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...
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.
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?
oof my googling skill so bad I didn't find this
Seems pretty on-brand for the Fed
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?)
(a) How do we know there isn't some hollow part inside the cube?
(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.
If only he had Googled he could have saved himself all the trouble!
So who am I supposed to believe the personal blog or the reddit post?
Back in the late 70s my uncle was at an auto show in Chicago at the McCormick place. There was a VW filled with beer cans of some particular brand. You could submit your name and your guess of the number of cans of beer and whomever was closest to the actual count won the beer (but not the car). My uncle won.
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.
back in the day at when I worked at a Seattle company there was a contest where a vase with an oblate spheroid shape was filled with M&Ms was left in the kitchen with some instructions for submitting guesses as to the total.
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).
This was the plot of a Monk episode if I recall correctly, except jelly beans
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
> "How do I know that's not a bunch of ones with a twenty wrapped around it?"
~ Vincent LaGuardia Gambini
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.
> 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 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.
I think it's very unlikely there's real money in it. Most likely it's "real-ish" bills taken early from the production line without any of the security features, if not outright prop money - it's not like someone can inspect the printing or security features through the glass anyway. There's little upside in using real money, and plenty of downside.
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).
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.
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I'm not sure where the original guy got the idea that the bills are uniform in the interior. Seems just as likely that the visible faces of the cube are "display" with an interior backing cube (say out of thin plywood) inside which the balance of the funds are dumped, either in pretty stacks or just how they land.
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.
> 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.
Museum: "Don't worry, no one will notice".
Calvin Liang: "Ackshually ..."
Fun fact: "area" denotes 2D. The 3D term is "volume".
It's probably hollow to make the display easier and more reliable.
Or, the cube was surplus?
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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.
Personally I'm a big fan of DotDotGoose [0]. Used by lots of people all over.
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...
I wonder if DotDotGoose was just training a counting model all along!?
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.
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.
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.
The only way to verify is open that sucker up and count.
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.
Goes against the whole premise of "ever wonder what a million dollars looks like?" They could have just created a million dollar bill and hung it on the wall
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.
in that case you would have to assume they stacked the money first, measured, then build a box to fit it
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.
The ones that are 25 pieces x 40 pieces are really 1000 pieces. But some puzzles are 27x38 or other more square form factors.
> In some way, this is how 1000 piece jigsaw puzzles will never be exactly 1000 pieces.
What??
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 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)
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.
What is the background of someone who visualizes Scrooge McDuck diving into a pool of doubloons?
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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.
So you are saying its even more incorrect than the article claims?
do you know that or just speculating? I couldn't figure it out at the museum.
That's not an answer to the problem - it just makes the discrepancy greater.
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.
so it's off by even more than a half mill?
That still wouldn't account for a 50% shortfall though?
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.
It’s obviously not really $1.5mm, if it had been, someone would have picked it up by now.
Except that whoever built the cube obviously knows how much money they put in. There is an answer out there.
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Making 1.1 million into about 550 k? It is less by nearly 50 percent, not more.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> “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.
Well, if it contains 1.5 million, it also contains 1 million.
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.
Do we truly know if the Middle is all dollar bills and not filler?
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.
Not until Nicolas Cage gets involved.
there's only one way to find out
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 piñata (but don’t hit it, security is watching).
>I used it just this morning for counting some embryos I collected
"Sentences that flashbang people not in biology"
It sounds like this may have been one of the pieces of software the author intentionally chose not to use:
> 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...
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.
I just use Inkscape to place dots on the objects and then select all to see the amount. Beware of off by one error! ;)
> 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/
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.
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Do they claim it's packed solid all the way through?
I assume there's a really big ink bomb in the center.
not explicitly, but the implication is strong. otherwise the cube would be almost any size
I'd like to see this or a similar follow up project memorialized onto a small plaque beside the exhibit.
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.
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.
Calvin: trust me, I know more than the Fed and I used AI account this pile of cash
Also Calvin: can't make a basic functioning webpage that doesn't crash
The absolute state.
I bet it’s not cash all the way through to make it look bigger
He did say he doesn't know if the center has cash inside... but a hollow core definitely defeats the display purpose!
Someone needs to call/email the museum and ask what is actually in there because it don't add up.
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/
I count 8 stacks in that orientation, which is exactly as described in the article.
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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) .
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.
> Bill, who lives near Aylesbury, said the reason for the request last Wednesday would be revealed in 23 years.
...well?
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.
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.
Hrm, that app seems to be shit, measuring only by its licensing system.
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).
Uh... in-app purchases for $24 for a 24-hour license? $80 pay-per-count? The AI marketing images... Ugh.
This is yet another link to an app that doesn't do what the author of the post actually specified.
Something on this blog post is spiking my cpu to 100%. Any idea?
Edit: it seems to be that video embed
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!
Sort of defeats the purpose of visualizing $1M. I'd call this art project flawed in its execution, at best.
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.
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?
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.
it's the uncertainty that kills me, I'm never sure if i've missed anything/double counted something
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?
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.
You can actually estimate this pretty well with only your brain and basic math.
Example 1 in Guesstimation by Lawrence Weinstein and John Adams, would work for this problem. The problem is about estimating the height of all lottery tickets in a lottery. Another book called The art of Insight in Science and Engineering by Sanjoy Mahajan has this problem (1.3) but its with a suitcase filled with $100 bills.
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.
"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"
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 :'(.
And you're charging $3 to export some dots on top of an image from a basic app that probably takes like 1 hour to make... Ugh, so lame.
