An anonymous reader quotes a report from Fortune: Starting in April, the Tokyo Metropolitan government, one of the country's largest employers, is set to allow its employees to work only four days a week. It is also adding a new "childcare partial leave" policy, which will allow some employees to work two fewer hours per day. The goal is to help employees who are parents balance childcare and work, said Tokyo Gov. Yuriko Koike. "We will continue to review work styles flexibly to ensure that women do not have to sacrifice their careers due to life events such as childbirth or child-rearing," Koike said in a speech during the Tokyo Metropolitan Assembly's regular session, the Japan Times reported.

Moving to a four-day workweek could help address some of the core issues associated with Japan's heavy work culture, which can especially weigh on working women. The gap between men and women when it comes to housework is one of the largest among OECD countries, with women in Japan engaging in five times more unpaid work, such as childcare and elder care, than men, according to the International Monetary Fund. More than half of women who had fewer children than they would have preferred said they had fewer children because of the increased housework that another child would bring, according to the IMF. In some cases, moving to a four-day workweek has been shown to improve housework equity. Men reported spending 22% more time on childcare and 23% more time on housework during a four-day workweek trial conducted across six countries by 4 Day Week Global, which advocates for the issue.

It would take a major societal change for the four-day workweek to catch on more broadly, but years of experiments have shown that working one day less a week improves employee productivity and well-being, said Peter Miscovich, the global future of work leader at real estate services company JLL. "The upside from all of that has been less stress, less burnout, better rest, better sleep, less cost to the employee, higher levels of focus and concentration during the working hours, and in some cases, greater commitment to the organization as a result," Miscovich told Fortune.

"To date, about 500 people have been put in cryogenic stasis after legal death," writes a Bloomberg Opinion technology columnist, "with the majority of them in the U.S.

"But a few thousand more, including Emil Kendziorra, are on waiting lists, wearing bracelets or necklaces with instructions for emergency responders. " Kendziorra, 36, runs Berlin-based Tomorrow Biostasis GmbH, one of the first cryonics businesses in Europe to join a market dominated by American firms organizations like The Alcor Life Extension Foundation and The Cryonics Institute. The former cancer doctor has several hundred people on his firm's waiting list. They skew to their late 30s, male and tend to work in technology. Patients can choose to have their entire body preserved and held upside down in a four-person dewars, a thermos-like aluminum vat filled with liquid nitrogen, or just preserve their brain, which is cheaper.

Kendziorra says cryopreservation overall has become less expensive over the past few decades on an inflation-adjusted basis, a claim that he bases on historic prices published by his peers, who he says are making a collective effort to bring down costs. That could be critical to shifting cryonics from a fringe pursuit to something a little more mainstream, especially since it is no longer just for billionaires like PayPal Inc. co-founder Peter Thiel (who has reportedly signed up with Alcor). Kendziorra, for instance, has made cryonics just another monthly subscription by capitalizing on insurance, he told me during a Twitter Spaces discussion on cryonics last month. His customers pay a 25-euro ($26.54) monthly fee to Tomorrow Biostasis, and they also make the company the beneficiary of a minimum 100,000-euro life insurance payout upon their legal death. Kendziorra says that covers the full cost of cryonics including the biggest outlay: maintenance over the next century or so.

All told, most of his customers are paying about 50 euros a month for both the company's subscription fee and the life insurance policy for the option of a long sleep at death. Of course, most companies don't survive for more than a century, so Tomorrow Biostasis also partners with a non-profit group in Switzerland to carry out the storage of customers on its behalf.... The domain itself is largely funded by wealthy individuals including CEOs of tech companies, angel investors and scientists, Kendziorra says, adding that for them to invest in his own firm, their primary motivation shouldn't be "monetary" but rather to help further the field.

The mechanics all sound sensible, but that still leaves the question of whether cryonics will work, medically speaking. Doctors and scientists have used words like quackery, pseudoscience and outright fraud to describe the field. Clive Cohen, a neuroscientist from Kings College London, has called it a "hopeless aspiration that reveals an appalling ignorance of biology." The Association of Cryobiology has compared it to turning a hamburger back into a cow.

A new paper, published in the journal Science, found that when the Y chromosome was gone from blood cells in male mice genetically engineered to lose their Y chromosomes, scar tissue built up in the heart, leading to heart failure and a shortened life span. The New York Times reports: Because there was a direct cause-and-effect relationship between the loss of Y and ailments of aging in the mice, the study bolsters the notion that the same thing can happen in human males. Researchers have documented an increase in risk for chronic diseases like heart disease and cancer related to loss of the Y chromosome in many studies over the years, including the new one, which used data from a large genetic study of the British population. The loss of Y could even account for some of the difference between the life spans of men and women, the authors of the Science study say.

