• markovs_gun@lemmy.world
    451·
    7 days ago

    I’m really glad I didn’t have to see the word cunt here that would have really ruined my day

  • maxwells_daemon@lemmy.worldEnglish
    21·
    6 days ago

    Oi, you got yer internet licence, mate? Can’t be crackin’ these jokes if you ain’t a proper grown-up, innit?

  • Aeao@lemmy.world
    6·
    5 days ago

    My morning as a Texan

    Knock on the door… I open the door with my 1911 cocked locked and ready to rock.

    It’s a sheriff with his own drawn. He goes to shoot my dog but the dog pulls a beretta. We laugh at the dog for his immigrant gun.

    Sheriff tells me there’s trouble at the watering hole so I ride out to grab bubba.

    I shoot my horse because I was pretty sure it hurt its leg later and grab one of the many spares roaming around…

    Head to the watering hole to see an Italian man in a native headdress…

    Shoot him because it was my right as an American

    It was my Pa.

  • gmtom@lemmy.world
    16·
    6 days ago

    One of 3 jokes.

    Its either either :

    “loicence”

    Haha no spices

    Or “bad teeth”

    • Zron@lemmy.world
      122·
      6 days ago

      My favorite to poke at is treating anything with a blade on it like it’s a deadly weapon with no other purpose.

      Can’t have a locking pocket knife.

      There was a group that wanted to ban pointed kitchen knives.

      Had a dude tell me he doesn’t carry an axe or saw when camping because it “might scare passersby”

      Photos of police “hauls” that show screw drivers and hammers as “deadly weapons that don’t belong on the streets”

      So it’s at least 4 jokes.

    • HugeNerd@lemmy.ca
      42·
      6 days ago

      Don’t forget the bizarre “r” into everything like drawring, the lawr, etc.

      • LotrOrc@lemmy.world
        62·
        6 days ago

        Thats more American in my experience That and completely dropping entire parts of words for absolutely no reason I can understand

        Ex. Comfortable somehow becomes comftable. Drawer becomes drawr. Wednesday becomes wensday

        • ObjectivityIncarnate@lemmy.world
          2·
          6 days ago

          People (I’m in the US) are pretty much always astonished to realize, when I ask them to say the word “important”, that they more often than not will pronounce zero of the T’s in the word, when I point out that they didn’t.

          It always really stuck out to me as a kid when Shawnee Smith (probably most famous for the Saw movies now), on the old sitcom Becker, would always enunciate the T’s in that word—that’s what made me realize how weird it was that everyone wasn’t saying it that way, lol.

        • HugeNerd@lemmy.ca
          1·
          6 days ago

          I’ve only ever heard that “added r” thing when watching BBC stuff. Can you link me to some Americans saying drawring instead of drawing, for example?

          • LotrOrc@lemmy.world
            4·
            6 days ago

            Huh thats really interesting ive never heard that on BBC

            Its all over the place in New England especially in MA

            • Alaik@lemmy.zip
              2·
              6 days ago

              I didnt know people from Boston could pronounce Rs at any point, let alone add more. “Pahk the cah.”

            • HugeNerd@lemmy.ca
              1·
              6 days ago

              Hm, I’ll try and find some examples. It just fascinates me how things like language evolve chaotically, like tiny changes that somehow then become the new equilibrium point.

      • ObjectivityIncarnate@lemmy.world
        1·
        6 days ago

        Apparently, there’s some sort of linguistic exchange program within British English where T’s are traded out for R’s, and then a persistent logistics issue causes the R’s to be distributed incorrectly.

        • HugeNerd@lemmy.ca
          2·
          6 days ago

          I’m glad I’m not the only one thinking about this important issue… I wonder what Susie Dent thinks of it.

    • GeneralEmergency@lemmy.world
      22·
      5 days ago

      Haha no spices

      That joke comes from yanks who are used to drowning their food in sugar syrup to mask the taste of underage mexican day labourer blood.

    • squaresinger@lemmy.world
      12·
      6 days ago

      Or “bad teeth”

      I lived in the UK for a while and what shocked me most was the ads for tooth care products.

      Where I’m from they are like “Fresh breath all day long” or “Keeps your teeth white”. In the UK they were like “Mouth wash can prevent tooth loss”.

    • Avicenna@lemmy.world
      1·
      5 days ago

      “Wait wait wait, I am not dead!”

      “Do you have a bleeding licence then?”

      “Fuck me…”

  • thearch@sh.itjust.works
    4·
    5 days ago

    honestly, the sleeping licence and tv licence are one thing, but an unregistered butterknife? that’s just asking for trouble. where’s the respect for law and order?

  • daggermoon@lemmy.world
    4·
    6 days ago

    Do y’all brits actually pay for the license? Can you be arrested for not paying it? How does it work exactly?

    • Flax@feddit.ukEnglish
      10·
      6 days ago

      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.

      • Aeao@lemmy.world
        2·
        5 days ago

        That sounds like the American IRS.you got to TRY to get arrested… they just want their money and since it’s a government they think long term “you only got 20 every other Friday? Well take that”

        I imagine it’s like that with tv licenses “well you have to backpay and theirs a fine… but we’ll wave the fine if you set up a payment schedule “

      • uid0gid0@lemmy.world
        2·
        5 days ago

        This greentext put me in mind of Monty Python’s Cat Fish License skit and you just come in here and casually drop the fact that there actually were detector vans (real or fake doesn’t matter). You learn something every day.

