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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.

I literally just said "Nothing from my end" on a zoom call. Still waiting on my million dollars though so not sure how reliable this method is.

The point is that if you do the boring job and save for long enough, and you'll reap the benefits of compound disinterest.

Once you realize that this task is massively parallelizable, you're all set!

Takes longer for some than others. Depends on your job title.

I'd say a small (single digit) percentage of people are able to accumulate $1.5 million over "a few" (2-3) years of working, but maybe I'm out of touch.

Maybe a tenth of a percent unless we’re pretty generous with “few”. Which I sometimes am! If I ate a few cookies it was probably more than two.

That sounds more like "a couple". Personally I think "a few" would be anywhere from 3-9, which is more reasonable, if still handily above the median national income (like 250k a year if you save and invest well).

Definitions are surprisingly varied. I see these words as being something to be cautious about.

For me:

couple(formal) = 2

couple(informal) = 2-3

few = 3-5

half-dozen = 6

[gap]

ten-or-so = 9-11

dozen(formal) = 12

dozen-ish(informal) = 11-14

And don't get me started on "this Friday" vs "next Friday"...

How about when a recipe tells you to let something soak / marinate / rise / whatever "overnight". When really should I start? When really does it end? Is 8am one day to 4pm the next day (32h) the same as 9pm one day to 7am the next day (10h)?

Where does “several” fall on your spectrum?

Several is the gap

Took me an embarrassingly long time to realise that "several" didn't mean "about seven"

My wife and I just discovered that we have different beliefs about "this Friday" vs. "Next Friday". I never even knew there was another possibility, so it's cool to see this mentioned here so soon after.

"This Friday" is the one during the current week, provided it's currently earlier than Friday. If it's Saturday/Sunday already and I want to talk about the Friday that's only 5 days away I would say "this coming Friday" (or just "Friday").

"Next Friday" is always a week+ away. If it's Tuesday and I say "next Friday", I ALWAYS mean the day 10 days away.

If someone says "next Friday" to me and they mean the one in a few days I'll look at them like they're crazy.

What if they say “Friday week”?

Native US English speaker here, and this is the first time I have ever heard of this. TIL

Reasonably commonly used in Commonwealth countries.

Next Friday is sometimes too ambiguous, you can never be sure you share the same definition with the other person. Is it the same as This Friday (the very next occurring Friday), or Friday Week (ie next week's Friday).

I heard it used this way in Australia, and I’ve heard it now and then in British TV programs. Only have heard it among very old timers in isolated areas in the US a few times when I was very young previously.

Every time I hear it, it befuddles me just like the first time. It seems like a syntax error or something. My mind literally reels, like the idea is a fish and I can nearly feel the fishing line drag but the syntax and grammar isn’t rigidly applied, and so I can’t increase the tension or the line will snap, as it isn’t rated for this hefty and impactful of an idea as when something occurs specifically. I don’t know if that fish story adds anything, but I realized that there was some potential for wordplay that helps explain how it feels perceptually to hear these English words in nonstandard order from someone to whom it is standard. It’s strange.

It's like saying "half ten" instead of "ten thirty". There's a missing word, it's "half past ten", it's "friday next week".

In Dutch the literal translation is "half tien" which means 9:30 in Dutch. This can be quite confusing ;)

How do I know the missing word isn’t [up]coming, as in “Friday (coming [up] (this)) week”? As opposed to next week, which would be “Friday (next) week” in this syntax.

For that matter, the missing word could be this, as in “Friday (this) week” versus “Friday (that (as in the next one after the one contrasted with via the word this) week”. I have no way to disambiguate this, so I ask something like “Friday after tomorrow” or “Friday the 13th” or something. It’s hard being me at times, I’ll admit.

That always means "two Fridays from now" - so if it's Tuesday, then they mean next Friday.

I use "<day> week" in conversation, but I'd say it's falling out of favour. I mostly use it with my parents.

What if the person saying that means “Friday this week” sometimes and “Friday next week” other times? How can you know that they don’t from an isolated utterance? Can you know with reasonable certainty that the person saying it knows what you think they mean?

From context you might know if it seems like they know how to use the phrase, but I always struggle to understand these quirks, perhaps because I heard these terms as an adult and haven’t used them much myself, or been exposed to them and the context enough to immerse myself in the colloquial usage by diffusion.

This is close to weird constructions like “x is deceptively y” like “the dog is deceptively large” which, without already knowing the size of the dog, makes me feel like a dunce because I don’t know while not giving me enough specificity to know if the the largeness is what is deceptive or just the perception of the largeness. It’s a syntactical tarpit.

> I use "<day> week" in conversation, but I'd say it's falling out of favour. I mostly use it with my parents.

