> 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
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 definitely know people who do almost nothing (they mostly show up to meetings and don't talk), and get paid really well because they can tell stories decently about their impact, and nobody seemingly has the stomach to throw them under the bus. I get paid better than them for sure, but I'm also at risk of getting laid off because of the practical upshot of being a top contributor. I am sure I will eventually get laid off, and they will outlast me at this company.
The tech industry is insane. While my "Nothing from my end" joke was tongue-in-cheek, it's parodying a very real dynamic.
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.
Given you use dollars, I'll use US economics as the benchmark. Your estimate only applies to the 1%, according to https://www.investopedia.com/personal-finance/how-much-incom..., according to [0], the top 1% earners has a minimal gross income of $682,577 per year; deduct taxes, cost of living and other expenses, there's no way they'd save up $1.5 million over 2-3 years.
Yeah you're very much out of touch, what kind of income are you earning or is this more wishful thinking?
It's doable, but it took me closer to 20 years.
I got to zero net assets in July 2001. Retired from paid work (mainly sw eng contracting) at the start of covid in April 2020.
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.
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).
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)?
I think for a lot of things it doesn't matter, so either 10h or 32h are okay (eg. soaking beans, marinating meat). If it says overnight I assume the time doesn't really matter that much.
Yeah, I use pear to marinate thinly sliced beef (my variant of bulgogi). I wouldn't let that marinate overnight either. An hour or so is enough. Too much pear for too long and the meat becomes so soft it almost falls apart.
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.
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.
In Germany it‘s even more confusing. In the West people say „Viertel nach Neun“ and “Viertel vor Zehn” which is pretty much „quarter past nine“ and “quarter to ten”, while in Eastern Germany people say “Viertel Zehn” and “Dreiviertel Zehn” which rather means “quarter of ten” and “three quarters of ten”. Even though they are meaning exactly the same times.
My English-speaking father with German heritage said both “quarter to ten” for 9:45 and “quarter of ten” for 10:15. He’s the only person I’ve heard say “quarter of ten”. Now I know that could be from his German heritage even though he never learned German.
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.
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.
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”.
> > 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.
I think this discussion of "Friday week" has people talking at cross purposes, and there may not be any real disagreement. It's an idiom, and if you're part of a (sub-)culture that has this idiom, its meaning is unambiguous. But if it's unfamiliar to you, you can't be expected to deduce its meaning from first principles.
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.
Interestingly, in the languages where do you say "half ten", it unambiguously means 9:30 not 10:30. For example, in German you would say halb zehn (or "half ten" / "half to ten"), which means 9:30.
> 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. ;)
Fair enough! I didn't mean to push against any exploration of this sort of thing; I think it's interesting too (and even if I didn't, that would be no reason to try to impose my feelings on others).
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.)
I didn’t interpret anything you said as prescriptive, but it did seem to be perhaps peremptory in a way where you were trying to adjudicate a supposed dispute that wasn’t actually occurring, but I appreciate your contributions as descriptive of how you interpreted the thread and your views on the term. I appreciated the nuanced interrogatory approach in a Socratic way and its lack of sophistry. I think you understand the situation, but some people struggle with how to respond to these phrasings more than others perhaps.
> “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".
That's just a spicy way of saying "I am unfamiliar with this idiom". Nobody is saying you should unilaterally start using it in the US, or in any other context where nobody would understand you. They're saying that, for those who do have this idiom, it is unambiguous.
There's a little bit more to it than that. I am unfamiliar with the idiom, and the idiom does not appear to be grammatical English, suggesting that something has gone wrong rather than that the speaker is using a foreign vocabulary item. Most idioms don't look like word salad, but this one does.
"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".
Your original complaint was that the phrase is meaningless. To people who are familiar with it, it's obviously not meaningless! For those who are unfamiliar with it, I'd say the bafflingness is more feature than bug; you'll immediately know that you've encountered an unfamiliar phrase (or missed a word), rather than trying to piece it together logically and coming away with an illusion of understanding.
(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.)
> "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".
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.
Exactly the point, requires clarification, doesn't stand on it's own, is hardly unambiguous.
Moreover most people are surrounded by by people using the same calendar and don't clarify, it's an issue for travellers and data reconciliation across boundaries.
That said, it's the month and year that are most lacking from a simple { Dayname, day of month } pairing.
> 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.
(a) I generally don’t schedule things in the middle of the night
and
(b) it’s well understood amongst my social circles that if you’re for some reason trying to schedule something at the end of a party at 2am Friday then for basically all purposes it’s still Thursday
—-
But also once time zones are involved it’s better to just give a date, time and zone for clarity. That doesn’t mean people need to apply the same to their personal life and use it even where shorthand is unambiguous.
I'd go off the timezone of whoever made the statement, but honestly this is where it's better to simply clarify by saying "just checking, that's in 8 days, yeah?" or similar.
My wife and I have a disagreement about "the other day".
I use it to mean, a time up to two years ago. She uses it to mean up to no more than a month.
I think the disagreement is because I have a better memory - two years ago does not feel so distant to me. It is a silly and fun thing to argue about, leading to some agreements on terminology:
A while ago - 2- 10 years
Back in the day - 10+ years ago
And just to troll her, I boldly make the claim, "just now" means any time between now and a week ago.
