It's just absolute nonsense, and demonstrates that my judgment of Mr. Ricketts several years ago was accurate. He really had no idea what I was talking about, and doesn't understand statistical distribution. His going on about "ringing a bell at every 500 books" and "quotas", which no one even remotely suggested, is ample demonstration of that. No one was talking about production defects, either, but he devoted the majority of his post to that. His patronizing explanation also didn't help.
He was in way, way over his head, and it showed. He simply wasn't capable of understanding my point...I imagine he's still not.
Also by the way...people
and complain about "tone" and "civility", I'd like to point out that people can be perfectly uncivil, while maintaining a veneer of civility...like the above post by Mr. Ricketts.
How so?
"Apples and oranges."
That is a very rude, very dismissive comment to make to ANYONE. They're basically telling you that you're so stupid, you can't tell the difference that is as obvious to THEM...and by implication, should be to you and everyone else...as the difference between an apple and an orange.
It tells me that Mr. Ricketts, despite whatever experience he may have gained while working at CBCS, never studied the results of slabbing, over thousands of examples, like many people have. The difference between a 9.6 and a 9.8 can be, and occasionally is...maybe 2-10% of the time...nothing. What is a 9.6 on one day would grade a 9.8 on another. So, for him to suggest that the difference between a 9.6 and a 9.8, vs. the difference between a 9.8 and a 9.9 is an "apples to oranges comparison," demonstrates his lack of real world experience with slabs on the other side of the slabbing process.
As I pointed out before, the ratio of 9.6 to 9.8 at CGC on the census is roughly 1:2...2 9.8s for every 9.6. This seems about right, especially given the facts that:
1. CGC overgives out the 9.8 grade, for reasons I can speculate, but which are, nonetheless, quite true.
2. Submissions are dominated by 1980-up books, which are, themselves, dominated by ultra high grade examples being the only ones generally "worth" submitting.
3. The pre-screen process, which tells us how many 9.8s we get, but doesn't tell us how many "not 9.8" (or whatever the pre-screen is set at) books were in the submission.
The material difference between an average 9,6, an average 9.8, and an average 9.9....books that are representative of AND DESERVE those grades...is very, very little. But, they do exist.
HOWEVER...the RATIO of 9.8s to 9.9s is still an astonishing 100:1. For every 9.9 slab, there are 100 9.8s.
That distribution is completely out of whack, especially when one considers the absolute number of 9.8s submitted...approaching 2 million at this point...the actual PHYSICAL difference between a typical 9.8 and a typical 9.9...AND the ratio of the next grade down, 9.6 to 9.8. A realistic distribution would be somewhere in the neighborhood of perhaps 10 or 20 to 1, based on the 1:2 relationship of 9.6s to 9.8s. That would make 9.9s roughly 5 to 10 times rarer than 9.6...not the 50 times rarer that they are right now.
And it has absolutely nothing to do with "quotas" of any sort. That should be the NATURAL distribution, given the actual differences in physical preservation between those 3 grades, and it would be, except both companies artificially hold back the 9.9 and 10 grades.
So if you ever see someone tell you you're making an "apples to oranges" comparison...you ought to tell them those are fighting words...
and complain about "tone" and "civility", I'd like to point out that people can be perfectly uncivil, while maintaining a veneer of civility...like the above post by Mr. Ricketts. 