I am a native English (US) speaker, and I think it’s a British English thing perhaps, as I heard it all the time in Australia, along with other week-related terms like fortnight.

> What if the person saying that means “Friday this week” sometimes and “Friday next week” other times?

Well, I suppose they could, but then what if they meant Thursday?

“Friday week” is surprisingly unambiguous. It always means “count forward from today until a Friday, then add a week”. Its partner is “Friday coming”, which is “count forward until a Friday”.

> “Friday week” is surprisingly unambiguous. It always means “count forward from today until a Friday, then add a week”.

Well, no, the typical case would be that it means nothing at all and the other person thinks you're having a stroke. Zero potential meanings isn't actually better than two potential meanings.

You know what's really unambiguous? "Friday the 8th".

I've been using Friday week type constructs for many decades .. never had an issue.

> You know what's really unambiguous? "Friday the 8th".

Sorry, of which month in which year under what calender?

> Sorry, of which month in which year under what calender?

Whichever could be a theoretical possibility for whatever you're describing the date of. In almost all cases, there will only be one choice. But in other cases, the speaker will provide the rest of the date.

> > What if the person saying that means “Friday this week” sometimes and “Friday next week” other times?

> Well, I suppose they could, but then what if they meant Thursday?

> “Friday week” is surprisingly unambiguous. It always means “count forward from today until a Friday, then add a week”. Its partner is “Friday coming”, which is “count forward until a Friday”.

That’s good that it’s unambiguous to you, as you happen to be correctly interpreting the meaning from the words as written, but I don’t read the context the same way, as in, your reading doesn’t always read as written, when I’m doing the reading. It comes naturally to you, it seems, but less so to me, if I can explain.

To me, “Friday coming/this coming Friday” is just as underspecified because it communicates explicitly ambiguously that which is definitively known due to unknown knowns and/or unknown unknowns: you don’t know if I know what day it is today or not, and on days I haven’t been outside yet, I may not know if it’s AM/PM or midnight or noon. I could think I know what day it is and be honestly mistaken, leading me to believe that the next/coming Friday is a day away, as in tomorrow, but miss that it’s already Friday today, making the listener think I mean a week from now, when I mean right now for events taking place on the night of the day in question.

I also think it’s ambiguous what “coming/next Friday” means, because it’s obvious that the one coming up this week is coming up, so it seems too on the nose to refer to it as such, which makes me think that it’s a week from now, but this time, they actually do mean the Friday a few days from now.

https://oxtweekend.com/

don't forget:

several = 5-10

handful = 10-20

Personally, after having worked in a hardware store, I always confirm. "grab me a couple of those please" - "is two enough, or do you need a few extra?"

I'm one of those people for whom a couple is 3-5, but never 2. I would just say "two".

I think it depends on where you grow up.

Still not as amorphous as the word "now" and its various prefixes when it comes to South Africans and time.

Handful is 5 unless you are talking about something that can physically fit in your hand ( in that case it’s however much can fit in your hand ).

Handful is more than "several" to me, and several tops out around 10, hence 10-20 being a handful.

Anything that's a word instead of a precise number implies a range to me (eg, few, handful, several).

I'd like a handful of bowling balls, please.

I mean, sure. That doesn't necessarily seem like a weird statement to me.

It's more than several, but still a manageable number.

Great! In that case I'll take two handfuls of bowling balls and several wheelbarrows. Maybe I should get a couple (4) more wheelbarrows to be safe, bring it down to under 4 balls per barrow

If you're trying to provoke a "wait, that's not what I meant" response with that sarcasm, you won't get it :)

Use depends on context, like all language, and deliberately choosing a situation that doesn't suit the language will obviously result in confusion.

I'm just really enjoying the absurd scenario we've created

I like the definition of several as “more than two but fewer than many”

“How many times more (than two)?”

“Several..?”

I would have thought a few meant 3 to 5, although I still agree that the number of people who could do it is small.

"couple" and "few" are debatable, but thanks to Survivor we know definitively that "several" means seven.

Couple is not really debatable - it has a definition that includes 2. Not 2 or 3, or any more than 2. Just 2.

What if you have a couple of couples? I think if it’s a couple, meaning two, that a couple couples could be two of however many the original couple is for the first couple, and the third one might couple with both members of the original couple, so I could see three as being a couple to a certain reading, though paradoxically four seems like one too many unless they are two couples of either one or a couple of kinds.

Just add a few more clones running other companies and the spice will flow…

Very relevant Key and Peele sketch:

https://youtu.be/jgYYOUC10aM?si=YuTT_hR7y9t74mAQ

It shouldn't be a problem spending $1 bills. Nobody scrutinizes them. It'll just take a while.

> 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?)

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?

