19 ms·
The Fed says this is a cube of $1M. They're off by half a million
- jongjong 1y agoThis 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.
- dankwizard 1y ago"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"
- jongjong 1y agoHaha, would love to see that play out in front of a jury. Who will they believe? The guy who says that the $1 million cube contained $1 million or the ones who try to make the case that it actually contained $1.5 million, contradicting their own claim. Imagine them opening up the cube and seeing the Styrofoam in the center... I'd be like; "Typical Fed behavior! Fractional reserve banking... Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, this is exactly the same thing they've been doing with your paychecks." I think where the metaphor falls apart is the part where they bribe the jury into delivering a guilty verdict; offering them jobs at Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan, each earning $500k per year.
- dvsfish 1y agoNow this is the type I post I come for
- JoeAltmaier 1y agoMy 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.
- ionwake 1y agoI 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.
- tasty_freeze 1y agoBack 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.
- nojs 1y agoThis was the plot of a Monk episode if I recall correctly, except jelly beans
- beaugunderson 1y agoback 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).
- DrNosferatu 1y ago"The world’s most expensive piñata"
- DrNosferatu 1y agoDid the author claim the excess cash there?
- chairmansteve 1y agoThe KLF burned a million pounds in 1994 (about $3million in today's money) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K_Foundation_Burn_a_Million_Quid https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K_Foundation_Burn_a_Million_Qu... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L9SzDFGbsFI&pp=0gcJCdgAo7VqN5tD https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L9SzDFGbsFI&pp=0gcJCdgAo7VqN...
- thewanderer1983 1y agoYou 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.
- moonlion_eth 1y agowell actually...
- foxglacier 1y agoHad 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.
- yvessy 1y agothe fed guys who counted the money: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ymRqYz-Mxnw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ymRqYz-Mxnw
- Mehuleo 1y agoWe don't know what kinda stuff is stuffed in the center — maybe some useless stuff that saves them Feds $500K!
- thih9 1y agoIs there any proof that the money inside, including what is visible, is genuine and not a prop?
- Evidlo 1y agoSomething on this blog post is spiking my cpu to 100%. Any idea? Edit: it seems to be that video embed
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- Evidlo 1y agoIf 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%
- thenoblesunfish 1y agoIt does contain $1,000,000, just not exactly that much.
- PaulRobinson 1y agoPersonally 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/dotdotgoose/ https://biodiversityinformatics.amnh.org/open_source/dotdotg...
- pbhjpbhj 1y agoI wonder if DotDotGoose was just training a counting model all along!?
- account-5 1y agoThis is my sort of pedantry!
- _el1s7 1y agoAnd 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.
- aitchnyu 1y agoI thought it was an AI object counting app, the kind that made headlines 8 years back. Nope, completely manual. https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=xz.camera.objectcounter&hl=en_IN https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=xz.camera.obje...
- coldtea 1y agoOr the counting is off...
- dwighttk 1y agoInflation
- tessierashpool9 1y agoThe approach seems overkill. You'd just have to count bills for a length of 5cm (density) and then some multiplication for the volume.
- elif 1y agoI 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
- tenuousemphasis 1y agoMr Beast probably doesn't use $1 bills.
- 5147548509 1y agoThat is so stupid and cool at the same time
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- sdenton4 1y agoHere's the go-to for counting stuff in pictures of lots of stuff: https://countthings.com/ https://countthings.com/ This would probably be a hard case for it! But would be cool to see how well it works.
- CobrastanJorji 1y agoHrm, 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).
- zefhous 1y agoUh... in-app purchases for $24 for a 24-hour license? $80 pay-per-count? The AI marketing images... Ugh.
- MadnessASAP 1y agoI 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 1y ago"If you are not getting 100% accuracy, contact us." Ok, that's pretty a pretty good marketing line, I have to admit.
- Dilettante_ 1y agoThat'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!"
- nyeah 1y agoDo they claim it's packed solid all the way through?
- c249709 1y agonot explicitly, but the implication is strong. otherwise the cube would be almost any size
- florbnit 1y agoThe cube is “almost any size” it’s literally overshooting by 50%
- jerf 1y agoJust 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+united+states+dollar+*+1000000%29+%2F+6%29 https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=sqrt%28%28area+of+a+uni...
- stavros 1y agoI 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 1y ago41 meters is the height of a 13-story building.
- padjo 1y agoA flat with very high ceilings? Edit: even still 41x41 floorspace is a very large flat.
