[HN Gopher] Japan's Temple-Builder Kongo Gumi, Has Survived Near...
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Japan's Temple-Builder Kongo Gumi, Has Survived Nearly 1,500 Years
Author : dangtony98
Score : 212 points
Date : 2024-09-02 02:25 UTC (20 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.openculture.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.openculture.com)
| romanhn wrote:
| It didn't really survive though, in the end. In January 2006 the
| company was bought out. Per Wikipedia: "The old Kongo
| Construction remained only in the real estate division and
| changed its name to KJ Construction Co., Ltd. The
| over-1,400-year-old Kongo family's management structure
| essentially closed its doors. In July 2006, KJ Construction filed
| for bankruptcy due to insufficient funds." Nevertheless, very
| impressive track record!
| gradschoolfail wrote:
| Heh, guessing the new management structure led to a bout of
| volatility in funding?
|
| _Survived nearly 1500_ - > Nearly survived 1500
| lenkite wrote:
| I think this is just due to the slow death of organized
| religion. There was no way for a temple builder to survive in
| their primary business. Otherwise, they had an extraordinary
| run. Wish governments supported such companies as cultural
| legacies.
| gradschoolfail wrote:
| Temple construction happens also to be concern of the world's
| 10th oldest:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nakamura_Shaji
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_oldest_companies
|
| (Of course, since wiki page hasn't been updated for the
| first, it might also have quietly passed into the ether)
| knallfrosch wrote:
| > Wish governments supported such companies as cultural
| legacies.
|
| I feel like the core of the company - led as a family
| business, earning real money - would be lost if it was
| suddenly state-supported, with the inevitable meddling to go
| with it.
| kwhitefoot wrote:
| The support doesn't have to be a financial subsidy; it can
| be the creation of a regulatory framework that advantages
| companies of this type. That is surely unexceptional, after
| all it's done in many countries all the time. It just
| happens that it is large corporations that are state
| supported rather than those with multi-century continuity
| or support for the local community in mind.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| Thankfully religions have never meddled in affairs of
| business, state, war, or culture.
|
| </s>
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| But they would; temples aren't destroyed unless there's a
| religious revolution, if the religion stops they become
| heritage sites and the work remains. Like modern day churches
| and cathedrals being repurposed as upmarket housing.
| hinkley wrote:
| Aren't a bunch of Japanese temples already heritage sites?
|
| The big problem with these temples is not religion it's
| deforestation. The spine is made of old growth timber. So
| some of these temples survived over a thousand years until
| the central pillars were deemed unsound and needed to be
| replaced. Problem is that the new pillars are estimated to
| need replacement again in 400 years. They are made of less
| sturdy stuff.
| onlypassingthru wrote:
| My impression is that Japan's temples are regularly
| destroyed. They're giant wooden structures with zero fire
| suppression and basically tinder boxes just waiting for a
| spark. Lo and behold, the Great ____ Earthquake/Fire or war
| occurs every few hundred years and there she goes.
| ensignavenger wrote:
| In fact, many Japanese temples are designed to be torn
| down and rebuilt on a regular basis.
| tmtvl wrote:
| As they say: fires and fights are the flowers of Edo.
| runjake wrote:
| If you look up the history of the temples mentioned in the
| article, they were more often destroyed by non-religious
| conflicts, fires, and earthquakes.
| astrobe_ wrote:
| Yes. I was surprised to see the castle of Hiroshima was
| still there. It was obviously rebuilt.
|
| Also AFAIK most of these constructions are made of wood,
| which also mean they need to be rebuilt over time. I
| think I also remember it is even part of the Buddhist
| tradition (at least for temples), a way to emphasis the
| impermanence of things.
|
| See for instance this long but fascinating video on one
| of the most famous temple of Kyoto: [1]
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rAeN7TdGq4o
|
| Found another reference, but for a shrine: [2]
| https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/this-japanese-
| shri...
| brendoelfrendo wrote:
| Ise Jingu in Japan is perhaps the marquee exception,
| ritually torn down and rebuilt every 20 years in a
| tradition at least 1300 years old. I think it stands to
| reason that if ritual reconstruction and maintenance of
| temple facilities is part of the religious tradition, then
| temple builders will see regular work.
|
| We shouldn't assume that all of the world's faiths follow
| the tradition of building temples as permanent monuments of
| stone and gold.
| ddfs123 wrote:
| This doesn't really say anything about religions.
| Constructions company can build a lot of thing. Temples are
| just happen to be good business at that time.
| FredPret wrote:
| But temples are almost uniquely good for construction
| companies.
|
| - the more ornate, the better
|
| - unlike palaces, every town needs at least one, and if
| you're polytheistic, so much the better
|
| - extremely price-insensitive clients who are content to
| wait generations
|
| - you can probably easily bulldoze both structures and
| local opinions that get in the way of construction because
| you're building for a cause everyone's supposed to worship
| prepend wrote:
| There aren't any examples of state run businesses this old,
| right? It seems like at 1,500 years governments aren't robust
| enough to survive. So any business run by a government would
| not survive the political upheavals.
| archgoon wrote:
| The Church of Sinai has operated Saint Catherine's
| Monastery for nearly 1500 years.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saint_Catherine%27s_Monastery
| alephnerd wrote:
| St Catherine's Monastery is not a business
| archgoon wrote:
| I mean, if you want to argue it's a Non Profit, not a
| business, go ahead, but I'm not particularly interested
| in fitting modern tax code and business rules to an
| entity that has existed for 1500 years.
|
| The organization has existed and has had a need to find
| funding for it's activities. Since the question was about
| 'state' run entities, the goal of "making a profit"
| seemed not particular salient.
|
| Honestly, I thought the more contentious part of this
| claim was going to be if the Church of Sinai constituted
| a state.
| alephnerd wrote:
| > I thought the more contentious part of this claim was
| going to be if the Church of Sinai constituted a state
|
| That is not as contentious, because it's basically
| autocephalous/self governing.
|
| It's always been a couple dozen loners in the Sinai
| peninsula maintaining self sufficiency, which is why I
| don't find it a good example - as there are plenty of
| similarly old and continuous organizations, but never
| truly scaled.
| anigbrowl wrote:
| Oh well, guess there's nothing you can learn from it then
| nothercastle wrote:
| It got killed by financial engineering in the end. No sanely
| run company can survive competition from a company structured
| to take advantage of low interest rates and public/private
| partnerships
| alephnerd wrote:
| > It got killed by financial engineering in the end
|
| Real interest rates in Japan were on par with in the US in
| the mid-2000s [0], and only entered the negative range when
| the US began dropping interest rates to near 0 during the GFC
| [0].
