The Fed says this is a cube of $1M. They're off by half a million
For all we know, the middle is just air and crumpled-up old newspaper.
I think this is the answer. I suspect the exhibit designers had a cool idea for a display, did a rough estimate of the area needed and then commissioned the exhibit builders to make the big metal-framed cube. Either they made an error in their calculation or the innate variability in the size of stacks of used bills threw it off. It's also possible the exhibit designer simply decided a bigger cube which filled the floor to ceiling space would be a better visual. Which would be unfortunate because, personally, the exhibit concept I'm more interested in is "$1M dollars in $100 bills fits in this area" not "Here's $1M in bills." The first concept is mildly interesting while the second is just a stunt.
Regardless of the reason it's off, I think it's most likely there's only $1M of bills in the cube. The folks responsible for collecting and destroying used bills tend to be exacting in their auditing for obvious reasons. So when the exhibit designers got $1M in used bills approved and released, that's exactly how much they got. It also stands to reason that they'd design the cube a little bigger than their calculated area requirement to ensure at least $1M would fit (along with some method of padding the interior) - although >50% seems excessive for a variability margin, so I still think it was an aesthetic choice or calculation error. Of course, one could do a practical replication to verify the area required with $10,000 in $1 bills.
Regardless, it's an interesting observation and a cool counting program to help verify.
Still, it does seem like it would be cheaper to rebuild the case than to add $500k to it. Maybe it's easy for the Fed to acquire more cash as long as it's guaranteed not to be spent.
Other than that, coins are cheaper than bills on the long run, because they last longer. It would be cheaper for the US government to stop making $1 bills and have people use the $1 coins, but I guess old habits die hard.
(Or at least they used to; when I visited back recently many supermarkets had free trolleys! Can you imagine my shock?)
Is this not a thing in other countries? How do they get people to return their trolleys to the bays?
How do they get people to return their trolleys to the bays?
There is no external force compelling US shoppers to do so. This has led to the (in)famous "shopping cart theory"[0], first posited like this:
The shopping cart is the ultimate litmus test as to whether a person is capable of self-governing.
To return the shopping cart is an easy, convenient task and one which we all recognize as the correct, appropriate thing to do. To return the shopping cart is objectively right. There are no situations other than dire emergencies in which a person is not able to return their cart. Simultaneously, it is not illegal to abandon your shopping cart. Therefore the shopping cart presents itself as the apex example of whether a person will do what is right without being forced to do it. No one will punish you for not returning the shopping cart, no one will fine you or kill you for not returning the shopping cart, you gain nothing by returning the shopping cart. You must return the shopping cart out of the goodness of your own heart. You must return the shopping cart because it is the right thing to do. Because it is correct.
A person who is unable to do this is no better than an animal, an absolute savage who can only be made to do what is right by threatening them with the law and the force that stands behind it.
The shopping cart is what determines whether a person is a good or bad member of society.
It's a different story if the material value of the metal in the coin exceeds its face value - at that point it makes sense to go to a bank, change money into pennies, then scrap them and sell the copper. That would be bad.
But the reason pennies are a bad deal isn't because of their manufacturing cost, it's because their handling costs exceed the value of incorporating them in a transaction. Should a store go to the trouble of keeping pennies available, counting them, storing them, transferring them to the bank? Or should they round up change to the nearest five cents and take a 4c hit on each transaction where you'd have been able to use pennies? If your average transaction value is over a hundred dollars or so, like most supermarkets, and you only handle cash on one sale in 50 say, if handling pennies in your cash-management operation takes more than a few thousandths of one percent of your budget, it's costing you too much.
It's a different story if the material value of the metal in the coin exceeds its face value - at that point it makes sense to go to a bank, change money into pennies, then scrap them and sell the copper. That would be bad.
Well, that is highly illegal and not very profitable vs the amount of risk. You'd be better off doing almost any other crime.
https://taitc.buzzsprout.com/2186249/episodes/17383823-the-p...
I haven't been there but the plaque seen in the picture just says:
Have you ever wondered what one million dollars looks like? You don’t have to wonder anymore because you can see it right in front of you!
I would hope they at least used real bills they just took out of circulation for whatever reason but there can't be any real expectation.
It's a "stunt" only anyway coz a million in $1 coins would look way different. As would a million in 20s or 100s.
Maybe it's easy for the Fed to acquire more cash as long as it's guaranteed not to be spent.
The Fed doesn't acquire cash, it creates it. USD banknotes are liabilities of the Fed, but that concept only makes sense when somebody other than itself owns them.
And when something is budgeted for $1 Million, it is $1m nothing more nothing less
I'm not really familiar with accounting in English but is it really a liability in double-entry accounting?
Only if you're the central bank, but for them, it really is, yes. For everybody else, money held is an asset, since it's somebody else's (in this case, the central bank's) liability to them.
So this million USD might or might not have been accounted for, but it definitely does not need to be budgeted for.
Yes the Fed creates an entry in the balance sheet by convention but it’s basically just a formality to the currency creator.
It could be even cheaper if these were old bills than needed to be pulled out of circulation. In that case they'ed be paying money to dispose of them anyways.
Not sure if they still burn the plastic money, would be nice to imagine they dissolve it in acid and use it to make more money (but they probably can't because of the dyes, at least).
Maybe it's easy for the Fed to acquire more cash as long as it's guaranteed not to be spent.
Based on Fed policy since 2007, they may be happy to hand out cash especially if it's going to be spent.
"Money printer go brrr" and all that...
The folks responsible for collecting and destroying used bills tend to be exacting in their auditing for obvious reasons. So when the exhibit designers got $1M in used bills approved and released, that's exactly how much they got.