At least 40 percent of males lose the Y chromosome from some of their blood cells by age 70. And by age 93, at least 57 percent have lost some of it. The chromosome is lost sporadically from blood cells during cell division, when it is kicked out of some cells and then disintegrates. The result is what researchers call a mosaic loss of Y. There is no way, other than to stop smoking, to reduce the risk of losing the Y chromosome. And the condition is unrelated to men having lower levels of testosterone in their bodies as they age. Taking testosterone supplements would have no effect, nor would it reverse the consequences. [...]

It is too soon to say what men should do -- other than to stop smoking -- to protect themselves from losing their Y chromosomes or to alleviate the consequences. Those in [the researcher's] group found they could protect the hearts of the mice without Y chromosomes by blocking TGF-beta, a key molecule involved in the production of scar tissue. Dr. Stephen Chanock, the director of the division of cancer epidemiology and genetics at the National Cancer Institute, said the mouse study was "really cool." But he noted that there was no evidence yet that drugs to block TGF-beta would be effective in men who lost their Y. And, for now, there is little point in testing men for loss of Y, Dr. Chanock said, adding, "the over-interpretation of these data for monetary purposes worries me deeply."

Somewhere on Yahoo, one writer asks "Is the comic book industry dying or thriving?" There was a time when comic books were sold at newsstands alongside mainstream publications, according to Forbes, but that changed in the early 1980s when periodical comics all but disappeared from newsstands. From then on, the vast majority of comic books were sold through independently owned retail comic shops.
But GamesRadar+ notes a boom started in the 1990s — when comic books became an investment: Long story short, folks outside of regular comic book readers discovered that, in some cases, key comic book issues (such as those that debuted popular characters or titles) could be worth significant amounts of money on the secondary market, leading to some fans buying dozens of copies of a single issue in the hopes of someday capitalizing on their monetary value...

Someone should've explained supply and demand — the bubble burst because when everyone is buying and meticulously preserving a million copies of a comic book, there is no rarity to drive up the value to the level of less well-preserved comic books from earlier eras.
Their article also points out that this era saw the dawn of lucrative "variant covers". But the '90s also saw a rebellion of top Marvel artists who left to found Image comics, "the first major third-party publisher to challenge Marvel and DC's reign over the industry in years," which led to "a rise in independent and creator-owned comic books, both large and small, and helped the rising tide of indie publishers gain a solid foothold as an overall industry presence." (Presumably this "rising tide" would also include publishers of manga and anime-derived titles.)

So where are we now? The article on Yahoo notes the vast popularity of comic book movies, and also argues that "The billion-dollar comic business continues to boom." According to Publisher's Weekly, sales of comic books and graphic novels topped $1.28 billion in 2020, an all-time high. It's no fluke. With a few exceptions — sales fell a little in 2017, for example — comic book sales have been rising consistently for decades.
But who's actually reading comic books? Is it teenagers? Nostalgic adults? Investing collectors? People who saw the movies first? (If you're 12 years old, are you going to read some comic book, or watch The Avengers?)

Comic books now also have to compete with incredibly immersive videogames, virtual reality, and a gazillion cellphone apps — not to mention social media, and even online fan fiction. So I'd be interested to hear the experiences of Slashdot's readers. It seems like we'd be a reasonably good cross section of geek culture — but can we solve the riddle of the state of the comic book industry today?

Share your own thoughts in the comments. Is the comic book industry dying or thriving?

The Federal Reserve wants to know what the internet is worth to you. The answer could help the central bank solve one of the most puzzling paradoxes of the modern economy: The current expansion is the longest in history, yet productivity gains are weak and GDP growth, while steady, is far from stellar. From a report: In a speech last week, Fed Chairman Jerome Powell raised the possibility that the problem is with the data itself. GDP measures the value of products and services that are bought and sold. But many of the greatest technological innovations of the internet age are free. Search engines, e-mail, GPS, even Facebook -- the official economic statistics are not designed to capture the benefits they generate for businesses and consumers. "Good decisions require good data, but the data in hand are seldom as good as we would like," Powell said. Instead, Powell cited recent work by MIT economist Erik Brynjolfsson, one of the leading academics on the intersection of technology and the economy. In a paper with Avinash Collis of the National Bureau of Economic Research and Felix Eggers of the University of Groningen in the Netherlands, the authors conducted massive surveys to estimate the monetary value that users place on the tools of modern life.