The cash probably didn't cost the government anything. They can just use bills that are slated for replacement/removal from circulation.

They can just print more money.

It's almost as if the art piece is a commentary on the imagined order of money between humans.

They may be out of practice overclocking the physical presses now that they're used to typing all the zeros at a terminal.

Maybe they didn't realize it was wrong until they filled it 66% up.

It's a baker's million?

a banker's million! new term

More like mortgage debtor's million

oof my googling skill so bad I didn't find this

Mine either. An LLM found it for me.

And I'm glad you didn't find it because that lead to a great post.

The latest use for AI in 2025: replacing obsolete and non-functional search engines like Google

Can we confidently say that top engineers have lost the battle with SEO spam ?

Or they just gave up ?

Or something else ?

engineers have nothing to do with it any more, is the entire issue.

With Google, at least, it was one division losing the battle with another division. https://www.justice.gov/d9/2023-11/417557.pdf

Searching some terms from this PDF (not in Google) brings up https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-men-who-killed-google/, which has a clearer narrative.

Thanks for the links, very interesting!

uhhhh... isn't that the latest use for AI in like 2023?

Glad you didn't:)

Seems pretty on-brand for the Fed

As we say in my family: "close enough for government work!"

(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?

You can toss a coin on which one to believe, since either way you'd believe the same thing...

Something on this blog post is spiking my cpu to 100%. Any idea?

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.

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.

It's the cost of paper not the dollar value. Also only the outermost bills need be real the rest could just be paper, or voided bills or whatever. But accounting can cover it. It's not gold or pennies where the currency costs what it is worth to make

Coins don’t cost what they are worth to make.

It's only true for the smaller denominations, 1c and 5c for USD.

Other than that, coins are cheaper than bills on the long run, because they last longer. It would be cheaper for the US government to stop making $1 bills and have people use the $1 coins, but I guess old habits die hard.

I guess that's why we have €1 and €2 coins (1 EUR ≈ 1.18 USD).

Well that, and Germans need the 1 Euro coin to unlock their shopping trolley.

(Or at least they used to; when I visited back recently many supermarkets had free trolleys! Can you imagine my shock?)

Pennies and nickels cost more to make than they are worth.

People are quick to state this as if it's a slam dunk case for 'we shouldn't make them any more', but I don't understand the thinking there. An individual coin can be used many many times to facilitate many many transactions before it eventually falls out of circulation through loss or damage. The amount you should spend on making coins of a given denomination has nothing to do with what the total face value of those coins is, but needs to be traded off against the value to the economy of having those coins in circulation. If spending more money on producing higher quality coins enables them to remain in circulation twice as long, it might be worthwhile even if the cost exceeds the face value.

It's a different story if the material value of the metal in the coin exceeds its face value - at that point it makes sense to go to a bank, change money into pennies, then scrap them and sell the copper. That would be bad.

But the reason pennies are a bad deal isn't because of their manufacturing cost, it's because their handling costs exceed the value of incorporating them in a transaction. Should a store go to the trouble of keeping pennies available, counting them, storing them, transferring them to the bank? Or should they round up change to the nearest five cents and take a 4c hit on each transaction where you'd have been able to use pennies? If your average transaction value is over a hundred dollars or so, like most supermarkets, and you only handle cash on one sale in 50 say, if handling pennies in your cash-management operation takes more than a few thousandths of one percent of your budget, it's costing you too much.

Stores are going to round amounts in their favor, not customers’. So they will make more money once the penny falls out of circulation.

Pennies do. (More, actually.)

There is an excellent recent "The Answer is Transaction Costs" podcast episode (The Price of Pennies: Make or Buy?) outlining a proposal to save money by buying back coins instead of making new ones.

https://taitc.buzzsprout.com/2186249/episodes/17383823-the-p...

What do you mean? The currency in there is spendable isn’t it?

What leads you to believe that?

I haven't been there but the plaque seen in the picture just says:

    Have you ever wondered what one million dollars looks like? You don’t have to wonder anymore because you can see it right in front of you!

I would hope they at least used real bills they just took out of circulation for whatever reason but there can't be any real expectation.

It's a "stunt" only anyway coz a million in $1 coins would look way different. As would a million in 20s or 100s.

> Maybe it's easy for the Fed to acquire more cash as long as it's guaranteed not to be spent.

The Fed doesn't acquire cash, it creates it. USD banknotes are liabilities of the Fed, but that concept only makes sense when somebody other than itself owns them.

No. We have a double accounting system. For every $1 it creates, it has to create an equivalent liability.

And when something is budgeted for $1 Million, it is $1m nothing more nothing less

Not sure when exactly the Fed accounts for USD printed – i.e. only once distributed to somebody else, or as soon as they're printed and still owned by the Fed – but even in the latter case, asset and liability work out to exactly zero.