But who says that they didn't actually request $1.5M in used bills after doing the math of what it would take to make a cube. Or fill it up with $1M in used bills, and come back and make another request for $500k that also got approved...
I have a friend who works at a firm which specializes in engineering and constructing exhibits for museums and all kinds of public spaces. There's a whole industry ecosystem around doing this. They get brought in on contracts by design firms which specialize in permanent installation exhibits who get hired by the person responsible for exhibits at a museum or exhibit space. It's no different than most niche specialty industries. Even though it's comparatively small, there are still thousands of sites and hundreds of firms. People who do this specialize in it, develop long-term careers and have resumes they care about. Jobs for firms and people come by reputation and word of mouth. Delivering on time, on spec and on budget is crucial for survival. The facilities manager for this Fed building hired an exhibit space manager who developed a budget for this public tour project and then put it out to exhibit design firms for bids. The project was approved on a fixed budget and time frame. The overall budget the exhibit space manager submitted to the facilities manager certainly included the cost of the cash in the cube.
But the bigger reason no one was cavalier about just filling it up with $100 bills is that this exhibit is different because the exhibited artifact is of uniquely high-value (and unlike a Rembrandt, immediately spendable), so it probably had to have a security assessment and is very likely insured against loss (not just theft but fire/water damage etc). The cost of insuring and securing the exhibit was calculated before the budget was ever approved. Adding another 50% in cash would increase the insurance premium.
As a side note: In some countries, central bank employees are the only individuals that can actually hold non-paper M0 (or MB?) money, since they get paid their salaries into a central bank account, which are otherwise only available to commercial banks. This used to be the case in Germany and Austria, but has been phased out at some point, as far as I remember.
But even if Fed employees just get paid in regular old M1 demand deposits, that's money nonetheless.
https://hrreview.co.uk/hr-news/strategy-news/bank-england-cl...
"U.S currency is produced by the Bureau of Engraving and Printing and U.S. coins are produced by the U.S. Mint. Both organizations are bureaus of the U.S. Department of the Treasury."
But even if this exhibit was at a U.S. Mint site, your assumption doesn't account for how the real world works. The people involved in planning, creating and operating a public exhibit space like this on behalf of some museum, department or company are just regular employees who report to mid-level managers with careers in facilities management. I'm not an expert but if this was a U.S. Mint site, I'd guess that the bills on display would be technically 'retired' (or whatever term they have for bills that are removed from circulation). Since the Federal Reserve is a quasi-governmental organization, I can't really guess if these bills are similarly retired or simply cash, the time-value of which this exhibit space is carrying on their balance sheet. Either way, based on the way the real world actually works, it's almost certain the cost of this cash is very precisely tracked and accounted for on an audited budget that some mid-level manager is responsible for balancing right alongside the payroll for ticket takers, security guards and janitorial.
So it seems very likely to me that whatever money is in the cube is decommissioned.
An engineer or artist that reliably find ways to go 50% over budget and generate contract extensions is a highly sought professional amongst vendors that specialize in the public sector.
In gov work contract extensions are almost guaranteed, provided your company also have the civic spirit of contributing to our democracy with health campaign donations.
I think it’s better served to use this as an analogy of how the federal government handles money.
Though I do sometimes feel the pervasive casual cynicism we have everywhere today sort of creates a self-reinforcing cycle as it preemptively erodes trust.
The opposite of clarity is not self-doubt but curiosity. And unlike cynicism it's constructive because it's not afraid of being challenged.
See what happened there? A clear statement was made, but obscured because you mistook it for cynicism.
The absolute I'm talking about in the GP comment, is in reference to the clarity you are referring to in the GGP. You don't actually provide any example of said clarity. And I didn't refer to anything you said directly as cynicism past the point in the chain where you state your preference towards analogizing a museum exhibit to an over-arching pattern about the Fed's handling of money. That to me is indeed casual cynicism, and it provides no clarity, only hand-wavy oversimplification with a defeatist sort of appeal.
Since you don't provide any other example of a statement that I would consider cynical, which in your view actually provides clarity, I'm having to use my own imagination as to what kind of "clarity confused for cynicism" you could possibly be referring to. Those are the statements I'm talking about in the GP comment. And I completely stand by what I said there.
Let's say the cube gets damaged and needs to go for a repair or rebuild - real money would require emptying it under supervision and counting the bills, where as fake money can just be sent as-is to the contractor, and any visible shortfall can be made up with more fake money upon return if needed).
(In line with some other commenters, I'm more inclined to believe it's bills they've taken out of circulation than "almost finished" ones -- security features are built in throughout the process, not just an extra step at the end.)
If there is no reasonable way for the public to notice, why not make everyone's life easier by using fake money? That would be easier and cheaper.
Leaks can be dealt with by the legal system (pay people decently and make them sign an NDA in exchange not to disclose the bills are fake) which is much easier than actually keeping track of 1M of currency.
Simplest way to double check is if top and bottom corners have the same bill density.
If it's 50% too big, that's a serious mistake! They should, like, take down the exhibit until it's fixed. You can't just make one of the bars on a graph taller because it looks more impressive, or your pen slipped, or whatever else. This thing is inaccurate and they should fix it.
I'm more interested in is "$1M dollars in $100 bills fits in this area"
Here's $1,000,000 in $50 notes at the Reserve Bank of New Zealand Museum: https://fastly.4sqi.net/img/general/600x600/2817090_qnRbbX_q...
personally, the exhibit concept I'm more interested in is "$1M dollars in $100 bills fits in this area" not "Here's $1M in bills." The first concept is mildly interesting while the second is just a stunt.
