1949threepence

Oh well you know the drill by now. Filling in the wasted time. Hopefully you'll be able to extract yourself from the situation.

Just been texting a mate of mine, and he tells me you can use "chinkie", as in ordering a Chinese meal, as he did so just a couple of weeks ago with no problem - yet that has a more obvious racist overtone (even though not meant that way) than "chink", which is a real dictionary word, as in "chink of light", or my example above. They really haven't put a lot of intelligent thought into this. What about Taffy, Jock or Paddy? (two of them are actual first names). Or are there gradations of racial offensiveness with some counting and some not, but none of us actually knowing which. How do they manage with other languages? Presumably they have national moderators or algorithms/bots (whatever they're called). .

What's the betting that in a year or so's time he'll be invited back into the ministerial fold? You'll wake up one morning and the news will be "following the resignation of xxxxx, the new minister for xxxxxxxx is Matt Hancock. Mr Hancock resigned as Health Minister in 2021 following controversy over not following social distancing rules".

My immediate thought was to give you a laughing emoji, but actually, you're probably right. That wouldn't surprise me at all.

Thanks Chris - I kind of thought that might be the case, and you've kindly confirmed it for me. These bans, for genuine posts, inhibit the free flow of conversation.

Quite apart from the lack of intelligent discernment, the other problem is that as posters we don't really know what's allowable and what's not - there's no handbook of specifics. Just a long winded set of somewhat rambling, very generically written rules. Also, it's virtually impossible to get in touch with facebook and dispute their decision. Not worth it for me anyway, as I'll be out of the ban in 2 days.

Thanks Gents. I did have second thoughts about posting this thread, hence why I deleted it immediately after posting. But on further reflection, we can possibly all learn from my experience, especially facebook users. I'm a member of a political discussion forum on facebook and yesterday we were discussing the government's intention to introduce vaccine passports for night club users from September, and it was mentioned that although Labour normally support the government on covid measures, this time they are against it. Given that a sizeable Tory backbench rebellion also seems likely, the government may be defeated on this issue. I merely said in response to another poster that Starmer may have found a chink in the armour of the government - a commonly used phrase you might think, and certainly employed by me in complete innocence and good faith. But it's landed me with a 3 day ban from facebook for hate speech. At first I wondered what they were on about, but then realised it was the use of the word "chink", which they obviously included in their "algorithm" as a racially abusive term against Chinese people - even though it obviously has an older dictionary meaning. So the moral is to be ultra careful when posting on facebook and don't use phrases/words which their algorithm can misinterpret. This shows up the limits of robotised moderation. I've redacted bits of this screenshot for anonymity of me, the group and the poster I was replying to.

You do anything but lay off of my blue suede shoes

He's 'avin a larf. Better in the hand indeed.

Ah, generic definition of the term, not individual explanation in the customer's personal account. Not enough in my view. Personally I'd rather pay a few more quid for the couple of minutes it would take the examiner to write a quick explanation, as it pertains to the generic term employed for the individual coin.

Oh, right. So there's some great advice for @Paulus who was also presumably in the dark. That's obviously an extremely relevant point of which some of us were completely unaware until you just mentioned it. Have you just found that out, Pete? All we need now is for the company to helpfully point that out when they return the coin, and all's good.

Surely it requires an element of commonsense. If you take, for example, "verdigris" as a reason for rejection - if the verd is obvious and easily visible to the naked eye, then yes, the single word "verdigris" is adequate. But if it's one (or even a few) tiny specks, only visible under high magnification, then it's surely reasonable to expect a pointer as to where it, or even just one of the specks, is. Same with "altered". If tooling is obvious and widespread, fair enough, "altered" covers it. But if it's not obvious, then a few further words of explanation are helpful. Otherwise the customer's understandable reaction is going to be "where, what?".

Absolutely. I can't see why customers should have to be involved in an unnecessary guessing game, when all it takes is the briefest of explanations to explain the precise reason for rejection. Essentially we're all still guessing now, and the one word given by the TPG was the entire reason for the OP's thread starter.

I totally agree. No idea what the "small print" ahead of slabbing says, but surely it would be better to just return the coin unslabbed, with more than a one word explanation. Not saying you need an essay, but instead of "altered" for example, how about "we noticed scratches on the Queen's neck which we interpret to be deliberately placed post mint", or some such? Just to point the sender in the direction of precisely why the rejection occurred. Simply saying "altered" is insufficient information.

Yes 107.7F (-32/9 x 5) = 42.06C. Apparently that too was Death Valley. I only got as far as the google headline. The Washington Post report was hidden behind a paywall. Difficult to imagine.

Originally called the chip shop variant. Now renamed the omega 3 variant.

They should certainly give you more than one word. I've never had a coin slabbed, but the attitude is strongly indicative of full payment in advance, as they'd surely be told to do one if they sent you an invoice with a one word rejection.

I might well try that Bob. Thanks for the tip. ETA: By the way are you being affected by the intense heat in the USA at the moment, or is it mainly the Western side? I heard Canada (Lytton British Columbia) had a temperature of 49.6 degrees recently (that's 121 degrees F in USA money). Unreal. Looks like it is definitely that. Thanks for the tip and link, Paddy.

Does anybody know what the plant/weed, whatever, is in the photo below? It's abundant in my garden and weed killer will not get rid of it. The stuff is totally impervious. For example in the paving cracks, the weedol will eliminate everything else but that. It just will not die.

Yep, more plausible.

Some time ago we discussed the 1897 O.NE penny, and @Zo Arms was of the opinion that the dot was the result of a deliberate attempt to stem a spreading crack by drilling a small hole in it - link Bob's theory is echoed in "A handbook of Modern British Coins and their varieties 1797 - 1970" by Michael G. Salzman, and prior to that by Freeman in Coin Monthly October 1976. Here's a pic of the relevant note - No 90 - from page 96 the Salzman book. I have two F147's, with perfect dots of slightly different sizes. So maybe the operation was performed twice. Once to try it out, then again when it was realised a larger hole was needed.

Have you thought about sending it to NGC instead? Just giving you the word "altered" isn't very helpful on their part.

Well, there you go.....

Very useful resource and thanks to Pete for highlighting it. But If you remember the same suggestion about a sticky was made about Jerry's thread on recording lost and stolen coins. I tagged in the moderator but the request was ignored without response - link to relevant post

Firstly, commiserations on such a frustrating series of events. With regard to the emboldened bit above, this is a situation I find quite intriguing as it appears you were shafted through no fault of your own. Indeed, possibly through nefarious practice, since the information you were given about being the highest bidder was inaccurate. Maybe the software hadn't got the sophistication to tell you that you were the equal highest bidder. So you entered the live bidding under the mistaken belief that you were the only high bidder, and that the absence of further bids meant you'd won it. Really unfortunate. I definitely agree about photographs and numbers/letters to border teeth. They can be incredibly misleading. I've bought one or two thinking they were a rare variety, then in hand it's a huge disappointment as your hunch proves wrong.