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Comment by lifeisstillgood | Hacker News Reader

In today's Slate Money podcast they interview Margret Sullivan on her new book about destruction of US local newspapers.

She has an interesting factoid - those local governments with local newspapers have significantly and demonstrably lower costs of borrowing than those without - the conjecture being that over the years councils have been unable to get away with blatant corruption for fear of public humiliation- that the "watchdog" role of newspapers is not nice journalist ethics but actually measurable in tax dollars

ICANN is part of the Internet's local government and we need to find new ways to keep watchdogs alive.

[#] https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/slate-money/id87652388...

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Random info - a factoid originally meant "a piece of information that becomes accepted as a fact even though it is not actually true", when it was coined a few decades ago.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Factoid

Of course, like "Literally" & "Decimated", the accepting meaning has drifted since then...

Weird that wiki doesn’t mention that it’s just the -oid suffix for “like” the same way we can call a non-square box a cuboid. The rest seems suspect eg anyone could’ve coined it.

Well, almost anyone. If the Progenitors had been startup devs we'd probably be approximately spherical meeple in a webgl tarski's world with "facty" and "fucky" truth values.

for 'decimated' are you talking about the change from 1 in 10, or something more recent I missed ?

"Literally" is literally my biggest pet peeve. Changing from 2 spaces to 1 at the end of sentences is another.

1 space after a period has always been correct unless you’re writing in a monospaced font (or with a typewriter).

exactly - 2 spaces was correct for anyone that learned to type before say y2k. Back when typing actually involved a typewriter :-)

How has decimated changed in meaning?

Decimated comes from the Roman military punishment "Decimation" where for some military unit being punished, 10% of their ranks were to executed by their colleagues.

The most literal meaning of decimated is "to reduce by 10%" but the common meaning is from the complete and total destruction of morale and resistance that results from being forced to kill your colleagues.

If you told the average American "We decimated the Iraqi army" they'd think America wiped them out entirely. Or at least 50%.

Which is why the modern 1st definition is:

> "kill, destroy, or remove a large percentage or part of."

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