They have that maybe 50 feet away. It fits in a briefcase. Also, $1 million in $20s.
This is actually not a million dollars in singles. It is over $1,000,000. The box was created with the wrong dimensions by the contractor, but they still decided to fill it, display it, and claim it is $1,000,000. > > Source: Tour Guide at the Chicago Fed
[0] https://old.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/2f9sp7/one_million_do...
Conclusion: Low, unless you're willing to take only a fraction of the face value.
Thinking through it though - you might be able to get away with spending the cash overseas, where it will take some time indeed for the money to be under scrutiny by banks to see if the serial numbers are out of circulation. There's then problem of getting the money there without anyone noticing, then there's the problem of what kind of characters you're going to be defrauding overseas.
All told - probably a better idea is to use all that cleverness to make a 1.5 million dollars the good old fashioned way: Spending a few years saying, "Nothing from my end" on Zoom calls.
For me:
couple(formal) = 2
couple(informal) = 2-3
few = 3-5
half-dozen = 6
[gap]
ten-or-so = 9-11
dozen(formal) = 12
dozen-ish(informal) = 11-14
And don't get me started on "this Friday" vs "next Friday"...
"Next Friday" is always a week+ away. If it's Tuesday and I say "next Friday", I ALWAYS mean the day 10 days away.
If someone says "next Friday" to me and they mean the one in a few days I'll look at them like they're crazy.
I use "<day> week" in conversation, but I'd say it's falling out of favour. I mostly use it with my parents.
From context you might know if it seems like they know how to use the phrase, but I always struggle to understand these quirks, perhaps because I heard these terms as an adult and haven’t used them much myself, or been exposed to them and the context enough to immerse myself in the colloquial usage by diffusion.
This is close to weird constructions like “x is deceptively y” like “the dog is deceptively large” which, without already knowing the size of the dog, makes me feel like a dunce because I don’t know while not giving me enough specificity to know if the the largeness is what is deceptive or just the perception of the largeness. It’s a syntactical tarpit.
I use "<day> week" in conversation, but I'd say it's falling out of favour. I mostly use it with my parents.
I am a native English (US) speaker, and I think it’s a British English thing perhaps, as I heard it all the time in Australia, along with other week-related terms like fortnight.
What if the person saying that means “Friday this week” sometimes and “Friday next week” other times?
Well, I suppose they could, but then what if they meant Thursday?
“Friday week” is surprisingly unambiguous. It always means “count forward from today until a Friday, then add a week”. Its partner is “Friday coming”, which is “count forward until a Friday”.
> What if the person saying that means “Friday this week” sometimes and “Friday next week” other times?Well, I suppose they could, but then what if they meant Thursday?
“Friday week” is surprisingly unambiguous. It always means “count forward from today until a Friday, then add a week”. Its partner is “Friday coming”, which is “count forward until a Friday”.
That’s good that it’s unambiguous to you, as you happen to be correctly interpreting the meaning from the words as written, but I don’t read the context the same way, as in, your reading doesn’t always read as written, when I’m doing the reading. It comes naturally to you, it seems, but less so to me, if I can explain.
To me, “Friday coming/this coming Friday” is just as underspecified because it communicates explicitly ambiguously that which is definitively known due to unknown knowns and/or unknown unknowns: you don’t know if I know what day it is today or not, and on days I haven’t been outside yet, I may not know if it’s AM/PM or midnight or noon. I could think I know what day it is and be honestly mistaken, leading me to believe that the next/coming Friday is a day away, as in tomorrow, but miss that it’s already Friday today, making the listener think I mean a week from now, when I mean right now for events taking place on the night of the day in question.
I also think it’s ambiguous what “coming/next Friday” means, because it’s obvious that the one coming up this week is coming up, so it seems too on the nose to refer to it as such, which makes me think that it’s a week from now, but this time, they actually do mean the Friday a few days from now.
Someone upthread mentioned "half ten", which is similar: if you're familiar with the idiom, you know it unambiguously means half past ten, but if you're not, you can't be sure that it doesn't mean 9.30 (or, for the literalists among us, 5.00).
Anyone telling you that you're wrong for not understanding it, or that you should start using it even though those around you are unfamiliar with it, is being silly; but I don't think anyone here is doing that.
is being silly; but I don't think anyone here is doing that.
I think it’s silly that English has these quirks, and it’s silly to engage with them as points of argument, which isn’t what I mean to do, but rather to show how my own thought process works, silly it may be. It’s okay to embrace silliness in the environment as long as it isn’t detracting from understanding. This thread is exploring the words, not arguing with each other or trying to convince the other, so it’s not at cross purposes to me. But I think I agree that there may be no disagreement?
Let’s not let the perfect be the enemy of the silly. ;)
I think the main thing I was responding to was this --
That’s good that it’s unambiguous to you, as you happen to be correctly interpreting the meaning from the words as written, but I don’t read the context the same way, as in, your reading doesn’t always read as written, when I’m doing the reading.
-- which I (perhaps wrongly) took to be arguing against, or slightly misunderstanding, the claim of the person you were responding to. I don't think they were claiming that the words as written are inherently unambiguous, and I don't think it's a question of reading the context; I think it's just an idiomatic phrase that has a fixed meaning for those who natively use it. It's a bit like a dialect word; it's only ambiguous in the sense that people who don't speak the dialect won't know how to interpret it.
(It could turn out that I'm factually wrong about this, and that there are different groups who use the phrase in mutually contradictory ways! But so far I've only seen a split between groups who use it to mean "the Friday after this coming Friday" and groups who don't use it at all.)
“Friday week” is surprisingly unambiguous. It always means “count forward from today until a Friday, then add a week”.
