on sunday april 1 2018 amamzon barred ny bettirs from betting at nassau otb on santa anita, gulf stream, golden gate and sunland
all pertinent legal issues. were vetted by coundel to nyc otb
see ny const art 1 sec. 3
make the amazon pay each time is sued by each bettor
if you know of benny ratner. head of the communist party in ny years ago and father of rugene j ratner let me know
Taking the Law Into Your Own Handheld& make the amazon pay you
Claude Solnik
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.
Some attorneys are unhappy with a new app that automates simple legal actions.
ILLUSTRATION: KEN FALLIN
Stanford, Calif.
Joshua Browder is an ambitious young man. A 21-year-old computer-science senior at Stanford, he aims to make lawyers obsolete, at least for humdrum troubles such as parking tickets, disputes with landlords, and small claims for which legal fees would wipe out much of the compensation.
Why not wipe out the lawyers instead? In September Mr. Browder launched a free iPhone app called DoNotPay, which he describes as the world’s first robot lawyer. Entering your details, you “swipe to sue” and can, among other things, fix your credit report, get bank-fee refunds, and claim payouts in class actions you may not know about.
Mr. Browder acknowledges apps won’t “be arguing before the Supreme Court anytime soon.” But “for a simple case, where someone has stolen your security deposit, I think there’s no reason why you have to have a lawyer.”
If there’s a righteous quality about Mr. Browder, it’s probably in his genes. His father is Bill Browder, the British-American portfolio investor who made impressive sums in Russia before falling foul of Vladimir Putin and becoming the strongman’s most vocal Western critic. Joshua Browder is a great-grandson of Earl Browder (1891-1973), the Communist Party USA’s presidential nominee in 1936 and 1940. The young Mr. Browder is sure Earl would approve of DoNotPay, “even if he wouldn’t agree with all of what Silicon Valley does.”
In his tiny dorm room, Mr. Browder describes the genesis of DoNotPay. It began when he was 17 and got a parking ticket in a lot near his London high school. A wheel of his car just shaded the sideline of his allotted space. “It was a £60 fine, and I had just £100 per month as my allowance,” he says. Mr. Browder decided to contest it. He researched the regulations and found that the parking lines at the lot near his school had been incorrectly painted, making the spots narrower than the law required. “Had the width been 180 centimeters, as it should have been, and not 177, I wouldn’t have cut the line.”
He prevailed and realized he could “beat the system.” But he wondered “how many other bays were too small, and how many other people were getting tickets because of these small bays.” Fellow students began seeking his help to have their tickets expunged. He created a bot—“a piece of software that speaks to you”—which gave users 12 options to challenge parking tickets. After several friends used it successfully, a consumer-rights blogger wrote about it, “and it just went completely viral.” From “10 appeals generated by random friends,” Mr. Browder says, it went “to about 60,000 in the space of 48 hours.”
When Mr. Browder came to Stanford in 2015, he brought his bot. He introduced it first in New York state, then California. Then he created a bot that enabled people to sue Equifax , the credit-reporting agency, after its 2017 security breach. Lawyers, he says indignantly, had filed class-action lawsuits against Equifax—“but of course they take a 50% cut of what you get and it takes five years. So I had the idea: Why not sue Equifax in small-claims court?”
Inevitably, Mr. Browder has drawn the stink eye of lawyers. Some have tweeted that he is practicing their profession without a license. Others have written menacing cease-and-desist letters. But he’s received no formal complaints. He adds that “lots of lawyers” are helping him, and “I think that as long as DoNotPay is free, there are First Amendment protections.”
Which raises the question of how to turn DoNotPay into a moneymaking proposition. It has attracted funding from some major investors in Silicon Valley. Mr. Browder admires companies like Credit Karma, which “makes credit scores free and helps you manage your credit, but makes money selling services not related to what’s free.” He wants to emulate that model in his own business. DoNotPay is also experiencing some growing pains. Two weeks ago its average rating on Apple ’s App Store was only 2.6 on a 5-point scale. That’s risen to 3.1, but Mr. Browder admits “we still have a long way to go.”
What might DoNotPay take on next? Mr. Browder wants to make uncontested divorce easier. The trouble is that “every American county seems to have different laws around divorce.” He could start in the U.K., where the rules are relatively uniform. But “it’s much more expensive here,” he says, “and much, much more divorce happens here, statistically. God bless America.”
Mr. Varadarajan is executive editor at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution.
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