[HN Gopher] The Fed says this is a cube of $1M. They're off by h...
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The Fed says this is a cube of $1M. They're off by half a million
Author : c249709
Score : 791 points
Date : 2025-07-01 16:22 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (calvin.sh)
(TXT) w3m dump (calvin.sh)
| sdenton4 wrote:
| Here's the go-to for counting stuff in pictures of lots of stuff:
| https://countthings.com/
|
| This would probably be a hard case for it! But would be cool to
| see how well it works.
| zefhous wrote:
| Uh... in-app purchases for $24 for a 24-hour license? $80 pay-
| per-count? The AI marketing images... Ugh.
| MadnessASAP wrote:
| I get that they're selling to industry, not consumers. They
| also seem to be offering some pretty strong guarantees
| regarding accuracy. Nevertheless that pricing is bananas. An
| _uncountable_ number of bananas.
| stavros wrote:
| "If you are not getting 100% accuracy, contact us."
|
| Ok, that's pretty a pretty good marketing line, I have to
| admit.
| Dilettante_ wrote:
| That's like some P.T. Barnum stuff, because how the heck
| would you know the count is off? That would imply you
| already have a way of counting.
|
| "If your parachute fails, your next jump is free!"
| stavros wrote:
| You'd have a person check some of the counts from time to
| time, I imagine.
| fragmede wrote:
| It's only EUR24 for a 24 hour period, and I'd pay that to
| know _exactly_ how many bananas their pricing is!
| Veen wrote:
| Counting is very time-consuming, important to get right, and
| easy to get wrong. I expect quite a few businesses are happy
| to pay that for fast, accurate counting.
| cxr wrote:
| This is yet another link to an app that doesn't do what the
| author of the post actually specified.
| sdenton4 wrote:
| The post specifically says there's not a tool for counting
| red dots on an image, and there absolutely are. From the
| side-counts, you still have to extrapolate to a volume, but a
| specific highlighted sub-problem is well addressed by apps.
| cxr wrote:
| > 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.
| nyeah wrote:
| Do they claim it's packed solid all the way through?
| c249709 wrote:
| not explicitly, but the implication is strong. otherwise the
| cube would be almost any size
| florbnit wrote:
| The cube is "almost any size" it's literally overshooting by
| 50%
| jerf wrote:
| Just for fun, the maximum sized cube you could make with a
| single layer of them facing flat and then entirely hollow on
| the inside would be about 41 meters or so on a side. https://
| www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=sqrt%28%28area+of+a+uni...
| stavros wrote:
| I can't argue with the math, but intuitively that just
| seems really small? It means that you can lay down 166,000
| $1 bills on the floor of a very small flat?
| dogecoinbase wrote:
| 41 meters is the height of a 13-story building.
| padjo wrote:
| A flat with very high ceilings?
|
| Edit: even still 41x41 floorspace is a very large flat.
| kaffekaka wrote:
| The square _side_ would be 41 m meaning ~1600 square
| meters per face, if I read correctly. So quite a large
| flat.
| stavros wrote:
| Oh, the side? That makes sense, I thought 41 sqm.
| jerf wrote:
| Sorry, yes, 41m-on-a-side cube, not 41m^2-sided cube. The
| outermost square-root in the expression takes the area of
| one side of the cube (which is the area of the dollars,
| divided by 6 to account for needing to cover the 6 sides
| of the cube) and pulls it down to the cube's length of
| one side.
| stavros wrote:
| Yeah, you said it correctly, but I'm not a native speaker
| and brainfarted "41m on a side" into "each side is 41
| sqm". I thought "face", rather than "edge".
| ourmandave wrote:
| I assume there's a really big ink bomb in the center.
| 0cf8612b2e1e wrote:
| I assume that at least 51% of the non visible bill parts have
| been destroyed. Then you do not care if anyone tries some
| elaborate heist.
| MisterTea wrote:
| Someone needs to call/email the museum and ask what is actually
| in there because it don't add up.
| kevin_thibedeau wrote:
| There are additional stacks hidden by the aluminum framing.
| Everything is flush against the glass so there are a few more
| inches on each face not counted in the 102 figure.
| c249709 wrote:
| do you know that or just speculating? I couldn't figure it out
| at the museum.
| alfalfasprout wrote:
| I was curious and looked and yes, there are absolutely bills
| that seem to go into the framing. It's not a solid aluminum
| bar it looks L shaped in person.
| Nextgrid wrote:
| That still wouldn't account for a 50% shortfall though?
| barrkel wrote:
| The article talks about 50% extra, not a shortfall.
| Brian_K_White wrote:
| Then another way to say that is that the claim is short.
| jjk166 wrote:
| Not in english it isn't.
| delgaudm wrote:
| Is _over_ by $500k, not short.
| suspended_state wrote:
| Doesn't this depend on the point of view?
| boston_clone wrote:
| Well, sure, things probably look different when you're
| standing on your head.
| Brian_K_White wrote:
| Listen, if the money is greater than the claim, another
| way to say the exact same thing, without even standing on
| your head, is that the the claim is less than the money!
| suspended_state wrote:
| Yes, but is it as efficient?
| alberth wrote:
| It's not a _shortfall_.
|
| The OP says it totals $1.5M ... and _extra_ $0.5M
| Modified3019 wrote:
| I wonder how many read the title, and assume it's about
| being short. I certainly did.
| pcthrowaway wrote:
| I had the feeling it would be a shortfall but had enough
| doubt to read the article.
| voxic11 wrote:
| So you are saying its even more incorrect than the article
| claims?
| reverendsteveii wrote:
| so it's off by even more than a half mill?
| johnfn wrote:
| That's not an answer to the problem - it just makes the
| discrepancy greater.
| pavon wrote:
| I'm guessing that is an illusion due to refraction through
| thick (plexi)glass.
|
| 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.
