There are plenty of 100 year old companies doing basically what they did 100 years ago (Exxon, Coke, Hershey, Wells Fargo, etc.). They’re just not tech companies.
I was thinking about companies approaching 200 years old since I knew my point would be more difficult to make if I said 100 years (and because they had a launch window that comes up roughly once every 200 years, though I checked that out and it is 175 years). That said, you're right about my basically overlooking companies that weren't based in technology.
Exxon is a cute example though. At one point, they owned Zilog.
* Exxon: Massive amounts of technology have been ingested by the oil majors in the last 50 years. It is basically a high tech business at this point. Also, if we only focus on the physical work, fracking didn't exist 50 years ago, and now it is a major part of the industry. Again: Huge changes.
* Coke/Hershey: Think about how much automation exists in their manuf. Do any humans touch a "bottle" of Coca Cola before it is packaged? I doubt it in highly developed countries.
* Wells Fargo: the same as Exxon. Commercial banking has a fraction the number of employees _in proportion to their assets under management (AUM)_ compared to 50 years ago. How/Why? Automation / computers!
Their point wasn’t that innovation doesn’t exist. Obviously things change. Still, both Exonn, Coke and Wells Fargo are still fundamentally in the same business as they were before. That’s not the case of other companies. IBM became big selling punch-card tabulating system. Have you seen a punch card recently?
> Ibm was not in the punch card machine making business. It was in the data processing business, and still is.
IBM absolutely was in the punch card machine making business in that they were absolutely selling punch card machines and not data processing consulting. And no, they are not in the data processing business today. They are clearly a consulting company first with some software development bolted.
They actually pivoted twice from a mostly hardware company to a mostly software one and once again to a mostly service based one.
Wells Fargo is still doing financial services but banking has very different meaning today. Computer is no longer a job title after all.
So sure those brands are 100 years old, but the underlying companies have been restructured several times with major mergers and spin-offs etc. ExxonMobil even did the baby bell thing of splitting off from a single entity only to merge again and again in the coming decades.
I would say that IBM's business has changed less than Wells Fargo's. IBM still supplies number-crunching devices and services to large corporations and government agencies. The technicalities have changed, but the core business is the same. But running a bank under a gold standard is very different from running a bank under a fiat money and fractional reserve regime.
Classic game that universities love to play where they hire someone but that person isn’t “really” part of the university. Happens with extension but happens in degree granting programs too with adjuncts.
Not sure about this. Generally there’s a line out the door of highly qualified people to teach at places like Caltech for little or nothing. A few years ago, UCLA tried to hire someone to teach a chemistry course as a volunteer position. https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2022/03/21/ucla-criticiz...
Sure, but somehow these people aren't teaching, one way or the other. Maybe it's not a shortage of able people (in fact you're right, it definitely isn't) but they aren't teaching at top universities. Or there isn't enough of these teachers.
People have spent their whole lives on the “Homeric question,” but basically Homer is well preserved and overall the variations are minor. In particular, as far as can be determined from quotations in Plato, the Homer we have is basically the same as the one that Plato had.
Looking at the webpage, she is now active in the diversity & inclusion space, which is still booming. She gets an endorsement from Sumana Harihareshwara, who turned the DEI up to 11 in Wikiland.
The talks of the Women in Chemistry section at the recent American Chemical Society meeting included gems like "Metalloids and mentoring: Life at a PUI as the 'Other" and "Transgender chemistry graduate students navigating between trans and STEM identities".
All of that sounds nice until you start teaching in Alabama or get students from a reservation in New Mexico, then you see that what the DEI folks offer is completely useless when it comes to deprivation.