- kaffekaka 1y agoThe square side would be 41 m meaning ~1600 square meters per face, if I read correctly. So quite a large flat.
- MisterTea 1y agoSomeone needs to call/email the museum and ask what is actually in there because it don't add up.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- kevin_thibedeau 1y agoThere 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 1y agodo you know that or just speculating? I couldn't figure it out at the museum.
- alfalfasprout 1y agoI 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 1y agoThat still wouldn't account for a 50% shortfall though?
- barrkel 1y agoThe article talks about 50% extra, not a shortfall.
- Brian_K_White 1y agoThen another way to say that is that the claim is short.
- jjk166 1y agoNot in english it isn't.
- Brian_K_White 1y agoDon't be absurd. The amount written on the plaque is short by .5m The comment we're all arguing about only says "50% shortfall" and does not say which side of the equation is short. So the word in that context merely means discrepency. Maybe they did actually have the wrong idea about the story, but what they wrote does not say one way or the other, so there is nothing to correct and everyone is just picking a meaning and acting like they actually said more than they said. English can't fabricate a missing identifier any more than any other language. There are no context rules that apply in this case to derive it indirectly, such as figuring out that "it" refers to something that was previously explicitly identified for instance, or anything like that.
- uticus 1y agoi'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 1y agoobligatory https://www.youtube.com/shorts/n6dJB8OcA8I https://www.youtube.com/shorts/n6dJB8OcA8I
- FerretFred 1y ago>So yeah. They’re off by 50%. Ah, that'll be the allowance for inflation/devaluation.
- pirate787 1y agoor allowance for vendor graft if they billed for $1mm
- tehwebguy 1y agoThis 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 1y agoI bet it’s not cash all the way through to make it look bigger
- voiper1 1y agoHe did say he doesn't know if the center has cash inside... but a hollow core definitely defeats the display purpose!
- ziofill 1y ago"What if it’s hollow? [...] A money shell. A decorative cube. A fiscal illusion. The world’s most expensive piñata" lol
- rafram 1y agoRe Dot Counter, cool work, but charging me $3 to download an image with dots on it is just silly.
- tonymet 1y agocounting 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 1y agoMakes 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 1y agoIraq, and no. Almost certainly the biggest undetected heist in history.
- ahazred8ta 1y ago2016: "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 1y ago...as part of the Iran nuclear deal that Trump reversed for no reason.
- toast0 1y agoA 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).
- giancarlostoro 1y agoDo we truly know if the Middle is all dollar bills and not filler?
- c249709 1y agothere's only one way to find out
- jihadjihad 1y agoNot until Nicolas Cage gets involved.
- lapetitejort 1y agoWe need to sneak a CT scanner, into the Fed...?
- volemo 1y agoAre there any "external"/"outwards" CT scanners? It'd have to somehow measure reflected radiation, I presume.
- whatshisface 1y agoRon Paul is still alive and in some small way, just got his dream of auditing the fed turned into reality.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- tromp 1y agoI 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 1y agoEdit: 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-coins/coin-specifications https://www.usmint.gov/learn/coins-and-medals/circulating-co...
- jo-m 1y agoThis is what 8 million (Swiss) 5c pieces looks like: https://cdn.unitycms.io/images/BasDL2iBqV3BLXFiXIPDdm.jpg?op=ocroped&val=1920,1280,1000,1000,0,0&sum=XddqWBFu_Q0 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 1y agoSince 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!
- alberth 1y agoI 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/ https://calvin.sh/blog/fed-lie/cube-side.jpg/
- tadfisher 1y agoI count 8 stacks in that orientation, which is exactly as described in the article.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- mslansn 1y agoNot surprised that the Fed overspent a project by 50%.
- School-Cotton 1y agoI 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 1y agoThe fact that this is not obvious to everyone is a bit disturbing to be honest..
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- HPsquared 1y agoProbably 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.
- wat10000 1y agoI'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 1y ago> 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/ https://www.countthis.ai/
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- gowld 1y agoCount Apps: https://apps.apple.com/us/developer/dynamic-ventures-inc/id921987312 https://apps.apple.com/us/developer/dynamic-ventures-inc/id9...
- quickthrowman 1y agoI 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 1y agoIt's always amusing how people easily carry $1M cash in the movies.
- nixpulvis 1y agoThose are probably $100 bills. So you only need to fill a bag with 100 bundles. Easily fits in a duffle bag I'd assume.
