Yes, performance fees were, and still are a thing. That’s why there are separate streaming services for playing background music in e.g. restaurants and malls, which have licences that cover that use case. You can’t just use e.g. Spotify even if you pay the appropriate fees separately, at least where I’m from (Finland). Same goes for playing TV and radio in the background – if it’s specifically as background noise or e.g. TV at a bar you typically need separate licencing on top of the one used by the channel itself for distribution. Might be different in the US for example, but copyright laws tend to be quite similar across countries (unfortunately).

The smooth jazz in malls part is likely a lot due to the (historically) overwhelming market share of the company Muzak. They were the pioneer of background music in commercial environments and got a strong enough presence in the market that their name ended up a generic one. AFAIK they’re still a large player in the business.

Mall music basically ended up as its own genre due to Muzak and how big it became, and started influencing other media as well. As an example, the style was referred to in the soundtrack of the first Sims game in the buy mode, where it brought with it the feeling of rampant consumerism and buzz of purchasing new stuff. At least according to this video essay on the subject, which in my mind makes its point quite convincingly. (the relevant part from 11:46 onwards re-watched the video and the relevant part actually starts at approx the 5 minute mark, but the video is altogether quite interesting)

That certainly contributes as well. I find myself especially annoyed by AI-created soundtracks – they usually sound like a mix of someone passing out in a drumset while someone else is hammering random keys on a keyboard. Similar to the early deep dream AI pictures, but for music.

Also, at some point people lost the skill of making short ads on YouTube (or YouTube reduced the price of unskippable ads too much). If your brand or product is so bad you need more than five seconds of advertisement before a YouTube video, you either need to improve your product (so it’s easier to describe) or hire a better copywriter.

Most actual good ads on YouTube have been 5-10 seconds, interesting, informative – and they fulfill the actual part of what the ad is trying to achieve. They get you interested, and get you to click it to find out more. They have a clear message that you can internalize even before realising there’s an ad running.

It’s almost as if advertisers are purposely making bad ads to force people to watch through them without interaction to avoid paying the premium for the user click rate. That or they simply don’t understand the amount of value a good ad director and a good copywriter can generate.

Keep them in a well ventilated space, if they rot too quickly it may be due to ethane making them ripen too fast. A mixed fruit bowl is one of the worst possible ways to store fruit.

Apples offgas ethane as an example, making other things around them ripen faster. In a cool, ventilated environment where you replace the ethane with something inert they can last over the winter.

I tend to get 1-2 weeks of shelf life from fruit, though I tend to only buy the stuff that stores well. (apples, bananas, oranges etc.)

Luckily not, law around here requires all university theses to be in an open and archival compatible format, like PDF/A. No docx allowed for publication.

It’s a university of applied sciences, they have a very low confidence in their students’ IT skills. Either that, or they lack the knowhow to create a LaTeX template. Honestly, probably both.

Theses have a certain set of requirements in the EU, like being archival-compatible and accessible. It’s easiest to fulfill those guidelines if you just require people to use a Word template and tick certain boxes when exporting the PDF/A.

I ended up using LaTeX anyway in order to join the code examples as appendices. I had to separately prove that the document still passed all the requirements though. I didn’t want to start pasting screenshots of code, as I find it unreadable. You get much better code formatting on LaTeX.

In case you’re using the web app version of word, that has blank pages left over, it’s likely that they’re actually not possible to delete in the online version.

Hidden page breaks are only possible to remove in the desktop version of Word. I originally encountered this in the university when writing my thesis on the school template (unfortunately we weren’t allowed to use LaTeX), and as I was using Linux I had to install a Windows VM to get rid of the page breaks in the template.

I’d say it’s a lukewarm take at best. A million dollar company is something like a small (<10 people) consulting agency or a couple hot dog stands in a relatively busy area. So like you said, nothing exceptional.

Leaving out self-employed individuals and 2-3 person hair salons and the like, a million dollar revenue is not really something difficult to reach. Especially if you include things like retail, where moving any inventory increases revenue a lot. Even for companies outside retail, when keeping in mind how much one is able to bill for things like trades in the US, revenue increases quite quickly.

I’d assume it’s WTC