Yes, with an actual payment (processed credit card transaction), a signed contract with clear payment terms, or a convincing promise to pay such as a written instruction to send an invoice.
A lot of startups have made the mistake of thinking "customers" are the same as "downloads of a free app" or "people who created an online account" or "people who signed up to be notified of the actual launch."
Accelerators once encouraged this ("you have to show progress to investors on demo day!") but unless you have actual paying customers it's not a real business.
On the afternoon of October 6 1989 I attended a Fugazi concert in Cambridge Mass, probably one of the best live shows I've ever seen.
Last year I casually searched YouTube for some shows I had attended in my youth and this one popped up, recorded by a high school classmate who happened to be there, filming from the side from a balcony or rope rack used by stagehands.
I then went to the Fugazi Live Series archive to see if there was better quality audio (the band recorded most of their shows from the 1980s through the early 2000s, and posted almost all of them in the archive). That October 1989 concert was in the database (https://dischord.com/fugazi_live_series/cambridge-ma-usa-100...), and there were some comments by others who attended, but there was no supporting media other than a single photograph.
So I emailed the address on the website:
Hi, regarding this show someone created a video recording from which the audio can probably be extracted. It's on YouTube here:
I was at the show but not near the stage. It was a memorable show for me and many others according to the description on the official Fugazi archive.
The uploader of the video (my high school classmate, who I believe was a member of the FUs at some point) says:
"In 1989, I went to the First Congregational Church, In Harvard Sq. Cambridge Massachusetts, in hopes of getting into this Fugazi show. Unfortunately, the promoter pre-sold the tickets to people he knew. Thus there was a large crowd of people trying to get in without tickets. Fortunately for me, I had been friends with him before, and he let my girlfriend and I in. Once inside, I asked Guy if I could videotape the show, he told me to go ahead... as long as I sent a copy of the video to Dischord Records... I never did... I just wasn't responsible enough in those days to bother... anyway, here it is, the full show, in all it's faded and low resolution glory... so go ahead, enjoy, and share."
To my surprise, Ian MacKaye responded! While he could extract the audio from YouTube, he wanted to know if I could get in touch with my high school classmate who might still have the original tapes which would have better quality. I did, and my classmate actually got the tapes (from his old girlfriend, who had them in a box in her basement) and shipped them off to Ian. At some point they will be properly digitized and put on the Fugazi archive.
I had a long interview with Ian about archiving which I hope to post on my blog later this summer. To make a long story short, he's amassed a huge collection of materials from Fugazi and his previous bands (most notably Minor Threat) which includes concert audio, studio audio, video, photos, concert flyers, and every piece of fan mail they received at Dischord House from the 1980s to the present day.
He's very systematic about organizing the archives, thanks to interactions with trained archivists including several working for the federal government (he's based in Washington DC).
Minor Threat was before my time, but I've seen Fugazi and The Evens a few times. Ian always puts on a great show. He seems like a really thoughtful, detail oriented guy. I'm not surprised that he keeps organized archives or that he found the time to respond.
My blog is related to my genealogy business, not music. But the story about archiving old audio and video is relevant to the struggle of many genealogists to preserve old media, a frequent topic on the blog:
> I was able to distill a few bottles of home made apple wine that I had screwed up some additional flavorings on. It took a couple of hours for 3 or 4 bottles.
My grandfather used to make something called Apple Jack using a method known as freeze distillation. He'd put fermented cider (widely available in rural New York) in a cask and place it out in the barn on a really cold night. The water would freeze, but the alcohol would not and could be tapped.
So "the water freezes, the alcohol does not," is not actually how freeze-distillation works. The entire batch freezes solid. You then let the block melt and collect the first meltings. If you start off with a 5% ABV solution, freeze it, and then melt off half of it, you'll end up with two halves where one is maybe 7% ABV and the other is maybe 3% ABV. You will need to reprocess those halves to further concentrate (yes, both halves, you want the alcohol from the 3% portion, too, but you have to do them separately or you're back to where you started) with your level of efficiency being limited primarily by your patience and how cold your freezer can get. Probably not cold enough to get above 20% ABV [0].