Well, no, the typical case would be that it means nothing at all and the other person thinks you're having a stroke. Zero potential meanings isn't actually better than two potential meanings.
You know what's really unambiguous? "Friday the 8th".
"Friday week" would ordinarily mean a week characterized in some way by Friday, but of course there can be no such week. There could be a "Good Friday week".
"Friday week" would ordinarily mean a week characterized in some way by Friday, but of course there can be no such week. There could be a "Good Friday week".
I think there was that one or maybe two times the Catholic Church changed the day or date? I don’t know much about it but that may have resulted in a week without a Friday, which would make the next one pretty good, when it happened.
(Yeah, it would be even better if it just made sense transparently and unambiguously to all listeners. But that leaves us with a complaint about idioms in general, not this one in particular.)
You know what's really unambiguous? "Friday the 8th".
Sorry, of which month in which year under what calender?
Moreover most people are surrounded by by people using the same calendar and don't clarify, it's an issue for travellers and data reconciliation across boundaries.
That said, it's the month and year that are most lacking from a simple { Dayname, day of month } pairing.
For that matter, the missing word could be this, as in “Friday (this) week” versus “Friday (that (as in the next one after the one contrasted with via the word this) week”. I have no way to disambiguate this, so I ask something like “Friday after tomorrow” or “Friday the 13th” or something. It’s hard being me at times, I’ll admit.
Next Friday is sometimes too ambiguous, you can never be sure you share the same definition with the other person. Is it the same as This Friday (the very next occurring Friday), or Friday Week (ie next week's Friday).
Maybe I should ask my kids...
The second Friday from today
What if it’s Friday where you are, but isn’t for me yet? Would that be a week from tomorrow or two weeks from tomorrow, for me or for you?
(a) I generally don’t schedule things in the middle of the night
and
(b) it’s well understood amongst my social circles that if you’re for some reason trying to schedule something at the end of a party at 2am Friday then for basically all purposes it’s still Thursday
—-
But also once time zones are involved it’s better to just give a date, time and zone for clarity. That doesn’t mean people need to apply the same to their personal life and use it even where shorthand is unambiguous.
I use it to mean, a time up to two years ago. She uses it to mean up to no more than a month.
I think the disagreement is because I have a better memory - two years ago does not feel so distant to me. It is a silly and fun thing to argue about, leading to some agreements on terminology:
A while ago - 2- 10 years
Back in the day - 10+ years ago
And just to troll her, I boldly make the claim, "just now" means any time between now and a week ago.
I'm no authority but to me using "the other day" as a phrase is trying to impart a rough reference to a point in time.
Which means we're talking in "day" timeframes where week or month wouldn't be suitable. I would expect "the other day" to be within a week, but accept no more than a month.
Similarly "some months ago" = probably less than 6 months but definitely no more than a year.
The world is a wonderful place and the ways we humans can confuse communication seemingly knows no bounds. But I don't want a proscriptive definition for each little casual phrase as I think this flexibility in language is why it keeps changing and being alive!
several = 5-10
handful = 10-20
Personally, after having worked in a hardware store, I always confirm. "grab me a couple of those please" - "is two enough, or do you need a few extra?"
I'm one of those people for whom a couple is 3-5, but never 2. I would just say "two".
It's more than several, but still a manageable number.
Use depends on context, like all language, and deliberately choosing a situation that doesn't suit the language will obviously result in confusion.
Anything that's a word instead of a precise number implies a range to me (eg, few, handful, several).
I don’t know where I got my idea of handful, but it probably came from how high I can count using the fingers on one hand. So far that understanding seems to work for me when other people say it as long as I do what you said and treat it as an approximation.
On the “several” topic, I used to think it meant “about seven” because of the shared “sev” prefix, but it didn’t take long to realize several has a much bigger range than that.
In practice my immediate response for "several" would be to use it interchangeably with "few". 3-5.
But all these comments make me think that maybe it should fill my [gap] at "seven-ish". I mean, the "seve" bit does kinda lend itself.
[0] Tangentially, several is from 'Medieval Latin separalis "separable," ' as in '(as in went their several ways)' . So to link it with "seven" would be a weird thing to do but I imagine this kind of thing happens with a living language.
[0] https://www.etymonline.com/word/several
As for "handful"... you and I are worlds apart on that one! :-P Hand has four fingers, five digits. So "handful" is 4-5 for me. But as other comments alluded, if the [thing] is a batch of small something (like sand) then it's simply how much you can grasp.
As I mentioned these words have surprisingly varied definitions between people! One of the wonders of a living language.
a couple is 3-5, but never 2
For me it depends on the formality. For example, a married couple is never more than two people.
The day I learned that the acidic feel of pineapples comes from it actually digesting you instead of the opposite is the day I stopped using them.
The day I learned that the acidic feel of pineapples comes from it actually digesting you instead of the opposite is the day I stopped using them.
Wait, what?
https://www.thespruceeats.com/flesh-eating-enzymes-of-pineap...
This of course led to much ridicule and many memes in the fandom, and Survivor even titled the seventh episode of that season "Episode Several". In post-season interviews the contestant is still adamant that several means seven.
I remember being confused as a kid what the difference is between a couple and a few. Turns out sometimes there is no difference.
I should say, at the start I wasn't married and had no dependents. Also, for large parts of those 20 years, I didn't need to own or use a car.
Yeah you're very much out of touch, what kind of income are you earning or is this more wishful thinking?
[0] https://www.investopedia.com/personal-finance/how-much-incom...
The tech industry is insane. While my "Nothing from my end" joke was tongue-in-cheek, it's parodying a very real dynamic.
to see if the serial numbers are out of circulation.