The results? The median user would need about $48 to give up Facebook for one month. The median price of giving up video streaming services like YouTube for a year is $1,173. To stop using search engines, consumers would need a median $17,530, making it the most valuable digital service. The authors also conducted more limited surveys with students in Europe on other popular platforms. One month of Snapchat was valued at about 2.17 euros. LinkedIn was just 1.52 euros. But giving up WhatsApp? That would require a whopping 536 euros. Twitter, however, was valued at zero euros.

Andrew L.Goodkind, Benjamin A. Jones, and Robert P. Berrens, writing in a paper: Cryptocurrency mining uses significant amounts of energy as part of the proof-of-work time-stamping scheme to add new blocks to the chain. Expanding upon previously calculated energy use patterns for mining four prominent cryptocurrencies (Bitcoin, Ethereum, Litecoin, and Monero), we estimate the per coin economic damages of air pollution emissions and associated human mortality and climate impacts of mining these cryptocurrencies in the US and China. Results indicate that in 2018, each $1 of Bitcoin value created was responsible for $0.49 in health and climate damages in the US and $0.37 in China. The similar value in China relative to the US occurs despite the extremely large disparity between the value of a statistical life estimate for the US relative to that of China. Further, with each cryptocurrency, the rising electricity requirements to produce a single coin can lead to an almost inevitable cliff of negative net social benefits, absent perpetual price increases. For example, in December 2018, our results illustrate a case (for Bitcoin) where the health and climate change "cryptodamages" roughly match each $1 of coin value created. We close with discussion of policy implications.

It's a design classic, but in these days of ubiquitous mobile phones, only 10,000 of the red kiosks remain on the streets. Can they survive the next decade? The Guardian: John Farmer, who describes himself as an activist shareholder, is a man with a mission -- to save Britain's red phone boxes. These were once a feature of every high street in the country, but now number only 10,000 or so (and half of those are decorative rather than operational). At the recent annual general meeting of British Telecom, which even in the age of the mobile phone has a statutory obligation to maintain a payphone network, Farmer demanded that more be done to maintain the traditional red boxes. It was a point he has made at past AGMs -- always, he says, to audience applause.

In 2015 the traditional red phone box was voted the greatest British design of all time, ahead of the Routemaster bus, the Spitfire, the union jack and Concorde. It was designed in 1924 by the architect Sir Giles Gilbert Scott. [...] There are still numerous Scott kiosks in central London, many of which have been listed as historically or architecturally significant -- a response to the destruction of many boxes by the newly formed British Telecom in the 1980s. Remarkably Scott's original wooden prototype still stands outside the Royal Academy in Piccadilly. Across the UK, more than 3,000 kiosks have been listed, including all the K2s, so there is no danger of them disappearing from Britain's streets. Neil Scoresby, BT's general manager for payphones, tells me a revolution in payphones is under way, reflecting the fact that only about 30,000 calls a day are now made from them. Over the next decade, most of the current 31,000 street kiosks (they are mostly ugly, post-Scott designs) will be swept away and replaced by three metre-tall InLink pillars and other devices that combine free calls with wi-fi services and are funded by advertising, but about 2,500 red boxes will be retained and converted for digital use.

The fact there were once more than 70,000 red kiosks and now only 10,000 remain on the streets suggests that a lot of boxes have disappeared. In the 1970s and 80s, many were melted down, but gradually aficionados such as Stamp fought back and the boxes' aesthetic (and indeed monetary) value started to be recognised. Since 2008, rather than remove decommissioned ones that have not been listed, BT has allowed local councils and charities to repurpose them under its adopt-a-kiosk scheme. More than 5,000 have been adopted.

An anonymous reader writes: You'd think striking it suddenly rich would be the ultimate ticket to freedom. Without money worries, the world would be your oyster. Perhaps you'd champion a worthy cause, or indulge a sporting passion, but work? Surely not. However, remaining gainfully employed after sudden wealth is more common than you'd think. After all, there are numerous high-profile billionaires who haven't called it quits despite possessing the luxury to retire, including some of the world's top chief executives, such as Amazon's Jeff Bezos and Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg. But it turns out, the suddenly rich who aren't running companies are also loathe to quit, even though they have plenty of money. That could be, in part, because the link between salary and job satisfaction is very weak. According to a meta-analysis by University of Florida business school professor Timothy Judge and other researchers, there's less than a 2% overlap between the two factors. In the long run, we derive job satisfaction from non-monetary sources, which include positive peer relationships, the ability to work on meaningful projects and even leadership opportunities.

