I think the idea is that in the financial world of 2100, when on currency, 10⁶ should be read as short-hand for 10E6, not 1E6.

Thus, 99⁶ should be interpreted as 99E6, hence 99 million, as the author says.

We know already that SI isn't universally followed. As a rough comparison, if a food item contains 160 calories, we know that's 160 kilocalories - and calorie isn't an SI unit. Or, 1GB of RAM is often 1024^3 bytes, with relatively fewer people using GiB.

If you look closely, kcal is always written Calorie not calorie. It’s interesting that even in otherwise metric based countries, the joule is completely foreign. It must be what most Americans experience when they see Celsius

RAM is always GiB - it’s how it works. I’d love to see an example of it being mangled though

Back about 20 years ago, I actually did see some SFF PCs listing their (chipset-fixed) RAM in terms of powers of 10, it was strange and disconcerting to see numbers like '1.04 GB' (1GiB - 32MB of video ram)

I'm don't know where you are talking about, I've now looked at the four closest food labels I could find and all have been kcal/ kJ, are you in Kenya or something?

I have looked closely. Quoting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calorie

> Some authors recommend the spelling Calorie and the symbol Cal (both with a capital C) if the large calorie is meant, to avoid confusion;[8] however, this convention is often ignored.

For example, the US FDA page on calories at https://www.fda.gov/food/nutrition-facts-label/calories-nutr... has:

> 2,000 calories a day is used as a general guide for nutrition advice, but your calorie needs may be higher or lower depending on your age, sex, height, weight, and physical activity level.

As for 'RAM is always GiB - it’s how it works.' - that's my point.

RAM by convention is in GiB even if the notation uses GB.

The "Crucial Pro 32GB Kit (16GBx2) DDR5-5600 UDIMM" at https://www.crucial.com/ is actually GiB, because the convention for RAM is to use "GB" to mean "GiB".

Even though that doesn't follow SI prefix conventions.

Just like the predicted currency of 75 years from now uses 99⁶ to mean 99 million, even though the superscript 9 is not currently a suffix meaning "million".

Given that 99^6 is supposed to mean 99,000,000, it seem clear that the superscript is not meant to be exponentiation but rather just denote the number of zeroes following (ie. short for scientific notation à la the 99e6 syntax used in programming languages.)

Hyperinflation requires austerity measures.

Not to mention, 99^6 = 941,480,149,401 ≠ 99,000,000 (which TFA also quotes). But who's to say notation didn't degrade along with the rest of society? :^)