|
| The bigger issue in was the hangover of the 1990s Japanese
| bust which lead to larger players tightening their belts at
| the expense of smaller players [1]
|
| The big players in Japan are also similarly old (usually
| 300-500 year old guilds converted into corporations/zaibatsus
| in the 19th century)
|
| There is also a succession crisis brewing in plenty of
| Japanese, Korean, and Taiwanese businesses. One person in my
| network is leaving American Tech PE/VC to concentrate on
| buying out Korean and a Japanese companies facing issues
| around succession now - just like American SMEs businesses
| faced in the 1970s-2000s.
|
| Ik people like to shoehorn the Japanese experience to
| extrapolate American and Western policy, but the Japanese
| economy is structured very differently from Western economies
| with an entirely different view on antitrust (ambivalent to
| opposed), welfare (highly supportive), inflation (keep it as
| low as possible), and state intervention (highly supportive).
|
| The only developed countries that can safely be compared to
| the Japanese economy are South Korea and Taiwan (maybe
| Dirigisme-era France and Italy pre-1990s, but they had the
| benefits of the EC/EU which made stuff significantly
| different).
|
| I recommend reading "The Japanese Economy" by Takatoshi Ito
| and Takeo Hoshi [2] and "Corporate Financing and Governance
| in Japan" by Takeo Hoshi and Anil Kashyap [3]
|
| [0] - https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/FR.INR.RINR?end=20
| 13&lo...
|
| [1] - https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2000/01/03/national/e
| xecs-...
|
| [2] - https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262538244/the-japanese-
| economy/
|
| [3] - https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262582483/corporate-
| financing-a...
| underlipton wrote:
| The Japanese bust (well, the bubble that lead to the bust)
| was itself partially engineered, as a clever bit of
| American protectionism. The Plaza Accord prompted the BoJ
| to cut interest rates, leading to a brief period of cheap
| and easy money that completely destroyed the remarkably
| solid and sustainable economy Japan had built post-war
| (sounds familiar?).
|
| >with an entirely different view on antitrust (ambivalent
| to opposed)
|
| Post-war, Japan (with the American occupation's "help") did
| what would be unthinkable to American businesses, taxing
| the personal wealth of company heads up to ~85% and purging
| them from their companies. This left much of Japan's
| industry essentially controlled by the government.
| alephnerd wrote:
| I recommend reading the sources I listed in my initial
| comment (they are written by senior leadership and
| advisors at the BoJ from that era).
|
| Furthermore, these are all texts that are expected
| reading in any upper level Asian Economics class.
|
| > leading to a brief period of cheap and easy money that
| completely destroyed the remarkably solid and sustainable
| economy Japan had built post-war
|
| The biggest cause was bad loan issues caused by lack of
| auditing and due dilligence. [0]
|
| In that era, the BoJ would set a quota on loan
| origination (called a window guidance) that Japanese
| banks needed to meet (p.s. China used to do the same
| thing til 2015 which is a major reason for China's
| current real estate crisis)
|
| The Plaza Accord would not have had as severe an impact
| if Japan's Window Guidance policy didn't incentivize
| business loans with minimal due diligence.
|
| > Post-war ... purging them from their companies
|
| And they completely reconstituted themselves in the 1950s
| by adopting the Keiretsu corporate structure where a
| single asset management firm controls all the broken off
| assets of the initial zaibatsu.
|
| This is what Mitsui, Sumimito, Mitsubishi, Fuyo, etc did.
|
| Take a look at NYT reporting about this from 1954 [1]
|
| Japan also does not have a wealth tax.
|
| > This left much of Japan's industry essentially
| controlled by the government
|
| Japan always had a high amount of government intervention
| in it's economy.
|
| MITI was the driver of Japanese industrial policy.
|
| I recommend reading "MITI and the Japanese Miracle"
| (1982) by Chalmers Johnson to dig deeper into the history
| of interventionism in the Japanese model [2]
|
| -------------
|
| While the Plaza Accord did have a significant impact on
| the Japanese economy, the recent politically driven "pop
| econ" Plaza Accord view needs to die [3]
|
| Like anything else that's pop-anything, it's so
| broadstrokes that it's bordering on misinformation.
|
| [0] - https://www.imes.boj.or.jp/research/papers/english/
| me19-s1-1...
|
| [1] - https://www.nytimes.com/1954/07/17/archives/japan-
| again-plan...
|
| [2] - https://www.sup.org/books/title/?id=2791
|
| [3] - https://www.imf.org/-/media/Websites/IMF/imported-
| flagship-i...
| underlipton wrote:
| If I may be flippant, "Killing a 1400-year-old institution," is
| quite a feather in capitalism's hat.
| userbinator wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_oldest_companies
|
| Looks like hospitality and foodservice make up the majority of
| the list, while very old construction companies are actually
| relatively rare.
| txdv wrote:
| Construction companies are very volatile but building temples
| is probably a steady business model
| seanmcdirmid wrote:
| Japanese temples are rebuilt every 20-30 years, so steady
| business.
| noufalibrahim wrote:
| Interesting how Japan and Germany dominate that list.
| perlgeek wrote:
| Could be an artifact of record keeping culture, combined with
| eagerness to contribute to Wikipedia.
| severak_cz wrote:
| I like how all Czech republic entries in this list are
| breweries (except for one hotel). There are some priorities of
| our people!
| defrost wrote:
| People who enjoy old European breweries may also enjoy _The
| Drawing of the Dark_
|
| https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Literature/TheDrawing.
| ..
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Drawing_of_the_Dark
| dhruval wrote:
| The very old buildings the article talks about have long
| continuity but aren't actually that old.
|
| Article doesn't seem to mention that Japanese temples are rebuilt
| periodically every 20-60 years.
|
| Most construction businesses don't have this recurring revenue
| model, tied to religious rebuilding.
| mitthrowaway2 wrote:
| > Japanese temples are rebuilt periodically every 20-60 years.
|
| I think this is more the exception than the rule, isn't it?
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| Is it? Chinese buildings are never old because China built in
| wood rather than stone. If you want to avoid rebuilding your
| buildings, they have to be made from permanent materials.
| lb1lf wrote:
| Wood is surprisingly long-lasting in reasonably dry
| environments as long as fire does not consume it.
|
| Norway still has more than a dozen wooden churches built in
| the 1100s-1200s, and on farms in the inland there are more
| wood buildings dating back several hundred years than we
| can count.
| lostlogin wrote:
| > If you want to avoid rebuilding your buildings, they have
| to be made from permanent materials.
|
| I'm not sure how well that works when the ground keeps
| moving. Some places manage it to a degree, but the cultures
| that come to mind (Aztec) weren't on land as shaky as
| Japan.
| psychoslave wrote:
| I saw a documentary about the forbidden city architecture,
| and despite the wood it's really a great lasting one.
|
| An interesting takeaway was that lightning strike fires
| have been a major "need to rebuild everything from scratch"
| trigger until very recently actually. I'm always amazed at
| how much time it took to come with things that are all in
| all rather trivial to build while bringing a major
| difference on the table.
