The Bettors of the State of New York and the employees of the remaining OTBs, public benefit corporations, have no standing to ask for your Opinion to the following simple questions with seemingly obvious answers::
1. Will the Attorney General defend the constitutionality of NY PML Sec 105?
2. Does NY PML Sec 105 apply to Nassau OTB?
3. Does NY PML Sec 105 violate the rights of New York Bettors secured by NY Const. Art. 1, Sec. 3?
4. Is NY PML Sec 105 vague, indefinite and/or overly broad as the term "Easter Sunday" does not define one and only one Sunday in all years (see eg Gregorian and Julian Calendars)? See article from the Wall Street Journal on Calendars below.
I hope that you will sua sponte issue an Opinion as to the above so that bettors may bet, workers may work or not as they wish, and the State and its subdivisions make money. There are tracks running all across the United States every day of the year that bettors want to bet. Track calendars may be found at eg www.ntra.com. The OTBs also sell New York Lottery tickets which are drawn every day of the year. The OTBs also cash non IRS Lottery tickets in cash for any sum, a convenience for many Lotto Players.
It is critical in these current time that the OTBs are open when customers want to bet. I believe that your Opinion will belatedly validate the actions of New York City OTB taken on the advice of its Counsel in 2003.
Sincerely yours,
Open On 1st Palm Sunday, Otb Rakes In $2m - New York Daily News
articles.nydailynews.com/.../18220335_1_racing-and-wagering-boar...
Open On 1st Palm Sunday, Otb Rakes In $2m. BY JERRY BOSSERT DAILY NEWS SPORTS WRITER. Monday, April 14, 2003. New York City Off-Track Betting ...
§ 105. Supplementary regulatory powers of the board. Notwithstanding
any inconsistent provision of law, the board through its rules and
regulations or in allotting dates for racing or in licensing race
meetings at which pari-mutuel betting is permitted shall be empowered
to: (i) permit racing at which pari-mutuel betting is conducted on any
or all dates from the first day of January through the thirty-first day
of December, inclusive of Sundays but exclusive of December twenty-fifth
and Palm Sunday and Easter Sunday; and (ii) fix minimum and maximum
charges for admission at any race meeting.
* § 109. Filing of pari-mutuel tax returns or reports by electronic
means. Every corporation or association authorized by this chapter to
conduct pari-mutuel betting on horse races shall file in a timely manner
pari-mutuel tax returns or other reports relating to such activity in
such form and by such means, including electronic means, as may be
prescribed by the state racing and wagering board or the commissioner of
taxation and finance, as the case may be in accordance with the
provisions of this chapter.
* NB Effective until October 1, 2012
* § 109. Supplementary regulatory powers of the commission.
Notwithstanding any inconsistent provision of law, the commission
through its rules and regulations or in allotting dates for racing,
simulcasting or in licensing race meetings at which pari-mutuel betting
is permitted shall be authorized to:
1. permit racing at which pari-mutuel betting is conducted on any or
all dates from the first day of January through the thirty-first day of
December, inclusive of Sundays but exclusive of December twenty-fifth,
Palm Sunday and Easter Sunday; and
2. fix minimum and maximum charges for admission at any race meeting.
* NB Effective October 1, 2012The Drama of Measuring the Days of Our Lives · By CARL BIALIK
Humanity's efforts to impose order on time don't always go like clockwork.
There was the Y2K computer-programming fiasco, as the world entered the year 2000. Then there are the seconds that have to be added to the clock occasionally—the next one is in June—to make our definition of a day match the ever-so-slight slowing of the Earth's rotation. And spare a thought for the Swedish couple who married 300 years ago but whose anniversary has never appeared on any calendar.
Sven Hall wed Ellna Jeppsdotter in Ystad, Sweden, on Feb. 30, 1712—a day that existed only because of Protestant Europe's fumbling transition from the Julian calendar system to an approximation of the Gregorian system. Sweden had tried to change gradually before realizing it was out of sync with everyone else, says Bengt Danielson, assistant archival director of the Demographical Database for Southern Sweden. The nation tried to get back in line by adding two leap days to 1712. But it was four decades before Sweden made the wholesale switch from the Julian calendar.
In the centuries since, society has improved its reckoning of time and synchronization of watches across borders. But it continues to use a relatively ancient system for tweaking time by adding leap days—such as next week's Feb. 29—that some astronomers say isn't the ideal mathematical solution to the problem that a year is a bit longer than 365 days. Add in the unpredictable variability in the length of years, and the calendar continues to defy simple computation.
