Crawtomatic

I don't see any reason why either of these coins should be graded.  If you see something I'm not seeing please be sure to elaborate.

I'm not David but I don't see a clear question.  Are you looking for a 1974 50c DDO variety here?

On 7/23/2021 at 9:22 AM, The broke bullion boys said:

Unfortunately we can use the online form in the UK

That's unfortunate you can't use the online form in the UK.  Odd that they wouldn't use the same front end.

Having submitted to NGC & CGC a few times I'd even add that the CGC online forms for both comics & cards is far superior.  Hopefully with the new holding company we'll see some new efficiencies and consistency in the webservices space across all of the companies.

....however, the company I'm with is part of a private corporation holding company style with 5 individual entities.  While we've all shared the same IT resources for at least a decade each company is allowed to maintain the look and feel of their web presence individually.  So it's not a given that NGC will incorporate elements of the CGC online form or that the UK office will conform to stateside standards.

On 7/19/2021 at 3:41 PM, Alex in PA. said:

In what was, perhaps, the most publicized case of a surgical mistake in its time, a Tampa (Florida) surgeon mistakenly removed the wrong leg of his patient, 52-year-old Willie King, during an amputation procedure in February 1995.

Unfortunately, I've seen medical reports & claims that involved things like this more than once in my career.

I think it's the norm these days, but not sure if it's independent hospital/ASC policy, but somebody should be marking the body part or area with a non-toxic marker while the patient is still awake and prior to anesthesia so that there's no dispute later from whomever starts the procedure.

On 7/14/2021 at 4:55 PM, Jason Abshier said:

I always bid max amount I wish to pay for a coin I do not come back to see if I won and do not or engage in battle of bidding 

Same.  I've sold on eBay (various items, not just coins) since 2001.  And one thing that hasn't changed, which I'm sure applies in real world auctioning, is that bidders make it emotional even when the item at stake is not worthy.  And by worthy I mean one of those items that only comes to market periodically and has no equal.

Shoot, I can't even tell you how many times I've had an item listed as Fixed Price for 2 months then sent it to auction and it sold for well above the Fixed Price listing because 2 guys got into a battle at the end.  

World coins can be fun for investigation if they're older.  For me at least, as there are obscure but noticeable die varieties to be found amongst the shrapnel.

Don't feel pressed to make an offer on your great nephews collection.  Personally, I created a rule for my son back when he was 8 or so that "you don't make money off family".  I.e. don't view family members as customers or clients.  You know how grandparents are, and he was delightfully "selling" grandma wheat cents which she probably turned around and gave back to him a week later.  It works for me since I want him to understand the value of doing fair business.  He gets it and he understands fair market value.  And I certainly don't mind passing along an item I get a great deal on at cost to him if it helps his collection grow.

There's a few ways you can approach the great nephew collection that'll satisfy the desire to investigate coins.  Help identify and facilitate a sale in exchange for choice of certain coins.  Allow him to set the asking price if he wants to sell them (to you or otherwise).  Or just help identify and help him collate the collection into something easily sortable if he agrees to pay for the supplies.  

5 hours ago, Revenant said:

and what a die mark is

Whenever I've seen mention of a die marker it's in relation to the small striations left behind after a die is re-polished to extend life.  OP did provide some pics of some of them on the coin he has which is helpful but then it's a whole other level of investigation to try to track down known die markers for a year.  It's not my area of expertise at all, but I imagine it's easier on older coinage where less dies were used to meet demand.

I think the major mints would avoid any type of coinage commemorating the "Defeat of Covid" since most of the major countries have similar discourse amongst their citizenry as we've had the last few pages.  Sales would be miserable.

But I do expect there'd be some sort of commemorative to nursing professionals, essential workers, or vaccine production.  The Caduceus symbol is timeless, detailed, and would lend itself well to a large format medal.

1 minute ago, VKurtB said:

China’s attempt to thin the herd of chronic smokers. LOL!

  Last I heard Philip Morris' biggest market for cowboy killers and the rest of their cigs was east Asia/China.

Let's file this under a convoluted conspiracy of the Chinese government to stop their citizens from sending to money to America via tobacco sales.

