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> France was gripped by widespread protests and public sector strikes on Tuesday, as hundreds of thousands of workers and students took to the streets to protest austerity measures and a collapsing cost of living.

Is that a Brit figure of speech that I don't know? Or should the phrase be "a collapsing standard of living"?

Or perhaps the tyranny of a copy editor would violate the spirit of Freedom's "Anarchist press, bookstore and news"? ;)

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No need for the snarky comment - it's a machine translated text from Spanish, as it says on the same page.

But you are right that it should've been "standard" instead of "cost" there. People sometimes conflate "cost of living" with "standard of living", especially if they're not native English speakers. A small issue, I'd say, in a world where English is a minority language.

Point on being snarky.

OTOH - having the exact opposite meaning, in the opening sentence, is getting into real "why should a human bother reading this?" territory.

I guess that the answer to that is "because it's news rather than yet another unnecessarily long poorly written essay".

But I take your point though.

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