Cash cannot be invalidated like this. It would ruin the value of all cash since you could no longer trust cash from anyone. Only damaged notes are taken out and replaced by the government.
you might be able to get away with spending the cash overseas
Outside the US is probably the last place you'd want to pass those bills off. Besides the logistical problem of physically getting an enormous stack of $1 bills past customs... there's so much counterfeit US currency out there that the level of caution is extremely high. Just spent a couple weeks in Costa Rica, and USD is not accepted anywhere if it is even slightly torn, worn, or out of date by more than a few years. Maybe you could tip with it, but that's about it.
can't just tell the contractor to do a new box
They can. But if the delivered box meets the ordered specifications they will ask for extra compensation to redo it.
That plus cost of shipping back and forth.
That plus any possible time pressure around opening of the exhibit.
That plus the fact that the Fed can obtain bank notes for less than their face value. (If they are for example voided bank notes. But they can also just order prop money beyond the first layer if they want to keep their museum work and their official business separate. Which very well might be easier for organisational, accounting and security reasons.)
Plus nobody wants to admit that they screwed up the box order.
All these factors would point towards just stuffing the box with more “banknotes” and pretending that all is well.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rai_stones
The ownership of a large stone, which would be too difficult to move, was established by its history as recorded in oral tradition rather than by its location. Appending a transfer to the oral history of the stone thus effected a change of ownership.Some modern economists have viewed Rai stones as a form of money, and the stones are often used as a demonstration of the fact that the value of some forms of money can be assigned purely through a shared belief in said value.
...
Rai stones were, and still are, used in rare important social transactions, such as marriage, inheritance, political deals, sign of an alliance, ransom of the battle dead, or, rarely, in exchange for food. Many are placed in front of meetinghouses, around village courts, or along pathways.Although the ownership of a particular stone might change, the stone itself is rarely moved due to its weight and risk of damage. Thus the physical location of a stone was often not significant: ownership was established by shared agreement and could be transferred even without physical access to the stone. Each large stone had an oral history that included the names of previous owners. In one instance, a large rai being transported by canoe and outrigger was accidentally dropped and sank to the sea floor. Although it was never seen again, everyone agreed that the rai must still be there, so it continued to be transacted as any other stone.
First rule in government spending: why build one when you can have two at twice the price?
And I'm glad you didn't find it because that lead to a great post.
Or they just gave up ?
Or something else ?
Searching some terms from this PDF (not in Google) brings up https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-men-who-killed-google/, which has a clearer narrative.
As we say in my family: "close enough for government work!"
The box was created with the wrong dimensions by the contractor, but they still decided to fill it
This sort of implies that it was cheaper to just go with he extra cash needed than to do a cube with the right dimensions?
But then again it's the Fed, so they probably just printed more money. (Which also costs money, though?)
(b) Whovever hypothetically got that money would have 37% stolen by the government so they'd be left with about a million anyways. It's effectively a million.
The Fed is extremely rigorous in tracking these things. It isn’t a couple guys in a room playing casually with millions of dollars. Even the retired bills are thoroughly monitored and tracked through their destruction.
He then named it “take the money and run” and showcased what amounted to an empty frame.
The conclusion that something is off is still right in that case.
sums, averages, population, budgets, spending, rates.
Counting things is time consuming and error prone. Ask a casino. You can have 3 people count something and come to a different figure off by a few percent.
Seriously if someone says there's $1m in there, who is going to second guess? Thankfully this guy did.
Ask a casino. You can have 3 people count something and come to a different figure off by a few percent.
That seems a wildly unlikely idea: Despite having three people checking sums, their daily profits have a few percent unknown variability in them.
Banks of old would famously make their tellers stay late to track down rather trivial discrepencies, probably as a deterrent to carelessness.
Cite?
The real reason is that payment processors like visa have a large network which is both technically challenging to maintain and has a massive barrier to entry to replicate. There are competitors but these are typically for niche applications, some of which are operated by banks, but beating visa and mastercard at their own game is no small task.
In other words these businesses know that paying visa and getting paid late is worth it because they are losing well more than 5% to losses (bad accounting & theft)
NRF reports that total retail shrinkage in 2021 was 1.44% - from all sources.
The survey found that the average shrink rate in 2021 was 1.44%, a slight decrease from the last two years but comparable to the five-year average of 1.5%
Apparently the most recent survey was 1.66%..
https://invue.com/resource-center/blog/6-retail-shrinkage-st...
Assuming the process keeps a single counter running continuously, it would be 1000 minutes, not quite 17 hours of work to do a single pass counting with one counter. There's a maintenance interval though. Some of the counters will scan serial numbers, so you could probably confirm you saw 1 Million distinct serial numbers while scanning. Multiple counters in parallel would reduce the wall clock time, of course. And you might want to do multiple counts, sometimes bills stick.
You could also count the number of straps and take a random sample to count. While counting the straps, you'd probably notice any grossly miscounted straps. If any of the sampled straps are wrong, you would presumably increase the sample rate to confirm. Weighing groups of 10 straps is probably faster than counting, but I don't know how sensitive it would be (depends on how consistent weights of the strapping material is, as well as weight of circulated bills).
I wish I remembered more specific details, but I at least assume similar levels of capacity for bill counting and counterfeit detection are available to nation states. Verifying the cash would be even easier and faster than you're describing.
Pick any industry which revolves around something, I assure you there is a child-industry dedicated to providing the technology and infrastructure to count the things.
Heck, accounting, as a general purpose, applies to every profession, profession, is at its core, focused on counting things.
