this post was submitted on 16 Aug 2025
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I can't believe the TV license is real. I just can't. I guess it helps makes good tv tho
Americans fund public TV and radio infrastructure through taxes, Brits just make it opt-out if you meet certain criteria by labeling it as a license.
You tell me which has more "freedom."
The one where I don't have to upload my I.D. to watch porn, BABY! 🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🦅🦅
I'll just leave this here https://worldpopulationreview.com/state-rankings/porn-site-verification-states
Sometimes I forget how much freedoms we have in Washington State. The only thing is strict gun laws, but it's mostly background checks and limited magazine sizes
Limited mag sizes are a legit issue, but NICs checks are federal.
The only thing limited mags are effective against is the possibility to have more rounds in a home defense situation (which is really only a problem if there are multiple invaders, but of course there usually are, that's not usually a solo activity).
Their stated objective (to reduce the amount of rnds/mag so mass shooters are less effective) is complete hogwash, magazines can be changed in one literal second, and sometimes the shooters even prefer the 10-20rnd mags because the standard 30s are harder to hide. Changing mags is only a problem when someone is returning fire, if you're completely unimpeded you might as well have a damn lever action.
And it's not like mass shooters are law abiding citizens except in the small area of murdering random people.... They can easily drive one state over to Idaho and get whatever they want, and if they're out, continue south to Utah or east to Montana. Nobody is going to check your car on the way back...
I grew up in WA, and everyone got around whatever law they didn't like. Want to blow up big fireworks but your town doesn't allow it? Go to the local res, hide them under a blanket in the car, and be a very law abiding citizen on the way home (and blow them up in a random neighborhood). Before weed was legal, people would just grow it in the forest on public land, which was literally everywhere.
The mag law just exists to piss off law abiding citizens and is the same "save the children" BS excuse that'd being used to effectively ban porn and other things across the country. Solve the problem another way.
Tbh you don't even have to drive, you can 3d print standard capacity magazines and then use a spring, which you can buy in any state, or cannibalize one from another mag (certain mags that can be legally bought in restricted states work too, but a man has to keep some secrets).
But also yeah driving works too, and plenty people have done it.
I grew up elsewhere, but have similar experiences regarding weed, fireworks, and more. Laws don't stop people from doing anything they're significantly intent on doing in my experience.
Totally agree, and I extend that to all the pointless feature bans. Their true purpose is for politicians to posture for reelection lol, same with the anti-porn bullshit, just different politicians.
Exactly.
If a criminal wants something, they can get it whether there's a ban or not. Actual solutions here are much more difficult than a ban, hence why politicians love bans so much.
well I live in Georgia (US state) who brought it in before the UK did.
The TV license is definitely real. All the others are fake though (I believe).
https://www.gov.uk/find-licences/tv-licence
Best joke in this thread
Thanks for noticing me, Senpai.
Wtf is this in addition to paying for cable/satellite?
Nope. You can just plug your TV into the aerial to get BBC + free channels. Netflix and whatever costs extra tho
I’m surprised that according to the website, they actually let you get away without a license if you only use commercial streaming services and don’t watch any BBC content. In Germany, that excuse doesn’t fly. As long as your device has the capacity to receive aerial broadcast, you have to pay, whether you watch it or not is irrelevant.
In theory, but the BBC has been known to harass people into paying, even pressuring you into letting them into your house even though they don't have the right to do so.
afaik in Germany you even have to pay if you have no device that to receive anything. Every household has ro pay wirth a few exeptions.
Pretty sure not owning ANY broadcast receiving devices is the only way to get around it, but that’s extremely difficult to accomplish. Keep in mind radio counts as well (though you can be eligible for a reduced rate if you only have radio access and no TV), including the one in your car, your stereo, or your alarm clock. Owning a TV with no antenna hooked up does not count either, since it’s trivial to do so, and you could just be hiding an antenna in your attic or your basement.
Basically, the only way to legally skirt the fee is to live under a bridge or in a forest without any electronic devices besides a flash lamp.
That was a thing years ago, but nowadays everyone has to pay (except if you have a low income and receive social benefits)
I mean we have free over the air TV here in the states too, just don’t need a loicense for it
Yes, and it's ad-riddled nonsense.
The BBC runs no adverts, save for trailers of its own stuff.
Yeah and even cable/satellite, paid services, are ad-riddled lol. Always kills me how the older generations criticize us for being financially irresponsible when they’re paying to watch a service that’s 20-25% ads
Do people elsewhere in the world pay for “cable” tv? I know we had a version here in Australia but it was so rare, no one really used it.
It was pretty big over here in the US, and still is with Gen X and older. Nowadays, pretty much the only reasons to get it are if you’re a sports fan or enjoy brainrot 24/7 news networks
Brexit really was a mistake
The long knife prohibition is real.
The early idea was to support the state-owned and state-operated channels through taxes. Then the channels got privatized and now the taxes are going straight into the pockets of The Brexit Bunch. I mean why would they voluntarily cut off a money source that people were already paying.
In San Diego they had a toll bridge.. once it was paid for they kept the toll. When asked why they were still charging a toll... They said the toll booths still cost money to run. They had to be sued for the toll to stop
Having to charge toll because they need money to run the toll booths is the most Kafkaesque thing I have heard in a while.
This is/was a thing in many other European countries too.
In Austria it used to be (not long ago, a few years at most) that only people who owned a TV needed to pay it, not anymore, now every household has to pay it, so it is basically a household tax.
It's not a tax tho? At least not in Germany. It's going directly to the state-broadcasting service but unconditionally; the idea being it's harder to influence the content or threaten them with cutting off their funding.
This is also the case in Austria according to https://orf.beitrag.at/faq/allgemein so whether to call that a "tax" or not is purely a terminological question. It used to be that this was only required for owning a TV, but this was hard to enforce because there was no automatic legal requirement to let inspectors into one's home and companies started to produce TVs without a TV tuner (i.e. could only stream from the Internet) to get around this.