| uticus wrote:
| i'm amazed he accurately placed the dots. if i were to use the
| png on the site without dots, i'd have trouble placing them in a
| lot of areas.
| cultofmetatron wrote:
| obligatory
|
| https://www.youtube.com/shorts/n6dJB8OcA8I
| FerretFred wrote:
| >So yeah. They're off by 50%.
|
| Ah, that'll be the allowance for inflation/devaluation.
| pirate787 wrote:
| or allowance for vendor graft if they billed for $1mm
| tehwebguy wrote:
| This is a cool tool. Did the same thing (manually, just counted
| and switched colors whenever I hit 100) when I vacuumed up like a
| thousand yellow jackets from inside our walls. Couldn't believe
| it when I hit 500, would have never estimated so high.
| Jabrov wrote:
| I bet it's not cash all the way through to make it look bigger
| voiper1 wrote:
| He did say he doesn't know if the center has cash inside... but
| a hollow core definitely defeats the display purpose!
| ziofill wrote:
| " _What if it's hollow? [...] A money shell. A decorative cube. A
| fiscal illusion. The world's most expensive pinata_ "
|
| lol
| rafram wrote:
| Re Dot Counter, cool work, but charging me $3 to download an
| image with dots on it is just silly.
| c249709 wrote:
| still cheaper than https://countthings.com/
| rafram wrote:
| That's 0.80EUR per count and it's automatic. Still seems too
| expensive.
| tonymet wrote:
| counting things are a huge intellectual blind spot. For some
| reason, when people hear a figure, they accept it as gospel.
|
| 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.
| burningChrome wrote:
| Makes you wonder if all those pallets of cash we sent Iran
| really contained all the money we said it did. Also makes me
| wonder how you count money that arrives on pallets like that?
| Do you set up a warehouse full of money counters?
| pjc50 wrote:
| Iraq, and no. Almost certainly the biggest undetected heist
| in history.
| ahazred8ta wrote:
| 2016: "The Obama administration is acknowledging its
| transfer of $1.7 billion to Iran earlier this year was made
| entirely in cash" -- We froze a bunch of their money in the
| 70s; Obama unfroze it.
| absoflutely wrote:
| ...as part of the Iran nuclear deal that Trump reversed
| for no reason.
| toast0 wrote:
| A quick look around says commercially available bill counters
| count around 1000 bills per minute. Low cost counters have
| batch sizes of around 200 bills. Larger capacity counters are
| available.
|
| 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).
| klank wrote:
| While doing work for hospitality optimization software, I
| had the fortune of seeing some of the cash management
| infrastructure at gaming trade shows.
|
| 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.
| lrivers wrote:
| <Cue Borat impression>My wife</end> works at a legit, long-
| established, high volume retail store. Some of the time she
| keeps books there. They just weigh money, it's accurate
| enough for them.
| klank wrote:
| People, as a group, trust numbers. Individuals, often, do not.
|
| 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.
| tonymet wrote:
| accounting / auditing is a good example. I review public
| finances. Many public agencies don't pass audits. Even those
| that do, wouldn't pass the smell test.
|
| 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.
| IAmBroom wrote:
| > 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?
| tonymet wrote:
| why do you think businesses willingly pay visa 3-5%? *and get
| paid a month in arears ? * and take on more tax liability
| jjk166 wrote:
| Because they were spending more money on having their
| personnel tracking down these mistakes. /s
|
| 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.
| giancarlostoro wrote:
| Do we truly know if the Middle is all dollar bills and not
| filler?
| c249709 wrote:
| there's only one way to find out
| aetherson wrote:
| Hacker News heist plan initiated.
| jihadjihad wrote:
| Not until Nicolas Cage gets involved.
| lapetitejort wrote:
| We need to sneak a CT scanner, into the Fed...?
| mh- wrote:
| This felt like the most obvious explanation to me as well.
| Maybe the artist's vision for it was a solid cube of cash, but
| it ended up needing a structure inside to support the thing.
|
| 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.
| giancarlostoro wrote:
| Agree, I loved the post, but I also wonder if there's more
| nuance to it that we're unaware of.
| delfinom wrote:
| Artist should have been fired. If I'm being shown a stack of
| $1 million, it better be a stack of 1 million of they are
| gonna be talking with the fishes.
| m-hodges wrote:
| Did you read the article?
|
| > What if it's hollow? You can only see the outer stacks. For
| all we know, the middle is just air and crumpled-up old
| newspaper. A money shell. A decorative cube. A fiscal illusion.
| The world's most expensive pinata (but don't hit it, security
| is watching).
| whatshisface wrote:
| Ron Paul is still alive and in some small way, just got his dream
| of auditing the fed turned into reality.
| tromp wrote:
| I can't help wondering how big a cube you'd need to fill it with
| 1 million $1 coins.
|
| 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.
| cgriswald wrote:
| Edit: Well, damn. I got about the same as you did and rechecked
| my math and got it wrong.
|
| Anyway, the weight would be 8.1 metric tons.
|
| https://www.usmint.gov/learn/coins-and-medals/circulating-co...
| jo-m wrote:
| This is what 8 million (Swiss) 5c pieces looks like:
| https://cdn.unitycms.io/images/BasDL2iBqV3BLXFiXIPDdm.jpg?op...
|
| (A party put them in front of the parliament to launch a
| campaign for universal basic income)
| taeric wrote:
| Since the rows counted were not uniform, why assume all 19 under
| each of them is? As such, it wouldn't have to be hollow, but
| doesn't have to be neatly packed in the center, either.
|
| Hilarious and well written exercise, regardless. Kudos!
| nativeit wrote:
| Sort of defeats the purpose of visualizing $1M. I'd call this
| art project flawed in its execution, at best.
| taeric wrote:
| Ish? Look up the optimum packing of squares. :D
| alberth wrote:
| I don't think the cube is stacked as uniformly as the OP thinks.