Turns out it's really hard to persuade people to exercise -- even when they have access to how many steps they've taken, and even when they get paid for it. A staggering 90 percent of people stop wearing fitness trackers when given the choice. Fortune reports: In the new yearlong study, published in The Lancet Diabetes & Endocrinology, researchers randomized 800 people in Singapore who had a full-time job into four groups. Some wore a Fitbit Zip and were paid a small amount of money to get moving -- which they were instructed either to keep or to donate to charity -- while others didn't wear Fitbits. Researchers measured their physical activity, weight, blood pressure, the body's ability to use oxygen (called cardiorespiratory fitness) and their self-reported quality of life. For the last six months of the study, all incentives were dropped, and people could choose whether or not to continue wearing their fitness trackers. (About 40% of people had stopped wearing it in the first six months anyway.) The cash seemed to work at first. Those who were rewarded with cash did an extra 13 minutes of moderate-to-vigorous physical activity each week and added 570 steps to their daily counts. Raising money for charity had no effect. But once the monetary rewards stopped, so did the improvements. By the end of the study, just 10% of people were still wearing the trackers.

An anonymous reader writes The internet is full of interesting nuggets of info about Nikola Tesla's life and scientific exploits: The time a young Tesla improved an electric motor for Edison, and Edison simply would not pay Tesla the monetary reward he had promised him earlier. The friction between Tesla and wealthy industrialist J.P. Morgan, and Tesla's friendship with (kinder) industrialist George Westinghouse. The 2 different times Tesla's main laboratory burned to the ground. The time a Tesla lab experiment reportedly caused a small earthquake to trigger in lower Manhattan. Tesla's (never quite fulfilled) dream of transmitting electricity across great distances without using wires or cables, etc. All this fascinating stuff, and more, about Tesla's life is out there, mostly in shortish snippets — and sometimes woven into outright conspiracy theories — on the internet for anyone to examine. Now to my question: What are the best books to read to get a fuller picture of Nikola Tesla's life and work? Preferably something well researched and factually accurate. Are there any good documentaries or movies (apart from David Bowie playing a wizard-like Tesla in "The Prestige")? Why is Thomas Edison so well known and covered in education/popular culture, and the equally prolific and ingenious Tesla a "mysterious and ghostly figure" by comparison?

jsuda (822856) writes "Most of us know that making money is difficult and saving it is even harder, but understanding money is easy–it's just coins and folding certificates, a mere medium of exchange. That's wrong! according to Felix Martin, author of Money: The Unauthorized Biography. Not only is that understanding wrong but it's responsible (in large part) for the 2007 Great Recession and the pitiful 'recovery' from it as well as a number of previous financial and credit disasters." Keep reading for the rest of Jsuda's review.

Frequent correspondent Bennett Haselton writes with a forward-looking response to a recent ruling that peer-to-peer network participants have little privacy interest in files stored on their computer and that they have made available via P2P. Writes Bennett: "A court rules that law enforcement did not improperly 'search' defendants' computers by downloading files that the computers were sharing via P2P software. This seems like a reasonable ruling, but such cases may become rare if P2P software evolves to the point where all downloads are routed anonymously through other users' computers." Read on for the rest.

An anonymous reader writes "An assistant professor at Ohio State University who recently earned her Ph.D. in literature writes a warning in Slate for others following the same path. She says, 'I now realize graduate school was a terrible idea because the full-time, tenure-track literature professorship is extinct. After four years of trying, I've finally gotten it through my thick head that I will not get a job—and if you go to graduate school, neither will you. ... Don't misunderstand me. There is unquantifiable intellectual reward from the exploration of scholarly problems and the expansion of every discipline—yes, even the literary ones, and even if that means doing bat-s**t analysis like using the rule of "false elimination" to determine that Josef K. is simultaneously guilty and not guilty in The Trial. But there is one sort of reward you will never get: monetary compensation from a stable, non-penurious position at a decent university. ... By the time you finish—if you even do— your academic self will be the culmination of your entire self, and thus you will believe, incomprehensibly, that not having a tenure-track job makes you worthless. You will believe this so strongly that when you do not land a job, it will destroy you, and nobody outside of academia will understand why. (Bright side: You will no longer have any friends outside academia.) ... In the place of actual jobs are adjunct positions: benefit-free, office-free academic servitude in which you will earn $18,000 a year for the rest of your life."