So this million USD might or might not have been accounted for, but it definitely does not need to be budgeted for.

So, in your mind, when the Federal Reserve prints a dollar bill - what's happening in accounting terms? I don't think your understanding of the way this works is consistent with the concept of money supply.

Not your parent but in my mind, when the Fed prints $1 million to replace old bills they take out of circulation and give then to people to stuff into a cube then in accounting terms basically nothing happens at all.

To be precise, the treasury prints the bills, not the federal reserve. The federal reserve balances what money is in circulation by selling or buying bonds. When they issue a bond, someone buys it, so money is removed from circulation. When they buy a bond, money is injected into circulation.

It’s the other way around. The treasury issues bonds; the Fed buys (or repos) them in exchange for newly issued USD.

Oh whoops, you're right!

Yes, but the liability account in the Fed's case is /dev/null, isn't it?

For the Fed though that liability is just a line in a spreadsheet.

Yes the Fed creates an entry in the balance sheet by convention but it’s basically just a formality to the currency creator.

Does the USG not use quad entry?

I’m certain there’s policy that allows for national mint to create non-spendable exemplars of currency in a way that does not count as cash.

I mean, that's a very corporate accounting way of looking at it. But countries are not corporations, or even banks, and the abstraction is so leaky it's pretty much never worth using.

Even for corporations and individuals it works that way. If you write a check to yourself, it represents both an asset and a liability whose effects on your equity exactly cancel out.

Double entry accounting has properties that allow it to track the flow of money, not just its state (current balance), so it useful for countries as well as corporations.

I'm not really familiar with accounting in English but is it really a liability in double-entry accounting? Wouldn't generating money basically be income? So if you sell $1000 worth of stuff, you credit the sales account for $1000 and debit your cash/bank account for $1000, and the account's basically a bottomless pit where you can draw as long as you're generating income.

> I'm not really familiar with accounting in English but is it really a liability in double-entry accounting?

Only if you're the central bank, but for them, it really is, yes. For everybody else, money held is an asset, since it's somebody else's (in this case, the central bank's) liability to them.

Most probably these are voided notes, they actually have zero value because they were taken out of circulation.

It costs about $.032 to produce a 1 dollar note, so an extra 500000 new bills would be about $16k.

It could be even cheaper if these were old bills than needed to be pulled out of circulation. In that case they'ed be paying money to dispose of them anyways.

> Maybe it's easy for the Fed to acquire more cash as long as it's guaranteed not to be spent.

Based on Fed policy since 2007, they may be happy to hand out cash especially if it's going to be spent.

"Money printer go brrr" and all that...

That ignores the other option which is it's not solid and they just filled the empty space with foam or a wooden box.

Which destroys what the exhibit is trying to show.

The exhibit only claims this is what a $1M cube would look like.

> I'm more interested in is "$1M dollars in $100 bills fits in this area"

Here's $1,000,000 in $50 notes at the Reserve Bank of New Zealand Museum: https://fastly.4sqi.net/img/general/600x600/2817090_qnRbbX_q...

Reminds me of getting a 20c coin in change with a Kiwi* on the back. My younger self always felt like I had been shortchanged 5c.

* AUD 20c was an identical size and same embossed image of the Queen, but a platypus on the reverse.

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.

But a bundle is a bundle

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

What's a yout?

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.

may be they started with a $1M and with time the bills weight compresses the bills, and they have periodically to add more to fill the newly forming emptiness. Kind of inflation.

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).

Those 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.)

Cameras still need to be monitored which costs money. Plus sleight-of-hand and other tricks are a thing, so you'd probably still need to background-check any contractors and maintain a strict chain of custody over access to the cube and then recount and re-check to make sure none of the currency has been substituted by lookalike fakes. Police still costs money.

If there is no reasonable way for the public to notice, why not make everyone's life easier by using fake money? That would be easier and cheaper.

Leaks can be dealt with by the legal system (pay people decently and make them sign an NDA in exchange not to disclose the bills are fake) which is much easier than actually keeping track of 1M of currency.

> 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...

Because going >50% over-budget isn't a good way to further anyone's career in exhibit design, engineering and construction.

I have a friend who works at a firm which specializes in engineering and constructing exhibits for museums and all kinds of public spaces. There's a whole industry ecosystem around doing this. They get brought in on contracts by design firms which specialize in permanent installation exhibits who get hired by the person responsible for exhibits at a museum or exhibit space. It's no different than most niche specialty industries. Even though it's comparatively small, there are still thousands of sites and hundreds of firms. People who do this specialize in it, develop long-term careers and have resumes they care about. Jobs for firms and people come by reputation and word of mouth. Delivering on time, on spec and on budget is crucial for survival. The facilities manager for this Fed building hired an exhibit space manager who developed a budget for this public tour project and then put it out to exhibit design firms for bids. The project was approved on a fixed budget and time frame. The overall budget the exhibit space manager submitted to the facilities manager certainly included the cost of the cash in the cube.