|
| 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.
|
| https://calvin.sh/blog/fed-lie/cube-side.jpg/
| tadfisher wrote:
| I count 8 stacks in that orientation, which is exactly as
| described in the article.
| mslansn wrote:
| Not surprised that the Fed overspent a project by 50%.
| umanwizard wrote:
| I doubt this cost them 1.5M out of their real budget, lol. My
| guess is these are not legal tender in some way, e.g. worn-out
| bills that would otherwise be destroyed.
| tracerbulletx wrote:
| The fact that this is not obvious to everyone is a bit
| disturbing to be honest..
| HPsquared wrote:
| Probably has a tidy facade, with a jumble full of gaps in the
| middle.
|
| 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.
| wat10000 wrote:
| I'd bet on "hollow." Either they overestimated how large the cube
| would have to be to contain that much, or just decided they
| wanted a bigger cube than they needed.
| jt2190 wrote:
| > 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:
|
| https://www.countthis.ai/
| gowld wrote:
| Count Apps:
|
| https://apps.apple.com/us/developer/dynamic-ventures-inc/id9...
| quickthrowman wrote:
| I spend more time counting things than most people. I use the
| 'Count' tool in Bluebeam Revu (an architecture/construction pdf
| editor) when doing material takeoffs for construction
| estimating. You need to do a lot more than just count when
| doing a takeoff, so there really isn't much use for a counting
| specific tool in my industry.
|
| 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.
| mv4 wrote:
| It's always amusing how people easily carry $1M cash in the
| movies.
| tbrake wrote:
| well, using larger denominations helps.
| sschueller wrote:
| I think you could tell if the bill was purple (Swiss franc
| [1]) instead of green in the movies...
|
| [1] https://www.snb.ch/.imaging/flex/jcr:778b68b3-1344-4872-9
| 3d7...
| c249709 wrote:
| if it's in $100 bills you can fit it in a suit case easily with
| lots of space left
| Taek wrote:
| In the movies, it's $100 bills, which are considerably more
| portable than $1 bills.
| jolt42 wrote:
| Would you roughly say 100x more portable?
| IAmBroom wrote:
| Using somat's estimate of 49" on a side, it would roughly
| weigh the same as 49^3/100 cu in of solid wood. Given a
| range of 0.01-0.03 lb/cu-in for pine, and choosing the
| midpoint: 23.5 lb.
|
| 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.
| nixpulvis wrote:
| Those are probably $100 bills. So you only need to fill a bag
| with 100 bundles. Easily fits in a duffle bag I'd assume.
| ffin wrote:
| the cube is full of $1 bills
| kingkawn wrote:
| Compress the cube by 100x and you could probably carry it
| steezeburger wrote:
| Those aren't stacks of one dollar bills though.
| labster wrote:
| Yeah, that many pennies would be really heavy.
|
| 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.
| mzur wrote:
| If you need a web app to mark/count things in images, search for
| "image annotation" tools. I know first hand of a tool that is
| around since 2009 and still maintained.
| crazysim wrote:
| I wouldn't be surprised if the bills themselves are marked with
| specimen or something on the non-visible side. Maybe they're also
| artificially worn bills produced during bringup or testing.
| burnt-resistor wrote:
| I agree. The "money" probably has the shape and appearance of
| money, but isn't legal tender out of concern risk management
| and theft.
|
| 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.
| nativeit wrote:
| Someone else had mentioned these were retired dollar bills
| (aka, otherwise headed to the incinerator) but I don't know the
| provenance of this information.
| lupusreal wrote:
| I expected it to be 50% short because whoever assembled it swiped
| half of the cash assuming nobody would ever count. 50% _over_ is
| hilarious.
| rkagerer wrote:
| I'd like to see this or a similar follow up project memorialized
| onto a small plaque beside the exhibit.
| citizenpaul wrote:
| Meanwhile I'm in a debate about the effectiveness/competence of
| government workers on another post.
|
| I realize the fed is not technically a government agency.
| fires10 wrote:
| I do not understand the claim the Fed is not a government
| agency?
| darkstar999 wrote:
| > 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.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Reserve
| burnt-resistor wrote:
| They're an IA.
|
| 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.
| chrisweekly wrote:
| IA - Independent Agency
| scrozier wrote:
| Thank you. While abbreviations are handy for those in the
| know, it's so helpful for general readers if one takes a
| moment to spell things out.
| Dilettante_ wrote:
| Respectfully, there's a Wikipedia link.
| whatevertrevor wrote:
| The Federal Reserve is an independent bank. An important
| detail the current US administration does not like.
| citizenpaul wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Reserve
|
| 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]
| JadeNB wrote:
| Why in the world would you use KaTeX to write a number that is
| just being used as a number, not part of a mathematical formula?
| But, if you must, at least use some tricks to make the spacing
| work correctly: since TeX treats `,` as `mathpunct`, you need to
| use something like `\$1{,}000{,}000` (or change its catcode) to
| get something that renders as a plain old non-KaTeXed
| "$1,000,000" would.
| c249709 wrote:
| thanks for the tip! I just wanted all the numbers to look the
| same
| JadeNB wrote:
| Oh, that makes sense! I was so caught up on the article
| beginning that way that it didn't occur to me that there'd be
| formulas later on, and it makes sense to want the numbers to
| appear the same in and out of formulas. Thank you for fixing
| the spacing, and nice article!
| dlinder wrote:
| Audit the Fed (cube)!
| ar_lan wrote:
| Did they ever consider there could be a hollow core, or filler to
| account for the discrepancy?
| HelloMcFly wrote:
| That's in TFA
| IshKebab wrote:
| Yes, I used my eyes to read the article and I can confirm that
| they did consider it, because they wrote it down in the article
| we are discussing.
| thinkingemote wrote:
| The exhibit rotates. It will have the same kind of structure
| shown at the bottom through the middle of it at the very least,
| and probably a sort of skeleton for stability.