|
| The documentary also went through seismic tests, explaining
| how the architecture was so resilient to them, how the fact
| that all peaces are really just plugged in together and
| relatively easy to replace with a fresh new copy, even
| large steels and pillars. Truly amazing masterpiece.
| onlypassingthru wrote:
| Never old or were all the old buildings destroyed in the
| the Great Leap Forward?
| karaokeyoga wrote:
| I'm no expert but I think this is Shinto tradition (e.g. https:
| //en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ise_Shrine#Rebuilding_the_Shri...)
| rather than Buddhist. But, (Buddhist) temples are sometimes
| destroyed (war, natural disasters) and are rebuilt as a result
| (e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kinkaku-ji).
| teractiveodular wrote:
| No, that's only Ise Shrine, which is famously rebuilt every 20
| years using what's basically a blue/green deployment: build new
| exact copy next to active site, switch over, tear down the old
| one, repeat.
|
| The reason there are few really old _buildings_ in Japan is
| that earthquakes and WW2 destroyed almost all of them. That
| said, Kyoto and Nara do have numerous 300+ year old buildings
| like Todaiji, which also remains the world 's largest wooden
| structure.
| estreeper wrote:
| Not to mention various other wars and random fires, such as
| the Onin War Ying Ren noLuan in the 1400s, a civil war
| between many feudal lords, which destroyed much of Kyoto
| among other areas.
|
| The world's oldest extant wooden structure is the Kondo (main
| hall) of the temple Horyu-ji Fa Long Si in Ikaruga, in the
| Nara Prefecture of Japan. It was initially built in 607 but
| completely burned down due to lightning. It was rebuilt in
| 670, but again nearly burned down by accident in 1949 [1].
|
| It's interesting to contemplate how across these timescales
| war, disasters, and accidents make it so difficult for
| structures to survive.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H%C5%8Dry%C5%AB-ji
| TheRealPomax wrote:
| And fire. The thing with buildings made out of kindling is
| that they tend to burn down after a while whether that's
| intentional or simply because lightning happened to strike in
| the wrong place, or these days the man-made equivalent:
| electrical faults.
| renewiltord wrote:
| That is belief in constancy only of form. There is constancy of
| concept as well. Is your copy of `cat` different because it is
| composed of different electrons even if `diff` would report no
| difference? It is still an old program.
|
| What is old? These companies have differing memberships,
| different corporate structures, and make different things. Yet
| we call them the same company.
|
| Constancy need not be only of form. It can also be of concept.
| jcims wrote:
| The closest (presumed) black hole to the Earth is Gaia BH1, which
| is about 1500 light years away. The expanding shell of photons
| reflected from the Earth during this era are just now reaching
| it.
|
| Some small percentage of those photons are going to approach the
| black hole at the perfect distance such that they will be slung
| back on a trajectory where our solar system will be 1500 years
| from now.
|
| Suppose in a thousand years we decide to build a space telescope
| of tremendous proportion sufficient to peer into that tiny little
| window and it takes us 500 years to build it. We could watch
| opening day!
| left-struck wrote:
| Well the photons leaving earth are scattered in almost all
| directions. So at 1500 light years there might not be any
| photons arriving from that exact moment and place on earth
| because you might be down to say 1 photon arriving per hour or
| even less. Then the photons coming back would be all mixed in
| with other photons from the black hole so even if the same
| photons did go to where earth will be, the picture would be
| mangled beyond repair, and the darkness of the data you're
| trying to capture is so low that again it might be less than a
| photon an hour.
| baxtr wrote:
| Easy. We just use AI to "augment" any photon that is missing
| and voila we'll be able to watch opening day.
| exe34 wrote:
| at this point we can do it without the photon!
| pavlov wrote:
| Homeopathic astronomy?
|
| Those quack homeopathy treatments operate on the
| assumption that water has a "memory", and it's somehow
| enough that it's been in contact with some molecule in
| the past. The astronomy version would be that space has a
| memory, and you can observe anything if you know there
| was a relevant photon out there at some point.
| dayjaby wrote:
| Water has memory? We should build a homeopathic computer
| first of all.
| lukan wrote:
| Not homeopathic, but maybe close enough:
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phillips_Machine
| exe34 wrote:
| Hah that's where GNU Terry got it from then.
| noisy_boy wrote:
| Enhance! - 2024 AI edition
| rachofsunshine wrote:
| We can work out a ballpark value here. Suppose we're trying
| to see one square meter of Earth's surface on a sunny day, in
| the sense that we simply want to get our photons close enough
| to the black hole to be noticeably affected by it.
|
| Under direct sunlight typical illumination at noon is on the
| order of 1 kW/m^2 (this is a slight overestimate, since Japan
| is in the mid-latitudes and not the tropics). Typical
| surfaces reflect roughly 10-20% of the light that strikes
| them; let's say 10% to make the math easy and to compensate
| for the previous overestimate. So 100 W of mostly visible
| light is reflected, i.e., 100 joules of energy per second.
|
| A single photon of visible light has an energy of about 4 x
| 10^-19 J, so that's 2.5 x 10^20 photons reflected from our
| hypothetical square meter per second.
|
| The black hole has a radius of around 30 km, or an apparent
| area in the sky equivalent to a plane of size pi * (30 km)^2
| = 2800 km^2. It's actually a bit bigger than that because the
| "shadow" of a black hole is larger than the event horizon,
| and that's what we need to hit, not the horizon itself. So
| let's say 10,000 km^2 to make it nice and round. That's
| 10,000 km^2 of coverage on a "sphere" of radius 1500 ly and
| hence of area 4 * pi * (1500 ly)^2 = 2.5 x 10^33 km^2. So the
| shadow of the black hole occupies about 4 x 10^-30 of the
| sky.
|
| If we spread out 2.5 x 10^20 photons across the sky evenly,
| we hit the black hole's shadow with about one-billionth of a
| photon from our square meter of Earth per second, or about
| one photon every 30 years. You hit it with a photon from
| somewhere on Earth at most roughly every ten seconds or so
| (when the geometry is such that Earth is close to "full" from
| the black hole's perspective).
|
| The situation for actually lensing it properly to get it back
| to Earth is far worse, since not only do you have to hit the
| "shadow", you have to hit a particular point in the distorted
| image of the sky that corresponds to Earth, meaning you
| effectively have to thread this needle _twice_. Assuming you
| just want to hit Earth, which is bigger than the black hole
| 's shadow, you're still trying to hit another 10^-26 or so
| shot. A single photon from Earth should make that shot
| roughly every 10^19 years, or about a billion times the
| current age of the Universe.
|
| TLDR: ain't gonna work.
