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Comment by PaulHoule | Hacker News Reader

It is not a popular opinion but I always thought the tv ads that spam the airwaves in the last few months of the year were harmful to the legitimacy of institutions. In this day and age most of us are so assaulted by spammed scams that we develop a sensitive sense of scamminess and like many of the ads aimed at seniors these ones scream “get grandma away from the tv!”

Certain day parts on tv are dominated by ads for personal injury lawyers and things you can spend government benefits on and are a desert for ads for things you might spend your own money on.

One series of ads that promoted getting some free medical equipment that ran for years and I thought looked scammy turned out to really be a scam.

I’ve always thought these ads promote the idea that some chiselers somewhere are trying to rip off government benefits and they drive people, even the pensioners that these are aimed at, to vote Republican.

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I've said this before but it was such a perfect moment that I share it whenever possible, my mother in law is one of these folks and once she said that she'd never support universal health care because there was a chance some immigrant might get free health care on her dime. She followed that statement up by mentioning she was going to Mexico for some dental work she couldn't afford.

Seems like perfectly congruous statements from what I can tell.

My wife’s uncle brought much of his family from Italy over to the US but I sometimes see him watching Fox News on the horror of ‘chain migration’.

In high school, my girlfriend's dad was Mexican born to illegals in the US, and we found it bizarre that he was a huge Rush Limbaugh fan and Fox News fan and regularly ranted about the border. His parents were different than the drug dealers and criminals coming over "now" and they eventually did become citizens was the logic if you asked about his origins.

This is much less bizarre when you realize that Mexicans are, you know, not a homogeneous bloc and have their own divisions that might simply not be visible to you.

Imagine creating a single stereotype for everybody in the US, calling us "Americans" and assuming we have a single set of values and opinions - now contrast it with the reality of our polarizing politics where people have wildly different points of view.

I remember Big Orange railing against it. To change the subject, I wonder how Melanie's parents are getting on these days.

"We let some in so we should let all in."

Are you implying that we reached our European immigrant quota or just the Italian quota?

There's no contradiction. Lots of insurance plans and systems, whether in the US or not, don't cover dental or don't make it "free". Let me introduce you to Mosonmagyaróvár <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mosonmagyar%C3%B3v%C3%A1r#Dent...>, a small town with no fewer than 350 dentists, because so many Austrians and other western Europeans cross the Hungarian border to visit. Dental care is so cheap that an Austrian can get work done on his teeth and take a local vacation for less than what he would pay in Vienna. Dentists even have their own small hotels <https://diamantdent.hu/en/Hotel/> to serve such patients!

If you think those are bad, try looking at the junk mail retirement-aged people get. My parents get "official" looking notices about owing money or being owed a lot of money, offers to reverse mortgage their house for a "retirement nest egg" without using the term reverse mortgage, and for different scam insurance plans that don't cover anything worth covering.

If they ever went through with the offers they get in the mail, they'd be homeless, without insurance, cashless and asset-less within a year.

They get that kind of junk mail literally everyday.

My in-laws fell victim to this. When they moved they sat us down and started to talk about this "407-B" (not the real name, but I don't remember what it was) and how it's not a reverse mortgage. Then they proceeded to describe it as exactly a reverse mortgage.

Meanwhile I was tap-tap-tapping on my phone. I called them out and said it was a reverse mortgage according this page titled "Everything you need to know about 407-B reverse mortgages". They asked what fly-by-night website it was and when I said "irs.gov" they grumbled and moved on. To this day they refuse to admit that it's a reverse mortgage.

> If they ever went through with the offers they get in the mail, they'd be homeless, without insurance, cashless and asset-less within a year.

Not that quickly, but yeah, they're on that road. They're trapped in that home until they die. They'll be needing hospice care soon, and they won't be able to get it. Nothing we can do to move them off of it now because it's basically irreversible.

Everyone needs to have that awkward "don't trust any unsolicited offers" conversation with their aging parents. They may seem sharp today, but people's mental faculties decline. My folks fell for one or two, and they're a lot more on the alert now. I'm glad they listened and understand not to trust any unknown callers or mail. Feel terrible for some other people I know who can't get through to their parents, who are convinced that "Rajesh" from the IRS needs to be paid $20K through Amazon gift cards.

This generation who told us all to not believe what you read online... now trusts everything they see on Facebook, everything they get in the mail, and every phone call they get.

Too true. We had to have the talk with them after they almost fell for the IRS gift card scam, basically verbatim

Hope it works out for them. Not sure though why you're so against reverse mortgages? It seems like it's just one of several options for folks to pull equity out of their home. Especially if a high priority is to stay in their home. I'm sure there are scams, but, for example, in NJ, before signing up, you meet with a government specialist who reviews the terms and the company to confirm that it's legit.

I'm not fundamentally against them, and I don't think they're scams, but it was a poor choice in their case. I also don't think this one wasn't legit, but I think that an objective bystander would not have been able to say it was a good decision.

- They had a $250,000 house that was completely paid off.

- They used the sale of that house as their down payment with a reverse mortgage to buy a $400,000 house, so they effectively didn't pull any equity out.

