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The Dow Jones Industrial Average, a name that evokes images of gleaming gears and determined men in bowler hats, has also bravely breached the 50,000 mark. And the Nasdaq Composite, a collection of companies that mostly involve blinking lights and complex algorithms, briefly touched 24,000. It’s all becoming rather…uncomfortable. Investors are, it seems, becoming desensitized to good news. (Which, as any seasoned observer of human nature will tell you, is a profoundly dangerous state of affairs.)

Forget the vaporware peddlers, the pre-revenue promises. We need to look at the behemoths, the ones with the balance sheets to withstand a decade of negative returns. The ones who can absorb the losses and still pay the bills. Because let’s face it, this quantum leap isn’t going to be a sprint. It’s a goddamn marathon, and most of these startups won’t even make it to the first water station.

The Coca-Cola Company. A name that evokes, for some, the very essence of American excess. For Berkshire, it has proven a remarkably durable asset. The initial investment, dating back to the mid-1990s, was, one gathers, predicated on a shrewd understanding of branding and the human appetite for sweetened water. The company, even then, possessed a mastery of lifestyle marketing, a skill now sadly diluted amongst a thousand competing distractions. More prosaically, it paid a dividend. And continues to do so, a practice now stretching to sixty-four consecutive years. A reassuring consistency in these turbulent times.