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.
thanks for the tip! I just wanted all the numbers to look the same
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!
The approach seems overkill. You'd just have to count bills for a length of 5cm (density) and then some multiplication for the volume.
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.
I do not understand the claim the Fed is not a government agency?
> 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
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.
Respectfully, there's a Wikipedia link.
Absolutely. And thank you for that.
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]
The Federal Reserve is an independent bank. An important detail the current US administration does not like.
It's "independent" of the Government in the way that Congress could just legislate them to not be independent anymore tomorrow if they felt like it...
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.
> 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?
why do you think businesses willingly pay visa 3-5%? *and get paid a month in arears ? * and take on more tax liability
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.
You're not considering cash losses.
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)
Tell me you've never worked as a cashier ...
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...
I call bullshit on that. Show me the evidence.
it's self evident context boy
If it's self evident it should be very easy to provide evidence of its truth, so do so.
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.
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.
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?
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).
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.
<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.
Iraq, and no. Almost certainly the biggest undetected heist in history.
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.
...as part of the Iran nuclear deal that Trump reversed for no reason.
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.
$10,000 notes carry a substantial premium for collectors.
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.
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!")
My bank had a little class dome full of shredded money - like the ones that cover a mantle clock? Tall, under a foot.
A million in hundred dollar bills is a stack four feet high. Puffy shredded bills? Either they were thousand dollar bills, or the sign was just a wild guess, and very wrong.
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
I thought, i've seen GPT nail estimations like this, what could go wrong?
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
Mr Beast probably doesn't use $1 bills.
They’re using US Treasury accounting standards. Either that or inflation is a
$!+(@.
Had a laugh at those cheap rubber furniture corner guards that only cover 2 edges of each 3 edged corner. Somebody must have got whacked in the head so they decided to stick them on afterwards.
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.
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.
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.
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)
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.
If the cube contains 1.5x more bills than it should (50% more volume), then the correct scaling of the cube should have been (2/3)^(1/3) = 87%
This right here is my favourite flavour of the Web.
I think I have the real explanation: Mint to Contractor: "Those dimensions were supposed to be in yards, not meters."
We don't know what kinda stuff is stuffed in the center — maybe some useless stuff that saves them Feds $500K!
Is there any proof that the money inside, including what is visible, is genuine and not a prop?
I've been thinking about using an app like this to count parking spaces in a city!
Thank you
This is my sort of pedantry!
>So yeah. They’re off by 50%.
Ah, that'll be the allowance for inflation/devaluation.
or allowance for vendor graft if they billed for $1mm
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".
That makes it worse, assuming the box has positive value
Probably has a tidy façade, 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.
It does contain $1,000,000, just not exactly that much.
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.
That is so stupid and cool at the same time
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.
Did the author claim the excess cash there?
jwosepរពធយពhdkhjsA//第二項/(
Or the counting is off...
It’s so easy for them to print USD money that they don’t care having 1M wasted like this.
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".
I dont know the answer.
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.
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.?
glad you like my website. it's there due to the lack of other meaningful achievements
I was nodding in modest agreement with @behnamoh's comment on self-aggrandizement, but your reply brought a huge smile to my face. And visiting his linked website dialed the mirth up to 11.
"What if it’s hollow? [...] A money shell. A decorative cube. A fiscal illusion. The world’s most expensive piñata"
lol
> "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..."
Yeah, that was clumsy, because you inflate the economy, a currency is depreciated.
"The world’s most expensive piñata"
Now show me a cube made of gold worth $1M.
It's approximately a 3 inch cube.
To be precise, a 7.83 cm³ cube. More portable, though a bit heavy at 9.27 kg.
Now this is the type I post I come for
Ron Paul is still alive and in some small way, just got his dream of auditing the fed turned into reality.
Re Dot Counter, cool work, but charging me $3 to download an image with dots on it is just silly.
That's 0.80€ per count and it's automatic. Still seems too expensive.
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Not surprised that the Fed overspent a project by 50%.
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.
The fact that this is not obvious to everyone is a bit disturbing to be honest..
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It's always amusing how people easily carry $1M cash in the movies.
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.
In the movies, it's $100 bills, which are considerably more portable than $1 bills.
Would you roughly say 100x more portable?
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.
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.
Compress the cube by 100x and you could probably carry it
Those aren't stacks of one dollar bills though.
if it's in $100 bills you can fit it in a suit case easily with lots of space left
well, using larger denominations helps.
the cube is full of $1 bills
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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.
if the Federal Reserve lies about the numbers.... what don't they lie about?
Did they ever consider there could be a hollow core, or filler to account for the discrepancy?
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.
Fair - I missed the "Empty Inside?" section. Just accidental carelessness. I appreciate the correction, though your tone was needlessly aggressive.
I will be more thorough in future articles/comment sections, and apologize for wasting your time, but please mind your attitude next time.
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.
I missed the "Empty Inside?" section. Apologies for that - I'll be more thorough in future articles/comment sections.
I missed the "Empty Inside?" section. Apologies for that - I'll be more thorough in future articles/comment sections.
I missed the "Empty Inside?" section. Apologies for that - I'll be more thorough in future articles/comment sections.
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.
OP counts the number of bundles, so I don't think this solves it.
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 × 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.
That's perhaps the heftiest clue that it might not be actually 1 million $1 bills. Looks unsafe to perch it like that.
It's substantially more than 1 million $1 bills.
So more than a metric tonne swiveling like that? Sounds dangerous.
Not particularly. That whole cube could be supported by a 1/4" diameter steel pin. The actual support almost certainly has a double digit factor of safety.
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