Friday, October 31, 2014

If it is not all about the money

It must be all about religion? Open Nassau OTB, 365 days of the year, because Nassau County needs the money because some politicians don't work for you?








Angry Nassau residents pack Jericho meeting to air grievances over speed camera program

Sharon Klein of Jericho speaks out at an Sharon Klein of Jericho speaks out at an open forum at Cantiague Elementary School where residents complained about a school speed zone they believe is unfair, Tuesday, Oct. 30, 2014. Photo Credit: Danielle Finkelstein
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More than 400 furious Nassau residents packed Cantiague Elementary School in Jericho Thursday night to confront the architect of Nassau County's controversial speed camera program and demand refunds for hundreds of tickets issued in front of the school.
The meeting, hosted by local residents, featured fiery exchanges between Nassau Traffic and Parking Violations Agency executive director John Marks and area homeowners, most of whom have received multiple tickets and want the camera removed.
They have complained about insufficient signage in the area. For example, a sign in front of the school lists the speed limit at 30 mph but the school-zone speed limit, painted on the pavement nearby, is listed at 25 mph. Motorists driving more than 10 mph over the school-zone speed limit will get an $80 ticket.
In addition, a sign alerting motorists to the cameras is located more than a block from the school and is not visible to homeowners turning out of the largest residential development in the neighborhood.
While Marks said the cameras are designed to improve safety, area homeowner Gary Strauss said the Cantiague school zone is "historically safe," with no known pedestrian injuries or fatalities.
Marks defended the program and said signage in the area "was not inconsistent." He cited statistics showing that 14 pedestrians were killed countywide in 2012 within a quarter-mile of a school.
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As Marks spoke, he was repeatedly heckled by homeowners who screamed out occasional obscenities and shouted "it's all about the money."
Assemb. Charles Lavine (D-Glen Cove), who co-sponsored the speed camera bill, told the crowd the program should be shut down immediately until proper signage is erected. The county expects to generate up to $30 million in revenue annually from the cameras.
Marks said cameras will be rotated in the Jericho school district and it's possible the fixed camera at Cantiague Elementary could be shut off at times.
Steve Kantorowitz of Jericho said the cameras "are destroying the quality of life in Nassau County and makes it difficult to enjoy the experience of living on Long Island."
Ernest Rauch of Syosset said the program has nothing to do with safety. "It's all about money, money and more money," he said.
Looking visibly frustrated, Marks said he was following the statute set in the law and that the program was having tangible results in causing motorists to slow down.
"Everyone gets complacent," Marks said. "You drive down a road for so long that you don't realize you are speeding."
Lawmakers at the meeting discussed last week's announcement by Nassau's 11-member Republican majority that they would use funds from their "community revitalization programs" to pay for flashing yellow warning lights at all school-zone speed camera locations in their districts.
CRP funds are allocated to each county legislator and are typically used for small capital projects that benefit a lawmaker's district. The funds are repaid with interest by county taxpayers. Presiding Officer Norma Gonsalves (R-East Meadow) said the move was necessary because minority Democrats "refused to support" County Executive Edward Mangano's request for $6.5 million for warning lights at all 434 public and private county schools.
Minority Leader Kevan Abrahams (D-Freeport) said the immediate need was for flashing lights only at speed camera sites. Abrahams said he would direct his caucus to use some CRP funds for the lights because "we will not hang half of the county out to dry."
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Meanwhile, Legis. Judith Jacobs (D-Woodbury) suggested in a letter to Mangano Thursday that the county use short-term borrowing to fund the lights and pay it off with speed camera revenue.
The warning signs would notify motorists they are entering a school zone with a speed camera. The lights blink only when school is in session. The county has selected 77 possible locations for fixed and mobile speed cameras, although only 56 sites -- one in each school district -- can operate at a time.
It was not clear how much the warning lights would cost. Republicans have roughly $2.4 million in CRP funds available while Democrats have about $1.6 million, Abrahams said.



HI-
Thanks for the help. The item’s below. I’d be happy to mail you a copy, if you give me a mailing address.

Claude Solnik
(631) 913-4244
Long Island Business News
2150 Smithtown Ave.
Ronkonkoma, NY 11779-7348 

Home > LI Confidential > Stop scratching on holidays

Stop scratching on holidays
Published: June 1, 2012


Off Track Betting in New York State has been racing into a crisis called shrinking revenue. Some people have spitballed a solution: Don’t close on holidays.
New York State Racing Law bars racing on Christmas, Easter and Palm Sunday, and the state has ruled OTBs can’t handle action on those days, even though they could easily broadcast races from out of state.
“You should be able to bet whenever you want,” said Jackson Leeds, a Nassau OTB employee who makes an occasional bet. He added some irrefutable logic: “How is the business going to make money if you’re not open to take people’s bets?”
Elias Tsekerides, president of the Federation of Hellenic Societies of Greater New York, said OTB is open on Greek Orthodox Easter and Palm Sunday.
“I don’t want discrimination,” Tsekerides said. “They close for the Catholics, but open for the Greek Orthodox? It’s either open for all or not open.”
OTB officials have said they lose millions by closing on Palm Sunday alone, with tracks such as Gulfstream, Santa Anita, Turf Paradise and Hawthorne running.
One option: OTBs could just stay open and face the consequences. New York City OTB did just that back in 2003. The handle was about $1.5 million – and OTB was fined $5,000.
Easy money.