3 minutes ago, VKurtB said:

I am NOT surprised that someone in NYC would have a different take on COVID. They have had a horrible experience. By contrast, a guy from central Pennsylvania who has lived on Interstate 81 and Northern Alabama during this pandemic really has to search around to make sure it’s not all a scam. The impact has been near nil. Alabama is OPEN OPEN. Schools were open for in person instruction the ENTIRE 2020-2021 school year. Businesses are open and masks are seldom seen. 

Completely agree. In Texas here, prisons & cities is where we saw the most impact & disruption.  So speaking to coworkers that lived in rural areas it was easy to see that they had a different perspective.  Then the virus is mild in most cases...  And talking heads on tv/radio have no problem exploiting innate tribalism...  The last year has been divisive when we could have been working on being cohesive.

I've still got friends that are ultra-safe in their approach and though I may initially think they're overreacting I then remind myself that I don't know the circumstances of their family's health and risk.  

11 minutes ago, Quintus Arrius said:

what you've provided us with is a veritable alphabet soup of causes of death extending back five year.

Unintentionally, what he provided does illustrate excess deaths if you look at just the Totals line.  Basically, 2020 had 503,976 more deaths than 2019.  That's good for a 17.6% increase over 2019.

2017 had 2.5% more deaths than 2016.  But then 2018 & 2019 showed less than 0.1% growth in death rate.  I'd argue there's a good correlation that the additional deaths were related to the only thing new to the environment.

12 minutes ago, gmarguli said:

But the government needs the death total to be high. Look at what the government did:

Don't take it that I'm here defending governmental functions on this action.  But what I recall from the last year+ is that death tolls and active case rates were all first collected at the states' respective DSHS levels then funneled up to CDC for national reporting.  There were many cases where reporting lagged in months, at least here in Texas.

But I think this may be a different discussion.  You give me a spreadsheet with 50,000 lines of data and 20+ data points and I can tell you whatever story you want with it.  The various "governments" (local, state, & federal) didn't control the data capture of the original reports.  They only controlled the collection & dissemination to the public.

I'm probably 60/40 or better when it comes to trusting that the majority of people within a public service position (the government if you will) are actually working within the best interest of the public.  In which case, I would place blame not on the government for reporting the data they have showing high death rates.  If I wanted to question the accuracy of the death rates I'd first look at the hospitals, VA agencies, nursing homes, etc... and audit their collection methods as well as their best practices to assign correlation from a death to a cause.

On 7/8/2021 at 2:42 PM, gmarguli said:

Fact: People who have/had COVID, but died due other reason were still called "COVID deaths" because the government was reimbursing hospitals at a significantly higher rate for COVID victims. Therefore, the official number is likely greatly inflated.

Interesting statement.  I've got 20 years in workers' compensation program administration specific to medical cost containment for insurance carriers.  I think about half the states at this point have figured out it's easier to let somebody else do the work on fee guideline creation so the systems have been transitioned to be based on CMS policy & fees.  Anyhow, just to point out why I find it interesting.  It's not an untrue statement, but there's a lot of nuance to it and at face value I'd say it's very misleading.  Let's unpack some of this.

1. Any payments issued to healthcare facilities from the federal government is through the CMS (Medicare) system.  In 2020 there were 62 million beneficiaries on Medicare.  That's only about 18-20% of the population.

2. Facilities are paid for treatment, not deaths.  Death cause is reported elsewhere to another organization but is unrelated to the billing for admission & treatment.  Facility reimbursement comes down to 3 types essentially:  Outpatient treatment (less than 24 hour stay; OPPS system); Inpatient (IPPS); and Rehab/Long Term Acute Care (similar to inpatient reimbursement).  Outpatient treatment reimbursement isn't based on diagnosis so we can toss that out as unaffected.  An MRI for a broken leg is an MRI no matter how it was broken.  But for Inpatient stays & LTAC there's a Diagnosis Related Grouper method used for reimbursement that basically lumps many different treatment types into a master category.  "Pregnancy", "Burns", "Disorders of Kidney", etc...  So ventilated folks would've fallen under a DRG for "Diseases & Disorders of the Respiratory System DRG Code Range 163-208".  DRG codes were established by Medicare back in the '70s so the payment methodology is the same as it was before regardless of why somebody was ventilated.  *To a certain degree.*

3. DRG coding reimbursement can be impacted by a few items.  Principal Procedure Code, Severity,  & Complications mostly.  So coronavirus isn't taken into account here either.

