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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,
by tonymet 1y ago
counting things are a huge intellectual blind spot. For some reason, when people hear a figure, they accept it as gospel.
sums, averages, population, budgets, spending, rates.
Counting things is time consuming and error prone. Ask a casino. You can have 3 people count something and come to a different figure off by a few percent.
Seriously if someone says there's $1m in there, who is going to second guess? Thankfully this guy did.
- burningChrome 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).
- klank 1y agoWhile doing work for hospitality optimization software, I had the fortune of seeing some of the cash management infrastructure at gaming trade shows. I wish I remembered more specific details, but I at least assume similar levels of capacity for bill counting and counterfeit detection are available to nation states. Verifying the cash would be even easier and faster than you're describing.
- lrivers 1y ago<Cue Borat impression>My wife</end> works at a legit, long-established, high volume retail store. Some of the time she keeps books there. They just weigh money, it’s accurate enough for them.
- klank 1y agoPeople, as a group, trust numbers. Individuals, often, do not. Pick any industry which revolves around something, I assure you there is a child-industry dedicated to providing the technology and infrastructure to count the things. Heck, accounting, as a general purpose, applies to every profession, profession, is at its core, focused on counting things. Hopefully this doesn't come across as argumentative. Your comment caused me to reflect on how you're right, we trust so much when it comes to numbers people tell us. But at the same time, we don't as evidenced by the vast amount of industry we dedicate to counting all that we do, whatever it is.
- tonymet 1y agoaccounting / auditing is a good example. I review public finances. Many public agencies don't pass audits. Even those that do, wouldn't pass the smell test. An audit just means "it looks like you are recording things" but it doesn't mean "it looks like you are spending money wisely.". Patrons see "passed audit" and assume the agency is run well.
- IAmBroom 1y ago> Ask a casino. You can have 3 people count something and come to a different figure off by a few percent. That seems a wildly unlikely idea: Despite having three people checking sums, their daily profits have a few percent unknown variability in them. Banks of old would famously make their tellers stay late to track down rather trivial discrepencies, probably as a deterrent to carelessness. Cite?
- tonymet 1y agowhy do you think businesses willingly pay visa 3-5%? *and get paid a month in arears ? * and take on more tax liability
- jjk166 1y agoBecause 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.
- tonymet 1y agoYou'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)