Wednesday, October 29, 2014

NY outdoes Detroit?


Lawsuit Contends Consultant Misled Detroit Pension Plan

Photo
Coletta Estes sued a pension consultant, saying its methods “doomed the plan to financial ruin.”Credit Sean Proctor for The New York Times
Updated, 8:06 p.m. | With the nation’s states and cities slowly sinking in a $3 trillion pension hole, the professionals who advise their pension plans have long wondered whether the fingers of blame might eventually point to them.
One of those fingers has surfaced in bankrupt Detroit, and it is singling out Gabriel Roeder Smith & Company, a top actuarial consultant for public pensions, which has hundreds of clients across the country that rely on it to keep track of data, calculate required annual contributions and advise on key assumptions like future investment returns.
Detroit has been a client of Gabriel Roeder since 1938, when the city first started offering pensions. Now the city is bankrupt, the pension fund is short, benefits are being cut and one of the system’s roughly 35,000 members, Coletta Estes, is suing the firm, contending it used faulty methods and assumptions that “doomed the plan to financial ruin.”
Gabriel Roeder’s job was to help Detroit’s pension trustees run a sound plan, she says, but instead the firm covered up a growing shortfall and encouraged the trustees to spend money they did not really have. Her complaint contends that the actuaries did this knowingly, “in concert with the plan trustees to further their self-interest.” The lawsuit seeks to have the pension plan made whole, in an amount to be determined at trial, and to have Gabriel Roeder enjoined “from perpetrating similar wrongs on others.”
Lawsuits like the one Ms. Estes filed have also been brought against Gabriel Roeder by members of Detroit’s pension fund for police and firefighters, and the fund for the employees of surrounding Wayne County. The plaintiffs cite damage growing out of Detroit’s financial collapse, but the litigation may have implications far beyond southeastern Michigan because of Gabriel Roeder’s status and influence in the world of public pensions. Its method for scheduling pension contributions is exceptionally popular and widely used by governments, although federal law does not permit companies to use it. A former chairman of the Governmental Accounting Standards Board, James F. Antonio, tried 20 years ago to disallow it for governments, too, saying it “fails to meet the test of fiscal responsibility.” But he was outvoted, and cities and states have been using it ever since.
Photo
Two retired Detroit workers, William Davis, right, and Mike Shane, left, protested cuts in July.Credit Paul Sancya/Associated Press
Gabriel Roeder said the three lawsuits “are factually, legally and procedurally infirm and reflect a gross misunderstanding of the nature of actuarial services.”
In a written statement, the firm also said that it was still providing services to all three pension funds and would vigorously defend itself against the lawsuits “without further public comment.”
The three lawsuits are separate from Detroit’s bankruptcy case. They were filed in Wayne County Circuit Court by Gerard V. Mantese and John J. Conway, Michigan lawyers who have tangled with Detroit’s pension system before. The lawsuits focus on the calculations and analysis that Gabriel Roeder provided to the trustees. Like many city and state pension systems, those of Detroit and Wayne County are mature, complex institutions, governed by trustees who do not necessarily have sophisticated financial backgrounds and rely heavily on the meaningful advice and accurate calculations of their consultants.
Detroit’s trustees did not get that, Mr. Mantese and Mr. Conway contend. Even as the city slid faster and faster toward bankruptcy, its workers kept building up larger, costlier pensions, and the actuaries “assured the trustees that the plan was in good condition.”
“Gabriel Roeder recommended that the plan could maintain and increase benefits,” Ms. Estes contends in her complaint, which was filed in September. That might sound odd, coming from a plan member who stood to enjoy any increases. But Detroit was making promises it could not afford, and Ms. Estes is also a Detroit homeowner and taxpayer who argues she was harmed as the city kept piling more and more obligations onto its shrinking tax base.
As the residents of other struggling cities have discovered, public pension promises, once made, are extremely hard to break, even if the city goes bankrupt. Now Ms. Estes has lost not only part of her pension but much of the savings tied up in her house, while she and her neighbors overpay for paltry city services. She says she might have been spared some of the misery had Gabriel Roeder warned the trustees years ago that the pension system was unsustainable and recommended changes.
“We just got blindsided,” she said.
In its plan to exit bankruptcy, Detroit proposes to claw back certain overpayments that the pension system made improperly in the past. Ms. Estes said she received a letter telling her she would have to forfeit $25,000 when she reaches retirement age, without explaining how that would happen. She is now 50.
Records for her pension plan show a number of anomalies. Not only was pension money spent on off-the-books benefits like “13th checks” and ad hoc death payouts, but some of the actuarial assumptions clearly conflict with reality. For example, Gabriel Roeder assumed that Detroit’s total payroll was growing by 4 percent a year. But in fact, Detroit’s payroll has been shrinking at 5 percent a year since 2003. Ms. Estes said that the two dozen employees she supervised as chief operator of a city water treatment plant all suffered 10 percent pay cuts in the last year, and she herself resigned last June.
A steadily growing payroll is an important element of Gabriel Roeder’s widely used funding method. A big part of any pension actuary’s job is to forecast a plan’s future benefit costs, then devise a contribution schedule that will fully fund the benefits over time. There are many ways to do this, and Gabriel Roeder’s method relies on assumed steady payroll growth. It calculates an employer’s required annual contribution as a level percentage of its payroll. This “backloads” the contributions so that they may not cover the plan’s true costs in the early years, but will rise automatically later as the payroll grows.
If the payroll shrinks, however, the required contributions will skyrocket as a percent of payroll, placing an extraordinary burden on the city and its tax base. The federal pension law that bars companies from using this method is not binding on states or cities, however, and virtually all of them use it.
In Detroit, Gabriel Roeder combined this funding method with a schedule to pay off shortfalls over a “rolling” 30-year period. This meant, in effect, that the 30-year period restarted every year at “Year 1,” or the low end of the rising contribution schedule. The high end was always put off into the future. Many governments “roll” their funding schedules back every year in this manner. Mr. Antonio of G.A.S.B. was so perturbed by this practice that he included a long statement of opposition to it in the pension accounting standard now in force. He said it delayed proper funding “on the theory that ‘over the long haul, everything will work out.’ ”
His warnings were largely ignored, and city and state pension systems have been free for the last 20 years to do what their actuaries’ models suggest. The pension accounting rules are now being updated, and starting next summer, “rolling” contribution schedules will no longer be acceptable. Backloading a city’s pension contributions on the assumption that the payroll will grow will still be the norm, but over a shorter time frame. That should reduce some of the risk.
In Detroit, Mr. Mantese said it was “indefensible” for Gabriel Roeder to assume the payroll was rising when in fact it was falling.
In its written statement, Gabriel Roeder said it was not a plan administrator, fiduciary or trustee for Detroit’s pension system and therefore did “not make decisions of any kind on behalf of the retirement systems.” It said it came to pension board meetings only when requested, usually just “a handful of occasions per year,” and based its analysis and recommendations on unaudited data supplied by the pension systems, the city or the county.
In its most recent report on Ms. Estes’s pension plan, submitted last November, the firm did note that the payroll had declined during the previous year. It recommended calculating contributions a different way for the next year or two, “to avoid the contribution loss that occurs with a declining payroll.”
Mr. Mantese also questioned the plan’s assumption that its investments would earn 7.9 percent over the long term, when the average in recent years was much less.
In an interview, Ms. Estes said that for the 20 years she worked for the city water department, she considered it her duty to provide pure, safe water all the time — not just when the stock market went up or if the payroll grew at a certain rate.
She said she thought the pension professionals should have been held to that standard, too.
“They had a job to do and we trusted them,” she said. “And it turned out the trustees, the advisers, the actuaries and the accountants misled us.”