Oh no, a whole new bunch of time-wimey words I hadn't even considered! :-)
I'm no authority but to me using "the other day" as a phrase is trying to impart a rough reference to a point in time.
Which means we're talking in "day" timeframes where week or month wouldn't be suitable. I would expect "the other day" to be within a week, but accept no more than a month.
Similarly "some months ago" = probably less than 6 months but definitely no more than a year.
The world is a wonderful place and the ways we humans can confuse communication seemingly knows no bounds. But I don't want a proscriptive definition for each little casual phrase as I think this flexibility in language is why it keeps changing and being alive!
Not that I'm any authority but I'd use "several" interchangeably with "few".
The sibling comment suggestion of using it in the [gap] does make sense though...
There was a contestant on a recent season of Survivor who, iirc, gave up on a challenge because the host said it would take "several hours" to finish. Later the contestant explained that "last I checked several means seven", and about an hour into the challenge he realized he wouldn't last for seven hours, so he quit.. (When the host said "several hours" I believe he meant about 4 hours)
This of course led to much ridicule and many memes in the fandom, and Survivor even titled the seventh episode of that season "Episode Several". In post-season interviews the contestant is still adamant that several means seven.
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".
Despite coming across like I was trying to correct you, I only meant to give my personal understanding of “handful”
I don’t know where I got my idea of handful, but it probably came from how high I can count using the fingers on one hand. So far that understanding seems to work for me when other people say it as long as I do what you said and treat it as an approximation.
On the “several” topic, I used to think it meant “about seven” because of the shared “sev” prefix, but it didn’t take long to realize several has a much bigger range than that.
This is what I love about language. "several" and "handful" have waaay different meanings to me.
In practice my immediate response for "several" would be to use it interchangeably with "few". 3-5.
But all these comments make me think that maybe it should fill my [gap] at "seven-ish". I mean, the "seve" bit does kinda lend itself.
[0] Tangentially, several is from 'Medieval Latin separalis "separable," ' as in '(as in went their several ways)' . So to link it with "seven" would be a weird thing to do but I imagine this kind of thing happens with a living language.
As for "handful"... you and I are worlds apart on that one! :-P Hand has four fingers, five digits. So "handful" is 4-5 for me. But as other comments alluded, if the [thing] is a batch of small something (like sand) then it's simply how much you can grasp.
As I mentioned these words have surprisingly varied definitions between people! One of the wonders of a living language.
So if I said "hand me a couple of screws, would you?" - you'd give me exactly 2? If you know you want an exact number I would always use the exact number. I'd never say "give me a dozen screws", I'd just say "give me 12 screws". Named quantities are almost always a range rather than a definitive number as far as I'm concerned.
Ahh, that's different than referring to a count of things though - you can't hand a couple of married people to someone, for example. But "Hand me a couple of screws, would you?" - I'd pass them 3-4 screws, not 2.
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
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.
>> you might be able to get away with spending the cash overseas
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.
> to see if the serial numbers are out of circulation.
Cash cannot be invalidated like this. It would ruin the value of all cash since you could no longer trust cash from anyone. Only damaged notes are taken out and replaced by the government.
This is something you see in movies. Cash is by nature not traceable, so invalidating notes after issue would make it impossible to trust any cash transaction.
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?
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.
I think Rai stones would be even better for that. One, because of their own history and usage, and two, because it is not the usual example everybody is already used to, showing that the concept is bigger and not bound to our modern society.
> 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.
The phrase "good enough for government work" was actually not originally meant ironically. It was for Roosevelt's Works Progress Administration and it was an optimistic statement on the quality of the 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.
Given that they are not contradicting, but supporting each other i would suggest to believe both. The blogpost says they counted the pile and it is more than a million dollar. The redit post says that a tour guide says it is more than a million dollar because the box was too big. That is the same information verified two different ways. Why do you feel the need to chose who you believe here?
It's also a culinary thing. I grow my own vegetables because they taste much better than what's in the store. Chickens raised in a small-scale chicken coop environment tend to taste much better than those raised in factory conditions.
Chickens raised in a small-scale chicken coop environment tend to taste much better than those raised in factory conditions.
Sure, but chickens raised in a small-scale $20k coop probably don't taste better than the same chickens raised in an equally sized $2k, or even $200, coop.
I do the same except I use shell scripts. script/fmt, script/lint etc are consistent across projects even though the implementation details differ. I only use make for actually making files. It’s great for that, but it’s a pretty crappy replacement for a shell script.
I take issue with assuming that based on his name alone. Is there a wealthy von Ahn family I’m not aware of? If there is, having that name doesn’t mean you are part of that family.
It wasn’t on the name alone. As another pointed out his name is a German noble name. A quick Google search revealed that he went to private school, had a C64 as a child, and his parents owned a candy factory. Not what I would call a standard middle class background.
Yes. Leaving “significant” out of the second one leaves the impression the author is pointing out that non-significant evidence is still evidence. That distracts from the actual point that “absence of evidence is not evidence of absence”
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