that to happen. it has nothing to do with public vs private ownership

honestly though, on second thoughts, a subscription model would just completely hollow out the BBC. if they're struggling for funding now, god knows what it'll be like if 80% of homes didn't have a license. they'd have to either massively expand BBC Worldwide, or take tax money. I honestly think it sounds like a good idea, but I just don't think it's viable.

It's not modern, although I don't disagree that it's more common. But you do have jokes even back to the 80s of "world ending, women and minorities most effected."

interesting. I suppose the women's rights movement has been around for a very long time

"Modern form of criticism" - pointing out the fact that the license fee is unfair and as a consequence disproportionately affects women.

>> women are simply less skilled at dealing with situations like this and need more help

Wow. That's a bold take.

I think you know how disingenuous you're being here, so I won't bless this with a genuine response

its ok for women to get prosecuted. they are not special

Your complaint would have much more merit if there wasn’t hundreds of years of examples of women being systematically discriminated against and having the system unfairly target them.

my complaint would have less merit if GP weren't simply using those hundreds of years as rhetorical technique

this modern style of criticism is so tiring.

It’s a modern style of criticism because….anyone…anyone…

We should ignore historical reality. It’s makes you uncomfortable.

>It’s a modern style of criticism because….anyone…anyone…

are you going through a tunnel?

in all seriousness I don't know what you're trying to say

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