But the bigger reason no one was cavalier about just filling it up with $100 bills is that this exhibit is different because the exhibited artifact is of uniquely high-value (and unlike a Rembrandt, immediately spendable), so it probably had to have a security assessment and is very likely insured against loss (not just theft but fire/water damage etc). The cost of insuring and securing the exhibit was calculated before the budget was ever approved. Adding another 50% in cash would increase the insurance premium.

I reckon you're not very familiar with the world of government spending.

An engineer or artist that reliably find ways to go 50% over budget and generate contract extensions is a highly sought professional amongst vendors that specialize in the public sector.

In gov work contract extensions are almost guaranteed, provided your company also have the civic spirit of contributing to our democracy with health campaign donations.

It is the Fed though, does money actually "cost" anything for them? They're the ones who make the money!

Per this site: https://home.treasury.gov/services/currency-and-coins

> "U.S currency is produced by the Bureau of Engraving and Printing and U.S. coins are produced by the U.S. Mint. Both organizations are bureaus of the U.S. Department of the Treasury."

But even if this exhibit was at a U.S. Mint site, your assumption doesn't account for how the real world works. The people involved in planning, creating and operating a public exhibit space like this on behalf of some museum, department or company are just regular employees who report to mid-level managers with careers in facilities management. I'm not an expert but if this was a U.S. Mint site, I'd guess that the bills on display would be technically 'retired' (or whatever term they have for bills that are removed from circulation). Since the Federal Reserve is a quasi-governmental organization, I can't really guess if these bills are similarly retired or simply cash, the time-value of which this exhibit space is carrying on their balance sheet. Either way, based on the way the real world actually works, it's almost certain the cost of this cash is very precisely tracked and accounted for on an audited budget that some mid-level manager is responsible for balancing right alongside the payroll for ticket takers, security guards and janitorial.

My wife works at the Fed, and I can confirm that 1) the Fed does decommission/retire bills and 2) that whole process is very tightly controlled. The retired bills are typically shredded, and if you go on a tour of a Fed bank, you can get little baggies of "Fed Shreds."

So it seems very likely to me that whatever money is in the cube is decommissioned.

If it's just diverting bills that were heading to be destroyed (not impossible looking at the end of the bills on the non strapped side they look pretty rough) they're not worth a million any more they're just scrap. If you were extra paranoid you could even partially destory the bills and leave only the outer edges needed for the display.

Fun fact, people who work at the Fed just print their salary at the end of the month.

That'd be fun, but I am pretty sure they get it electronically into their bank account — as in, no money is ever made for their salaries, just like most white collar workers.

Demand deposits in bank accounts are also money.

As a side note: In some countries, central bank employees are the only individuals that can actually hold non-paper M0 (or MB?) money, since they get paid their salaries into a central bank account, which are otherwise only available to commercial banks. This used to be the case in Germany and Austria, but has been phased out at some point, as far as I remember.

But even if Fed employees just get paid in regular old M1 demand deposits, that's money nonetheless.

The Bank of England used to offer personal bank accounts to their employees, but they phased it out after 2015. Not sure if these accounts were exactly the same as those used for central banking though.

https://hrreview.co.uk/hr-news/strategy-news/bank-england-cl...

While not money, and probably not even real, those numbers in a DB still keep my kids fed. Tasty tasty DB numbers.

...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.

> 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.

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.

$5k/month or $60k/year is roughly 6% of annual conformal interest rate — is there any bank that will provide that much return in USA today? (There are investment funds which usually do, but there are no guarantees there)

I used AFR [1] that are from 4% to 5%. One cannot give loans lower than that. Any mortgage is higher than that.

[1] https://www.irs.gov/applicable-federal-rates

These are bank notes so they are a liability of the fed. Them holding them doesn't mean they have more money, they just have less liability.

Yep. Imagine if they put those banknotes through decommissioning, but didn't actually destroy them.

Some day they would put it out (or get it stolen), and now there's unaccounted (counterfeit?) cash in circulation. Better to keep it real.

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.

Considering they handle and transport a lot of money, it's safe to assume they don't meet to make back of the envelope estimations concerning weight and volume.

Yeah by "rough calculation" what I mean is that since the Fed knows the ratio of volume to bills, they might have intentionally made the box too big.

Or, the cube was surplus?

It's probably hollow to make the display easier and more reliable.

It is hollow. But it wasn't originally. cough

Museum: "Don't worry, no one will notice".