| 8n4vidtmkvmk wrote:
| Yes, they did.
| mrandish wrote:
| > 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.
| johnfn wrote:
| I think this is the most reasonable answer on the thread. As
| amusing as it is to see everyone come up with zany solutions,
| it is most likely something boring like this.
| ninetyninenine wrote:
| What's the point of disseminating the technical reasoning
| behind it?
|
| I think it's better served to use this as an analogy of how the
| federal government handles money.
| colejohnson66 wrote:
| They handle money by putting them in cubes of glass?
|
| Non-snark: Because it's fun to theorize.
| ninetyninenine wrote:
| agreeed
| whatevertrevor wrote:
| Because we still care about assigning sensible priors to
| whatever we think is the truth? You can use this to
| "analogize" how the feds handle money, but if they were
| actually careful with the money but a bit misleading on the
| space $1m would take, that's a different and less egregious
| error. Ignoring the space of potential possible explanations
| to make your analogy stronger is just confirmation bias with
| additional steps.
| ninetyninenine wrote:
| I'm half serious. Yeah I see the point. But more important
| to me is the analogy.
| whatevertrevor wrote:
| I see. That is fair, no judgement.
|
| 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.
| quantadev wrote:
| Yeah, there's no way they piled the cash into a square on the
| floor and then measured it and then had the box made based on
| the measurements. They had the box made FIRST based on rough
| calculations, being sure to over-estimate it's size on purpose,
| knowing they can fill the interior with cardboard boxes as
| needed to space things out.
| a2800276 wrote:
| Considering they handle and transport a lot of money, it's
| safe to assume they don't meet to make back of the envelope
| estimations concerning weight and volume.
| quantadev wrote:
| Yeah by "rough calculation" what I mean is that since the
| Fed knows the ratio of volume to bills, they might have
| intentionally made the box too big.
| gpm wrote:
| > 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...
| mrandish wrote:
| Because going >50% over-budget isn't a good way to further
| anyone's career in exhibit design, engineering and
| construction.
|
| 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.
| roywiggins wrote:
| It _is_ the Fed though, does money actually "cost"
| anything for them? They're the ones who make the money!
| mrandish wrote:
| Per this site:
| https://home.treasury.gov/services/currency-and-coins
|
| > "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.
| rtkwe wrote:
| If it's just diverting bills that were heading to be
| destroyed (not impossible looking at the end of the bills
| on the non strapped side they look pretty rough) they're
| not worth a million any more they're just scrap. If you
| were extra paranoid you could even partially destory the
| bills and leave only the outer edges needed for the
| display.
| ekholm_e wrote:
| My wife works at the Fed, and I can confirm that 1) the
| Fed does decommission/retire bills and 2) that whole
| process is very tightly controlled. The retired bills are
| typically shredded, and if you go on a tour of a Fed
| bank, you can get little baggies of "Fed Shreds."
|
| So it seems very likely to me that whatever money is in
| the cube is decommissioned.
| a2800276 wrote:
| Fun fact, people who work at the Fed just print their
| salary at the end of the month.
| necovek wrote:
| That'd be fun, but I am pretty sure they get it
| electronically into their bank account -- as in, no money
| is ever made for their salaries, just like most white
| collar workers.
| lxgr wrote:
| Demand deposits in bank accounts are also money.
|
| 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.
| komadori wrote:
| The Bank of England used to offer personal bank accounts
| to their employees, but they phased it out after 2015.
| Not sure if these accounts were exactly the same as those
| used for central banking though.
|
| https://hrreview.co.uk/hr-news/strategy-news/bank-
| england-cl...
| doubled112 wrote:
| While not money, and probably not even real, those
| numbers in a DB still keep my kids fed. Tasty tasty DB
| numbers.
| elzbardico wrote:
| I reckon you're not very familiar with the world of
| government spending.
|
| 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.
| ggreer wrote:
| It could be that they measured a stack of bills sitting on a
| table, then did the math to make a metal frame to contain
| $1,000,000. But they didn't account for stacks compressing
| under the weight of higher stacks, and it wouldn't look as nice
| if the top part of the cube was empty.
|
| 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.
| grogenaut wrote:
| It's the cost of paper not the dollar value. Also only the
| outermost bills need be real the rest could just be paper, or
| voided bills or whatever. But accounting can cover it. It's
| not gold or pennies where the currency costs what it is worth
| to make
| kasey_junk wrote:
| Coins don't cost what they are worth to make.
| tempestn wrote:
| Pennies do. (More, actually.)
| bandofthehawk wrote:
| Pennies and nickels cost more to make than they are
| worth.
| eloisant wrote:
| It's only true for the smaller denominations, 1c and 5c
| for USD.
|
| 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.
| adolph wrote:
| There is an excellent recent "The Answer is Transaction
| Costs" podcast episode (The Price of Pennies: Make or
| Buy?) outlining a proposal to save money by buying back
| coins instead of making new ones.
|
| https://taitc.buzzsprout.com/2186249/episodes/17383823-th
| e-p...
| dyauspitr wrote:
| What do you mean? The currency in there is spendable isn't
| it?
| tharkun__ wrote:
| What leads you to believe that?
|
| 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!
|
| That does not say nor in my mind even implicate that
| these would be valid dollars. It just wants you to be
| able to "see" what a million would look like. For all we
| know they printed fake money for it that uses the right
| paper for thickness and such and the right face value
| print but is otherwise fake. It would still meet the
| stated description.
|
| 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.
| rtkwe wrote:
| That ignores the other option which is it's not solid and
| they just filled the empty space with foam or a wooden box.
| dyauspitr wrote:
| Which destroys what the exhibit is trying to show.
| jjk166 wrote:
| The exhibit only claims this is what a $1M cube would
| look like.