Monday, October 27, 2014

school zone cameras

NY will never tell you when Easter Sunday occurs and when Palm Sunday occurs because school zone cameras will suck your money faster than Greeks will bet money at Nassau OTB on Roman Catholic Palm Sunday and Roman Catholic Easter Sunday.

the below document ignores NY Const Art. 1, Sec. 3

NY State where crime pays and all religions are not treated equally


 

S03821 Summary:

BILL NO    S03821 

SAME AS    No same as 

SPONSOR    ADAMS

COSPNSR    

MLTSPNSR   

Amd S109, RWB L

Permits racing or licensing race meetings on Palm Sunday.
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S03821 Actions:

BILL NO    S03821 

02/21/2013 REFERRED TO RACING, GAMING AND WAGERING
04/23/2013 REPORTED AND COMMITTED TO FINANCE
05/07/2014 PASSED SENATE
05/07/2014 DELIVERED TO ASSEMBLY
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S03821 Votes:

There are no votes for this bill in this legislative session.
Go to top

S03821 Memo:

Memo not available
Go to top

S03821 Text:

                           S T A T E   O F   N E W   Y O R K
       ________________________________________________________________________

                                         3821

                              2013-2014 Regular Sessions

                                   I N  S E N A T E

                                   February 21, 2013
                                      ___________

       Introduced  by  Sen.  ADAMS  -- read twice and ordered printed, and when
         printed to be committed to the Committee on Racing, Gaming and  Wager-
         ing

       AN  ACT  to  amend the racing, pari-mutuel wagering and breeding law, in
         relation to allotting dates for racing or licensing race  meetings  at
         which pari-mutuel betting is permitted on Palm Sunday

         THE  PEOPLE OF THE STATE OF NEW YORK, REPRESENTED IN SENATE AND ASSEM-
       BLY, DO ENACT AS FOLLOWS:

    1    Section 1. Subdivision 1 of section 109  of  the  racing,  pari-mutuel
    2  wagering and breeding law, as added by section 1 of part A of chapter 60
    3  of the laws of 2012, is amended to read as follows:
    4    1.  permit  racing at which pari-mutuel betting is conducted on any or
    5  all dates from the first day of January through the thirty-first day  of
    6  December,  inclusive of Sundays but exclusive of December twenty-fifth[,
    7  Palm Sunday] and Easter Sunday; and
    8    S 2. This act shall take effect immediately.