        • Flax@feddit.ukEnglish
          2·
          5 days ago

          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

      • ulterno@programming.devEnglish
        1·
        5 days ago

        You get a free streaming service along with it (bbc iplayer) which is far better than the likes of Netflix.

        Nice. Hope that stays for long

    • Log in | Sign up@lemmy.worldEnglish
      4·
      6 days ago

      Do y’all brits actually pay for the license?

      Licence. (Lisense is a verb in British English.)

      Yes. It funds the BBC which is public service broadcasting, usually very high quality and has no advertisements. You aren’t allowed to watch BBC or any live television whatsoever in the UK without a TV licence.

      Can you be arrested for not paying it?

      Not any more. It’s now a civil rather than criminal offence. The conservatives didn’t like that they even today tend to report facts alongside opinions, so they threatened to remove the licence fee. Instead they made of civil rather than criminal, so non payment is only punishable by a fine, which of course means it’s only illegal for poor people who can’t gamble the fine.

      They used to send detector vans round to addresses that don’t have a licence for enforcement. The ads said they could tell if you were watching telly. I suspect they detected aerials, but that was in the days of Cathode Ray Tubes, and maybe you can detect them being on, I don’t know.

      How does it work exactly?

      They just send a bill to everyone in the post, warning of the consequences of non payment. You can pay by direct debit for less paperwork. Compliance is pretty high. It used to be higher before the conservatives started meddling.

      The conservatives would love to get rid of the BBC and the NHS but they know it would be an absolute disaster for them politically because the people love them, flawed as they are, so they just underfund them badly and then complain about how bad they are.

      +++

      That strategy initially worked with the trains, which the conservatives privatised in the 1980s on the grounds that the reliability was poor and the rolling stock was badly out of date, but after a few decades of privatised rail, the promise of competition driving up quality and driving down prices has proven very hollow indeed, and now nationalisation is popular in every demographic group including conservative voters.

      The East Coast Main Line went bust so many times that no commercial operators would touch it and the government was forced to step in. The civil servants were told to look for efficiency savings and make it more commercially viable, but when they did that it became the most reliable and punctual line in the UK with the best customer satisfaction, and cost far less in subsidies than the privatised lines. Who knew that extracting the most money possible for shareholders would drive down quality whilst driving up prices and government costs?

      The current labour government is nationalising rail on the cheap by simply not renewing the franchises when they expire. Manchester’s buses have come back under local authority regulatory control. Some things are getting better under labour, but some things are not and the prime minister seems to think that Biden is the best example to follow in many ways.

      • Tar_Alcaran@sh.itjust.works
        5·
        6 days ago

        The ads said they could tell if you were watching telly. I suspect they detected aerials, but that was in the days of Cathode Ray Tubes, and maybe you can detect them being on, I don’t know.

        You can absolutely detect a CRT from outside. A CRT is basically a small particle accelerator with a magnetic deflection system, inside an unshielded plastic (or wooden, if you go back far enough) box. Of course, it will need to be turned on, just the presence of a TV doesn’t show up. It’s probably a fair bit harder to actually detect which house the signal comes from, but you can solve that with a big enough directional antenna. With analog TV, you might even be able to detect which channel they’re watching, based on the exact frequency, which makes it easy to tell a TV from a computer monitor too.

        Basically, if you’re converting an analogue radio signal into a picture, you’re using that frequency. And any leaks would be detectable by another antenna. From that point, it’s “only” a matter a building the right antenna, aiming it correctly and filtering out the stuff that comes from other directions.

        Spotting a flatscreen/LCD/TFT or really, any non-analog TV is probably a LOT harder, and distinguishing between a TV recieving a signal and computer monitor seems (to my lay skills) pretty much impossible.

        • ulterno@programming.devEnglish
          3·
          5 days ago

          Yeah, considering that the TV has enough noise to be heard by the human ear, it doesn’t seem far fetched that specialised equipment can tell much more about it.

          heard by the human ear

          I mean the screen, not the audio output from the speakers

      • Ricaz@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
        3·
        5 days ago

        It works more or less the same in Denmark, except we now switched to paying it over our taxes automatically

      • QueenHawlSera@sh.itjust.works
        5·
        7 days ago

        In my state they tried that but everyone ignored the law because they didn’t include a way to enforce it.

        Pornhub and only pornhub is blocked but if I gave a shit I’d use a VPN

        • Echo Dot@feddit.uk
          6·
          7 days ago

          It’s the same in the UK. The politicians bitch and moan about it but they’re not actually going to do anything about VPN because that would be far too complicated to work out and enforce, and it would force them to admit that the law doesn’t work, and they don’t want to draw attention to that.

    • Avicenna@lemmy.world
      11·
      7 days ago

      that is coming to the UK and the EU soon. It is almost like these people are saying “while Trump is doing some outrageous shit, lets slip in a couple quickies ourselves shall we?”

      • Regrettable_incident@lemmy.world
        2·
        7 days ago

        Yeah I think a lot of people don’t realise how significant these changes are going to be. It’s a big increment of the surveillance state. The fuckin Labour party are making a big lurch to the right, the Palestine Action thing is another sign of the times.

        • Avicenna@lemmy.world
          1·
          6 days ago

          The labour party turned out to be a great stepping ladder for shitface Nigel. What an absolute joke and a shame on its name.