Posted by c249709 3 days ago
>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 :'(.
I realize the fed is not technically a government agency.
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.
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]
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/jens-haaning-take-the-money-and...
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.
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?
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.
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)
NRF reports that total retail shrinkage in 2021 was 1.44% - from all sources.
> The survey found that the average shrink rate in 2021 was 1.44%, a slight decrease from the last two years but comparable to the five-year average of 1.5%
Apparently the most recent survey was 1.66%..
https://invue.com/resource-center/blog/6-retail-shrinkage-st...
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.
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.
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).
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.
4o: that's $25.7 million
Is the idea of the exhibit that the cube is empty other than the outside edges?
Mr beast routinely has a million dollars as a prop and it's significantly smaller than this, and cubed values go up FAST
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.
I find it funny they still advertise having a display of a million dollars, but in boring modern notes. Didn't even bother to look for it even though I walked past the place like 15 times on a Vegas trip, and literally went into the building for a cheap breakfast.
The Bureau of Engraving and Printing had a similar glass box filled with uncut sheets of $10 notes when I visited in 2016.
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