Calvin Liang: "Ackshually ..."

[dead]

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.

They handle money by putting them in cubes of glass?

Non-snark: Because it's fun to theorize.

agreeed

Because we still care about assigning sensible priors to whatever we think is the truth? You can use this to "analogize" how the feds handle money, but if they were actually careful with the money but a bit misleading on the space $1m would take, that's a different and less egregious error. Ignoring the space of potential possible explanations to make your analogy stronger is just confirmation bias with additional steps.

I'm half serious. Yeah I see the point. But more important to me is the analogy.

I see. That is fair, no judgement.

Though I do sometimes feel the pervasive casual cynicism we have everywhere today sort of creates a self-reinforcing cycle as it preemptively erodes trust.

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.

There was a danish artist that got a very large amount of cash to do a similar in spirit artwork.

He then named it “take the money and run” and showcased what amounted to an empty frame.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Take_the_Money_and_Run_(artwor...

This is so unbelievably funny. Thank you for sharing!

wasn't he sued by the museum and made to pay it back?

Sort of. A third party paid it seems.

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

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.

See sibling comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44437004

The only way to verify is open that sucker up and count.

They should send all of DOGE to work on this very important problem immediately. /s

Whatever happened to the audit of Fort Knox?

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.

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

When you print money by the trillions a million is insignificant. Maybe they're just not good at such small numbers.

The Fed keeps rigorous track of every bill. They have a database with the serial number of every live bill. The money isn't valid until the serial is put into the database, and any time a bank gets a bill, they have to verify the serial number is in the database. And if it's not they have to turn it in for a replacement that is.

The thing is that only a tiny amount of all money exists as physical bills. So they can track that all they want, it ain't going to make a dent in the total money supply :p

20 years ago before there were as many erosions of personal privacy and before I realized how important privacy was, I thought of a similar system to detect counterfeit money.

Scan it and upload the serial to a database. If that serial has been registered somewhere else, before a plane could possibly transport it there, flag both registers to inspect that bill.

If the serial has already been registered as counterfeit, refuse the currency.

If the serial was not issued by the US mint, refuse the currency.

This would have the adverse effect of flagging valid currency too, but this could be worked around. I think it would make counterfeit much harder and have very little technical cost, since reading the denom and serial is trivial.

Same thing can be done to detect fake number plates.

Is there anywhere I can find out more about this?

I learned it when I toured the Mint in Washington DC, but I suspect they have a web page somewhere.

That’s actually the Bureau of Engraving and Printing, on 14th St. SW, which is indeed worth visiting. They print the paper bills (among other things). The U.S. Mint produces the coins. I think only the Philadelphia Mint still mints coins, but it’s also worth visiting.

Denver also mints coins for circulation (mint mark D) and San Francisco does rarely, but mostly does proof sets (legal tender, but generally kept by collectors). Apparently there’s also a newer mint at West Point which uses a W mint mark and also mints coins for circulation.

When you print money by the trillions, tracking every transaction becomes more important not less. I don't know about the exhibit, it is possible that this is not real money too.

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.

25x40 is rarely used because non square piece give a lot more info about placement and a 25 X 40 rectangle is almost twice as wide as it is tall. It’s rarely the right kind of aspect ratio.

> In some way, this is how 1000 piece jigsaw puzzles will never be exactly 1000 pieces.

What??

Yeah, most jigsaw puzzles do not have precisely the number of pieces advertised. Here's an amusing video (by the channel Stand-up Maths) that does a deep dive into it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vXWvptwoCl8

TLDR if you don't have a half-hour: puzzles are usually cut with the pieces on grids, and not all aspect ratios are conducive to that with all piece counts. Like, you might want a 2:3 shaped puzzle with 500 pieces, and 18x28=504 is close enough.

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.

Stacking it in a single sack is a bit silly though, it would fit in a small duffle bag or backpack.

JBR = JonBenet Ramsey

https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Killing_of_JonBen...

Separate comment so you can separately downvote/flag me:

Why, OP, why? How much self-awareness does it really take to realize JBR is a non-standard acronym people won't recognize? It almost feels like a superpower that I take an extra half-second to think about what jargon the average person needs to have defined.

Reading 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.

What is the background of someone who visualizes Scrooge McDuck diving into a pool of doubloons?

Is there any proof that the money inside, including what is visible, is genuine and not a prop?

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.

I was curious and looked and yes, there are absolutely bills that seem to go into the framing. It's not a solid aluminum bar it looks L shaped in person.

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?

It's not a shortfall.

The OP says it totals $1.5M ... and extra $0.5M

I wonder how many read the title, and assume it’s about being short. I certainly did.

I had the feeling it would be a shortfall but had enough doubt to read the article.