Supreme Court Declines to Hear Appeal of Conclusion that PE Funds are Potentially Liable for Pension Obligations of Portfolio Companies

on May 6, 2014 ·
In March 2014, the U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear an appeal from Sun Capital Partners Inc. of the decision by the First Circuit Court of Appeals in Sun Capital Partners III, L.P. et al. v. New England Teamsters & Trucking Industry Pension Fund, an important 2013 case under the Employee Retirement Income Security Act of 1974 (ERISA) relating to the potential for “controlled group” liability of private equity funds for underfunded pension plans of portfolio companies. In that case, the First Circuit held that a private equity fund with an investment in a portfolio company managed by the fund’s general partner would be considered a “trade or business” with potential joint and several liability under ERISA for that portfolio company’s withdrawal liability from a multiemployer pension plan. As such, it continues to be the case (in the First Circuit, and in other jurisdictions if this precedent is followed) that a private equity fund may become liable for certain pension liabilities of its portfolio companies if the additional “common control” tests under ERISA’s controlled group rules are satisfied.
“Controlled Group” Liability under ERISA
Under Title IV of ERISA, significant pension liabilities can arise upon the withdrawal by a participating employer from a union multiemployer pension plan (at issue in the Sun Capital case), as well as upon the termination of an underfunded single employer pension plan (i.e., in a “distress” or “involuntary” plan termination under ERISA). Under the “controlled group” liability rules of ERISA, an entity other than the direct employer is also responsible for these liabilities, on a joint and several basis, if the entity is (i) a “trade or business” and (ii) under “common control” with the employer, which generally requires common ownership of at least 80 percent. The Sun Capital decision deals with the first such test.
In this case, two private equity funds sponsored by the same firm, Sun Capital Advisors, Inc. (Sun Capital), acquired a 100 percent ownership interest in Scott Brass, Inc. (SBI) in 2007: “Fund IV” acquired a 70 percent interest, and “Fund III” acquired a 30 percent interest. These respective ownership interests apparently were arrived at with a view toward avoiding ERISA’s 80 percent common control test. When SBI subsequently withdrew from a union-sponsored multiemployer pension plan, the plan sought to collect SBI’s withdrawal liability from the two funds under ERISA’s controlled group liability rules.
Private Equity Fund as a “Trade or Business”
The First Circuit held that Sun Capital Fund IV constituted a “trade or business” and thus could potentially be treated as a member of the controlled group for purposes of ERISA. In reaching its conclusion, the court held that Sun Capital was more than merely a passive investor (which would not be deemed a “trade or business” under ERISA) by applying the “investment plus” test to the activities of Sun Capital and Fund IV. This test looks at whether, unlike a mere passive investor, the investor is also exercising control over the management and operations of that company. The court acknowledged that this is a facts and circumstances test and requires a case-by-case determination.
Implications of the Sun Capital Case
As a result of the Supreme Court’s refusal to hear an appeal of the Sun Capital case, it continues to have important implications for private equity firms, private equity fund investors, and their portfolio companies. If a single fund holds more than 80 percent of the equity of a portfolio company, that fund and even its other 80 percent-owned portfolio companies could become liable for the pension liabilities of the company, if the Sun Capital precedent is followed. This will put additional emphasis on due diligence, pricing, indemnities, and structuring in transactions involving significant potential pension liabilities.
Additional details regarding the Sun Capital case can be found in a prior blog post. We will continue to stay apprised of this matter and update you on any further developments in this area.

Not a peep in the house on

Sunday October 26, 2014 as Suffolk County Legislator Kevin McCaffrey presided over the meeting of Teamsters Local 707 in Franklin Square


Court approves 3-year plan for Suffolk OTB to pay off $17M debts

Without fanfare, Suffolk Off-Track Betting Corporation last week quietly won court approval for a plan to get out of bankruptcy and pay off its $17 million in debts over the next three years.
The agreement with the creditors, approved by U.S. Bankruptcy Court Judge Carla Craig, will allow plans to move forward on purchase of 32 acres just east of Long Island Expressway Exit 64 that once housed a movie multiplex.
It will allow Suffollk OTB and gaming firm Delaware North to construct its new 1,000 machine video lottery terminal casino, which officials now hope to open before the end of 2015.
Under the plan, Suffolk County will be put first in line for repayment gauranteeing Suffolk $2 million in the first year after the casino opens and $3 million in the second. Other creditors will be required to be paid in full by the end of the third year or OTB will be considered in default. However, OTB officials say once the casino opens, they expect to refinance the $65 million construction debt for far less than the 4.75 percent to 7 percent rate it is paying Delaware North, which will build and manage the complex.