|
| -----
|
| In reality, none of this matters for a more fundamental
| reason: diffraction. The fact that light "smears out" as it
| travels poses a fundamental limit to resolution based on the
| size of your telescope, and the resolution we're trying to
| achieve here is orders of magnitude beyond it. For scale,
| Hubble is pretty close to the diffraction limit for visible
| light and a telescope of its size, and it already can't image
| planets within our own solar system at the resolution we're
| talking about here. So no reasonable telescope could even
| image Earth from the black hole, much less image a tiny
| portion of Earth.
|
| ...or that would be true, if you limited yourself to physical
| telescopes.
|
| See, the diffraction limit depends on the size of your
| telescope, or more properly, on the size of its lens. And the
| effective size of a gravitational lens can be very, very
| large indeed. It turns out that current technology is
| sufficient to reach a distance where the distortion of the
| Sun's own gravity focuses light - the required distance is a
| few times the distance to the Voyager probes. From that
| vantage point, you could theoretically use the Sun itself as
| a giant telescope. And the resolutions achievable are tight
| enough that, while you wouldn't be able to image individual
| square meters, you actually _could_ image details of planets
| with a resolution of tens of km (the rough equivalent of
| looking at a globe from a distance of a couple of feet away)
| across galactic distances. [1]
|
| The reason this works is that it's not hitting the
| gravitational shadow of the gravitationally-lensing object
| itself - it's hitting a focal "ring" with a very large radius
| around the object, effectively magnifying the imaged object
| by ~eleven orders of magnitude. At such magnification even a
| handful of square meters start hitting with meaningful
| numbers of photons, though diffraction is still (I think) the
| limiting factor on actually resolving anything.
|
| The black hole here is not much more massive than the Sun, so
| it wouldn't achieve too much more power. But with careful
| observation, you could use the hole to image Earth to a scale
| that would let you map out our world and our civilization to
| reasonable accuracy - if not the details of our corporate
| endeavors.
|
| -----
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_gravitational_lens
|
| See also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WHL0137-LS for an
| example of this kind of lensing on the scale of galaxies,
| which allows us to see a single star (or possibly a binary)
| from literally halfway across the Universe.
| vikingerik wrote:
| The trick here would be getting your spacecraft to be
| exactly Sun-antipodal from the planet you want to view,
| right? At multiple times Voyager's distance, its orbital
| period would be thousands of years, and any thrusting would
| make for impossibly tiny changes to your solar-relative
| angle.
|
| Doing the math: the Wikipedia article says the solar focal
| distance is 547 AU, which would be an orbital period of
| 547^1.5 = up to 12793 years to line up with any particular
| target along that plane.
| nkrisc wrote:
| One proposal I saw would be a series of spacecraft on a
| one way trip that pass through the focal point and image
| as much as they can while there before going off on their
| way forever.
| smallstepforman wrote:
| A pointy haired executive would say "silly engineers, did you
| forget to add an _enhance_ button, the solution is so
| simple".
| bjornsing wrote:
| > you might be down to say 1 photon arriving per hour or even
| less
|
| Have you calculated this or are you just speculating?
|
| The quantization of light is a real physical limit that may
| make this impossible. The rest sounds more like engineering
| problems.
| napo wrote:
| Then let's put one of this well-positioned black hole in all
| photons' trajectories.
| wwilim wrote:
| This is a perfect pastiche of xkcd
| Animats wrote:
| Berenberg_Bank, private bankers since 1590, and Beretta, making
| guns since 1526, are probably the oldest large companies. There
| are a few wineries, hotels, and religious goods makers that are
| older, but quite small. Berenberg remains a successful merchant
| bank today, and Beretta guns can be purchased wherever guns are
| sold.
|
| [1] https://www.berenberg.de/
|
| [2] https://www.beretta.com/
| xmprt wrote:
| The most interesting thing about these long lasting companies
| is how their governance changes over time considering how
| different society is from when they were originally founded.
| Countries have come and gone within the lifetime of these
| companies. There have been entire paradigm shifts in terms of
| how companies operate. And yet they still exist through it all.
| marc_abonce wrote:
| It looks like most of this centuries-long companies are
| family owned which sort of explains why do they survive all
| sorts of extreme political and economic changes that would
| otherwise break most companies. But it would be interesting
| to see if there's an actual study to explain this.
| lostlogin wrote:
| > Countries have come and gone within the lifetime of these
| companies.
|
| Are there any that have existed as long as this company? Some
| sort of have if you are a bit vague and wave your hands a
| bit.
| AmericanChopper wrote:
| Depends entirely on how you define the parameters of the
| question. Egypt has been around for a very long time, but
| is the ~3000BC Egypt the same country as the 2024 Egypt?
| Did Egypt stop being Egypt during the period of Roman rule?
| What about during Macedonian rule? Did people 5000 years
| ago even have a concept of a "country" that would align
| with what we think makes a country in 2024? Do people in
| 2024 even have an agreed upon concept of what a country is
| today? (I would say evidently not) Does the country of
| ancient Persia still exist? If it's longest contiguous
| self-sovereignty then probably Japan would be pretty high
| up the list. If its longest surviving constitution, then
| the USA and San Marino would also be two of the oldest
| countries in the world. But is San Marino even a country?
| Certainly not by every single metric you could possibly use
| to define one. Is the Magna Carta still in effect? Some of
| it is, but is that enough to make it the oldest surviving
| constitution?
|
| To make the question meaningful you probably have to make
| it a lot more specific. Otherwise the answer is just a
| debate about what constitutes a country, and what
| constitutes it coming into and out of existence.
| hinkley wrote:
| I wonder how many of these were considered semi benevolent
| either during their entire life span or lucky or wise enough
| to do so during times of turmoil.
|
| Some stores will have people willing to stick their neck out
| to defend them during riots. Some have good insurance and
| don't care. Which ones get obliterated when the pitchforks
| and torches come out?
| ftrobro wrote:
| Stora Enso has 20000 employees and roots in the 13th century.
| In the 17th centry Stora produced two thirds of all copper in
| the world.
|
| "The oldest preserved share in the Swedish copper mining
| company Stora Kopparberg (Falun Mine) in Falun was issued in
| 1288. It granted the Bishop of Vasteras 1/8th (12.5%)
| ownership, and it is also the oldest known preserved share in
| any company in the world."