One problem with freeze-distillation is that it's more like removing watery alcohol and taking everything else than it is like in boil distillation where you're trying to remove alcoholic water and leave everything else behind. So you still need to make multiple runs to get the ABV up, but boiling will remove impurities, whereas freezing will concetrate them.
[0] IDK, that's just a guess, I'm not inclined to look it up. I'm not writing a reference guide here.
Just telling you how my father remembered it. Not sure how big the cask or barrel was, but if time and temperature are controlled, how will that affect the rate of ice formation inside the cask? What happens to the remaining unfrozen liquid in terms of ABV?
Sorry, it's just that these kinds of threads have a lot of people repeating things that aren't really all that correct. It creates an image of things that doesn't match reality that continue to persist in the collective conscience. Like how hibernation for bears isn't really "the bear sleeps all winter." Anyway, neither here nor there (I'm still not happy I lived 35 years of my life believing bears curled up in caves and take 3-month-long naps for winter. It's preposterous on its very face).
Solutions of alcohol and water are weird. If you had a solution of salt and water, you could boil 100% of the water out in one go and have 100% of the salt left over. With alcohol and water, you don't get that. You get a continuum of concentrations that changes over time, as the distillation progresses.
And there is more than one alcohol that you're dealing with, with different phase change temperatures for each. So it's a bit like homeopathy. At any particular point, you are dividing the batch into two sections, one that is increasing on the gradient of alcohol concentration and one that is decreasing. But each part of the batch will actually have some proportion of each chemical in it. All you can do is change the relative proportions and repeat until you've changed the ratios such that the one you don't want is negligible.
Water's freezing point is 0C, of course. Methanol's is, like, -97C. Ethanol's is around -115C. Something like that. So "the water freezes first". But it's not just water. It will be some proportion of all three, as well as trace other acetyl alcohols where the flavor comes from. It's just that more of it will be water than what you started. On the flip side, the ethanol freezes "last". But again, it will be a certain proportion of all three. So the "remaining, unfrozen liquid" increases in ABV over time. But the frozen liquid is not free of alcohol. And if we were trying to run a production distillery, we'd want to reprocess the frozen portion to extract the remaining aclohol from it as well.
It's an infinite series on which we're performing a manual, physical Taylor expansion approximation.
One of the nice things about boiling distillation is that it is the methanol with the lowest boiling point and the water with the highest. So, you can more easily bracket your product away from the beginning parts of the process to avoid the methanol. You can't really do that with freeze distillation, because the methanol is sitting in the middle between the water and ethanol in the phase change spectrum. Thankfully, it's impossible to make yourself go blind from in-good-faith home brewing and distilling. The amount of methanol you can produce will--at worst--give you a wicked hangover. But that's why more people don't do freeze distillation.
The New Yorker also comes with Apple News+ subscriptions (part of an Apple One plan that many people get for extra iCloud storage) which further includes a number of top-tier and local news orgs such as the Wall Street Journal, LA Times, SF Chronicle, Times of London, etc.
I believe this is what we call small claims court in the United States. The threshold varies by state, but it is a very effective way to deal with recalcitrant companies both large and small.
Amazon still charges ebook publishers the same “delivery fee” for each sold digital copy (US$0.15/megabyte) as it did in the mid 2000s when Kindles came with 3g chips.
Maybe the technical requirements at the time were a good excuse but as soon as you demonstrate the market will tolerate that why on earth would you remove it?
To turn around the famous quote: "Amazon's margin is someone else's opportunity". :)
The Amazon flywheel is all about reducing costs to consumers. The moment that stops happening, consumers can get caught by offers elsewhere, and the flywheel can start to go backwards.
That's not exactly true, they expanded the free tier from 1 to 100GB/mo (1TB/mo out of CloudFront) and dropped egress from ~20c/GB to ~9c/GB. This was due to pressure from the Bandwidth Alliance formed by all the other Clouds and spearheaded by Cloudflare.
Yes, with an actual payment (processed credit card transaction), a signed contract with clear payment terms, or a convincing promise to pay such as a written instruction to send an invoice.
A lot of startups have made the mistake of thinking "customers" are the same as "downloads of a free app" or "people who created an online account" or "people who signed up to be notified of the actual launch."
Accelerators once encouraged this ("you have to show progress to investors on demo day!") but unless you have actual paying customers it's not a real business.
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