Hopefully this doesn't come across as argumentative. Your comment caused me to reflect on how you're right, we trust so much when it comes to numbers people tell us. But at the same time, we don't as evidenced by the vast amount of industry we dedicate to counting all that we do, whatever it is.
An audit just means "it looks like you are recording things" but it doesn't mean "it looks like you are spending money wisely.".
Patrons see "passed audit" and assume the agency is run well.
People from a "working class" background tend to see a massive pile of money, more middle class, a smaller pile, upper class maybe a cheque or a small stack of $100 bills or a bank transfer.
It's maybe one of the weirdest parts of the JBR ransom note (getting really off-topic now), "$118,000 dollars be placed into an "adequately sized attaché" consisting of $100,000 in $100 dollar bills and $18,000 in $20 dollar bills."
That would take up a really small amount of space, but if you're never seen that amount of money you might not know that (especially in 1996, pre-internet)
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Killing_of_JonBen...
Why, OP, why? How much self-awareness does it really take to realize JBR is a non-standard acronym people won't recognize? It almost feels like a superpower that I take an extra half-second to think about what jargon the average person needs to have defined.
Obligatory xkcd: https://xkcd.com/2501/
So you don't need to explain it by any specific failing of the OP, it's common among the lucid as well.
The amount written on the plaque is short by .5m
The comment we're all arguing about only says "50% shortfall" and does not say which side of the equation is short. So the word in that context merely means discrepency.
Maybe they did actually have the wrong idea about the story, but what they wrote does not say one way or the other, so there is nothing to correct and everyone is just picking a meaning and acting like they actually said more than they said.
English can't fabricate a missing identifier any more than any other language. There are no context rules that apply in this case to derive it indirectly, such as figuring out that "it" refers to something that was previously explicitly identified for instance, or anything like that.
There are most certainly context rules that apply in this case which clearly indicate 50% shortfall to be referring to the money.
In english, a short claim is equivalent to a small claim.
Otherwise, if the bills really are where they appear, then there would have to be some partial (cut) bills along the edges for everything to line up properly.
This would probably be a hard case for it! But would be cool to see how well it works.
If you are not getting 100% accuracy, contact us.
Ok, that's pretty a pretty good marketing line, I have to admit.
But I wonder about an app that can count things automatically, plus maybe also work out counts of 3D shapes by counting visible things and making estimates about packing ratios. A sort of "how many M&Ms are in the jar calculator" app. That'd be neat (and would ruin a fun game).
The post specifically says there's not a tool for counting red dots on an image
Oh really? Is that what it says? Let's take a look:
All I wanted was a way to click on things in a photo and have the number go up.
Those are the requirements. That's what the app is supposed to do.
I don't see "a tool for counting red dots" anywhere. The closest thing is this passage:
It's stupidly simple: upload an image, click to drop a dot, and it tells you how many you've placed[…] But somehow, nothing like it existed.
You linked to an app that places its own markers (by way of ML) and then gives you a count of those—not a count of the ones that you put down. That so obviously fails the requirements.
Pass in your image with red dots, and the red dots will be counted by the ML-counting thing just fine. It's a minor variation in approach to solving the problem, and that's OK: When confronted with a problem, people often jump to specific solutions too quickly, and miss out on better or more general approaches. This is quite pertinent in this specific case, as well - you can ask the ML-counting thing to count the rectangles instead of the dots, and perhaps save yourself all the clicking in the first place.
This is quite pertinent in this specific case, as well - you can ask the ML-counting thing to count the rectangles instead of the dots, and perhaps save yourself all the clicking in the first place.
Are you just dead set on totally missing the point of what the author of this post is doing? You keep leaving comments that suggest you don't understand the requirements at all. Let's put that aside. Here's a dead simple question:
Have you successfully used the app to do the thing that you're saying that it will do when you try to use it?
Last week I was watching that episode of Better Call Saul where he carries $7M throughout the desert for 36 hours, and realized his bags were supposed to get ripped 4 minutes into the process.
--
Calculation by Claude:
Here's the calculation:
A single US banknote weighs about 1 gram regardless of denomination.
So 70,000 bills × 1 gram = 70,000 grams = 70 kilograms = 154 pounds.
That's quite heavy - equivalent to carrying around a large person!
Those 70,000 bills would also represent $7 million in cash
* edit corrected the pounds calculation
In case you wondered, $1M in cash ($100 bills) weigh approximately 15.4 pounds (about 10 kilograms).
Your answer is incorrect. You asked Claude to calculate $7M, which netted 154 pounds, but you then divided it by 10 instead of 7 to get the weight of $1M.
Further, it's quite irrelevant here, as the display involves $1 banknotes, not $100 bills. The correct answer, without the need for an LLM, is: 1 million bills times one gram = 1 million grams = 1,000 kg = 1 metric ton.
I realize the fed is not technically a government agency.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Independent_agencies_of_the_Un...
The for-profit ones (Amtrak, USPS, etc.) are called SOEs.
The loan-related ones (Freddie Mae) are called GSEs.
Although an instrument of the U.S. government, the Federal Reserve System considers itself "an independent central bank because its monetary policy decisions do not have to be approved by the president or by anyone else in the executive or legislative branches of government, it does not receive funding appropriated by Congress, and the terms of the members of the board of governors span multiple presidential and congressional terms."[11]
Although an instrument of the U.S. government, the Federal Reserve System considers itself "an independent central bank because its monetary policy decisions do not have to be approved by the president or by anyone else in the executive or legislative branches of government, it does not receive funding appropriated by Congress, and the terms of the members of the board of governors span multiple presidential and congressional terms.
So many reasons this might be exactly $1,000,000 but not sum up on the outside.
