antibuddy

Apple does just the distribution. The promotion is still on the developer and you may not even promote your own services in your own app. It is also save to say that a lot of developers would like to do the selling themselves. Apple is not supposed to do the distribution for free, but 30% is really a lot, especially when they do unwanted stuff for you (the payment).

Also the App Store really is the only way to get apps on an iOS-device, so the user has no real choice anyway.

"[...] and it's one of the reasons the country still has by and large a shared reality when it comes to political discussion." Shared reality is quite a cynical word and is a reminder just how bad it really is.

"I don't think that they also provide entertainment is in any way problematic, because entertainment is part of a cultural offering that should be accessible by everyone. I don't really see the competition issue here, just like the BBC they produce content, which is fine." How is it not unfair if you compete in the exact same market with a publicly funded corporation[1]?

"Has to be said though in quality it doesn't really measure up to the BBC, but you can try to claw Tatort from my dead hands " It is basically on par with ntv, Welt and doesn't really measure up to ServusTV. They all share one thing with ARD/ZDF tho and that is advertisement.

[1]: Open any site of public funded TV and look for "Unternehmen" (Corporation) also they have a lot of for-profit corporations spun off, so there is no point calling it a public institution when in fact it is not.

Public broadcasting in Germany is no better than private media. In fact most topics are reported the same and even the opinion is the same. But even ignoring this, it is a big problem that publicly funded media is in direct economic competition with privately funded media. This is exacerbated by the official entertainment mission (Unterhaltungsauftrag[1]) and the usage of advertisement.

[1]: https://www.die-medienanstalten.de/fileadmin/user_upload/Rec... in §11

Yeah it makes sense, however I don't think we should be grateful* that Google played an important role in building the internet, since for Google it is about control and that's where the problems begin.

*not that this was your point

You could argue in both directions actually, since they are part of society and they likely don't want to be held to the same standard as they treat their users. (still not necessarily a contradictory view, but it gets bendy)

However in general I do find cognitive dissonance badly used, since the experience of cognitive dissonance is usually the positive part, since you notice a problem in your view point. The resolution on the other hand ... So it would be better to just say contradiction and then it's obvious that one has to give a better explanation of it.

Flu season is about 2-3 months usually and kills, depending on severity, 1-2 million people each year.

That's not exactly what the article is saying tho. Also it doesn't change the 0.36% mortality rate and I might add the high age median of around 80. So we will likely see a lower average mortality afterwards.

The flu kills way more than that and Corona will kill more than that.

You can see what happens without containment in Sweden. Given that countries with a bad health system probably need more measures.

The real difference is that we are informed broadly about the many deaths and this was not the case with the flu in our lifetime.

Heinsberg study suggests a mortality rate of about 0.36%. This is high, but not "a big threat". Given that with 0.36% and 15% infection spread in the general population (like flu) you look at ca 162k deaths in the US.

It is not even close 5.7% mortality. If it would be that lethal you would look already at over one million deaths.

Sweden is a good example of a country without a lot of counter measures and we see that it will end in the realm of 0.36% lethality (5,4k deaths). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_pandemic_in_Sweden

Does nobody question the premise that Sars-Cov-19 is actually a big threat? At least the current incarnation seems rather tame. The panic over it however is rather real.