| logifail wrote:
| > 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...
| lxgr wrote:
| > 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.
| meta_ai_x wrote:
| No. We have a double accounting system. For every $1 it
| creates, it has to create an equivalent liability.
|
| And when something is budgeted for $1 Million, it is $1m
| nothing more nothing less
| lxgr wrote:
| Not sure when exactly the Fed accounts for USD printed -
| i.e. only once distributed to somebody else, or as soon
| as they're printed and still owned by the Fed - but even
| in the latter case, asset and liability work out to
| exactly zero.
|
| So this million USD might or might not have been
| accounted for, but it definitely does not need to be
| budgeted for.
| jacksnipe wrote:
| I mean, that's a very corporate accounting way of looking
| at it. But countries are not corporations, or even banks,
| and the abstraction is so leaky it's pretty much never
| worth using.
| lxgr wrote:
| Even for corporations and individuals it works that way.
| If you write a check to yourself, it represents both an
| asset and a liability whose effects on your equity
| exactly cancel out.
| hosh wrote:
| Double entry accounting has properties that allow it to
| track the flow of money, not just its state (current
| balance), so it useful for countries as well as
| corporations.
| throwpoaster wrote:
| Does the USG not use quad entry?
| NovemberWhiskey wrote:
| So, in your mind, when the Federal Reserve prints a
| dollar bill - what's happening in accounting terms? I
| don't think your understanding of the way this works is
| consistent with the concept of money supply.
| tharkun__ wrote:
| Not your parent but in my mind, when the Fed prints $1
| million to replace old bills they take out of circulation
| and give then to people to stuff into a cube then in
| accounting terms basically nothing happens at all.
| Hamuko wrote:
| I'm not really familiar with accounting in English but is
| it really a liability in double-entry accounting?
| Wouldn't generating money basically be income? So if you
| sell $1000 worth of stuff, you credit the sales account
| for $1000 and debit your cash/bank account for $1000, and
| the account's basically a bottomless pit where you can
| draw as long as you're generating income.
| lxgr wrote:
| > 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.
| Thrymr wrote:
| Yes, but the liability account in the Fed's case is
| /dev/null, isn't it?
| stephen_g wrote:
| For the Fed though that liability is just a line in a
| spreadsheet.
|
| Yes the Fed creates an entry in the balance sheet by
| convention but it's basically just a formality to the
| currency creator.
| xnyan wrote:
| I'm certain there's policy that allows for national mint
| to create non-spendable exemplars of currency in a way
| that does not count as cash.
| coliveira wrote:
| Most probably these are voided notes, they actually have zero
| value because they were taken out of circulation.
| jjk166 wrote:
| It costs about $.032 to produce a 1 dollar note, so an extra
| 500000 new bills would be about $16k.
|
| 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.
| daemonologist wrote:
| The compression of the bills under their own weight might
| account for the excessive margin - a lone $100 bundle, even
| compressed by hand before measuring, probably takes up more
| vertical space than the ones in the cube.
| hidelooktropic wrote:
| But a bundle is a bundle
| deepsun wrote:
| I think those bills didn't go through decommissioning process
| for used bills. It's much easier to just keep $1M on passive
| cash balance forever. Yes, they lose about $5k/month on lost
| interest rate, but a bank can afford it.
| hgomersall wrote:
| These are bank notes so they are a liability of the fed. Them
| holding them doesn't mean they have more money, they just
| have less liability.
| necovek wrote:
| $5k/month or $60k/year is roughly 6% of annual conformal
| interest rate -- is there any bank that will provide that
| much return in USA today? (There are investment funds which
| usually do, but there are no guarantees there)
| deepsun wrote:
| I used AFR [1] that are from 4% to 5%. One cannot give
| loans lower than that. Any mortgage is higher than that.
|
| [1] https://www.irs.gov/applicable-federal-rates
| tmnvix wrote:
| > 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...
| Retric wrote:
| Rather than counting error it's likely the ~1 ton weight of
| stacking bills like this would deform the lower sections and
| possibly stress the glass depending on thickness. So rather
| than random filler there may be internal structural bracing so
| the outside of the cube looks nice and neat.
|
| Simplest way to double check is if top and bottom corners have
| the same bill density.
| trhway wrote:
| may be they started with a $1M and with time the bills weight
| compresses the bills, and they have periodically to add more
| to fill the newly forming emptiness. Kind of inflation.
| moralestapia wrote:
| Museum: "Don't worry, no one will notice".
|
| Calvin Liang: "Ackshually ..."
| rob_c wrote:
| It's probably hollow to make the display easier and more
| reliable.
| eschneider wrote:
| It is hollow. But it wasn't originally. _cough_
| NoSalt wrote:
| > _" How do I know that's not a bunch of ones with a twenty
| wrapped around it?"_
|
| ~ Vincent LaGuardia Gambini
| tmtvl wrote:
| What's a yout?
| wl wrote:
| > 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.
| Wowfunhappy wrote:
| ...I actually think you're being too nice. The exhibit implies
| that this is how big a cube of a million dollars would be. You
| can use it to get a sense of how much a million is.
|
| 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.
| RyanOD wrote:
| Or, the cube was surplus?
| eggy wrote:
| Did you account for the paper band that wraps the 100 one-dollar
| bills? Not nitpicking, but you said you counted everything you
| could see.
|
| 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.
| johnfn wrote:
| OP counts the number of bundles, so I don't think this solves
| it.
| tzury wrote:
| In case you wondered, $1M in cash ($100 bills) weigh
| approximately 22 pounds (about 10 kilograms).
|
| 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 x 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
| hinterlands wrote:
| > 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.
| actionfromafar wrote:
| That's perhaps the heftiest clue that it might not be
| actually 1 million $1 bills. Looks unsafe to perch it like
| that.
| jjk166 wrote:
| It's substantially more than 1 million $1 bills.
| ehsankia wrote:
| Maybe just my biased brain, but the title made it sound like they
| were half a million under, not over. In some way, this is how
| 1000 piece jigsaw puzzles will never be exactly 1000 pieces. As
| long as there's at least 1000, I think most people are fine,
| especially as an art piece. And of course as mentioned, there's
| the possibility that there's filler inside.
|
| It would've been much worse if it was under though.
| megablast wrote:
| > In some way, this is how 1000 piece jigsaw puzzles will never
| be exactly 1000 pieces.
|
| What??
| delecti wrote:
| Yeah, most jigsaw puzzles do not have precisely the number of
| pieces advertised. Here's an amusing video (by the channel
| Stand-up Maths) that does a deep dive into it.
