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Comment by coffeevradar | Hacker News Reader

I have less faith in public radio because my local station is always playing Lumosity adverts. I'm old enough to remember when the whole "sponsored by" thing being extended to full ads was a controversial development on US public radio. Now they're shilling outright scams and doing so with specific promises that are completely specious.

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When I was a kid, I remember a talk radio show my family listened to that was one of those consumer watchdog / product review shows. One of the advertisements that you head a lot back then was for purchasing a star (like, getting your name registered somewhere and when a new star was discovered by astronomers it would be named after you?)... It was obviously a scam and all you'd get is a bogus certificate in the mail.

Anyway, one day someone called into the show and asked about this product that they advertised, and the host stammered a bit and basically said "well, yeah that's not true but it's all just for fun, a fun gift for people maybe". Was funny to hear him trying to justify this obvious scam because they happened to advertise with the station, even though the entire premise of the show was calling bullshit on other phony product claims.

My grandmother has a "star named after her". She knows it's fake but she says she appreciates the thought behind it. Like wearing costume jewelry, you know that green hunk of plastic the size of a walnut isn't a real emerald but that doesn't stop people from wearing them.

I'll name a grain of sand after her too if you ping me a $100... :-D

See, you gotta do it right. Make it romantic. Stars are romantic. It has to be on a huge scale, too, so it sounds impressive. And then you need something tangible, so there has to be a piece of paper, preferably showing how they could see the thing named after them. Stars are easiest, but you could do custom constellations named after them. Shouldn't be too hard to hack up a python script that draws pictures over a star map and prints out certificates of the brand new constellation.

I'd buy that for my grandma. She'd like that.

Did the host get in trouble for this?

I think if you should have less faith in anything it's the increasing attitude (at least from what I see) that public media is not worth funding with tax dollars or personal donations because it becomes a mouthpiece for a political agenda you may not agree with, so they have to rely on advertising stay on the air.

That said, there does appear to be some political leaning to NPR, but it's not nearly as bad as the cable news outlets.

One thing about NPR: they definitely know their market.

The ads are always quite careful to avoid promising anything outright. "brain training," "testing," "compare your score with global averages." Technically, Lumosity IS training your brain... to do better at Lumosity games.

It's obviously vaguely promising cognitive gains, but it manages to talk around it extremely well.

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