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Significant Digits For Wednesday, May 15, 2019

You’re reading Significant Digits, a daily digest of the numbers tucked inside the news.


2 Florida counties

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis publicly confirmed yesterday one of the findings first published in the Mueller report — that Russian hackers had infiltrated the election systems of two Florida counties in 2016 using a spear-phishing scheme to fool election officials. The governor also said, however, that no data was altered and no vote tallies were affected. [NPR]


49 percent of subscribers

As new streaming services proliferate, some dearly beloved franchises may be leaving Netflix for good, which could be a problem for Netflix. According to a poll from the Hollywood Reporter and Morning Consult, 49 percent of subscribers age 18 to 29 said they’d drop their subscription if “The Office,” “Friends,” and Marvel and Disney content were removed from the streaming service. [The A.V. Club]


2.7 million subscribers

Speaking of subscriptions, people can apparently make money by being a “beauty vlogger,” and one named James Charles has lost 2.7 million YouTube subscribers on since Friday. Charles became, as the kids say, “canceled” after another “prominent creator” named Tati Westbrook posted a lengthy video in which she publicly ended their friendship because Charles had used Snapchat to promote a certain wellness brand and because she believed that Charles was acting sexually “aggressive” with other men. Westbrook, meanwhile, has gained 3.5 million subscribers. [The Verge]


$1.6 billion in funding

NASA is after $1.6 billion in increased funding for its mission to return to the moon by 2024, an endeavor called Artemis. As part of this mission, NASA plans to put a woman on the lunar surface for the first time. [Gizmodo]


12.6 million vs. 12.5 million

There are two Americas, and they’re both approaching their series finales. “The Big Bang Theory” had 12.6 million live viewers last week while “Game of Thrones” had 12.5 million. My Twitter feed, however, told a much different, and frankly rather irritating, story. One of these days I’ll learn what a Daenerys is. [Associated Press]


120,000 troops

President Trump yesterday denied a New York Times report that said he was considering sending up to 120,000 troops to the Middle East “to respond to Iran,” calling it — surprise, surprise — “fake news.” But then he also said he was willing to do that. “Would I do that? Absolutely. But we have not planned for that,” Trump said outside the White House. “And if we did that, we’d send a hell of a lot more troops than that.” [NBC News]


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Oliver Roeder was a senior writer for FiveThirtyEight. He holds a Ph.D. in economics from the University of Texas at Austin, where he studied game theory and political competition.

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