Flax

Was her name sappho? So sapphic… Crazy

Read the letters they sent in the link. They actually are threatening.

My favourite line they often use is to the tune of “We have scheduled a visit to inspect this address. It could be the 7th of July. It could be next week. Or it even could be tomorrow!”

Which is literally a contradiction

This is the case in the UK

His suicide is actually kind of disputed. (I’m being pedantic, not ruling it out entirely)

Either way, the way he was treated by the government was completely unacceptable and immoral

If you don’t pay for it, you get a harassing letter every month. You can find them documented here.. Occasionally, someone from TV licencing may visit. You have no obligation to let them in.

Most people who do get convicted are the ones who engage with TV licensing. For example, they admit to using the iPlayer. They miss a payment on a weekly payment plan for it and then say something like “My mum was in hospital and I wanted to keep the kids entertained”. Someone I know almost got caught out because they tried to do the “right thing” and sent them an email saying they didn’t need a tv licence (they were doing it on behalf of their elderly father. They personally owned a licence) and TV Licensing detected their email was attached to the BBC iPlayer. Or they were let into the house and set up the TV for them.

If you just ignore the letters, and shut the door as soon as they show up, basically nothing can happen. There is very little way they can prove you were watching TV. Someone else mentioned “detector vans” but these were most likely fake (The BBC claimed they did that but didn’t let anyone see how they work, even the Ministry of Defence who was very interested in such a technology), and definitely wasn’t admissible in court.

Personally I pay for the licence. I like the BBC. It’s high quality. I think it’s the right thing to do. You get a free streaming service along with it (bbc iplayer) which is far better than the likes of Netflix.

It was someone in China working for a game company trying to flirt with you to get you to sign up and play their game with them

In November 1996, amateur astronomer Chuck Shramek of Houston, Texas, took a CCD image of the comet which showed a fuzzy, slightly elongated object nearby. His computer sky-viewing program did not identify the star, so Shramek called the Art Bell radio program Coast to Coast AM to announce that he had discovered a “Saturn-like object” following Hale–Bopp. UFO enthusiasts, such as remote viewing proponent and Emory University political science professor Courtney Brown, soon concluded that there was an alien spacecraft following the comet. Several astronomers, including Alan Hale, stated that the object was simply the 8.5-magnitude star SAO141894. They noted that the star did not appear on Shramek’s computer program because the user preferences were set incorrectly. Art Bell claimed to have obtained an image of the object from an anonymous astrophysicist who was about to confirm its discovery. However, astronomers Olivier Hainaut and David Tholen of the University of Hawaii stated that the alleged photo was an altered copy of one of their own comet images.

They died over someone’s computer settings being misconfigured 💀