 

Friday, October 24, 2014

cuomo kills by incompetence

multi drug resistant TB may be found in the US and in Africa and Andrew the killer Cuomo fails to see that BCG is made available to all in NY who seek same.  Ristori, the Italian (see pubmed.org ristori + bcg) will teach Andrew Cuomo of the multiple uses of BCG. See also faustmanlab.org and pubmed.org faustman dl .


Andrew Cuomo needs to read and study and perhaps even travel to Italy to talk to Ristori to expand his knowledge.


NY State Healthcare is often of poor quality because life in the US is cheap and is measured simply in the number of dollars that may be extracted from the sick. Good, bad or indifferent treatments abound driven strickly by money!

Hiram Maxim is the favorite MD of the US and the world as his invention has stood the test of time and is used all over the world.

  • WriteClick: Editor's Choice

Effects of Bacille Calmette-GuÉrin after the first demyelinating event in the CNS

  1. Nitin K. Sethi
  1. doi: 10.1212/01.wnl.0000452303.37990.ff Neurology vol. 83 no. 3 293
Ristori et al.1 reported the benefits of Bacille Calmette-Guérin (BCG) vaccination after clinically isolated syndrome (CIS). BCG vaccination may prevent progression to clinically definite multiple sclerosis in these patients. In countries like India where tuberculosis is endemic, BCG vaccination is administered to all children any time from birth to 15 days. If administered after 6 months, a Mantoux test is carried out, and if it is positive, the vaccine is withheld. Widespread BCG vaccination at birth may explain the low incidence of multiple sclerosis in the Indian subcontinent along with other hypotheses: distance from the equator, Epstein-Barr virus association vs causation, genetics, and hygiene. A well-designed study could clarify this vaccination hypothesis.

Author Response

  1. Marco Salvetti
We thank Dr. Sethi for his comments on our article.1 His hypothesis is plausible. Studies have been carried out regarding the association of early BCG vaccination and type 1 diabetes. Protective effects of repetitive vaccinations have been shown in Turkey,2 and an association between BCG vaccine and reduced production of GAD65 and IA-2 autoantibodies was demonstrated in Southern India.3 It is unclear how early administration of the BCG vaccine may work over time and how it may affect autoimmunity prevalence in children and young adults. It is possible that early priming with BCG sensitizes this population to environmental nonpathogenic mycobacteria that exert long-term immunomodulatory effects, especially in developing countries. This may represent a sort of benign exposure to microbes that lacks or is deficient in the context of Westernization.4 Another possibility is that BCG vaccination could provide protection from mycobacterial triggers and disregulated immune response to mycobacterial antigens that have been associated with multiple sclerosis.5,6

References

  1. 1.
  2. 2.
  3. 3.
  4. 4.
  5. 5.
  6. 6.


To every thing there is a season


 

Ecclesiastes 3:1-8King James Version (KJV)

To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven:
A time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is planted;
A time to kill, and a time to heal; a time to break down, and a time to build up;
A time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and a time to dance;
A time to cast away stones, and a time to gather stones together; a time to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing;
A time to get, and a time to lose; a time to keep, and a time to cast away;
A time to rend, and a time to sew; a time to keep silence, and a time to speak;
A time to love, and a time to hate; a time of war, and a time of peace.


airborne education et al

 

After Yosemite Hantavirus Outbreak, Survivors Haunted by ...

abcnews.go.com › Health
ABC News
Sep 5, 2012 - As the Yosemite hantavirus outbreak continues to make headlines, past ... United States, those who have survived the deadly airborne disease ...

 

CDC - Airborne Transmission - Hantavirus

www.cdc.gov/hanta...
United States Centers for Disease Control and Preve...
Aug 29, 2012 - For a hantavirus to cause HPS, the virus must travel from the rodents that carry it to a person. A common way this happens is when a person ...
One of many problems in the US and with Obama and with Nassau County is that BCG vaccine is not available to all who seek same. BCG is an old and useful vaccine that is used all over the world.
See also faustmanlab.org and pubmed.org faustman dl and pubmed.org ristori  + bcg
BCG should be available in the US from Doctors Without Boarders, your MD, hospitals and the Nassau County and New York State Dep't of Health 

The US healthcare maxim should not be ammunition and automatic weapons for all, guaranteed safe and effective.

Shoot BCG. Shoot your assault rifle.

I think BCG is more useful and effective for many conditions.

If you want airborne, see Hanta Virus.  Not hard to find out west.