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vXWvptwoCl8
|
| 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.
| jefftk wrote:
| The ones that are 25 pieces x 40 pieces are really 1000 pieces.
| But some puzzles are 27x38 or other more square form factors.
| Retric wrote:
| 25x40 is rarely used because non square piece give a lot more
| info about placement and a 25 X 40 rectangle is almost twice
| as wide as it is tall. It's rarely the right kind of aspect
| ratio.
| Brian_K_White wrote:
| What is the point in making a display like this at all in the
| first place, but making it either under claimed or over filled?
|
| 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.
| swyx wrote:
| artists cant do math
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| _Sure, it does technically contain $1,000,000. And also $550,400
| of bonus money. Which is kind of like ordering a burger and
| getting three._
|
| Well, no, it's kind of like ordering two burgers and getting
| three.
| goodcanadian wrote:
| It's funny how all the comments seem to assume the conclusion is
| correct. I think it is far more likely that it is exactly $1M
| (plus or minus a couple of percent margin of error), and that the
| packing isn't uniform. It seems extremely unlikely to me that
| they would fuck it up so bad as to have $500k more in the box
| than claimed.
| bboygravity wrote:
| When you print money by the trillions a million is
| insignificant. Maybe they're just not good at such small
| numbers.
| whatevertrevor wrote:
| When you print money by the trillions, tracking every
| transaction becomes more important not less. I don't know
| about the exhibit, it _is_ possible that this is not real
| money too.
| jedberg wrote:
| The Fed keeps rigorous track of every bill. They have a
| database with the serial number of every live bill. The money
| isn't valid until the serial is put into the database, and
| any time a bank gets a bill, they have to verify the serial
| number is in the database. And if it's not they have to turn
| it in for a replacement that is.
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| Is there anywhere I can find out more about this?
| jedberg wrote:
| I learned it when I toured the Mint in Washington DC, but
| I suspect they have a web page somewhere.
| ericvsmith wrote:
| That's actually the Bureau of Engraving and Printing, on
| 14th St. SW, which is indeed worth visiting. They print
| the paper bills (among other things). The U.S. Mint
| produces the coins. I think only the Philadelphia Mint
| still mints coins, but it's also worth visiting.
| dhosek wrote:
| Denver also mints coins for circulation (mint mark D) and
| San Francisco does rarely, but mostly does proof sets
| (legal tender, but generally kept by collectors).
| Apparently there's also a newer mint at West Point which
| uses a W mint mark and also mints coins for circulation.
| gosub100 wrote:
| 20 years ago before there were as many erosions of personal
| privacy and before I realized how important privacy was, I
| thought of a similar system to detect counterfeit money.
|
| Scan it and upload the serial to a database. If that serial
| has been registered somewhere else, before a plane could
| possibly transport it there, flag both registers to inspect
| that bill.
|
| If the serial has already been registered as counterfeit,
| refuse the currency.
|
| If the serial was not issued by the US mint, refuse the
| currency.
|
| This would have the adverse effect of flagging valid
| currency too, but this could be worked around. I think it
| would make counterfeit much harder and have very little
| technical cost, since reading the denom and serial is
| trivial.
| bboygravity wrote:
| The thing is that only a tiny amount of all money exists as
| physical bills. So they can track that all they want, it
| ain't going to make a dent in the total money supply :p
| c249709 wrote:
| in that case you would have to assume they stacked the money
| first, measured, then build a box to fit it
| jolt42 wrote:
| The only way to verify is open that sucker up and count.
| burnt-resistor wrote:
| They should send all of DOGE to work on this very important
| problem immediately. /s
| Aurornis wrote:
| I also think it's funny that so many comments assume they would
| have lax accounting for the extra $500K, or that the artists
| could have casually asked for another $500K of old bills to use
| as filler and the request would have been granted.
|
| 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.
| wodenokoto wrote:
| There was a danish artist that got a very large amount of
| cash to do a similar in spirit artwork.
|
| He then named it "take the money and run" and showcased what
| amounted to an empty frame.
| nemomarx wrote:
| wasn't he sued by the museum and made to pay it back?
| ZYbCRq22HbJ2y7 wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Take_the_Money_and_Run_(artwo
| r...
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| Non uniform in what way? If all the money in the middle is
| jumbled up and 50% air that's still extremely misleading. And
| it's not far off the crumpled up newspaper the article threw in
| as a possibility.
|
| The conclusion that something is off is still right in that
| case.
| hk__2 wrote:
| See sibling comment
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44437004
| jjk166 wrote:
| I mean the math given showing the size for an actual ~$1M cube
| is substantially smaller is pretty compelling. The author puts
| forward the explanation that there may be voids in the cube
| instead of an additional $500k, but that doesn't really address
| the problem that this isn't the right size for a $1M cube.
| OJFord wrote:
| Or why does it even actually need to contain 1M anyway, just do
| your calculation for cube size, then cover the transparent
| faces. Filling the middle at all, nevermind completely and
| accurately, just seems pointless.
| divbzero wrote:
| It was $1M back in 2007.
| ysofunny wrote:
| if the Federal Reserve lies about the numbers.... what don't they
| lie about?
