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Comment by jwecker | Hacker News Reader

Pedantic-police: The $1-million little pile there has 10 bundles of $10,000 - that's not 1 million. (or are my eyes deceiving me?) Don't have the patience to figure out if that error is propagated to the rest...

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No, it's $1 million.

http://www.pagetutor.com/trillion/calculations.html

It's just that dollar bills look pretty small next to feet. The perspective also makes it look smaller.

It's 5 bundles deep and 2 wide, but also 10 high (about 5 inches). So I guess your eyes are deceiving you.

You're totally correct. It appears every picture in this article is off by a large factor.

One million dollars takes up several duffel bags. Here's a picture I found that I can't verify but HuffPost thinks it's true:

http://images.huffingtonpost.com/2008-05-27-1MillionDollars....

Even if it's not 100%, it's much closer to that than the size of two shoes. Here is a picture from the same article of 100 million:

http://images.huffingtonpost.com/2008-05-27-100MillionCash.j...

Not even close. A packet is 100 bills; a packet of $100 bills is ten thousand dollars. Just a rough count of the front face of what you see in that picture will tell you that there is either more than a million there, or that the centre of the main block is hollow. Think of it this way (in a very lossy fashion): a crisp, new bill is not too very different in thickness from a premium sheet of inkjet paper. A US bill of current issue is 2.61" by 6.14", so four of them can be printed on a letter-size page with a lot of trimming waste (42% waste -- but it's the best packing you can get on letter). A ream of paper is 500 sheets, so with a whole lot of waste, a pile of paper about the size of a ream of ordinary office paper is $200,000 dollars. Paper is ordinarily sold in boxes of ten reams, and if you are familiar with the standard size box of office paper, well, you are familiar with something that is 42% bigger than is needed to hold two million dollars in $100 bills.

...10 bundles of $10,000...

The text right next to the picture says 100 bundles of $10,0000.

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