Bruce Blakeman Esq

another NY lawyer and political candidate proudly supporting religious preference for many years and allowing Nassau OTB, a public benefit corporation, to close on Roman Catholic Easter Sunday and Roman Catholic Palm Sunday in preference to Greek Orthodox Easter Sunday and Greek Orthodox Palm Sunday.

Fair is fair? Open on both of them or closed on both of them, NY Const Art 1, Sec 3 etc



HI-
Thanks for the help. The item’s below. I’d be happy to mail you a copy, if you give me a mailing address.

Claude Solnik
(631) 913-4244
Long Island Business News
2150 Smithtown Ave.
Ronkonkoma, NY 11779-7348 

Home > LI Confidential > Stop scratching on holidays

Stop scratching on holidays
Published: June 1, 2012


Off Track Betting in New York State has been racing into a crisis called shrinking revenue. Some people have spitballed a solution: Don’t close on holidays.
New York State Racing Law bars racing on Christmas, Easter and Palm Sunday, and the state has ruled OTBs can’t handle action on those days, even though they could easily broadcast races from out of state.
“You should be able to bet whenever you want,” said Jackson Leeds, a Nassau OTB employee who makes an occasional bet. He added some irrefutable logic: “How is the business going to make money if you’re not open to take people’s bets?”
Elias Tsekerides, president of the Federation of Hellenic Societies of Greater New York, said OTB is open on Greek Orthodox Easter and Palm Sunday.
“I don’t want discrimination,” Tsekerides said. “They close for the Catholics, but open for the Greek Orthodox? It’s either open for all or not open.”
OTB officials have said they lose millions by closing on Palm Sunday alone, with tracks such as Gulfstream, Santa Anita, Turf Paradise and Hawthorne running.
One option: OTBs could just stay open and face the consequences. New York City OTB did just that back in 2003. The handle was about $1.5 million – and OTB was fined $5,000.
Easy money.


 Home New York State Unified Court System

Attorney Detail
as of 10/24/2014
Registration Number: 1901644

BRUCE ARTHUR BLAKEMAN

ABRAMS FENSTERMAN ETAL

1111 MARCUS AVE STE 107

NEW HYDE PARK, NY 11042-1034

United States

(Nassau County)

(516) 592-5858


E-mail Address:
Year Admitted in NY: 1984
Appellate Division Department of Admission: 2
Law School: CALIFORNIA WESTERN
Registration Status: Due to reregister within 30 days of birthday
Next Registration: Oct 2014

The Detail Report above contains information that has been provided by the attorney listed, with the exception of REGISTRATION STATUS, which is generated from the OCA database. Every effort is made to insure the information in the database is accurate and up-to-date.
The good standing of an attorney and/or any information regarding disciplinary actions must be confirmed with the appropriate Appellate Division Department. Information on how to contact the Appellate Divisions of the Supreme Court in New York is available at www.nycourts.gov/courts.

If the name of the attorney you are searching for does not appear, please try again with a different spelling. In addition, please be advised that attorneys listed in this database are listed by the name that corresponds to their name in the Appellate Division Admissions file. There are attorneys who currently use a name that differs from the name under which they were admitted. If you need additional information, please contact the NYS Office of Court Administration, Attorney Registration Unit at 212-428-2800.
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Thursday, October 23, 2014

the bettor is not always right

but.....



The customer is always right - Wikipedia, the free ...

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_customer_is_always_right
Wikipedia
"The customer is always right" is a motto or slogan which exhorts service staff to give a high priority to customer satisfaction. It was popularised by pioneering ...






Photograph by Robert Adam Mayer
Steven Crist
Extra
Watch a brief excerpt from Exotic Tickets, Steven Crist’s instructional DVD about betting on horse races.
Despite newspapers’ hard times, at least one daily is thriving, even though its price—$5 to $6 a copy—makes it one of the most expensive papers in the world. In a way, that high price is the Daily Racing Form’s strength: 95 percent of its revenue comes from circulation, only 5 percent from advertising. Furthermore, the DRF, which is to horseplayers what the Wall Street Journal is to investors, also prospers online: about 20 percent of its revenue comes from downloading fees for its racetrack data. Steven Crist ’78 is the DRF’s publisher and chairman; he was bitten by the racing bug in college and has built his entire career around the turf. “The stats and numbers stuff is there,” he says, “plus the animals, the gambling—and the weird subculture: the racetrack is…well, like people who ran away and joined the circus.”
Though it’s edited in downtown Manhattan, the DRF publishes—every day but Christmas—up to 35 regional editions keyed to action at local tracks. (Horses race in more than 30 states, in all parts of the country save the Deep South.) There are 35,000 horse races per year in the United States, which, after Japan and the United Kingdom, bets the third-largest amount of money on their outcomes. (Racetracks in Asia can draw 75,000 to 100,000 on weekends, compared with a typical Saturday’s 10,000 at Belmont Park, not far from Crist’s home on Long Island.)
The racetrack economy has evolved in recent decades. “Fifty years ago, horse racing had a virtual monopoly on legal gambling,” Crist explains. “Other than Las Vegas, there were no casinos. Now there are a lot of gambling and entertainment options and, sad but true, it’s much easier to sit at a slot machine and pull a handle than to spend years learning how to read the Racing Form and handicap horses. You have to work before you make a bet on a horse race; at a casino, you just walk in, order a drink, and start gambling.”