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stora_Enso
| bjornsing wrote:
| From Wikipedia: "Some observers consider Stora Enso to be the
| oldest limited liability company in the world".
|
| Interesting, especially considering that Sweden didn't have
| limited liability companies until 1st of January 1849 [1].
| Any ideas how this worked?
|
| 1. https://www.foretagskallan.se/foretagskallan-
| nyheter/lektion...
| ftrobro wrote:
| I assume the charter issued by the king in 1347 declared
| limitations of liability for the owners of the company.
| throw0101d wrote:
| > _Interesting, especially considering that Sweden didn't
| have limited liability companies until 1st of January 1849
| [1]. Any ideas how this worked?_
|
| Legal personhood dates back to (at least) Ancient Rome:
|
| * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legal_person
|
| Medieval guilds, city charters, universities were all forms
| of such. Liability would be implicitly included in such
| structures.
| victorbjorklund wrote:
| That was when Sweden got a more general law of limited
| liability cooperations. There existed limited liability
| cooperations before that but they were created on an ad hoc
| basis by the government.
| nucleardog wrote:
| It was likely created by an act of government/royalty/etc.
|
| The UK law formalizing the structure of LLCs didn't really
| come around until the 1800s. Think of how many institutions
| in the UK are older than that (e.g., Bank of England is
| from 1694).
|
| Or for something that is a little more distinct from the
| government itself--Hudson's Bay Company in Canada was
| formed in 1670. Canada didn't exist yet and the laws
| weren't on the books. It was created by royal charter. It's
| currently owned by an American private investment firm.
| hinkley wrote:
| Back then if you pissed off the king he could revoke your
| charter.
|
| So effectively we used to have the death penalty for
| companies that committed treason-adjacent acts, or killed
| customers.
| FredPret wrote:
| Interesting idea - although wouldn't it have been the
| government that could, and still can, bring down the
| corporate death penalty if annoyed?
|
| I think even back then the kings were losing power to the
| governments that ruled in their name.
|
| It's also interesting to note that some of Europe's
| colonizing was actually done by companies which had
| armies, and definitely killed at least some of their
| customers (whether you think the customers were the
| colonizers or the colonized).
| permo-w wrote:
| what is the difference between the Catholic Church and a
| business?
| ftrobro wrote:
| Roughly the same as the difference between a country and a
| business.
| permo-w wrote:
| not really
| victorbjorklund wrote:
| Why not? The Vatican is its own country (and throughout
| history more a "real" country with lots of ordinary
| people living inside its borders).
| telotortium wrote:
| Yes, the Papal States (the state that the Pope ruled over
| between ~800 and 1870) were to a large extent the
| successor to the Exarchate of Ravenna, the area that the
| Byzantine Empire reconquered in Italy from the mid-500s
| to the mid-700s. Ravenna had become the capital of the
| Western Roman Empire long before the fall of the Western
| Roman Empire, since it was closer to the action on the
| frontiers of Central and Eastern Europe.
| hinkley wrote:
| You're the one who picked the only church that has its
| own country. Don't shoot the messenger.
| psychoslave wrote:
| A business generally don't threat its audience with post-
| life infinite burn in Hell if they don't buy its product.
| Also they don't impose celibacy to their employees. Oh, and
| tax exemptions, I guess.
| Detrytus wrote:
| Yeah, modern corporations tend to threat people with
| things like raising sea levels to make them buy electric
| cars or photovoltaic panels, or vegan food. They also
| impose their woke worldviews on their employees. And
| don't get me started on tax exemptions.
| OmegaMetor wrote:
| No, those threats come from scientists, the companies
| just change their products over time to give people those
| options.
| j_leboulanger wrote:
| I'm thinking also of Canson (founded 1557), the paper
| manufacturer and Richard de Bas (1326). Even Monnaie de Paris
| dates back from 864. Actually there are many companies still
| alive today that are more than 400/500 years old.
| divbzero wrote:
| > _There are a few wineries, hotels, and religious goods makers
| that are older, but quite small._
|
| Wineries, hotels, and makers of ceremonial goods are indeed
| common among older companies listed on Wikipedia.
|
| [3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_oldest_companies
| pjc50 wrote:
| Hmm, I thought the oldest bank was
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banca_Monte_dei_Paschi_di_Sien...
| , which has its origin in 1472 (although not in the present
| form).
|
| I had to go check whether they'd survived the 2008 financial
| crisis without being absorbed, and I think they did. A _lot_ of
| the UK 's oldest banks and building societies got absorbed in a
| consolidation wave immediately before (and partly causative of)
| the financial crisis.
| hinkley wrote:
| I get the impression that the M&A ahead of the crisis was the
| crisis itself. The fever that marks the beginning of the
| illness, before the nastier symptoms present.
| Animats wrote:
| There were many reorganizations, bankruptcies, government
| interventions, and other churn in the last 20 years.
| Something came out with the same name, but the primary owner
| is currently Italy's ministry of finance. Whether the company
| "survived" is a good question.
|
| It's like the Hudson's Bay Company, which claims continuous
| existence since 1670. That's really a unit of US mall
| operator NRDC Equity Partners, which acquired Hudson's Bay
| and switched to using that name. They also own Saks Fifth
| Avenue and various other department store chains.[1]
|
| [1] https://www.nrdcequity.com/timeline
| prepend wrote:
| I once ate at a falafel restaurant in Jerusalem that was 1,000
| years old.
|
| I think there's many restaurants that last a long time, but
| they aren't what I'd consider a "large" company.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| The restaurant, or the building it was in?
| FergusArgyll wrote:
| It has been speculated that its history may go back to
| Pharaonic Egypt.
|
| However, the earliest written references to falafel from
| Egyptian sources date to the 19th century
|
| -Wikipedia
|
| I doubt there's a 1000 yr old falafel shop in Jerusalem, if
| you remember the name, pray tell
| thoi2342o4j23jo wrote:
| People (incl. Japanese who have a overtly rosy picture of Europe)
| underestimate how important Tokugawa's Sakoku was for the
| survival of all this.
|
| Indeed, by the time Europe had f*ed up all of Asia in the
| mid-1800s and reached Japan again, Japan had very high levels of
| literacy which was perfect for selectively taking of high-
| culture/industrial-technology of Europe.
| javaunsafe2019 wrote:
| Any sources on this ?
| CRConrad wrote:
| _Shogun,_ by James Clavell.
| keiferski wrote:
| The whole Asia series is great. Personally I think _Noble
| House_ and _Tai-Pan_ are the best.
| sva_ wrote:
| The TV series based on that book which was released this
| year is extremely good.
| ahazred8ta wrote:
| From the 1600s, Japanese scholars had an entire field of study
| dedicated to absorbing western knowledge.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rangaku
| bolangi wrote:
| I have an in-law from a family of temple carpenters in Nara.
| They're not finding people who want go through the rigorous
| training and the work load demanded of an apprentice.
| temporarara wrote:
| Have they tried to make the deal more appealing? Apprentices
| certainly don't have to be treated like garbage, not even in
| Japan. So what if the apprenticeship takes a little bit longer
| than in the old days where you needed to basically live in your
| workplace and survive all the toxic behaviour directed towards
| you, and maybe you don't even have to master every single one
| of those ancient skills to become a professional. Attitude and
| willingness to negotiate matter.
| keiferski wrote:
| Maybe it's just me, but the idea of starting a company that
| exists 1,000 years into the future is much more exciting than
| building a startup in a trendy industry, getting acquired for big
| bucks, and never being heard of again.
| blitzar wrote:
| Its just you.