The Numbers Guy blog:
"The calendar isn't a mathematical thing," says Robert Poole, a historian at the University of Cumbria in Lancaster, England, and author of a book on calendar reform in England. "All attempts to systematize calendars are misguided." Yet history is dotted with attempts to systematize calendars. The Julian calendar was named for Julius Caesar, who instituted it in 46 B.C. after recognizing that the time it takes for the Earth to orbit the sun isn't neatly divisible by the time it takes for the Earth to rotate about its axis.
Caesar added a leap year every four years, which was almost right. But the almost added up. Those extra leap days made the average year too long, shifting annual phenomena—such as the spring and autumn equinox—earlier than their normal seasonal dates by 10 days by 1582. Since the date of Easter is tied to the spring equinox, Pope Gregory XIII sought to overhaul the calendar, skipping 10 days and then removing three leap years every 400 years.
In Gregory's time, England had just emerged from a schism with the church and wasn't eager to follow papal authority. Enter John Dee—"variously listed as an astronomer, mathematician, magician and mystic; today one might even call him a crackpot," says Geoff Chester, a spokesman for the U.S. Naval Observatory, which plays a key role in counting world time today.
Associated Press
Petr Skala walking on a ledge Friday during his weekly maintenance of the famous astronomical clock in Prague, Czech Republic. The clock was first installed in 1410, making it the third-oldest astronomical clock in the world and possibly the oldest one still working.
Dee suggested to Queen Elizabeth a cycle of eight leap years every 33 years. The leap years would come every fourth year starting with the fourth of the cycle, putting a five-year gap between the last leap year of the cycle and the first of the next cycle. Dee didn't invent the system, says Duncan Steel, an astronomer at the Australian Centre for Astrobiology and author of a book about calendar history. A variant of the system remains in use in Iran today, a millennium after Persians first used one like it.
The average year in the Gregorian system lasts exactly 365.2425 days, compared with the average year in the Dee system of a touch over 365.2424 days. The latter is closer to the actual time it takes the Earth to rotate around the sun, about 365.242 days, says Dr. Steel.
Still, Dee was ultimately unsuccessful, and most of the world eventually fell into line with a uniform calendar.
But that hasn't run out the clock on calendar problems. Another complication is that years are measured in days, and days are getting longer as tides create friction and slow the Earth's rotation. The length of the second has been fixed to the oscillation frequency of Cesium-133, using a duration that once corresponded to 1/86,400th of a day. But today—and tomorrow—are longer than the 86,400 seconds clocks world-wide include in a day by about one or two milliseconds—the gap changes daily.
To rectify that shift, the world's timekeepers have agreed to add so-called leap seconds whenever the drift nears a second, typically at midnight London time—the minute starting at 11:59 p.m. has 61 seconds.
As the day grows longer, somewhat unpredictably, there are fractionally fewer days in the year, and so eventually, in the very long run, today's calendar may need to be amended once more. But then, that should be expected, says Steve Allen, an astronomer at the University of California who maintains a website with research about the leap second.
"It is extraordinary hubris for any civilization to presume that its calendar will still be in use in 1,000 years," he says.
Learn more about this topic at WSJ.com/NumbersGuy. Email numbersguy@wsj.com.
Big City
A Different Intersection of Church and Politics
Marcus Yam for The New York Times
PROTESTING Loren Hart, a member of the Catholic Worker Movement, on Thursday.
By GINIA BELLAFANTE
Published: April 27, 2012
On Tuesday afternoon, on the steps of Federal Hall, in Lower Manhattan, where Occupy Wall Street protesters have been contained in recent weeks, Loren Hart, a conservatively dressed man of 33, sat reading a newspaper as he held a sign that gave quiet expression to pervasive grievances: “The economy is failing us. Our climate is worsening every day. Perhaps we should make some serious changes.” Mr. Hart arrived in New York from North Carolina in October to join the Occupy movement with the expectation that he would stay a few days, but he has felt unmotivated to leave.
Big City Book Club
In the afterword to his latest novel, “11/22/63,” about John F. Kennedy’s assassination, Stephen King calls Jack Finney “one of America’s great fantasists,” and his book, “Time and Again,” “the great time travel story.” Thus, we would seem to have sufficient reason to make “Time and Again” our next book.
Written in 1970, the novel revolves around the advertising artist Si Morley, who is recruited by the government to join a secretive operation committed to exploring the possibility of time travel. The project lands him in the New York of 1882, where, as a sidebar to his adventures, he has reason to trace the mystery of a half-destroyed letter for a friend. Join us for the live online conversation on May 16 from 7 to 10 p.m.
To join the Book Club and receive updates about chats, send an e-mail with the subject line “Join” to bigcity@nytimes.com.
