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Comment Re: Does this remove the "menu costs" argument (Score 1) 193

Cost of living adjustments for everything including savings?

Ai: "According to Fischer and Modigliani (1978), a fully indexed economy is an idealized system where all financial contracts, tax systems, and accounting procedures automatically adjust for inflation, neutralizing its real economic effects. This framework assumes nominal institutions, such as tax systems and debt contracts, are replaced with real-terms adjustments that keep real interest rates constant. Read the full NBER paper at nber.org."

Comment Good for basic income, no? (Score 1) 77

by blue trane (#66068292) Attached to: Is It Time For Open Source to Start Charging For Access?

Unless this is really about fidelity to economics and not software, can you imagine the pure engineering productivity unleashed if engineers had a decent guaranteed inflation-proofed basic income and didn't have to listen to bosses telling them to artificially restrict access and features due to advertiser pressure?

Comment Re: Does this remove the "menu costs" argument (Score 0) 193

Then why did Modigliani and Fisher say in their 1978 paper "Towards an understanding of the real costs of inflation": "The traditional view that because money is neutral, inflation produces no appreciable real effects is shown to hold approximately only for an economy whose institutions are fully inflation proof, e.g. a fully indexed one.", and why can't we fully index the economy?

Why did Israel use full indexation for decades while increasing their standard of living? What if the decision in the 1980s to use price controls instead of indexation was an arbitrary mood; why couldn't they have kept indexation going forever (they still use it today in fact)?

If your income goes up immediately with prices, why would you care about nominal inflation, because even if gas went to $10/gallon your income increase would allow you to buy the same amount you always did without losing any money?

Since the US currency has lost some 90+% of its value since the country's founding, yet the US is the world's premier superpower, hasn't indexation been used implicitly to keep real purchasing power rising even as nominal inflation has risen?

Do you just have a mood affiliation against indexation and no sound argument?

Comment Does this remove the "menu costs" argument (Score 1, Interesting) 193

Does this tech eliminate the key objection to printing basic income money faster than prices rise, that "menu costs" become negligible?

If you get a printed basic income and stores raise prices costlessly and your income goes up in lockstep, why can't you forget about nominal inflation and convert nominal prices to units of real purchasing power, which won't change under an indexation scheme, no matter how fast nominal prices may rise?

Submission + - Thorny issue plaguing lithium-ion batteries laid bare in new study (phys.org)

Submitted by alternative_right
alternative_right writes: Lithium dendrites, i.e. tiny crystalline thorns that grow off of lithium-ion battery anodes during charging, have been a persistent challenge for the world's most widely used form of energy storage. "Dendrites can penetrate the battery's separator, causing catastrophic short circuits and safety hazards," said Qing Ai, a former research scientist at Rice University who is a first author on a new study published in Science that reports for the first time exactly how these tricky structures behave inside batteries. "Despite decades of study, the fundamental nanomechanical properties of lithium dendrites remained a mystery—until now."

Submission + - Executives say AI boosts productivity but the real gain is just 16 minutes per w (nerds.xyz)

Submitted by BrianFagioli
BrianFagioli writes: A new study suggests the productivity boost from artificial intelligence may be far smaller than executives claim. According to research cited in Foxitâ(TM)s State of Document Intelligence report, while 89 percent of executives and 79 percent of end users say AI tools make them feel more productive, the actual time savings shrink dramatically once people account for reviewing and validating AI-generated output.

The survey of 1,000 desk-based workers and 400 executives in the United States and United Kingdom found executives believe AI saves them about 4.6 hours per week, but they spend roughly 4 hours and 20 minutes verifying those results. End users reported a similar pattern, estimating 3.6 hours saved but 3 hours and 50 minutes spent reviewing AI work. Once that âoeverification burdenâ is factored in, executives gain just 16 minutes per week, while end users actually lose about 14 minutes.

Submission + - Solar in poor countries is creating a huge lead hazard (slowboring.com)

Submitted by schwit1
schwit1 writes: Off-grid systems use cheap old-fashioned batteries that aren’t recycled properly.

A new report from the Center for Global Development documents that most of these systems use lead-acid batteries, like Americans use in cars. Lead-acid batteries work for a while and then need to be recycled. If they're recycled safely, that's fine. But in poor countries, most lead-acid batteries are not recycled safely and they become a huge source of toxic lead poisoning.

C.G.D. believes that decentralized solar systems are currently generating somewhere between 250,000 and 1.5 million tons of unsafe lead-acid battery waste per year, a number that could grow much higher.

Americans have mostly heard about lead issues in recent years due to the tragic situation in Flint, Michigan. But on the whole, lead exposure via faulty water pipes is a relatively minor issue. Across American history, the biggest culprits for lead exposure have been lead paint and leaded gasoline. Both were phased out decades ago, but old paint chips and lingering lead in soil have remained problems for years, albeit at diminishing rates.

The global situation is quite different and much worse, to the point that in low- and middle-income countries, half of children have blood lead levels above the threshold that would trigger emergency action in the United States.

It sounds fantastical to cite numbers this high. But there is credible (albeit somewhat uncertain) research indicating that five million people per year die as a result of lead-induced cardiovascular impairments. And roughly 20 percent of the gap in academic achievement between poor and rich countries is due to lead's impact on kids' cognitive development.

Submission + - Seagate just unleashed 44TB hard drives (nerds.xyz)

Submitted by BrianFagioli
BrianFagioli writes: Seagate says it is now shipping its Mozaic 4+ HAMR-based hard drives at up to 44TB per drive, with production deployments already underway at two hyperscale cloud providers. The company claims the platform is the only heat-assisted magnetic recording implementation currently operating at scale, and it is targeting a path from todayâ(TM)s 4+TB per disk toward 10TB per disk, eventually enabling 100TB-class drives. In a one-exabyte deployment, Seagate estimates Mozaic could improve infrastructure efficiency by roughly 47 percent compared to standard 30TB drives, cutting both footprint and energy consumption.

While GPUs dominate AI headlines, large-scale storage remains the economic backbone of training and archival workloads. HAMR uses a tiny laser to heat the disk surface during writes, allowing higher areal density without sacrificing stability. With most major cloud storage providers reportedly qualified on the Mozaic platform, Seagate is positioning spinning disks, not flash, as the long-term answer for cost-effective AI-scale data growth.

Submission + - LibreOffice says its UI is way better than Microsoft Office's (neowin.net) 1

Submitted by darwinmac
darwinmac writes: While many users choose Microsoft Office over LibreOffice because of its support for the proprietary formats (.docx, .xlsx, and .pptx), others prefer Office for its "better" ribbon interface. These users often criticize LibreOffice for having a "clunky" UI instead of the "standard" ribbon interface you would find in Word, Excel, and other Office apps.

Now, Neowin reports that LibreOffice is fighting back, arguing that its UI is actually superior because it is customizable, with several modes such as the classic toolbar interface, an Office-inspired ribbon layout, a sidebar-focused design, and more. Furthermore, it argues that there is no evidence that the ribbon offers "superior usability" over other interface modes.

Incidentally, the characterisation of ribbon-style interfaces as "modern" or "standard", used by several users, is not based on any objective usability parameter or design principle, but is the result of Microsofts dominance in the market and the huge investments made when the ribbon was introduced in Office 2007 as a new paradigm for productivity software.

Before this, LibreOffice had also criticized its competitor OnlyOffice, accusing it of being "fake open source" because it believes OnlyOffice is working with Microsoft to lock users into the Office ecosystem by prioritizing the formats mentioned earlier instead of LibreOffice's own OpenDocument Format (ODF).

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