That said, this is also something I would have spent way too much time overthinking, so I thoroughly enjoyed reading the blog post.
Very portable.
(Yes, it's cotton not wood, but the weight of solid cotton is hard to find, and probably not much different.)
Cross-check: bills are apparently ~1g apiece. That predicts $1M in $100-bills is 20.8 lb. Very close.
[1] https://www.snb.ch/.imaging/flex/jcr:778b68b3-1344-4872-93d7...
Similarly, I always love it when small women smuggle suitcases full of gold in movies, when it would be heavy enough to break the handle off if it weren’t painted styrofoam.
It would've been much worse if it was under though.
In some way, this is how 1000 piece jigsaw puzzles will never be exactly 1000 pieces.
What??
TLDR if you don't have a half-hour: puzzles are usually cut with the pieces on grids, and not all aspect ratios are conducive to that with all piece counts. Like, you might want a 2:3 shaped puzzle with 500 pieces, and 18x28=504 is close enough.
Who gets anything out of giving people the wrong idea about what $1m would look like?
If you are commissioning the thing to be built, why might you want it to either contain more than $1m, or be hollow and larger than what $1m really is? What purpose does an incorrect display serve? A correct display already serves almost no purpose in the first place, now make it incorrect.
None of the reasons I can think of would seem to apply here:
Disinformation.
Advertizement.
Art, where the artists point was to make it wrong and never tell anyone.
Simple goof up? This one is at least plausible. Someone estimated wrong, got a local shop to build an expensive cube(1), well we got the cube we got, fill it and get the display up.
(1) That will have to be quite thick polycarbonate or glass, not cheap. In fact, that right there might expose that there is at least some kind of fakery inside, if the glass is not at least as thick as the aluminum frame, then it's not strong enough, neither is the frame for that matter if it's what it looks like. So if the glass and frame are as thin as they look, then there is some kind of internal skeleton.)
Maybe there is some other significance we've lost since it was built. Maybe the $1m was never the interesting point originally. Maybe instead the dimensions or maybe weight of the cube were the interrsting thing, and this is really something like "1000 gallons of $1 bills" and that just hsppens to come out to 1.55m.
How did he guess so well? He was there very early on and he noticed a stack of cardboard trays stacked up in the corner of the venue. He counted the number of trays, multiplied by 24, and submitted that number. :-)
EDIT: I forgot to mention he was a functional alcoholic who drank beer constantly. It is appropriate he won it, but I'm not sure if was good for him.
I created a 3D model of the vase in Blender, used some Python to get the interior area, and then found a figure for the average volume of M&Ms to get a count.
my guess was off by about half, but was very close to many of the other engineers' numbers, to the point where we asked them to recount. the recount revealed I was closest and it turns out they had used a method other than counting for the original number (they weighed them or something... it was way off).
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BhFNiPsVRoM
[2] https://fiji.sc/
There are some clunky old Windows programs, niche scientific tools, and image analysis software that assumes you’re trying to count cells under a microscope...
I discovered this when I had to test accuracy in a pose estimation model for a computer vision project involving crowds being counted by CCTV. Turns out in low-res imaging (even the best CCTV is a bit rubbish at long range due to wide angle lenses and so on), pose estimation models beat almost everything else for counting. Except... they're still not accurate.
I would spend hours going through hundreds of frames, counting people by hand, and then I'd compare with different pose models, and found they were always out, but they were out by the same amount.
Some models got confused by reflective surfaces, so would double count. Others would be out by ~20% every time for various environmental factors. The good thing about this is you could then easily show calibration. "OK, in that space, whatever the model says, half it, that's a better count", or "OK, in this image from this camera whatever the number the model says, increase/decrease it by 20%, and that'll be more accurate".
We ended up through human calibration being able to provide much more accurate "models" per camera than the models themselves.
It did mean counting hundreds of people per frame for hundreds of frames for dozens of cameras though... I had to abandon the trackpad for a mouse and just got settled in for a few days with DotDotGoose. Colleagues were surprised I had the patience for it. :-)
https://biodiversityinformatics.amnh.org/open_source/dotdotg...
Hilarious and well written exercise, regardless. Kudos!
Hi yes, I'm Mr. Museum and although we called it the $1,000,000 cube it actually contained about ~$1.5m. This man has stolen $500,000. Send him to the gulags
Imagine them opening up the cube and seeing the Styrofoam in the center... I'd be like; "Typical Fed behavior! Fractional reserve banking... Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, this is exactly the same thing they've been doing with your paychecks."
I think where the metaphor falls apart is the part where they bribe the jury into delivering a guilty verdict; offering them jobs at Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan, each earning $500k per year.
Notice in this photo how the side of the cub right/side - the bills are not oriented in the same direction as on the other sides.
us dollar size: Width: 6.14 inches (155.956 mm) Height: 2.61 inches (66.294 mm) Thick x100: 0.43 inches (10.922 mm)
How close over a million dollars can you make this cube?
The exhibit picked a cube ~50 inches. 8 wide = 49.1 inch 19 tall = 49.6 inch.
But this assumes that having a perfect "cube" of bills was the artistic vision.
Though having an app handy might make sense sometimes.
Once you realise that the error bars are small (and it was mostly intuitive for me, probably looking at counting up to a hundred, so a few percent off is not a big deal), you stop worrying about the uncertainty as much ;-)
Jack Binion's sister, Becky Behnen, famously sold million-dollar display of one hundred $10,000 bills in '99 for (a rumored) $4 million to the currency dealer Jay Parrino.
(Supposedly) one of those $10,000 bills was posted on eBay for $160,000.