4. I did find where the statement's nugget of truth is, though.  The CARES Act (Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act) passed into law 3/27/2020.  The CARES Act created a 20% add-on to be paid for Medicare patients with COVID-19.  Is 20% significant?  Well, it's a nice enough net profit margin to run most companies so it's not insignificant.  I'm not sure how CMS administered that but there's a few ways.  They could've looked at diagnosis codes present and just added it on at the time of payment.  The ICD-10 code for coronavirus was created 3/18/2020 so that's possible.  Or they could have done it post-payment through a backend reconciliation process which I think is more likely.  Why bother investing dev time in catching it all on the fly when you could just run a report later and assign it to a specialized team of folks to handle.

Reporting it all has been a significant pain in the butt though.  While the disease was spreading we were all playing catchup to capture the data, identify the claims, and then later report the data.  Government moves slow so they've asked us in the "big bad insurance company" world to provide them with data calls routinely because they can't pull it out of their data warehouse effectively.  So yeah, there's overinflated numbers and underinflated numbers.  But that's the case with any of the big data out there when you expect thousands of entities to capture it all consistently and report to one organization.  Even with regulation & oversight, consistency across that many hospitals is never going to be 100% accurate.

anyhow....now I've bored you all to death.  I may even report it as coronavirus related.    But my takeaway is that facilities that received Medicare payments did receive more money for reporting an admission as coronavirus related. 

We could ask more questions like:  what's the breakdown in Medicare patients treated to non-CMS patients?  who was the organization collecting & reporting deaths?  how many facility administrators felt the risk of fraud charges and prison time was worth the cost of an extra 20%?

Also, thanks for giving me a nice little research activity on a slow Friday afternoon.  That was satisfying.

On 7/5/2021 at 2:08 PM, MAULEMALL said:

I haven't been gone...

Wait.  You mean reports of your demise were merely exaggerations?  

<calamity ensues>

11 hours ago, James Zyskowski said:

One thing I’m doing is watching video and reading forums and information on line about the minting process. Also I’m learning about this wonderful artist name of Dan Carr. Moonlight mint. He posts now and again on the other forum. I’m too new to-this forum to know if he’s here and I lack the armor to jump in too much with that group but I do read it.All this is rather eye opening. Welcome! We’ll learn together 

You'll find a lot of conviction and opinion on the topic of Daniel Carr and Moonlight Mint in these forums.  Do a little search and grab some popcorn.  There's a lot of reading to be done. 

Can I answer the 5oz silver ones?  Do those count for the question?

I'm no expert but I think I've plucked out 2 67's in the past 2 years.  Just going off memory here's things I can remember.

1. Luster.  I *feel* like a coin with beautiful cartwheel luster gets a pass in other categories.  It's that eye appeal.
2.  Obverse:
   1. Clean cheeks.  The cheeks get contact marks & chatter a bit.  A "clean" minute contact mark isn't a killer but it'll need to be lower on the profile, like towards the chin.
   2. well defined lines in the hair, especially the area north of the ear.
3. Reverse:
   1. defined feathers on the eagle's breast.  it's a high point so it gets smushy a lot here.
   2. a moon with a full rim.  the lower left side of the moon tends to not get a full strike on worn dies.

I'm sure others can provide more details. 

36 minutes ago, Quintus Arrius said:

@lehigh96 I do not ever recall seeing any encapsulated coin from PCGS with such a high certification number:  90+ million.  My 🐓🐓🐓 all bear #'s in the 37 million range from only two years ago. They are only up to 43 million or so.

Can you, or anyone else for that matter, tell me when the PCGS coin was certified?