| teddyh wrote:
| Of those two, of course one is preferrable. But. Either you
| have a company which does everything and anything, or you have
| a company which depends on solving a particular problem or set
| of problem. If your company solves a particular problem, _the
| company depends on that problem persisting_. I'd rather the
| problem be _eliminated_ at some time by future developments,
| making the company defunct, rather than hoping for a 1000 year-
| old company. Hoping for a 1000 year-old company which solves
| one problem is really the same as hoping for humanity to keep
| having that specific problem for a 1000 years.
| keiferski wrote:
| I think that's a false dichotomy. Most of these old companies
| are addressing basic human activities, not problems. Unless
| you thinking eating good food and staying in hotels are
| problems that ought to be solved?
|
| Most entertainment business are also not solving problems,
| and yet manage to be extremely successful businesses. See:
| Disney, Pokemon, video game companies, etc.
| teddyh wrote:
| Yes, you're right. (There's also the "oldest profession".)
| But I'd still like to think that many of these actually
| _are_ problems to be solved, rather than unalterable facts
| of life. Look what happened to, for instance, secretaries.
| Or "computers" - i.e. the profession. Regarding
| entertainment, I don't see how companies providing
| entertainment is an absolute necessity; people can be
| entertained by each other's company, and have been for most
| of history and pre-history. Furthermore, the examples you
| give all rely heavily on copyright for their business
| models, a purely legal concept without a guaranteed future.
| If I had to bet on any entertainment company to survive for
| 1000 years, I would pick one which does things which can
| not be copied, like live performances, perhaps at specific
| historically important locations.
| fsloth wrote:
| "Problems to be solved" is a narrow view of the mechanism
| of providing goods and services.
|
| Is food a problem? Clothes? Housing? Historically
| societies that have lacked markets in these (grow your
| own food, make your own clothes etc) are not something I
| would call as aspirational models for our current
| civilization.
| ikekkdcjkfke wrote:
| So a company that can pivot within their general domain
| is preferable
| psychoslave wrote:
| "Flourishing and and thrive in peace" can be a good starting
| point. Specifications will vary over time sure, but there are
| good chances humankind will still crave for this in a few
| thousand years if it managed to stay alive as a species.
|
| I seize the opportunity to wish you a great satisfying and
| fulfilling life in harmony with the rest of your relatives,
| whoever you are.
| wrycoder wrote:
| In this case, the company was providing a service that was
| needed for millennia - building temples.
|
| Their structure seems to have been like a private
| corporation, with special rules and efforts to maintain their
| ideology and culture. They had the ability to expand outside
| the current leading families when necessary, though.
|
| When they hit the recent hard patch, they pivoted, but didn't
| scale back enough to survive until the next great leader
| showed up. They fell into the hands of modern corporations,
| and we all know how that turns out.
| bjornsing wrote:
| So what would be the equivalent of building temples today, and
| for the next 1000 years?
| keiferski wrote:
| Good question.
|
| One answer would be focusing on basic human activities.
| People will still probably be eating and traveling in 500
| years.
|
| Another would be to figure out and/or develop the "temple" of
| whatever future belief system or religion one thinks will be
| necessary and popular in the future. And this could be a
| currently existing religion; Islam and Christianity will
| probably be around in some form or another for a long long
| time.
| l3x4ur1n wrote:
| I mean, modern cloud computing centers are the new temples
| of current digital religion. And graphics cards are the new
| chalices.
| jakeinspace wrote:
| Is... Snowden Jesus? And Tim Berners Lee Moses? Or
| perhaps Jobs was Moses, and Xerox PARC was the burning
| bush?
| tsimionescu wrote:
| There is no similarity whatsoever. Temples are places
| that people flock to, computing centers are places kept
| secret.
| fsloth wrote:
| The Mars Terraforming Company? Half-kidding.
| jajko wrote:
| Building houses? Wooden furniture? Can't imagine this getting
| out of fashion anytime soon. Methods and materials may
| change, the mission not so much.
|
| With wooden furniture you are (at least for some time) also
| blocking release of stored CO2 back into atmosphere, a fate
| all other wood faces.
| drewcoo wrote:
| Construction involves a lot of changing technology.
| agumonkey wrote:
| ecosystems ? terraformed sustainability spots ..
| pclmulqdq wrote:
| When you look at these long-lasting companies, they are all
| slow-burning concepts with very little competition and little
| innovation, so you're not going to find suggestions of
| "technology" companies on this list. The innovator's dilemma
| cannot be an issue if you want your company lasting hundreds
| of years. Another problem here is that you need to
| financialize as little as possible, so you can't have a lot
| of competition. Investors don't have 500-year time horizons,
| so those are out (especially VCs). Debt on physical assets
| seems to be okay when used sparingly.
|
| 1. Datacenters or datacenter construction may be the most
| high-tech ones I would try. Not cloud services, but the
| literal physical buildings.
|
| 2. Musical instruments, art supplies, or other
| cultural/religious goods of some kind, possibly as high-tech
| as electric guitars or synthesizers (although those have not
| historically gone well).
|
| 3. Financialization businesses like insurance or securities
| packaging of some kind could work (if you don't get high on
| your own supply).
|
| 4. Food and hospitality never go out of style.
|
| I assume that the way this sort of business would work is a
| 3-step process:
|
| 1. Start by becoming the best in the world at something very
| weird and specific.
|
| 2. Bootstrap your business with enough connections to start
| making sales without needing significant financing. Run as a
| completely bootstrapped business.
|
| 3. Convince your children to continue being the best in the
| world at that thing and maintain your values. If you don't
| have any suitable children, adopt one. Also, make sure to
| disinherit any children who are not both very competent and
| fully onboard with the plan - you need to keep the power
| concentrated in the one or two best successors.
|
| It's no accident that a lot of these long-lived businesses in
| Japan, where all three of these are part of the culture.
| 0x1ceb00da wrote:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hmjU-6tkEc8
| surfingdino wrote:
| City of London Corporation started trading around 1067. It's
| getting close to being 1000 years old.
| dghf wrote:
| That's not a corporation in the sense of a company, though.
| It's a corporation in the sense of a local government body:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Municipal_corporation
| razakel wrote:
| That's a local government rather than a private company,
| though.
| ajb wrote:
| It says something about the UK that of the 10 oldest companies, 5
| of them are pubs (and two more are hotels with rather pub
| sounding names). Three share the name "The Old(e) Bell"
| cjs_ac wrote:
| The UK does extremely well in oldest schools:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_oldest_schools
| nix-zarathustra wrote:
| A lot of the names of the pubs came from the depictions of
| highly recognisable objects (given that the population was
| illiterate) that they would use to attract customers.
| phs318u wrote:
| I'm surprised that no one has mentioned the oldest and prima
| facie most successful corporate enterprise in history: the Roman
| Catholic church.