| pjs_ wrote:
| This good article contains a photograph of a million quid nailed
| to a wall. Since burnt by scoundrels
|
| http://www.lysator.liu.se/~johol/KLF/Money.html
| nemo1618 wrote:
| > Bill, who lives near Aylesbury, said the reason for the
| request last Wednesday would be revealed in 23 years.
|
| ...well?
| behnamoh wrote:
| the homepage of this website is so cool, but also a bit
| pretentious. like, why would the OP include things like "#1 on
| Hackernews", etc.?
| c249709 wrote:
| glad you like my website. it's there due to the lack of other
| meaningful achievements
| Scarblac wrote:
| Well, if it contains 1.5 million, it also contains 1 million.
| ticulatedspline wrote:
| Seems silly at first but in retrospect isn't that surprising to
| construct from requirements:
|
| 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.
| somat wrote:
| You need a cube that is a multiple of the width of a dollar on
| one side and a multiple of the height of a dollar on the other
| side. technically it needs to be a a multiple of the thickness of
| a stack of 100 dollars as well.
|
| 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.
| stephen_g wrote:
| Yeah this was my guess too, I haven't done the maths but my
| guess was that $1M probably just doesn't happen to tesselate
| nicely into a cube so perhaps they went up to a larger, more
| nicely cube shaped size and there might be filler in the
| middle?
| red_admiral wrote:
| The economist's answer would be to offer to buy the cube for
| $1.1M. Tell them the extra $100k will fund building another cube
| plus expenses with spare cash left over. If you're right, pass GO
| and collect the payout.
| a3w wrote:
| Making 1.1 million into about 550 k? It is less by nearly 50
| percent, not more.
| jedberg wrote:
| The post claims that it has $1.5M inside.
| gambiting wrote:
| Except that whoever built the cube obviously knows how much
| money they put in. There is an answer out there.
| nocoiner wrote:
| It's obviously not really $1.5mm, if it had been, someone would
| have picked it up by now.
| ck2 wrote:
| What's really crazy is even if it was real it wouldn't be enough
| to refund taxpayers for a single presidential golf weekend (428
| times first term, 30+ this term so far)
| c22 wrote:
| I imagine that to have the cube displayed on its corner like that
| the center must contain some pretty solid structure that anchors
| the whole thing securely to the floor or else the 2000+ pounds of
| carefully balanced cash would present an even larger liability.
| Feuilles_Mortes wrote:
| Instead of writing the counting tool he could have used the
| Multi-Point Tool in ImageJ [1] [2]. I used it just this morning
| for counting some embryos I collected.
|
| [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BhFNiPsVRoM
|
| [2] https://fiji.sc/
| 0cf8612b2e1e wrote:
| Being a web tool is significantly lower friction. I will
| definitely look into self hosting a version of this I can use
| in the future.
| adolph wrote:
| Here you go: https://ij.imjoy.io/
| Dilettante_ wrote:
| >I used it just this morning for counting some embryos I
| collected
|
| "Sentences that flashbang people not in biology"
| necovek wrote:
| I counted and got the exact same numbers from the first photo in
| the article: 8x19x102. No helper software needed, on a small
| phone screen.
|
| Though having an app handy might make sense sometimes.
| c249709 wrote:
| it's the uncertainty that kills me, I'm never sure if i've
| missed anything/double counted something
| necovek wrote:
| In general, it's pretty easy to get the 8x or 19x correctly
| -- these are the large dimensions. So really, you are only
| looking at being wrong on the 102, and off by two (100-104)
| is not such a big difference (1.52M-1.58M).
|
| 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 ;-)
| tantalor wrote:
| > "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.
| omoikane wrote:
| The dot counting tool is kind of neat, but I guess most people
| didn't need it because if they see a large enough pile of
| something, they assume it's roughly what they expected (as
| opposed to "does this bag of candy really contain 30 servings
| like it says on the package? Let me get a count!")
| jmkni wrote:
| Kind of off-topic, but I've always thought a good way to suss out
| what sort of background somebody comes from is to ask them to
| visualise $1million dollars.
|
| 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 attache" 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)
| SilasX wrote:
| JBR = JonBenet Ramsey
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Killing_of_JonBen...
| SilasX wrote:
| Separate comment so you can separately downvote/flag me:
|
| _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.
| alex_young wrote:
| IDK, a strap of $100 bills is $10k, so $1M would be 100 of
| them. Seems sizable. Looks like a strap is about .43 inches
| tall, so that would make your $1M about 3 and a half feet high
| or more than a meter tall for the non-imperial afflicted
| amongst us.
| adolph wrote:
| What is the background of someone who visualizes Scrooge McDuck
| diving into a pool of doubloons?
| trhway wrote:
| That reminds when a corrupt bureaucrat or a high ranking military
| in Russia gets arrested there frequently an amount of cash found
| in the apartment/house equivalent to 1-3 cubic meters in $100
| bills (and usually it is a mix of mostly dollars with some euros)
| .
| onionisafruit wrote:
| From a 2014 reddit post[0]:
|
| > 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...
| echelon_musk wrote:
| If only he had Googled he could have saved himself all the
| trouble!
| c249709 wrote:
| oof my googling skill so bad I didn't find this
| onionisafruit wrote:
| Mine either. An LLM found it for me.
|
| And I'm glad you didn't find it because that lead to a great
| post.
| sidewndr46 wrote:
| The latest use for AI in 2025: replacing obsolete and non-
| functional search engines like Google
| IG_Semmelweiss wrote:
| Can we confidently say that top engineers have lost the
| battle with SEO spam ?
|
| Or they just gave up ?
|
| Or something else ?
| bravesoul2 wrote:
| Glad you didn't:)
| RajT88 wrote:
| This thread is very informative on your chances of carrying off
| a heist stealing this cube.
|
| 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.
| takinola wrote:
| I literally just said "Nothing from my end" on a zoom call.
