Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
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
> 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".