- It was very clear that they would need nursing home care in 10-15 years due to several health issues in both their backgrounds.

- They had no investments, no savings, no assets, and they were planning on living almost completely off of social security.

- It was clear that they had no basic understanding of what a reverse mortgage even was.

At the time I predicted that they'd need to move to a nursing home or an assisted living facility in ~15 years. They wouldn't have any way to pay for that, and selling the house wouldn't be an option because they'd be completely underwater on it. They'd eventually try to get a nurse to stop by regularly, but when they get to that point it'll be paid by us because they won't be able to afford that and food.

My predictions were off slightly, but not for the better. The house is already underwater due to a variety of factors. Mother in law's cancer is aggressive enough that she won't live long enough to need nursing care. Father in law is right on schedule. We're already paying for food occasionally because we found out that when faced with not being able to afford both food and medicine they were sending cash to one of their kids.

I think the ideal case for a reverse mortgage is a healthy elderly couple that either has no children to leave things to, children who are self-sufficient, or who have sufficient retirement income but they want a bit of splurge.

> My in-laws fell victim to this

The "this" was a reverse mortgage that they had been coached to call "not a reverse mortgage"

It's because they're purposely obfuscating what the mortgages are in order to deceive. There's nothing wrong with them per se, what's wrong is taking advantage of people and deceiving them into making poor choices that can have significant consequences.

In Canada we basically get no medical ads, and it’s great. We find US acceptance of direct-to-patient advertising… ethically problematic. Most developed countries are more like Canada than the US on this.

No Freemium Speeches™!? Sounds like a dystopian hellscape. Just as William Gibson describes.

I couldn't imagine living there, deprived of carnival barkers yelling at me about erectile dysfunction, cybercriminals, and investing in gold.

“get grandma away from the tv!”

That’s always a good idea, not only because of the ads, and not only grandma.

As someone living outside the US, I've rarely, if ever, seen any ads like the ones you're describing

US ads is such a cultural shock when you visit USA. The biggest surprise was all the lawyer ads, "Did something happen to you? You could get rich by suing them with our help!". So ads like this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q3wX5pOUIMw

I think the bigger shock is how frequent the ad breaks are. In Ireland, an ad-break 4 times an hour is typical, and often if a movie is showing, it'd be every half-hour or on the hour instead.

In the US it feels like it's every 5 minutes. It's especially jarring watching a show that originally aired on network television in the US, seeing it cut to black or a title card every few minutes where an ad-break would've been.

Wildest of all to me is that some networks add even more ads above and beyond what an older show was produced for, leading to running episodes at slightly faster speeds to fit in that extra ad break.

TBS was infamous for doing this with episodes of Seinfeld, you can find them side-by-side with the original speed airings on youtube.

TNT sped up the Law&Order theme & chopped parts out to fit more ads.

This is anecdotal, but it feels like there are more ad breaks than there used to be. TV is unwatchable in the USA as a result, and I have little doubt that this was a big factor in the rise of streaming.

Streaming with ads is worse; invariably they cut to the ad 2-3 seconds early, then when you get back it's the last two seconds and then the next segment.

I know ad minutes per hour have increased, because older shows have to be slimmed to air. Sometimes that's fiddling with the credits, sometimes on stations that care less, it's dropping minutes of content; I tried to watch an episode of The Munsters on some sub-channel, and they cut to commercial over the punchline of a joke... which ended up just being omited. Thanks a lot.

As a child, I remember a "~30m" cartoon might run until :27 or :56 until credits, etc.

As a teen, I remember the shows would end around :23 or :24.

When it came out I enjoyed twitch, but now it feels worse than TV.

Now I don't watch TV or much streaming content. I tried to find some record or source on length over time, but wasn't able to.

We also have ads in the US where aging actors sell questionable reverse mortgages to senors to help them pay for their expenses.

I recently saw Tom Selleck as a spokesman for reverse mortgages and googled his net worth which came back as $45M. Pretty slimy if you ask me.

A reverse mortgage can be very helpful. Why the hate?

There are all kinds of useful financial instruments: that's part of capitalism.

Another example: J. G. Wentworth, who provide no only your favorite ads https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pdPM6j1Q4sg

but also "structured settlements, annuities, and lottery payments in exchange for a lump-sum cash settlement." After all, it's your money, use it when you need it!

Hollywood celebs peddle public policy they are too rich be affected by during their working years. Selling reverse mortgages and other garbage they're too rich to need targeted at seniors is a perfectly sensible continuation of that income stream.

Advertising is the business of converting good will and trust into cash.

>One series of ads that promoted getting some free medical equipment that ran for years and I thought looked scammy turned out to really be a scam.

Do you mean Hoveround¹, or was it something else?

¹https://oig.hhs.gov/oas/reports/region5/51200057.asp

No, this place would set you up with a knee brace or similar thing out of a catalog, the thing is they did not care if you really needed it. If it did turn out you needed something like that later you’d find that you already wasted your benefit on something you didn’t need.

I don't watch TV anymore. I mainly watch YouTube with uBlock Origin. It is jarring whenever I watch TV or browse the web without adblock.

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