redletterdave writes "Mark Zuckerberg, Sergey Brin and Yuri Milner have teamed up to create The Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences Foundation, which now offers the most lucrative annual prize in the history of science: A $33 million pot to be split among 11 people, with individual rewards worth $3 million apiece. Comparatively, the monetary value of the Nobel prize is just $1.1 million. 'Our society needs more heroes who are scientists, researchers and engineers,' Zuckerberg said. 'We need to celebrate and reward the people who cure diseases, expand our understanding of humanity and work to improve people's lives.'"

jsuda writes "For those billions of people for whom the current political-economic system doesn't work–the Occupy Wall Street people, the Tea Partiers, the 99%-ers and have-nots, the middle and lower classes, and the rest of the unwashed masses, Occupy World Street is a starburst of enlightenment and a practical vision of hope for a new and advanced society." Read on for jsuda's review

Hugh Pickens writes "NPR reports that not so long ago, the prospect of a debt-free U.S. was seen as a real possibility with the potential to upset the global financial system. As recently as 2000, the U.S. was running a budget surplus, taking in more than it was spending every year — and economists were projecting that the entire national debt could be paid off by 2012. So the government commissioned a secret report outlining the possible harmful consequences of retiring the debt completely. For one thing, paying off the national debt would mean the end of Treasury bonds, a pillar of the global economy. Treasury securities are crucially important to the world financial system in a number of ways: banks buy them as low-risk assets, the Fed uses them for executing monetary policy, and mortgage interest rates vary based on Treasury rates. 'It was a huge issue ... for not just the U.S. economy, but the global economy,' says Diane Lim Rogers, an economist in the Clinton administration. In the end, Jason Seligman, the economist who wrote most of the report titled 'Life After Debt (PDF),' concluded it was a good idea to pay down the debt — but not to pay it off entirely. 'There's such a thing as too much debt,' says Seligman. 'But also such a thing, perhaps, as too little.'"

krou writes "According to the Guardian, the Augustine panel is going to declare that there is simply no money to go back to the moon, and the next-generation Ares I rocket is likely to be scrapped unless there is more funding. The $81B Constellation Program's long-term goal of putting a human on Mars is almost certainly not going to be possible by the middle of the century. The options outlined by the panel for the future of NASA 'are to extend the working life of the aging space shuttle fleet beyond next year's scheduled retirement until 2015, while developing a cheaper transport to the moon; pressing ahead with Constellation as quickly as existing funding allows; or creating a new, larger rocket that would allow exploration of the solar system while bypassing the moon.' All of this means that NASA won't be back on the moon before the end of the next decade as hoped, 'or even leaving lower Earth orbit for at least another two decades.' Another result of the monetary black hole is that they don't have the '$300m to expand a network of telescopes and meet the government's target of identifying, by 2020, at least 90% of the giant space rocks that pose a threat to Earth.'"

Frequent Slashdot contributor Bennett Haselton writes "A newspaper copies a rant from a girl's MySpace page and reprints it as a 'Letter to the Editor' without her permission. Could the girl sue for copyright violation? This question provoked much more disagreement among legal experts than I expected." Read on for the details.

eldavojohn writes "We're all well aware of the scams that sometimes happen in online games like Eve Online. But despite this looking primarily like a problem with Eve Online, the MIT Technology Review brings us stories from Second Life and the very real $700,000 (USD) in Linden Dollars that has recently disappeared in what is appearing to be a classic ponzi scheme by a company named Ginko Banking. Unbelievably high interest rates coupled with some shady withdrawal limits leads to classic epic losses to investors. Eve Online was merely virtual currency but Second Life has a real monetary value associated with Linden Dollars & therefore is certain to see more and more scams pop up like this. How can Linden Labs set up a safety net to catch things like this?"

Michael J. Ross writes "Money plays a key role in modern life; in fact, for some people, nothing is more important than acquiring more of it. Yet most people do not know what money really is, how it is created, how its supply is expanded and contracted, and who benefits from those changes. In the United States, the central figure in this ongoing drama, is our central bank, the Federal Reserve, whose history, power, and effects are explored in G. Edward Griffin's fascinating book The Creature from Jekyll Island: A Second Look at the Federal Reserve." Read on for the rest of Michael's review.