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The Fed says this is a cube of $1M. They're off by half a million

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Re: The Fed says this is a cube of $1M. They're off by half a million

#311

Post by stephen_g »

meta_ai_x wrote: post #242
lxgr wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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

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.

Re: The Fed says this is a cube of $1M. They're off by half a million

#312

Post by eloisant »

kasey_junk wrote: post #255
grogenaut wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Re: The Fed says this is a cube of $1M. They're off by half a million

#313

Post by jjk166 »

tonymet wrote: post #282
IAmBroom wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Re: The Fed says this is a cube of $1M. They're off by half a million

#315

Post by jjk166 »

h1fra wrote: post #213

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

Re: The Fed says this is a cube of $1M. They're off by half a million

#316

Post by stephen_g »

somat wrote: post #139

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 cu…

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?

Re: The Fed says this is a cube of $1M. They're off by half a million

#317

Post by OJFord »

goodcanadian wrote: post #117

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.

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.

Re: The Fed says this is a cube of $1M. They're off by half a million

#319

Post by throaway920181 »

RajT88 wrote: post #288
takinola wrote: post #283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

Re: The Fed says this is a cube of $1M. They're off by half a million

#320

Post by SilasX »

SilasX wrote: post #208
jmkni wrote: post #192

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 rea…

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.

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