Is over by $500k, not short.

Doesn't this depend on the point of view?

Well, sure, things probably look different when you’re standing on your head.

Listen, if the money is greater than the claim, another way to say the exact same thing, without even standing on your head, is that the the claim is less than the money!

Yes, but is it as efficient?

The article talks about 50% extra, not a shortfall.

Then another way to say that is that the claim is short.

Not in english it isn't.

Don'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.

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.

Making 1.1 million into about 550 k? It is less by nearly 50 percent, not more.

No, making 1.1 million into nearly 1.5 million. It is more by nearly 50 percent, not less.

The post claims that it has $1.5M inside.

We don't know what kinda stuff is stuffed in the center — maybe some useless stuff that saves them Feds $500K!

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.

> “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.

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.

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.

Well, if it contains 1.5 million, it also contains 1 million.

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.

Agree, I loved the post, but I also wonder if there's more nuance to it that we're unaware of.

Artist should have been fired. If I'm being shown a stack of $1 million, it better be a stack of 1 million of they are gonna be talking with the fishes.

Not until Nicolas Cage gets involved.

We need to sneak a CT scanner, into the Fed...?

there's only one way to find out

Hacker News heist plan initiated.

For scientific purposes only obviously.

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).

Instead of writing the counting tool he could have used the Multi-Point Tool in ImageJ [1] [2]. I used it just this morning for counting some embryos I collected.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BhFNiPsVRoM

[2] https://fiji.sc/

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...

>I used it just this morning for counting some embryos I collected

"Sentences that flashbang people not in biology"

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.

Here you go: https://ij.imjoy.io/

> 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.

Count Apps:

https://apps.apple.com/us/developer/dynamic-ventures-inc/id9...

Do they claim it's packed solid all the way through?

I assume there's a really big ink bomb in the center.

I assume that at least 51% of the non visible bill parts have been destroyed. Then you do not care if anyone tries some elaborate heist.

Or if the cube needs to go for maintenance or a rebuild. I very much doubt it's real currency with all the security features and stuff.

not explicitly, but the implication is strong. otherwise the cube would be almost any size

Just for fun, the maximum sized cube you could make with a single layer of them facing flat and then entirely hollow on the inside would be about 41 meters or so on a side. https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=sqrt%28%28area+of+a+uni...

I can't argue with the math, but intuitively that just seems really small? It means that you can lay down 166,000 $1 bills on the floor of a very small flat?

The square side would be 41 m meaning ~1600 square meters per face, if I read correctly. So quite a large flat.

Oh, the side? That makes sense, I thought 41 sqm.

Sorry, yes, 41m-on-a-side cube, not 41m^2-sided cube. The outermost square-root in the expression takes the area of one side of the cube (which is the area of the dollars, divided by 6 to account for needing to cover the 6 sides of the cube) and pulls it down to the cube's length of one side.

Yeah, you said it correctly, but I'm not a native speaker and brainfarted "41m on a side" into "each side is 41 sqm". I thought "face", rather than "edge".

A flat with very high ceilings?

Edit: even still 41x41 floorspace is a very large flat.

41 meters is the height of a 13-story building.

The cube is “almost any size” it’s literally overshooting by 50%

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.

I'd like to see this or a similar follow up project memorialized onto a small plaque beside the exhibit.

The KLF burned a million pounds in 1994 (about $3million in today's money)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K_Foundation_Burn_a_Million_Qu...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L9SzDFGbsFI&pp=0gcJCdgAo7VqN...

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.

Edit: Well, damn. I got about the same as you did and rechecked my math and got it wrong.

Anyway, the weight would be 8.1 metric tons.

https://www.usmint.gov/learn/coins-and-medals/circulating-co...

This is what 8 million (Swiss) 5c pieces looks like: https://cdn.unitycms.io/images/BasDL2iBqV3BLXFiXIPDdm.jpg?op...

(A party put them in front of the parliament to launch a campaign for universal basic income)

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.

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!

This good article contains a photograph of a million quid nailed to a wall. Since burnt by scoundrels

http://www.lysator.liu.se/~johol/KLF/Money.html

> Bill, who lives near Aylesbury, said the reason for the request last Wednesday would be revealed in 23 years.

...well?

Someone needs to call/email the museum and ask what is actually in there because it don't add up.

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.

> 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..

And 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.

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.

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.

I get that they're selling to industry, not consumers. They also seem to be offering some pretty strong guarantees regarding accuracy. Nevertheless that pricing is bananas. An uncountable number of bananas.

"If you are not getting 100% accuracy, contact us."

Ok, that's pretty a pretty good marketing line, I have to admit.

That's like some P.T. Barnum stuff, because how the heck would you know the count is off? That would imply you already have a way of counting.