I find it funny they still advertise having a display of a million dollars, but in boring modern notes. Didn't even bother to look for it even though I walked past the place like 15 times on a Vegas trip, and literally went into the building for a cheap breakfast.
The Bureau of Engraving and Printing had a similar glass box filled with uncut sheets of $10 notes when I visited in 2016.
It’s stupidly simple: upload an image, click to drop a dot, and it tells you how many you’ve placed. That’s it. But somehow, nothing like it existed.
A small related story.
I once was an intern on a bioscience laboratory that was working with maize. My very intern-y job was to count the number of white spots on the leaves of like ... thousands of plants.
Improvement # 1 (not by me but a colleage), we scanned the plants, on a regular flatbed scanner, they were small enough to fit in.
Improvement # 2 (this one was me), the plan was to automatically count all the spots with CV but it wasn't really working that well; it was back in 2012 and the algos were not that good, they still missed some and we needed to be as accurate as possible. I ended up doing a web app very similar to the one in the article, you just loaded an image and start tagging stuff and at the end it gave you a count for each type of spot you tagged ...
... then we spent weeks scanning and tagging plants full-time :'(.
"No-no-no, that won't do. The cube is too small! Its puny size doesn't convey the crushing might of the American dollar! Hm. Do we have bigger dollars?""I'm afraid we don't, boss."
"Let's inflate it!"
"The dollar?"
"Not the dollar, idiot, the cube! With air.
"On second thought..."
4o: that's $25.7 million
Is the idea of the exhibit that the cube is empty other than the outside edges?
Mr beast routinely has a million dollars as a prop and it's significantly smaller than this, and cubed values go up FAST
1: we want a big cube
2: has to have a million dollars
3: should be stacked neatly.
Given the bills are so evenly arranged on the lower surface there's only so many squares you can produce with the bills like that. 8x19 or 6x17 . 6x17 is noted as close to 1 mill but they only remove 2 stacks from the 100 side. so now it's not a cube, you'd come under if you trimmed it down to a cube.
so stacked flat seems 8x19 is the smallest square you can make for one side for a cube of cash that fits mil. so they did that and just filled it up.
It might be hollow, there's certainly a void. There's some comments about the border but you can clearly see that the bills don't go behind the border so the corners are squared in, which means there's probably a weird void of some sort because it's not really a normal cube.
It should be between 0.002-0.004 in. thick, so each band per bundle is about 0.004 to 0.008 thick. Might take off a little bit of your overage.
43x43 piles of 541 coins each make 1000309 coins with a pile height of 541*2mm = 1.082m, while the width would be somewhat less than 43*26.5mm = 1.1395m with a hexagonal packing.
So just over 1m cubed, a little smaller than the bill version. But at 8100 kg, tons heavier.
(A party put them in front of the parliament to launch a campaign for universal basic income)
Anyway, the weight would be 8.1 metric tons.
https://www.usmint.gov/learn/coins-and-medals/circulating-co...
The cube is almost certainly hollow, to cut weight and cost.
It's the idea of what a cube of $1m would look like. It should at least fulfill that requirement faithfully.
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=xz.camera.obje...
Like if I had a box with an apple and pear in it, I could put up a little plaque saying “There is an apple in this box” and it would be a completely accurate statement
But I DO know, the most of HN is probably autistic and mostly agree on an explanation that completely defies Occams Razor.
The truth imo...
Its mostly a million, fake, stuck to the sides, padding in the middle, with a few bills missing from the top for mementos from the last installer in the room. Every now and again some more bills are thrown in if people start asking too many questions.
Which ironically represents the FED accurately.
“Hey so… we’re $550,400 over budget on the million-dollar cube project.”
The cube did not cost $1.5M+. These are decommissioned dollars diverted from the normal process. The Federal Reserve is responsible for destroying currency. These bills are worthless. The only expense here is building the walls of the cube.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/jens-haaning-take-the-money-and...
[1] https://www.tagesanzeiger.ch/wert-nutzung-gewicht-6-fakten-z...
Of course the tracking of this information down to that level would be pretty pointless. The moment someone breaks a 20 the connection to the recorded transaction is lost, and there's no one who can prove you didn't break a 20.
tracking of this information down to that level would be pretty pointless
Maybe pretty pointfull tracking shadow economy. When Bob sells moonlight stuff his clients will more often than not simply go to the ATM, withdraw the sum and hand it to him. Bob will then buy at shop with big bill. Shop owner will deposit bill at bank..
All I wanted was a way to click on things in a photo and have the number go up.You’d think this would already exist, a browser based tool for counting things.
Just want to point out that these apps do exist, perhaps not browser based. For example:
Bluebeam Revu can also do visual counts for specific symbols/images provided the drawings aren’t too busy, that is one use of AI I would like to see (automated takeoffs) so I don’t have to click thousands of light fixture symbols every year. One problem is that construction drawing are 2D and height information isn’t always present so measuring distance and accounting for rise and drop is difficult to automate, I use google maps street view frequently to gather height info (calibration is based off a standard commercial door at 80” x 36” or a CMU at 8” tall) if I don’t visit a site. Due to this and other factors, I think accurate construction estimating will be difficult to automate completely with LLMs, but the process will definitely be sped up by them.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K_Foundation_Burn_a_Million_Qu...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L9SzDFGbsFI&pp=0gcJCdgAo7VqN...
Edit: Actually I reckon they deliberately oversized the container a bit so it's easier to pack the cash in. You don't want to build it too small! (Relative budget notwithstanding). Another design constraint it has to be a cube, and has to fit nicely to the dimensions of the banknotes on the front face (aspect ratio and size) without having a big gap on one side.