| alecco wrote:
| It's interesting how there are a lot of jokes like this but not
| many about the other two Abrahamic religions.
| timeon wrote:
| Is it because of church's structure?
| berkes wrote:
| They aren't as centrally and hierarchical organized as the
| RCC. Even most other Christian sects aren't organized like
| that. So this unique feature makes it distinctive.
|
| That, and the fact that it's much nicer to poke fun at
| "higher ups" than at peers. So if you make your whole
| organization about "higher ups" there's a lot of fun to be
| poked, I guess.
| Ekaros wrote:
| State churches like Anglican church might be more apt
| comparison. And those often do look like corporations when
| squinting, with lot of state funding or even taxation
| instead of sales... You even get various managerial
| classes, which do need to perform slightly different
| corporate rituals.
| rsynnott wrote:
| Yeah, the Church of England is (ironically, given its
| origins) structurally not a million miles away from the
| Catholic Church.
|
| Much newer, though, of course; there are (quite a few)
| pubs older than the CoE.
| et-al wrote:
| The Latter-Day Saints (aka Mormons) are relatively young,
| but they're definitely one of the more, if not _the_ most,
| organized Christian sect around.
| rsynnott wrote:
| I mean, I assume because there's nothing you could plausibly
| call Judaism Incorporated, or Islam Limited, but the Catholic
| Church arguably does look like a corporate entity if you
| squint hard enough (though it's actually really the remnants
| of a _state_).
|
| It would be impossible to make this joke about Judaism or
| Islam, or at least, if you did, it wouldn't make any sense.
|
| The Knights of Malta is a similar case, though newer; used to
| be a state, and kind of still pretends to be a state, but
| really a non-profit corporation of sorts.
| alecco wrote:
| >> jokes like this > this joke
|
| I think you know EXACTLY what I'm talking about and being
| disingenuous muddying my point.
| rsynnott wrote:
| No, I'm sorry, I've no idea. Unless you're claiming that
| no-one ever makes jokes of any sort about the other two
| big Abrahamic religions, but, I mean, er, they do.
| Perhaps you could be a bit clearer about what you're
| attempting to say?
|
| For this particular joke, though, neither would make any
| sense.
| alecco wrote:
| >>>> A LOT of jokes like this but NOT MANY [...] >
| Unless you're claiming that NO-ONE EVER makes jokes OF
| ANY SORT about the other two big Abrahamic religions,
| but, I mean, er, THEY DO.
|
| Again you change what I say and then you use it to
| blatantly lie. There are jokes on the other two but it is
| very, very rare and usually very, very mild. And you know
| exactly what I mean.
|
| I'm done. I don't care about your answers out of
| cognitive dissonance or straight out malice.
|
| And final note: I'm not even Christian.
| magic123_ wrote:
| Just because you know exactly what you mean (which in
| itself could be questioned), it's just ridiculous to
| expect anyone else to.
|
| FWIW where I'm from and in my social circles, the other
| two religions get joked about way more.
| rsynnott wrote:
| You seem to be an English-speaker, so you're likely to be
| hearing jokes from people who, by and large, have a fair
| bit of cultural context on Christianity, but almost none
| on Judaism or Islam. So, naturally, the religious jokes
| you hear, particularly on the media, where jokes have to
| be comprehensible to a broad audience, are more likely to
| be about Christianity than about Judaism or Islam,
| because the average viewer/reader doesn't actually know
| anything about Judaism or Islam, but a fair bit of
| context on Christianity is part of majority English-
| speaking culture.
|
| An example - in the Seinfeld episode 'The Bris', there's
| a bit of exposition where Kramer finds out what a bris is
| (and is disturbed by it). The reason for that exposition,
| presumably, is to explain it to the _audience_; the jokes
| wouldn't work if the audience don't know what it is. This
| just isn't work you have to do for the basics of
| Christianity, so making jokes about it for a wide
| audience is easier.
| wwilim wrote:
| "To think they started in a barn..."
| kibwen wrote:
| This is a joke, but also it promulgates the conflation
| between the institution of Catholicism and the general
| religion of Christianity (much like the commenter above is
| doing). In truth Catholicism could be said to have started
| as conceptually far from a humble barn as possible: in the
| imperial palace of Constantine (or maybe Theodosius or
| Justinian, depending on who's counting).
| keiferski wrote:
| Indeed the RCC even has something of a long history with the
| word _corporate_ itself, which ultimately comes from Latin for
| _body_ ; as in, _Corpus Christi,_ the body of Christ.
| weebull wrote:
| ...or the English word "corpse".
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| If religious institutions count, there's plenty that are older
| than Catholicism.
| keiferski wrote:
| Just curious, what did you have in mind? I cannot think of
| any extant religious institution with the kind of centralized
| singular organizational structure that the RCC has. Many
| "religions" (using quotes here because the concept of a
| religion is a bit of a complicated topic) are older than
| Catholicism but are or were more decentralized - like
| Hinduism.
| rsynnott wrote:
| Still extant? Do you have examples? The oldest Buddhist
| temples seem to be a few centuries older than it, but there's
| little reason to think that there's any organisational
| continuity there.
|
| (Of course, if you want to get super-vague, one could semi-
| reasonably argue that the Catholic Church is just a successor
| state to the Roman Republic via the Empire anyway, which
| pushes it back to about 500BCE.)
| nix-zarathustra wrote:
| The Roman Catholic Church is more of a country than an
| enterprise, given the Holy See.
| anilgulecha wrote:
| This is something that is a question to modern organizations:
| Capitalism is how the world runs, but companies don't last. For
| eg: any bet on how many of the top 50 companies in the world will
| exist in 50 years -- probably single digit at best.
|
| The institutions that endure seem to be religious, or family run
| institutions. One change in outlook is towards
| values/principles(/blind-faith?), as opposed to
| scaling/commercial aspects. Nation states and companies are
| broadly about a century old, and philosophers need to think and
| call out paths for current institutions and people for endurance.
| vladms wrote:
| Is endurance to be desired? If we would make a parallel with
| biological systems, it seems that death allows evolution, so I
| think it's good that nowadays companies don't last that long.
| Given the state of the world I think there are still a couple
| of things to improve...
| anilgulecha wrote:
| 1) There is definitely value in endurance. Examples abound:
| whether history, religion, etc.
|
| 2) Evolution is possible with endurance. Religions and these
| family business have adapted to changing requirements of the
| world (mostly). It's core principles that have perhaps stayed
| the same. There's also confirmation bias at play - theres
| plenty institutions that were at odds with evolution did die
| out for sure.
|
| You raise a good point, but IMO we're giving close to zero
| thought on how our current institutions will endure. Perhaps
| one answer is don't do anything and some will anyway.. (I
| don't like that answer, personally)
| diatone wrote:
| > There is definitely value in endurance. Examples abound:
| whether history, religion, etc.
|
| This is spurious. What about history or religion shows that
| for profit companies should last a long time?
| anilgulecha wrote:
| For one, to ensure we're building our civilization for
| millennia rather than current short sighted thinking
| which has given us global warming and other problems.
| Profit motive solves for incentives, but isn't tuned for
| long term and community/overall betterment.