| Still waiting on my million dollars though so not sure how
| reliable this method is.
| RajT88 wrote:
| Takes longer for some than others. Depends on your job
| title.
| throaway920181 wrote:
| I'd say a small (single digit) percentage of people are
| able to accumulate $1.5 million over "a few" (2-3) years
| of working, but maybe I'm out of touch.
| achierius wrote:
| That sounds more like "a couple". Personally I think "a
| few" would be anywhere from 3-9, which is more
| reasonable, if still handily above the median national
| income (like 250k a year if you save and invest well).
| uxp100 wrote:
| Maybe a tenth of a percent unless we're pretty generous
| with "few". Which I sometimes am! If I ate a few cookies
| it was probably more than two.
| strken wrote:
| I would have thought a few meant 3 to 5, although I still
| agree that the number of people who could do it is small.
| viccis wrote:
| Man how expensive was that contractor when your art
| installation requires $1M in cash and all the labor to assemble
| it, but you can't just tell the contractor to do a new box?
| kingstnap wrote:
| Maybe they didn't realize it was wrong until they filled it
| 66% up.
| ftmch wrote:
| They can just print more money.
| bravesoul2 wrote:
| They may be out of practice overclocking the physical
| presses now that they're used to typing all the zeros at a
| terminal.
| wavemode wrote:
| The cash probably didn't cost the government anything. They
| can just use bills that are slated for replacement/removal
| from circulation.
| bobbygoodlatte wrote:
| Seems pretty on-brand for the Fed
|
| As we say in my family: "close enough for government work!"
| mlindner wrote:
| So who am I supposed to believe the personal blog or the reddit
| post?
| swores wrote:
| You can toss a coin on which one to believe, since either way
| you'd believe the same thing...
| bravesoul2 wrote:
| It's a baker's million?
| sschueller wrote:
| 1 Million Swiss Francs in the highest denomination (1000) weighs
| just 1.14 kg and is a stack of bills around 10 cm high. That is
| currently also around 1,261,037 USD
|
| [1] https://www.tagesanzeiger.ch/wert-nutzung-
| gewicht-6-fakten-z...
| efitz wrote:
| They're using US Treasury accounting standards. Either that or
| inflation is a $!+(@.
| h1fra wrote:
| nit: Technically, even if there is exactly $1M you need to
| account for the box price since they don't specify that it's $1M
| in cash but just say "what one million dollars looks like".
| jjk166 wrote:
| That makes it worse, assuming the box has positive value
| erk__ wrote:
| At the complete other end there is this art piece which should
| contain a total of $84,000 in Danish kroner and euros, but
| contains a grand total of $0:
|
| https://www.cbsnews.com/news/jens-haaning-take-the-money-and...
| ZoomZoomZoom wrote:
| > "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..."
| doublerabbit wrote:
| Now show me a cube made of gold worth $1M.
| jjk166 wrote:
| It's approximately a 3 inch cube.
| devops000 wrote:
| It's so easy for them to print USD money that they don't care
| having 1M wasted like this.
| cvoss wrote:
| It is almost certain that none of these bills represent wasted
| money. The piece of paper and the money are not identically the
| same thing. The paper is a document that is made to represent
| the money. At some point, the document is made to cease to
| represent the money. The Federal Reserve routinely acquires and
| destroys old worn bills, replacing them with freshly printed
| ones. This, by the way, has little or nothing to do with "how
| much money exists".
| moralestapia wrote:
| Hey, this is great.
|
| >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
| :'(.
| thisisauserid wrote:
| On the other hand, due to the provenance of the cube, the whole
| thing would sell for a lot more than $1 million.
|
| 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.
| msowers77 wrote:
| I think I saw this cube back in the day, or one like it. I worked
| at a place called Coin Wrap and we handled sorting and wrapping
| money for banks, and also wrapped the Sacagawea coins when they
| came out. One of the trucks came through and had to offload this
| large cube of money they told us contained 1 million in dollar
| bills, so they could offload the pallets of coins behind it. I've
| told people about it but had not seen a picture or knew it was in
| the Chicago Fed building.
| 8bitsrule wrote:
| Kind of off-topic, but I've always wondered. When you use a card
| to get cash in $20 bills from an ATM, does it record the serial#
| of every bill it pumps out to you?
| jjk166 wrote:
| Such scanners exist but most ATMs do not have them. Of course
| if you fill the ATM with a stack of fresh bills you know the
| serial numbers for, and you know how many bills were dispensed
| prior to a particular transaction, you should know which bills
| got dispensed during that transaction.
|
| 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.
| alcover wrote:
| > 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..
| jrflowers wrote:
| A box with one and a half million dollars in it _does_ contain a
| million dollars. It just also contains another half million
| dollars.
|
| 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
| cies wrote:
| Once more proof the fed cannot be trusted. They are a private
| (and very secretive) entity at the heart of the US govt, thus not
| democratically governed.
| calibas wrote:
| The bills look well used, I assume they were going to be retired
| anyway.
|
| I bring this up because the article and many of the comments here
| act like this "cost" the Fed $1.5 million to make the cube.
| ab_goat wrote:
| I've been thinking about using an app like this to count parking
| spaces in a city!
|
| Thank you
| linsomniac wrote:
| I think I have the real explanation: Mint to Contractor: "Those
| dimensions were supposed to be in yards, not meters."
| Waterluvian wrote:
| This right here is my favourite flavour of the Web.
| jongjong wrote:
| This guy could have pulled the greatest heist in the history of
| mankind. Steal the cube, take out $500K, leave $1 million inside
| (fluff it up a bit or put some Styrofoam in the center), then
| return the cube, saying it was a stunt to draw attention to
| climate change or similar and you intended to return it. Then
| they would count the dollars, you'd get a minor sentence
| (maybe)... Then you get to keep $500k.
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