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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

obligatory

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

>So yeah. They’re off by 50%.

Ah, that'll be the allowance for inflation/devaluation.

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.

I bet it’s not cash all the way through to make it look bigger

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

lol

Re Dot Counter, cool work, but charging me $3 to download an image with dots on it is just silly.

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.

Do we truly know if the Middle is all dollar bills and not filler?

Ron Paul is still alive and in some small way, just got his dream of auditing the fed turned into reality.

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.

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!

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/

Not surprised that the Fed overspent a project by 50%.

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.

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.

> 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/

It's always amusing how people easily carry $1M cash in the movies.