- tbrake 1y agowell, using larger denominations helps.
- sschueller 1y agoI 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:778b68b3-1344-4872-93d7-ed4e1b01acb7/hash/5ca9b21a06770f39bb075e69ac823b9d/version/1551776400/width/345/banknote_widget_series_9_design_denomination_1000_front.n.jpg https://www.snb.ch/.imaging/flex/jcr:778b68b3-1344-4872-93d7...
- c249709 1y agoif it's in $100 bills you can fit it in a suit case easily with lots of space left
- Taek 1y agoIn the movies, it's $100 bills, which are considerably more portable than $1 bills.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- mzur 1y agoIf 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 1y agoI 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 1y agoI 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 1y agoSomeone 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 1y agoI 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 1y agoI'd like to see this or a similar follow up project memorialized onto a small plaque beside the exhibit.
- citizenpaul 1y agoMeanwhile 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 1y agoI do not understand the claim the Fed is not a government agency?
- darkstar999 1y ago> 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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Reserve
- burnt-resistor 1y agoThey're an IA. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Independent_agencies_of_the_United_States_federal_government 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 1y agoIA - Independent Agency
- scrozier 1y agoThank 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.
- JadeNB 1y agoWhy 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 1y agothanks for the tip! I just wanted all the numbers to look the same
- JadeNB 1y agoOh, 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!
- jaisio 1y ago[dead]
- dlinder 1y agoAudit the Fed (cube)!
- ar_lan 1y agoDid they ever consider there could be a hollow core, or filler to account for the discrepancy?
- IshKebab 1y agoYes, 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.
- ar_lan 1y agoFair - 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.
- HelloMcFly 1y agoThat's in TFA
- ar_lan 1y agoI missed the "Empty Inside?" section. Apologies for that - I'll be more thorough in future articles/comment sections.
- thinkingemote 1y agoThe 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.
- ar_lan 1y agoI missed the "Empty Inside?" section. Apologies for that - I'll be more thorough in future articles/comment sections.
- 1y ago
- mrandish 1y ago> 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.
- Nextgrid 1y agoI 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).
- __float 1y agoThose downsides don't seem that bad to me. If something needed repair, they can bring a contractor on site, and certainly the Fed has cameras and police to monitor. (In line with some other commenters, I'm more inclined to believe it's bills they've taken out of circulation than "almost finished" ones -- security features are built in throughout the process, not just an extra step at the end.)
- eggy 1y agoDid 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 1y agoOP counts the number of bundles, so I don't think this solves it.
- tzury 1y agoIn 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
- hinterlands 1y ago> 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.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- actionfromafar 1y agoThat's perhaps the heftiest clue that it might not be actually 1 million $1 bills. Looks unsafe to perch it like that.
- jjk166 1y agoIt's substantially more than 1 million $1 bills.
- actionfromafar 1y agoSo more than a metric tonne swiveling like that? Sounds dangerous.
- ehsankia 1y agoMaybe 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 1y ago> In some way, this is how 1000 piece jigsaw puzzles will never be exactly 1000 pieces. What??
- delecti 1y agoYeah, 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 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 1y agoThe ones that are 25 pieces x 40 pieces are really 1000 pieces. But some puzzles are 27x38 or other more square form factors.
- Retric 1y ago25x40 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 1y agoWhat 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 1y agoartists cant do math
- suspended_state 1y ago[dead]
- CamperBob2 1y agoSure, 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 1y agoIt'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.
- conductr 1y agoGoes 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
- bboygravity 1y ago[flagged]
- whatevertrevor 1y agoWhen 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 1y agoThe 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.
- divbzero 1y agoIt was $1M back in 2007.
- ysofunny 1y agoif the Federal Reserve lies about the numbers.... what don't they lie about?
- pjs_ 1y agoThis 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 http://www.lysator.liu.se/~johol/KLF/Money.html
- nemo1618 1y ago> Bill, who lives near Aylesbury, said the reason for the request last Wednesday would be revealed in 23 years. ...well?
- behnamoh 1y agothe 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 1y agoglad you like my website. it's there due to the lack of other meaningful achievements
- miles 1y agoI 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.
- Scarblac 1y agoWell, if it contains 1.5 million, it also contains 1 million.
- ticulatedspline 1y agoSeems 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 1y agoYou 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 1y agoYeah 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 1y agoThe 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.
