Quote:
Originally Posted by Peter_Spaeth
There are days I'm pretty pessimistic and have come close to abandoning this thinking, but overall, I think at least some substantial part of the hobby still views most stuff done to cards as something they would want to know about.
And yes, it's a slippery slope, and there's no perfect definition of what is material alteration and what isn't that will satisfy everyone, I get that. But that doesn't invalidate the overarching point. I can have a valid general principle even if I can't perfectly and consistently apply it in every case. And anyhow, disclosure is the perfect solution, let people decide for themselves if they care.
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I definitely vote for your disclosure requirement.
At the same time, a couple of cautionary tales come to mind, where disclosure has become meaningless:
1) In the great state of CA, there are disclosures on just about everything about how it may cause cancer. They've grown so ubiquitous that they're meaningless. I could see a situation where just about every card includes some throwaway disclosure like, "This card may have been altered by a previous owner." Obviously, once it's everywhere, it starts to lose its potency, and buyers would probably no longer care.
2) As one of my accounting professors used to say, "If you want to hide something in your financial statements, put it in the footnotes, because no one ever reads them." While it's not a thing today, it's not inconceivable to have a long list of boilerplate for every item at auction. If the boilerplate is long enough, you could disclose just about anything in there, and no one would ever read it.
Just to be clear, I don't condone card doctoring. I don't doctor cards myself (except in industry-approved fashion, like trimming down a card that is intended to be hand cut, like a 71 Bazooka). And I do support disclosure of any work done to a card, because knowing is half the battle.
But sometimes I do like to poke the bear. And in this case, I do worry that disclosure might not lead to the outcomes we might hope to accomplish.
10-21-2024, 05:24 PM
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