Posted by c249709 18 hours ago
> 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...
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 should say, at the start I wasn't married and had no dependents. Also, for large parts of those 20 years, I didn't need to own or use a car.
Yeah you're very much out of touch, what kind of income are you earning or is this more wishful thinking?
[0] https://www.investopedia.com/personal-finance/how-much-incom...
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"...
The day I learned that the acidic feel of pineapples comes from it actually digesting you instead of the opposite is the day I stopped using them.
"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.
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).
Maybe I should ask my kids...
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.
I use "<day> week" in conversation, but I'd say it's falling out of favour. I mostly use it with my parents.
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.
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”.
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".
"Friday week" would ordinarily mean a week characterized in some way by Friday, but of course there can be no such week. There could be a "Good Friday week".
(Yeah, it would be even better if it just made sense transparently and unambiguously to all listeners. But that leaves us with a complaint about idioms in general, not this one in particular.)
I think there was that one or maybe two times the Catholic Church changed the day or date? I don’t know much about it but that may have resulted in a week without a Friday, which would make the next one pretty good, when it happened.
> You know what's really unambiguous? "Friday the 8th".
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.
> 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.
Someone upthread mentioned "half ten", which is similar: if you're familiar with the idiom, you know it unambiguously means half past ten, but if you're not, you can't be sure that it doesn't mean 9.30 (or, for the literalists among us, 5.00).
Anyone telling you that you're wrong for not understanding it, or that you should start using it even though those around you are unfamiliar with it, is being silly; but I don't think anyone here is doing that.
I think it’s silly that English has these quirks, and it’s silly to engage with them as points of argument, which isn’t what I mean to do, but rather to show how my own thought process works, silly it may be. It’s okay to embrace silliness in the environment as long as it isn’t detracting from understanding. This thread is exploring the words, not arguing with each other or trying to convince the other, so it’s not at cross purposes to me. But I think I agree that there may be no disagreement?
Let’s not let the perfect be the enemy of the silly. ;)
I think the main thing I was responding to was this --
> 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.
-- which I (perhaps wrongly) took to be arguing against, or slightly misunderstanding, the claim of the person you were responding to. I don't think they were claiming that the words as written are inherently unambiguous, and I don't think it's a question of reading the context; I think it's just an idiomatic phrase that has a fixed meaning for those who natively use it. It's a bit like a dialect word; it's only ambiguous in the sense that people who don't speak the dialect won't know how to interpret it.
(It could turn out that I'm factually wrong about this, and that there are different groups who use the phrase in mutually contradictory ways! But so far I've only seen a split between groups who use it to mean "the Friday after this coming Friday" and groups who don't use it at all.)
Riiight
“Several..?”
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".
Anything that's a word instead of a precise number implies a range to me (eg, few, handful, several).
Still not as amorphous as the word "now" and its various prefixes when it comes to South Africans and time.
For me it depends on the formality. For example, a married couple is never more than two people.
It's more than several, but still a manageable number.
Use depends on context, like all language, and deliberately choosing a situation that doesn't suit the language will obviously result in confusion.
Outside the US is probably the last place you'd want to pass those bills off. Besides the logistical problem of physically getting an enormous stack of $1 bills past customs... there's so much counterfeit US currency out there that the level of caution is extremely high. Just spent a couple weeks in Costa Rica, and USD is not accepted anywhere if it is even slightly torn, worn, or out of date by more than a few years. Maybe you could tip with it, but that's about it.
They can. But if the delivered box meets the ordered specifications they will ask for extra compensation to redo it.
That plus cost of shipping back and forth.
That plus any possible time pressure around opening of the exhibit.
That plus the fact that the Fed can obtain bank notes for less than their face value. (If they are for example voided bank notes. But they can also just order prop money beyond the first layer if they want to keep their museum work and their official business separate. Which very well might be easier for organisational, accounting and security reasons.)
Plus nobody wants to admit that they screwed up the box order.
All these factors would point towards just stuffing the box with more “banknotes” and pretending that all is well.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rai_stones
> The ownership of a large stone, which would be too difficult to move, was established by its history as recorded in oral tradition rather than by its location. Appending a transfer to the oral history of the stone thus effected a change of ownership.
> Some modern economists have viewed Rai stones as a form of money, and the stones are often used as a demonstration of the fact that the value of some forms of money can be assigned purely through a shared belief in said value.
...
> Rai stones were, and still are, used in rare important social transactions, such as marriage, inheritance, political deals, sign of an alliance, ransom of the battle dead, or, rarely, in exchange for food. Many are placed in front of meetinghouses, around village courts, or along pathways.
