I think that once people know the tone of the show, and they're in the right audience for it, moments like that aren't in danger of failing.
If they're good at satire and ranting, not every line really has to be a joke.

12:24-13:07

Stars are for JHM

My mother is addicted to the video machines. My dad has dementia. She leaves him alone every day and usually doesn't come home until around 6:30 pm and maybe she'll make him a sandwich or bring him McDonald's or something.

We've tried talking to her about it but she gets defensive and indignant and entitled and won't discuss it.

I have lost all respect for her.

When I was in college, I worked at a 7-11. There was a lady who used to come in every night and buy Keno Scratch off tickets. 20, 40, 50 dollars a night. If she won any money, she just used it to buy more tickets until it was all gone. sometimes she went like this for hours. Toward the end of my time there, she started saying things like "I really need to stop this" while handing me her money and taking her tickets. There was desperation in her voice. There was nothing I could do. The lottery is a tax on those who can least afford to pay it. It brings out the worst in us.

I've won 0 on scratchoffs twice. 0 twice and 0 more than I can remember.

I'm probably behind, but I don't play the lottery to win, and I don't play it to help schools. I play it because I enjoy it.
My "habit" is pretty small. I remember seeing in Brooklyn mothers dropping 0 on scratchoffs right at the counter. That shit is depressing, but they'll find another way to gamble. They'll go to OTB. They'll buy what we called "dummy tickets," those slips of paper that Fast Eddy sells you at a bar when its football season the list the spreads and returns on betting on a trifecta of bookie cooked passes. There really is no way to stop "the desperate" from burning their money, because that's what it means to be desperate.

Their neighbor wins 150,000 on the pick 5 and there goes the neighborhood. At the bodega one block from where I bought my scratch-offs, back when I played them a lot, a guy won ,000,000 on a scratch-off. That's a 150 foot sprint of hope for somebody that just doesn't give a shit anymore.

If a brightly colored, state-sanctified, wholly legal lottery machine is sitting in the same room where we go to buy our food -- where we go to pick up our baby supplies -- where we go to *drown* our *financial sorrows* -- then we are being encouraged by the state to burn our money.

Yes, people will always find ways to burn their money -- but that's not the issue. The issue is the state is *encouraging* us to burn our money -- and getting a big, fat cut of the proceeds. This is an insane conflict of interest, and needs to stop.

The state's job is to protect us when we are vulnerable. They should not be colluding with lotteries to find better ways to exploit our vulnerability; they should be fighting *against* lotteries to regulate under what conditions (if any) they can sell us their completely worthless pieces of paper.

Banning lotteries probably wouldn't help -- but states shouldn't be encouraging them, and they *sure* as hell shouldn't be taking a cut.

Also, when I worked at 7-11 in Canada, welfare checks would clear after midnight on a certain day of the month. I know this, because on that night (and at that time), three or four people came in -- went straight to the ATM -- took out anything between a hundred and two hundred dollars -- and proceeded to burn it all on scratch tickets.

I was familiar enough with some of these people to know that was money they desperately needed for food and shelter. And while I'm not okay with regulating how people spend their money, there's part of me that really wishes I had refused to sell them those tickets.

The lottery industry -- the gambling industry -- really is despicable. I don't know how you could work in it and feel good about what you do. I felt dirty just from participating in the retail end of it.

The gambling industry produces nothing of worth beyond a feeble amount of entertainment; the cost is the financial welfare of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of families. It's designed from the top-down to predate upon the vulnerable and desperate -- and the people running it *know* this. I rate 'gambling rep' as just below 'speculative investor' on my top-ten list of jobs that, in a just and reasonable world, would cease to exist.

Do they still put scratch ticket style games on kids' trading cards (and are trading cards even marketed towards kids anymore, or are they more aimed at manchildren now)? I remember a lot of the Legend of Zelda trading cards in the late 80s were, in retrospect, pretty much trainer scratch tickets.

In Georgia we have a Walking Dead themed scratch off that people buy without seeing any irony.

I did too. This was worse.

I have friends who use that excuse that they like to daydream about winning. I've convinced a few that the odds are so low of winning, that you can daydream about winning while not playing, and have just about the same odds of winning as if they were playing.

The problem is the money isn't going where they say it is. For more information, watch the damn video.