151–160 of 272 posts
Beretta the Italian Gun manufacturer is almost 500 years old.
FN Herstal, Mossberg & Sons, Smith & Wesson, Winchester, Browning, Walther all tick the 100+ year mark.
However, most of them trace their roots back to the industrial revolution, and didn't make the transition from bespoke pieces to mass production like Beretta did.
Company, firm, and business have specific meanings.
Given BBC is UK based, a company would mean a separate legal entity to its members (a 'corporation' in US).
A firm means a group of people in business together, either a company of more than one member or a general partnership.
And a business is the true catch-all.
I doubt these businesses going back hundreds of years are incorporated entities. Back in the day those took an act of the state to form. The first KK in the country (Inc. equivalent for those in US, or Ltd. for UK) was only formed in 1873.
And I doubt businesses have been general partnerships continuously for hundreds of years -- since these desolve automatically when the membership changes e.g. by a death.
Especially to journalists, these details should matter.
Interestingly, this feels related to the low levels of entrepreneurship (Japan ranks 4th lowest in the world) https://bradchattergoon.com/japan-and-entrepreneurship-e468a... These things are neither universally good nor bad: I do believe the Japanese conception of duty (and how it diverges from an American sensibility) plays a large role in the fact 33k businesses are over 100 years old. As an American this many busi…
I think you're right about the sense of duty, it leads people to turning their innovation into something that can help their existing company versus taking it and starting their own firm most of the time.
On the flipside, company management seems more accepting of occasionally taking these radical ideas and rebuilding the whole business around them. Nintendo is a good example.
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I did not read that comment in that way. But I think you'd need to explain for a pretty long time to get engineers to believe your story of nuclear fission power plants. In 1912 we didn't even know about neutrons and protons.
Sure, I grant that these may not be forthcoming and obvious developments to everyone, and that you may need to "fill in the blanks" for many when it comes to atomic energy (a jet engine is not a complex machine, however; it is a precision machine). But my comment is more about how much we underestimate the state of the world that came before us and our historical forebears, and the ability of otherwise open-minded, e…
On the one hand the idea for nuclear fission was still fairly far off in 1912, since even in the 30's many physicists were still skeptical that radioactive energy could be released more rapidly than it normally is in natural substances. On the other hand a couple of major factors leading to it were already known in 1912: the fact that radioactive decay released large amounts of energy and Einstein's discovery of mass-energy equivalence.
As for jet engines the situation is clearer since a pulsejet was already patented in 1906.
I think in 1912 these technologies would seem like semi-plausible science fiction, but not magic.
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Well, in 1912, jet-engine-powered aircraft and atomic energy would not seem like far-fetched ideas. Certainly not to educated research engineers at GE, anyway. People routinely underestimate how technologically advanced the world was prior to WW1. Aerospace was advancing rapidly, and chemistry was quite well understood in 1912. A jet engine requires precision manufacturing but otherwise is not a complex idea. Radiati…
Now imagine being a worker at Kongō Gumi Co., Ltd and 14 centuries ago you told them that in the 21st century they would build skyscrapers... Oh, and that the 21st century is a way of counting centuries of the west, that was just being invented around that time, that would be implemented in Japan about 4 centuries later
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> Japan's oldest temple, burned to the ground and rebuilt every 20 years It's a shrine, not a temple, it's torn down, not burned down, and whether it's the oldest is a matter of whether you believe the legends.
Radio Yerevan was asked: "Is it correct that Grigori Grigorievich Grigoriev won a luxury car at the All-Union Championship in Moscow?" Radio Yerevan answered: "In principle, yes. But first of all it was not Grigori Grigorievich Grigoriev, but Vassili Vassilievich Vassiliev; second, it was not at the All-Union Championship in Moscow, but at a Collective Farm Sports Festival in Smolensk; third, it was not a car, but a…
It's interesting about growing older. I don't know if this is a function of aging or a change in how humanity recons time. When I was younger, a century seemed like forever. Now it's just 1920 and we have film, music, audio, books and so on from that time period readily available. In many ways 1920 doesn't really seem all that far away to me while 1860, 1870, 1880 (a century from when I was a child) seemed to be fore…
I can't remember where i heard this from (it was a podcast) but it was on an economic theory that, if you exclude the internet & computer revolution, humans has not progressed that much in the past 100 years and that we may have entered a period of stagnant growth that may extend a century. Again, internet & computer revolution aside, realistically saying the last "human leap" was the invention of the combustion engi…
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I can't remember where i heard this from (it was a podcast) but it was on an economic theory that, if you exclude the internet & computer revolution, humans has not progressed that much in the past 100 years and that we may have entered a period of stagnant growth that may extend a century. Again, internet & computer revolution aside, realistically saying the last "human leap" was the invention of the combustion engi…
> Oh, there is this new computer & internet thing but that's it. This sentence is doing an unbelievable amount of work. I don't think you realize how strange it is that we have instant-speed trans-Atlantic communication that can transmit massive amounts of data. Computers are practically foreign objects to plenty of people born in the 60s, who grew up as they were invented. You don't think someone from 1920, with no…
I think a lot of modern tech is really just 19th century tech done (a lot) better, smaller, faster, more conveniently, and much more widespread.