> Although the ownership of a particular stone might change, the stone itself is rarely moved due to its weight and risk of damage. Thus the physical location of a stone was often not significant: ownership was established by shared agreement and could be transferred even without physical access to the stone. Each large stone had an oral history that included the names of previous owners. In one instance, a large rai being transported by canoe and outrigger was accidentally dropped and sank to the sea floor. Although it was never seen again, everyone agreed that the rai must still be there, so it continued to be transacted as any other stone.
And I'm glad you didn't find it because that lead to a great post.
Or they just gave up ?
Or something else ?
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.
As we say in my family: "close enough for government work!"
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?)
(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.
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.
I discovered this when I had to test accuracy in a pose estimation model for a computer vision project involving crowds being counted by CCTV. Turns out in low-res imaging (even the best CCTV is a bit rubbish at long range due to wide angle lenses and so on), pose estimation models beat almost everything else for counting. Except... they're still not accurate.
I would spend hours going through hundreds of frames, counting people by hand, and then I'd compare with different pose models, and found they were always out, but they were out by the same amount.
Some models got confused by reflective surfaces, so would double count. Others would be out by ~20% every time for various environmental factors. The good thing about this is you could then easily show calibration. "OK, in that space, whatever the model says, half it, that's a better count", or "OK, in this image from this camera whatever the number the model says, increase/decrease it by 20%, and that'll be more accurate".
We ended up through human calibration being able to provide much more accurate "models" per camera than the models themselves.
It did mean counting hundreds of people per frame for hundreds of frames for dozens of cameras though... I had to abandon the trackpad for a mouse and just got settled in for a few days with DotDotGoose. Colleagues were surprised I had the patience for it. :-)
https://biodiversityinformatics.amnh.org/open_source/dotdotg...
I 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.
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.
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.
(Or at least they used to; when I visited back recently many supermarkets had free trolleys! Can you imagine my shock?)
Is this not a thing in other countries? How do they get people to return their trolleys to the bays?
And did Britain have this before the invasion of Aldi and Lidl?
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.
Well, that is highly illegal and not very profitable vs the amount of risk. You'd be better off doing almost any other crime.
https://taitc.buzzsprout.com/2186249/episodes/17383823-the-p...
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.
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.
And when something is budgeted for $1 Million, it is $1m nothing more nothing less
So this million USD might or might not have been accounted for, but it definitely does not need to be budgeted for.
Yes the Fed creates an entry in the balance sheet by convention but it’s basically just a formality to the currency creator.
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.
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.
Not sure if they still burn the plastic money, would be nice to imagine they dissolve it in acid and use it to make more money (but they probably can't because of the dyes, at least).
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...
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...
* AUD 20c was an identical size and same embossed image of the Queen, but a platypus on the reverse.
~ Vincent LaGuardia Gambini
Simplest way to double check is if top and bottom corners have the same bill density.
But who says that they didn't actually request $1.5M in used bills after doing the math of what it would take to make a cube. Or fill it up with $1M in used bills, and come back and make another request for $500k that also got approved...
I 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.
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.
> "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.
So it seems very likely to me that whatever money is in the cube is decommissioned.
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.
https://hrreview.co.uk/hr-news/strategy-news/bank-england-cl...
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).
(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.)
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.
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.
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.
They have that maybe 50 feet away. It fits in a briefcase. Also, $1 million in $20s.
Calvin Liang: "Ackshually ..."
I think it’s better served to use this as an analogy of how the federal government handles money.
Non-snark: Because it's fun to theorize.
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.
The opposite of clarity is not self-doubt but curiosity. And unlike cynicism it's constructive because it's not afraid of being challenged.
See what happened there? A clear statement was made, but obscured because you mistook it for cynicism.
The absolute I'm talking about in the GP comment, is in reference to the clarity you are referring to in the GGP. You don't actually provide any example of said clarity. And I didn't refer to anything you said directly as cynicism past the point in the chain where you state your preference towards analogizing a museum exhibit to an over-arching pattern about the Fed's handling of money. That to me is indeed casual cynicism, and it provides no clarity, only hand-wavy oversimplification with a defeatist sort of appeal.
Since you don't provide any other example of a statement that I would consider cynical, which in your view actually provides clarity, I'm having to use my own imagination as to what kind of "clarity confused for cynicism" you could possibly be referring to. Those are the statements I'm talking about in the GP comment. And I completely stand by what I said there.
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.
He then named it “take the money and run” and showcased what amounted to an empty frame.
The conclusion that something is off is still right in that case.
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.
It would've been much worse if it was under though.
What??
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.
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)
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Killing_of_JonBen...
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.
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.
The OP says it totals $1.5M ... and extra $0.5M
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.