But if slot machines and lotteries have siphoned off income from racetracks, there’s still an annual racing handle of $13 billion—more than Hollywood’s box office—and the Internet has made it easy to wager on races from the comfort of your home, which is exactly what Crist does.
Yet it’s harder now to prosper as a horseplayer. That’s because racetrack betting employs a pari-mutuel system in which the bettors who pick the top finishers divide the losers’ stakes, minus the racetrack commission: hence, poor gamblers subsidize the winners. “Twenty years ago, if you made your own speed figures [a method of standardizing horses’ running times for comparison, popularized by noted handicapper and Washington Post columnist Andrew Beyer ’65] and followed horseracing closely, you had a real edge over the majority of the public,” Crist explains. “But now, so many of the bad gamblers—the people who should be pulling handles on slot machines— have left racing for casinos that one of the great regrets of current horseplayers is: ‘Where did all the suckers go?’ You want to be betting against people who are betting based on colors and jockeys and hunches.”
Today Crist’s titles of chairman and publisher are largely honorary and his ownership stake in the DRF is less than 1 percent. “I’m the crazy uncle in the attic whom they leave alone to write and blog and consult about the data,” he says. He bets avidly but goes to the track less; having attended 25 Kentucky Derbies, he hasn’t been to Churchill Downs for the past two years.
He bets his own money, and “I do it in a very public way,” he says. “For the big betting days of the year, like Breeders’ Cup or Derby Day, I do it all in real time [on his blog] and might post 12 or 15 times through the day. I lay out my whole play: here’s $3,000 worth of tickets. People follow along, either rooting for me or against me.”

From 1981 until 1990, Crist was a horseracing reporter and columnist for the New York Times. As “an old-fashioned print guy, I was dragged kicking and screaming into blogging,” he says. “Now, I love the format. You’re not constrained by space, and you can do it anytime you want. I usually write a column for Saturday and Sunday, but if something happens on Tuesday that ticks me off, I can post about it immediately. I put up video clips of races and screen grabs of past performances, charts—there’s a lot of stuff going on.”

Statistics and probabilities of athletic performance laid the groundwork for his love of playing the ponies. He grew up an only child on the Upper West Side of Manhattan; his father had his own public-relations firm and his mother is the film critic Judith Crist. In his 2003 memoir, Betting on Myself: Adventures of a Horseplayer and Publisher, he recalls that as a child, he developed an “obsessive devotion to a board game called Strat-O-Matic, a baseball simulation that to this day has a cult following. I would play entire 162-game seasons at my desk,” he writes. “I developed an unconscious fluidity at calculating percentages….It became second nature to me that a batter who started the season with 24 hits in 84 at-bats was a .287 hitter.”
At Harvard, he concentrated in English and joined the Lampoon. One summer night after his junior year, he went to the Wonderland dog-racing track near Boston with his friend George Meyer ’78. It proved an epiphany. Reading the race program’s summary of the past performances of the greyhounds racing that night “was like hearing a new language but understanding it right away,” Crist writes. The Wonderland track, then a “charming little place, with a festive feeling—the animals, lots of people,” made an immediate impression. “This is the greatest place I’ve ever been!” he recalls thinking. “I felt right at home, the first night.”