Peculiar perhaps but in PCGS Coinfacts there's quite a few with cert numbers in the 80 million range for this year/mintmark.

https://www.pcgs.com/coinfacts/coin/1941-d-5c-fs/images/84011

17 hours ago, Quintus Arrius said:

I am having difficulty reconciling the plainly stated information provided in the link above with the comments made by Lem E, DWLange and RWB. Evidently, something has changed. Maybe grading standards have evolved. Or have simply been overlooked or ignored. One thing for sure: if I can see it with my own two eyes 👀 it would be disingenuous to claim otherwise. Then again, it would be sheer folly to advertise it.  Someone with clout will politely point out there is no prior official Mint record supporting my claim of owning a Jefferson nickel with 7 Full (clearly distinguishable) Steps, irrespective of grade.

6 millions ways to reconcile, choose one:

1. The author intended MS (Mint State) to represent coins minted for commerce - not in relation to grading scales.
2. Consider me naive, but in any focus that relies on subjectivity I would expect changes over time.  You may call that evolution if you like.
3. An 8 paragraph educational article is likely not considered by a grader when making a determination.  Nothing to overlook or ignore.
4. There's not 7 steps on a Jefferson reverse.  Irrespective of grade, year, mintmark, or composition.

I shouldn't have responded but my earlier comment was to the OP in a "hey, I thought the same thing" way.  I didn't mean to see it twisted into an Encyclopedia Brown adventure.  If anything, the educational article could use a postscript outlining Mr. Lange's succinct and satisfactory answer that strike designation could apply to numerical grades if warranted.

20 minutes ago, Lem E said:

I know I have read about having to be MS to get a full step designation in a couple different places. I’ll have to see if I can find that info again. Obviously doesn’t apply here at NGC. Thanks again for all the help everyone.

I'm sure I've read it elsewhere before.  Thought it applied to NGC strike characteristics as well but that was probably me misinterpreting the usage of "Mint State" in the article below as "mint state 60-70 range" instead of as "Business Strike".

That's a nice curious find, though.  Certainly worth a pickup.

https://www.ngccoin.com/news/article/6752/learn-grading-full-steps-nickels/

"Since 2004, NGC has used the 5-Full Steps (5FS) and 6-Full Steps (6FS) designations for qualifying Jefferson Nickels. These designations are only used with MS (Mint State) Jefferson Nickels. Proof coins are generally expected to have full steps."

Posted in the wrong subforum but somebody might be able to help anyway.

My google might be broken but what's a chibi coin?

1 hour ago, Alex in PA. said:

Who is kidding who on this?  I can find not other place, business, treasury, country or mint that is suffering a silver shortage.

pinehurstcoins.com

Eh, I suspect they're dumbing it down by calling it a global shortage.  The alternative would be to explain spot price vs. physical price and silver futures to the masses when that's not the point of the email.

23 hours ago, Freedomsweetfreedom said:

Everyone talks about getting stuff graded but they also complain it takes to long. Am I right?

When do people not complain?

It takes a little time but in one of your posts on this thread you're comparing your 1/4 fractional gold with a PCGS AU55 graded one for sale.  If you do that kind of thing you're going to be disappointed when you get offered a fraction of the going price for a RAW coin.

3 minutes ago, Hoghead515 said:

Boy do I feel dumb.    I need to start slowing down and reading the fine print before I pull the trigger on these coins from now on. Is it usually bad to buy from sellers who sell by stock photos?  

I mean, it depends what you're looking for.  I sell a lot of mint set singles using stock photos and the target market is album collectors & fillers.  Returns & refunds accepted no problem.  (Generally just say keep the coin and I'll refund it.)  Anything of real value is always listed with an actual photo though.

But you can always reach out to the seller ahead of time and ask for an honest opinion of the stock on hand and perhaps a photo.  I've had folks ask me to send the best on hand, that's not a problem.  I've had folks tell me they're upgrading an album so looking for anything gem or better.  I enjoy prescreening for them and letting them know if I won't be able to help or if I have a coin on hand I think will work (and send a photo).

There's a lot of options and I feel like most sellers aren't full time professionals so you can get a feel on what to expect from them after a quick question.