"If your parachute fails, your next jump is free!"

You'd have a person check some of the counts from time to time, I imagine.

It's only €24 for a 24 hour period, and I'd pay that to know exactly how many bananas their pricing is!

Counting is very time-consuming, important to get right, and easy to get wrong. I expect quite a few businesses are happy to pay that for fast, accurate counting.

This is yet another link to an app that doesn't do what the author of the post actually specified.

The post specifically says there's not a tool for counting red dots on an image, and there absolutely are. From the side-counts, you still have to extrapolate to a volume, but a specific highlighted sub-problem is well addressed by apps.

> The post specifically says there's not a tool for counting red dots on an image

Oh really? Is that what it says? Let's take a look:

> All I wanted was a way to click on things in a photo and have the number go up.

Those are the requirements. That's what the app is supposed to do.

I don't see "a tool for counting red dots" anywhere. The closest thing is this passage:

> It's stupidly simple: upload an image, click to drop a dot, and it tells you how many you've placed[…] But somehow, nothing like it existed.

You linked to an app that places its own markers (by way of ML) and then gives you a count of those—not a count of the ones that you put down. That so obviously fails the requirements.

You seem... needlessly offended.

Pass in your image with red dots, and the red dots will be counted by the ML-counting thing just fine. It's a minor variation in approach to solving the problem, and that's OK: When confronted with a problem, people often jump to specific solutions too quickly, and miss out on better or more general approaches. This is quite pertinent in this specific case, as well - you can ask the ML-counting thing to count the rectangles instead of the dots, and perhaps save yourself all the clicking in the first place.

Look, there's no need to get upset. Take a breath. Calm down.

> This is quite pertinent in this specific case, as well - you can ask the ML-counting thing to count the rectangles instead of the dots, and perhaps save yourself all the clicking in the first place.

Are you just dead set on totally missing the point of what the author of this post is doing? You keep leaving comments that suggest you don't understand the requirements at all. Let's put that aside. Here's a dead simple question:

Have you successfully used the app to do the thing that you're saying that it will do when you try to use it?

A good friend+colleague uses that app for counting nests of migratory seabirds in drone imagery for population surveys. It's great. I work in acoustics, myself. :)

> Here's a dead simple question: Have you successfully used the app to do the thing that you're saying that it will do

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.

Ish? Look up the optimum packing of squares. :D

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

In general, it's pretty easy to get the 8x or 19x correctly — these are the large dimensions. So really, you are only looking at being wrong on the 102, and off by two (100-104) is not such a big difference (1.52M-1.58M).

Once you realise that the error bars are small (and it was mostly intuitive for me, probably looking at counting up to a hundred, so a few percent off is not a big deal), you stop worrying about the uncertainty as much ;-)

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?

the fed guys who counted the money: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ymRqYz-Mxnw

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.

At the complete other end there is this art piece which should contain a total of $84,000 in Danish kroner and euros, but contains a grand total of $0:

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/jens-haaning-take-the-money-and...

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

They're an IA.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Independent_agencies_of_the_Un...

The for-profit ones (Amtrak, USPS, etc.) are called SOEs.

The loan-related ones (Freddie Mae) are called GSEs.

IA - Independent Agency

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.

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!")

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)

I call bullshit on that. Show me the evidence.

it's self evident context boy

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.

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.

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.

They’re using US Treasury accounting standards. Either that or inflation is a $!+(@.

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."

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.

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.

artists cant do math

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I've been thinking about using an app like this to count parking spaces in a city!

Thank you

Did the author claim the excess cash there?

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

>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

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.

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.

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.

Audit the Fed (cube)!

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.

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.

well actually...

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) .

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".

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"

Haha, 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.

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

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

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)

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!

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.

"The world’s most expensive piñata"

"What if it’s hollow? [...] A money shell. A decorative cube. A fiscal illusion. The world’s most expensive piñata"

lol

It was $1M back in 2007.

> "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.

Now this is the type I post I come for

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.

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 :'(.

1 Million Swiss Francs in the highest denomination (1000) weighs just 1.14 kg and is a stack of bills around 10 cm high. That is currently also around 1,261,037 USD

[1] https://www.tagesanzeiger.ch/wert-nutzung-gewicht-6-fakten-z...

Now show me a cube made of gold worth $1M.

It's approximately a 3 inch cube.

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.

still cheaper than https://countthings.com/

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.

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.

I think you could tell if the bill was purple (Swiss franc [1]) instead of green in the movies...

[1] https://www.snb.ch/.imaging/flex/jcr:778b68b3-1344-4872-93d7...

the cube is full of $1 bills

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

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.

obligatory

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/n6dJB8OcA8I

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.

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.

That's in TFA

Yes, they did.

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.