For the rest of that summer, Crist and Meyer went to the dogs almost every night, and added horse racing, too, at Suffolk Downs. At first Crist preferred the greyhounds, because the smaller scale of a dog track was “more manageable.” (Today, two small cast-iron horses flank his front door, and he and his wife, Robin Foster, a fellow horse-racing writer and editor, are the adoptive parents of two retired racing greyhounds. They also own a nine-year-old retired thoroughbred, Teddy, who raced as Three Steps Ahead.)
Crist’s consuming fascination with racing propelled him into his job at the Times, where he became the horseracing correspondent. His columns included outspoken criticism of the sport’s Bible, the Daily Racing Form, which dates from 1894. “The Racing Form that I grew up with in the ’70s and ’80s was just a terrible newspaper,” Crist recalls. “The so-called articles were heavily edited press releases, where not a discouraging word was ever said. Gambling was hardly mentioned. There was this huge disconnect between the paper, both editorially and statistically, and the gamblers, who were very sophisticated.”
In 1990, representatives of British media magnate Robert Maxwell approached Crist about editing a new paper, The Racing Times, to be launched as a competitor to the DRF, which had been newly acquired by Rupert Murdoch. “It was pretty tough to leave the best job at the New York Times,” Crist says. “I mean, really—to get paid by the Times to go to the racetrack and write about it? What a great gig. But how many journalists get the opportunity to create the newspaper of their dreams, and take on the hated Racing Form? So I did it.”
With the Racing Times, Crist’s goal was to produce a legitimate newspaper with real reporting and dramatically enhanced statistical data. He hired the 10 best writers on the sport, such as Beyer, and put out what he and many others considered “a vastly better version of the Daily Racing Form.” Within six months, they had captured 30 percent of the market and the future looked rosy. Then, in 1991, Maxwell went overboard from his yacht and drowned under “weird, suspicious circumstances that have never been resolved,” Crist says. Maxwell’s estate soon sold the Racing Times to Murdoch, who folded it, re-establishing his monopoly.
Crist spent the next three years as a professional horseplayer, and “never enjoyed racing less. Betting horses is a much better hobby than a profession. It plays with your head if you’re trying to win to eat.” In 1992, Governor Mario Cuomo appointed him to the New York State Commission on Racing in the 21st Century; there, he drafted recommendations and legislation that subsequently became law. And for two years, he was a vice president of the New York Racing Association, in charge of simulcasting, marketing, and corporate development; he introduced in-home simulcasting of races.
Then, one day, the DRF announced, on page 4, that the paper was to be sold. Crist and a group of investors eventually acquired it for $40 million, and Crist served as CEO from 1998 until 2002. Since then, it has been sold twice to venture-capital groups, but Crist has remained centrally involved.
In addition to his memoir, he has written several other horse-racing books, including The Horse Traders (1986) and Exotic Betting (2006). The latter deals with the mechanics of new, complicated betting options that racing has developed during the last decade, particularly the “pick six,” in which bettors have to pick six consecutive winners. “You don’t actually just pick one horse in each race and make out one ticket,” Crist explains. “There’s a fairly complicated matrix of tickets you fill out and try to include all six of those winners. Until recently, when it’s had to compete with other forms of gambling, racing almost pretended there was no betting going on—they made no effort in their advertising and marketing to appeal to bettors, game players, and gamblers. Consequently, racing has done very little, historically, to educate its customers about how to play these bets.”
His own wagers have put him ahead overall, though “when you spend eight to 10 hours a day at this for 20 or 30 years, it works out to minimum wage, or less,” he says with a guffaw. One reason there are only a couple hundred professional horseplayers in the country is the “takeout”: the racetrack skims off 20 percent of every dollar wagered before paying off the winning bettors. The takeout goes toward operating racetracks and paying purses for owners, breeders, trainers, and jockeys, as well as paying the slice for state governments. (Betting sports in Las Vegas involves a takeout of 4.5 percent, roulette takes 5.25 percent, slots, 10 percent, and lotteries 40 percent to 50 percent. Two or three times a year, Crist, an excellent poker player, goes to Vegas to play cards, which he finds “relaxing.”)

Gambling on Wall Street, or at games of pure chance like roulette, holds no interest for Crist. People sometimes remark that the one thing he hasn’t done in the sport is own a racehorse, but “I own the horse I’m betting on for one minute and 12 seconds, and that’s good enough for me,” he says. “There is a strong feeling of success for your ego when you make a winning bet. When their horse crosses the finish line in front, horseplayers never say, ‘What a good horse!’ They go, ‘That was me—me, me, me!’ That’s part of the pleasure of horse racing, and why it’s so much more fun to pick your own horses than to bet somebody else’s picks. With a Wall Street stock, I can’t imagine the same feeling of satisfaction.”
He believes that jockeys are “hugely overrated” as a factor in racing; without minimizing the skill or danger involved in riding, he says, “You could take the top 20 jockeys in America, switch them on all their mounts, and the races would come out the same.” That’s an example of his contrarian thinking. In fact, he says, “That’s what you have to do to succeed in a marketplace of opinions.” He notes that at the track, for example, if you always bet the favorite, you’ll win one-third of the time, but predictably lose at least 10 percent of your stake in the long run.
Over the years, Crist has heard every theory under the sun on how to bet horses, but has seen no secret formula for success. “There are a hundred little things going on,” he says. “But the most important single piece of information is how fast a horse can run from point A to point B.”



Nassau OTB Introduces Print-It-Yourself Kiosks In It's Branches
Date:
10/24/2014

Time:

Description:
Throughout its existence, Nassau OTB has been proud to be able to supply FREE program sheets, or PROFILES, for all tracks that are on the Nassau OTB wagering roster. In addition, Daily Racing Forms and other racing amenities have always been sold at the betting windows, subject to availability. Now, customers will not have to worry about whether their local branch has run out of Profiles or Forms, because you can print all of your handicapping documents yourself, from the new, state-of-the-art Kiosks at Nassau OTB's branches. Profiles for all tracks are available through the printer/Kiosks, at no charge to the bettor. You can select DRF Past Performances for the tracks YOU want, without purchasing a cumbersome book that is filled with tracks you don't want to bet on today. It's BETTER for the BETTOR: save money while only collecting the materials YOU need. AND ... it's better for the environment! Just another way that Nassau OTB is making YOUR wagering experience as convenient, personalized and comprehensive as possible.