- nocoiner 1y agoIt’s obviously not really $1.5mm, if it had been, someone would have picked it up by now.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- a3w 1y agoMaking 1.1 million into about 550 k? It is less by nearly 50 percent, not more.
- margalabargala 1y agoNo, making 1.1 million into nearly 1.5 million. It is more by nearly 50 percent, not less.
- jedberg 1y agoThe post claims that it has $1.5M inside.
- gambiting 1y agoExcept that whoever built the cube obviously knows how much money they put in. There is an answer out there.
- ck2 1y agoWhat'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 1y agoI 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 1y agoInstead 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 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BhFNiPsVRoM [2] https://fiji.sc/ https://fiji.sc/
- __float 1y agoIt 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...
- volemo 1y agoI just use Inkscape to place dots on the objects and then select all to see the amount. Beware of off by one error! ;)
- 0cf8612b2e1e 1y agoBeing 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 1y agoHere you go: https://ij.imjoy.io/ https://ij.imjoy.io/
- Dilettante_ 1y ago>I used it just this morning for counting some embryos I collected "Sentences that flashbang people not in biology"
- necovek 1y agoI 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 1y agoit's the uncertainty that kills me, I'm never sure if i've missed anything/double counted something
- necovek 1y agoIn 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 1y ago> “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.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- omoikane 1y agoThe 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 1y agoKind 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)
- adolph 1y agoWhat is the background of someone who visualizes Scrooge McDuck diving into a pool of doubloons?
- PebblesRox 1y agoGerman
- SilasX 1y agoJBR = JonBenet Ramsey https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Killing_of_JonBen%C3%A9t_Ramsey&useskin=vector https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Killing_of_JonBen...
- SilasX 1y agoSeparate 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.
- spiralcoaster 1y agoReading the OP, it appears they were pretty much blurting out a semi-nonsensical stream of consciousness. That's my best guess as to why they didn't bother to define JBR, because in reality, they weren't writing for any other audience other than themselves.
- trhway 1y agoThat 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 1y agoFrom 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_dollars_in_singles/ck7arkb/ https://old.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/2f9sp7/one_million_do...
- dheera 1y ago(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.
- xboxnolifes 1y agoPeople keep asking (a), but wouldn't that completely defeat the point of the visual representation? That seems like the least likely outcome to me.
- numlock86 1y ago> 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?)
- rmnwski 1y agowhy print it? the illustration of the size of the cube is still valid if unprinted (if it where correct) and it makes it worthless to steal
- echelon_musk 1y agoIf only he had Googled he could have saved himself all the trouble!
- sschueller 1y ago1 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-zum-1000er-818002923168 https://www.tagesanzeiger.ch/wert-nutzung-gewicht-6-fakten-z...
- efitz 1y agoThey’re using US Treasury accounting standards. Either that or inflation is a $!+(@.
- musa11 1y ago[flagged]
- h1fra 1y agonit: 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 1y agoThat makes it worse, assuming the box has positive value
- erk__ 1y agoAt 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-run-blank-canvases-kunsten-museum-modern-art-denmark/ https://www.cbsnews.com/news/jens-haaning-take-the-money-and...
- ZoomZoomZoom 1y ago> "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..."
- ZoomZoomZoom 1y agoYeah, that was clumsy, because you inflate the economy, a currency is depreciated.
- doublerabbit 1y agoNow show me a cube made of gold worth $1M.
- devops000 1y agoIt’s so easy for them to print USD money that they don’t care having 1M wasted like this.
- cvoss 1y agoIt 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".
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- moralestapia 1y agoHey, 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 1y agoOn 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.
- hakfoo 1y ago$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.
- msowers77 1y agoI 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 1y agoKind 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 1y agoSuch 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 1y ago> 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..
- jjk166 1y agoAnd how do you know which bill from the shop is Bob's? Or which hands the bill passed through before or after going through Bob? The only thing you'll be able to determine is that some of the money withdrawn from the local atms eventually gets spent at the local shops, which you could probably intuit.
- jrflowers 1y agoA 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
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- cies 1y agoOnce 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 1y agoThe 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 1y agoI've been thinking about using an app like this to count parking spaces in a city! Thank you
- linsomniac 1y agoI think I have the real explanation: Mint to Contractor: "Those dimensions were supposed to be in yards, not meters."
- Waterluvian 1y agoThis right here is my favourite flavour of the Web.
- hduh 1y agojwosepរពធយពhdkhjsA//第二項/(
- gonational 1y agoCalvin: 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.