In the afterword to his latest novel, “11/22/63,” about John F. Kennedy’s assassination, Stephen King calls Jack Finney “one of America’s great fantasists,” and his book, “Time and Again,” “the great time travel story.” Thus, we would seem to have sufficient reason to make “Time and Again” our next book.Written in 1970, the novel revolves around the advertising artist Si Morley, who is recruited by the government to join a secretive operation committed to exploring the possibility of time travel. The project lands him in the New York of 1882, where, as a sidebar to his adventures, he has reason to trace the mystery of a half-destroyed letter for a friend. Join us for the live online conversation on May 16 from 7 to 10 p.m.
To join the Book Club and receive updates about chats, send an e-mail with the subject line “Join” to bigcity@nytimes.com.
Related
Readers’ Comments
Share your thoughts.
Issue-specific protests are now so ubiquitous on the menu of New York experience that Mr. Hart has had plenty to do since the police cleared Zuccotti Park of demonstrators in November. Last week had him rallying in Union Square to denounce the rise of student debt. Several days earlier he was arrested at the Brooklyn Supreme Court for participating in an action organized in part by Karen Gargamelli, a Queens housing lawyer who sought to disrupt foreclosure auctions by gathering demonstrators to sing during them. Two weeks ago, 63 arrests were made in a series of these disturbances around the city (which take place under the banner Organizing for Occupation), and many of those hauled off were, like Mr. Hart and Ms. Gargamelli, members of the Catholic Worker Movement.
May 1 marks the 79th anniversary of Dorothy Day’s great achievement: a movement whose vision of activist faith couldn’t be farther from the moralizing of the religious right that has seemed to define Christianity’s incursion on politics since the 1980s. The Catholic Worker, which Day founded with Peter Maurin, a French immigrant, was — and remains — a philosophy, a social initiative, a way of life. Its understanding of personal responsibility maintains not that we all must rely on ourselves, but rather that we are all beholden to better the lives of the less fortunate. On May 1, 1933, during the height of the Great Depression, Day took to Union Square handing out the first copies of her newspaper, also called The Catholic Worker, which delivered the message of compassion and justice at the cost of one penny; the price has never gone up.
The movement has always sought “a new society in the shell of the old” — peace, less disparity of wealth, an end to economic exploitation, violence, racism and so on. Its goals can seem broad but its methods are intimate and practical. Around the country and in various parts of the world, Catholic Worker communities exist as households where lay members, typically committed to voluntary poverty, often live among the homeless and needy they are aiding. It is a model for Occupy Wall Street — like that more recent movement, it is decentralized and decisions are largely made by consensus — which has said it will hold protests around the country on Tuesday, historically a significant day for the labor movement. There are no headquarters or board of directors and, since Day’s death in 1980, no leader. Things have hardly faded: in the past 17 years, the number of communities has grown from 134 to more than 210.
The oldest of these is in New York —in two buildings in the East Village, one primarily for men, the other for women — and a visit there offers lessons in the kind of radical empathy we rarely get to witness. Mr. Hart lives among 25 or so mostly homeless men at the St. Joseph House on East First Street. Every Friday he cooks for the 80 to 200 nonresidents who show up each weekday for a midmorning meal.
Among the live-in volunteers at St. Joseph is Megan Fincher, who, at 29, having completed college (at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where Day studied) and graduate school, decided to devote herself to the movement. She had long considered becoming a nun, but her own spirit was more anarchical. She cooks, visits residents in the hospital, disperses clothes and laundry, and stocks and handles donations (nearly everything in the house is donated). She has a few clothes of her own, a used laptop with no Internet access, a cellphone given to her by her mother and little else. Her friends — corporate lawyers, editors, agents — experience a more dramatically familiar Manhattan life. When I asked her if she felt she was missing any of that, she said that as someone who loves good food, she occasionally misses going to restaurants.
The men’s residence, where Ms. Fincher lives, harbors a number of unmedicated schizophrenics, but she doesn’t keep a lock on the door to her room. She has never felt unsafe, she told me. “Being a Catholic means following the example of Jesus,” she said. “And I don’t know how to do those things in this society. Jesus says, ‘Come follow me.’ How do you do that with a job and an apartment?”
It is this vision of Catholicism that has come so maddeningly under review by the church establishment. Two weeks ago the Vatican reprimanded American nuns, dozens of whom had broken with bishops in support of health care reform two years ago, for focusing too heavily on poverty and social inequality at the expense of decrying abortion and same-sex marriage. Miraculously, Rome’s ingratitude hasn’t caused those ministering at St. Joseph’s to pack it up and head to Babbo.
 |  | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| | 
|
| |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
 
| | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
No comments:
Post a Comment