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| I wonder if there were families or the equivalent of "companies"
| in the old Egyptian kingdom, which lasted for about 3000 years,
| longer than any modern-day civilization (although there may be
| some cultures that have existed for more than 3000 years)
| msravi wrote:
| Why does Japan have such a heavy presence on the list of oldest
| companies[1], compared to say, China or India or Egypt?
|
| 1. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_oldest_companies
| AndyMcConachie wrote:
| Lack of colonialism.
| huijzer wrote:
| From what I've read (but note that a Japanese could answer this
| much better), honor is an extremely important aspect of
| Japanese culture. As Karen Ma put it on a Quora answer:
|
| > In some odd ways, you can view many of Japan's famous and
| historical companies such as Mitsubishi and Mitsui as having
| assumed the role of the lords from feudal Japan, and the
| employees working for these companies can be seen as the modern
| day warriors. They devote absolute loyalty to their
| companies/modern day lords, who in turn vow to take care of
| these warriors by providing life-time employment, etc.
|
| > However, if these warriors tarnished the image of their
| companies somehow, e.g., involving in a scandal whereby their
| companies get blamed, or the reputation is severely damaged,
| then these corporate warriors would assume responsibility by
| kneeling down to apologize in public, and/or in some cases,
| jump off a building in an extreme expression of their deep
| regrets for failing to defend the honor of the company.
|
| Historically, warriors who protected the feudal lords would
| also commit suicide when they failed their master. See the
| Bushido book for more information about Japanese culture in
| English terms. It's really hard to express the culture in
| English, I think, because some is lost in translation and some
| is just hard to put in words.
| ahoka wrote:
| Colonialism, probably?
| iamEAP wrote:
| My understanding is that many of the oldest companies have
| lasted so long because they were/are family operations.
| Countries where "son takes over the business" is the norm will
| have more older businesses.
|
| Japan is one such country and also happens to have been around
| a long time too.
| f1shy wrote:
| AFAIK, in the case of the German company Robert Bosch GmbH,
| the founder was pretty sure his family would not do a good
| work of keeping the company running (he didn't even trusted
| himself), so he devised a somewhat complicated mechanism,
| where the family receives some money, but has little power
| over the direction of the company. Some other companies
| followed after that.
| clarionbell wrote:
| In China there was this thing called revolution, maybe you have
| heard of it.
| Danieru wrote:
| Couple posters have replied and attempted to answer, but the
| true reason is the concept of adult adoption.
|
| These companies have survived because any time the family had
| only girls, one of the women would marry and their husband
| would be adopted. Thus making the husband the eldest man, and
| keeping the business in the family.
|
| Japan having family businesses is not the factor, all
| businesses were good family businesses before the invention of
| the stock company. Instead what doomed most family businesses
| in the west was the eventual chance of getting unlucky with
| inheritance.
|
| The general acceptance of adult adoption to continue a family
| line, kept those businesses in a single family and justified
| passing the business whole to the "eldest son".
| victorbjorklund wrote:
| Could it be because China had a communist revolution and
| privately owned companies where banned (for a while)?
| ruthmarx wrote:
| My guess it has something to do with Japanese culture
| constantly discouraging individualism. If you're raised to be a
| cog in the machine and make sure you children will be cogs in
| the machine then that machine can run for a very long time.
| enugu wrote:
| There is a lot of individual creativity in Japan. How much
| you care for the interest of group (family/company/nation) is
| different from how much expressiveness there is at a personal
| level. The fomer being higher doesn't mean the latter is low.
|
| Also, for a group to be resilent, there actually needs to be
| a lot of creativity at in its members as otherwise it will
| collapse when it meets challenges.
| ruthmarx wrote:
| > There is a lot of individual creativity in Japan. How
| much you care for the interest of group
| (family/company/nation) is different from how much
| expressiveness there is at a personal level. The fomer
| being higher doesn't mean the latter is low.
|
| Could you elaborate on this some more? It was my
| understanding people were discouraged from even dressing
| different, for example.
| et-al wrote:
| I think this may also come down to record keeping.
|
| And keep in mind that China had the Cultural Revolution which
| reset the counter to zero.
| singularity2001 wrote:
| Look up Charlemagne Paradox and ship of Theseus to see that it's
| merely a name that survived, and maybe some old techniques.
| quantumfissure wrote:
| This was fascinating and lead me down the "Oldest Companies"
| Wikipedia.
|
| However, I was watching the second video linked in the article
| made by Endevr and it just sounds like it was made by and read by
| ChatGPT. The pauses are off and inflections are exactly the same
| on some words sounding unnatural. Is it me, or does anyone else
| feel that way about it? This isn't a new trend, is it?
| mstade wrote:
| It's not just you. YouTube is littered with videos just like
| this one, with exactly the properties you describe. My guess is
| they are cheap to produce from stock footage, and the scripts
| rarely offer any deep insights but are mostly just regurgitated
| blurbs from Wikipedia. If narrated it's almost always by the
| same voice, presumably synthesized so no voice actors to pay.
|
| I guess it's good business from the ad income sharing, and at
| the very least it's slightly more interesting than people
| posting reactions to reaction videos.
| QuantumGood wrote:
| AI-created voices do natural conversation pretty well, but many
| of the voices sold are developed from intentionally unnatural
| announcer speech. Online marketplaces became strong before the
| pandemic (and exploded during) and this meant many voice actors
| could get work and train themselves, and many of them tended
| toward a variety of unnatural announcer styles. This was partly
| because video narration was one of the largest (and lowest-
| paying) areas of work, and many of the buyers sought out
| inexpensive announcer styles.
|
| When you buy an AI voice, there isn't (yet) much you can do to
| get it vary its read, and many of the least-expensive voices
| you can buy are from these early mostly self-taught voice
| talent. When I used to hire agents to train for one of the 78
| Voice Acting Expo events we put on, they would tell me that
| most voice actors "lose their talent when they get an agent".
| Too many trainees feel that acting is not something you do, it
| something used to train them, and that once they are trained
| and graduate by getting an agent, they simply need to "open
| their mouth and gold will fall out". A similar reversion to the
| mean happens in other areas of training. People return to just
| "making an effort" after training. I remember my parents
| (father was an Army doctor) going to tennis camps, and being
| good for a few weeks afterwards, but not having much of what
| they learned "stick".
|
| It's interesting to see AI immortalize this odd self-taught
| speech.
| tim333 wrote:
| Sadly it does seem a trend, maybe produced with this kind of
| stuff https://invideo.io/make/youtube-video-editor/
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