The licence fee is currently only due if you watch live content. Owning a TV is not sufficient as there are now many people who own a TV set but don't actually use it to watch TV broadcasts, and there's not really much distinction between a TV and a computer screen other than size (kudos if anyone reading has a 70" computer screen though) and having a TV tuner built in these days.
That's the root issue really. The BBC is a provider of media that's increasingly irrelevant, and even if approval of it hadn't declined precipitously over the last decade or so it'd still have a big issue with the youth mostly not being interested in that format at all. It's not the only reason for declining ratings (declining quality is a big one) but it's a bad sign for the future.
> The licence fee is currently only due if you watch live content
That is what I thought, but the article characterizes it more broadly: "Currently, anyone who uses a television to watch content must pay the licence fee even if they do not watch the BBC"
I think they must have meant to say live television content, otherwise the fee would already apply to streaming services or anything you can watch through the tv.
It does but only to live content not catch-up/on-demand. Technically if you watch, for example, a live football match on Amazon Prime you are due to pay the licence fee. This is of course completely unenforceable even by the already low standards of the licence fee and as live content is a very small % of what the streaming services offer they can't blanket charge it.
Twitch streams don't count afaik as they aren't TV-like content.
To be fair, they dug their own grave. Schmoozing to the party in power for the last decade practically destroyed all of their credibility in the eyes of the youth. Not to mention, the BBC was the champion of empty virtue signalling in its programming, which gave enough fodder to neo-right online media outlets to render it irrelevant in the eyes of the right-wing population. Perhaps the only ones who'll clutch their BBC pearls are the Telegraph readers still dreaming of the good old days of yore.
Yeah, I don't honestly know anyone who's even remotely happy with the BBC these days. There are different hopping off points, but no-one really respects them all that much any more and they don't exactly do a lot to keep people tuning in with the absolute rubbish they fill their schedule with.
That quote is incredible really. The current fee and its terms are just about justified because the BBC plays a big role in maintaining the transmission infrastructure and the relevant standards for the formats. What does it have to do with YouTube or any streaming service's material getting from A to B? Bugger all as far as I know. It has no role in the UK's Internet infrastructure. And if it's part of any of the consortiums that are responsible for the standards it's getting a cut of the patent fees already for that.
Might as well ask me to pay an OpenReach licence fee to support the national standard even though I'm using Virgin Media.
I don't really understand this either. Mixer taps are just better, but I have separate taps in my bath tub despite the block of houses being built in the 2010s. Guess some people like the aesthetic.
Probably not in your bath, but in houses with water tanks at least one of the cold taps will be fed directly from the mains supply. If you are drinking it then you want it straight from the mains rather than from the tank in your loft that’s been sat there for a while and had all sorts of things falling into it
... Huh. So, these seem to have totally died out in Ireland, despite us changing the rules on mixers at about the same time as the UK did (Irish plumbing and electrical rules tend to follow UK ones). You'll see them in old installations, but more or less never in modern ones (even modern antique-stylised plumbing has anachronistic mixer taps). Hadn't realised that they were still a thing in the UK.
It's one thing when you're a fit adult male and get hit by an idiot cycling recklessly on the pavement, it's another if you're a small child or frail through sickness or old age. I've seen a couple of very near misses that would have ended very badly for the pedestrian through no fault of their own.
Saying this it's mostly teenagers in the idiot role from what I've seen and they are reckless by default.
I've been nearly hit by a bicycle-messenger looking dude in San Francisco when I was crossing the street with a "walk" sign at a crosswalk and he blew through the red light at probably about 15mph, and I have plenty of other experiences like that.
If you are running a red light at 15mph on a bicycle, dodging pedestrians, you are just an asshole - maybe you're slightly less dangerous than an SUV running a red light, but it is still completely not okay.
There are dumb teenagers, which is one thing, but the aggressive "well, we're not emitting carbon, so we can do whatever we want crowd" is probably even more crappy and dangerous, since they're deliberate about it, and more present in areas with lots of pedestrians.
Getting my first SSD was absolutely the best computer upgrade I've ever bought. I didn't even realise how annoying load times were because I was so used to them and coming from C64s and Amigas even spinning rust seemed fairly quick.
It took a long time before I felt a need to improve my PC's performance again after that.
There were quite a few mind blowing upgrades back in the day. The first sound card instead of PC beeper was one of my most memorable moments.
I remember loading up Doom, plugging my shitty earplugs that had a barely long enough cable and hearing the “real” shotgun sound for the first time. Oo-wee
> Actually it was the Ati Radeon 9500 non pro that could be modded into a Radeon 9700.
Sometimes. At least some of those 9500s were binned parts that showed their broken bits when you modded them. I had one. The screen turned into a kaleidoscope when I tried to play a game.
The post office was acting as victim, investigator, and prosecutor and simply lied or withheld evidence to ensure that the defence had nothing to work with and the jury had nothing to contradict that view. It's absolutely batshit levels of corruption and there must be severe consequences.
The replies from blue ticks that get pushed up mostly seem to be braindead trolling and camgirl spam too. Twitter was always a bit of a cesspit but you could curate your way to a useful feed. Now it's just awful.
There's been talk of replacing the natural gas used directly for heating in the UK with hydrogen. I have absolutely no idea how viable that will actually prove to be but it seems difficult.
So technically it might be possible to do that. But I don't think the economics would work out for that. Mostly because your cost of hydrogen will then be linked to the cost of electricity coming in. Given the choice between hydrogen which will cost the base electricity prices + overhead of electrolysis plants and transportation or to just use a resistive heater, you would most likely pick the resistive heater since it would be cheaper.
Not saying people should switch to resistive heaters since they significantly less efficient than heat pumps but simply that resistive electric heating would be cheaper than hydrogen (If that hydrogen is produced using electrolysis).
> base electricity prices + overhead of electrolysis plants and transportation
IF the capital cost of electrolysis isn't too bad - and this paper suggests that it can be done more cheaply than the current use of platinum - then it's economical to run them with zero or negative cost electricity produced by renewables overbuild, then keep the hydrogen in tanks (another if) or convert it to actual natural gas via the sabatier reaction and keep that. That may be cheaper than building really huge battery farms for long-duration electric storage.
So negative cost electricity tends to be a side effect of large thermal power plants that can't ramp down quickly due to a drop in demand. Renewables can typically be turned off relatively easily. Maybe there will be situations that might still happen with an over build of renewables but I haven't heard of any. But either way if prices of electricity become very cheap then using that electricity directly with a heat pump or resistive heater also becomes cheaper.
I am not saying making hydrogen can't be economical utilizing cheap off peak rates. I just don't see it as economical for home heating or typical consumer transportation since there are alternatives that utilize electricity directly.
That's the root issue really. The BBC is a provider of media that's increasingly irrelevant, and even if approval of it hadn't declined precipitously over the last decade or so it'd still have a big issue with the youth mostly not being interested in that format at all. It's not the only reason for declining ratings (declining quality is a big one) but it's a bad sign for the future.