EMP now MoPop just keeps hanging on by a thread as well and has gone through lots of turmoil.
Justifying the adjacent "Science Center" subway station, increasing real estate value of the science museum land. If the land was going to be auctioned to the highest bidder, a tech company consortium could have bid for the opportunity to protect this science student feeder of US/Canada university and industry tech talent.
Instead of Ontario Science Center, why not Apple/Bell/Google/Rogers/Samsung/Shopify or even Toronto Science Center, if that would forestall destruction of a priceless historical landmark? Same principle for the Living Computer Museum, why not Amazon/Microsoft/Valve Living Computer Museum?
And this "brand building" that you describe here has basically zero return on investment.
Of course some company - proablably a private one (not public), could invest into it, but if you want to burn money on something your CEO likes or the owners like, you can use other ideas like paying millions to put your logo on soccer tshirts for hundreds of millions. Or hosting a forum ;)
On a side note, I worked in a company that paid a lot of money for golf sponsorships and couldnt figure out why this "marketing" does not work in countries where nobody plays golf. I think they still havent figured out that there are countries outside of USA.
> zero return on investment
Any junior i-banker can produce a spreadsheet showing the lifetime labor value of high-quality technical talent educated at Canadian universities, many of whom are recruited to work for US technology companies.
https://www.utoronto.ca/news/u-t-deep-learning-pioneer-geoff...
When you translate a sentence using Google, or ask Siri to send a text, or play a song recommended by Spotify, you are using a technology that owes much to the innovative research of Geoffrey Hinton.. “deep learning” – a form of artificial intelligence (AI) based on neural networks.. Hinton’s revolutionary contributions to the field have earned him the nickname “the godfather of deep learning,” and have made Canada a hotbed for high tech.. for his excellence as a global pioneer in deep learning, Hinton received a Doctor of Science, honoris causa from the University of Toronto, where he is a University Professor Emeritus.
Nvidia agrees and invested in the future long before others. Thanks Geoff Hinton for planting seeds of science and money!
Nvidia Science Centre?
Anyway, since you know better how those big companies can invest, you can use your own money to reap the benefits. Money is literally lying on the street for you.
He likely didn't like thinking about it.
He probably convinced himself into thinking he wasn't going to die until it was too late, and things like this probably drop down to fairly low priority at that point.
Not trying to excuse him though; if he actually cared he should've been thinking about it when he was opening the museum.
(His original diagnosis with Hodgkin's Lymphoma was in 1983 according to Wikipedia. Most of the these projects in his life through 2018 were under the specter of that cancer. Even the complication of the additional non-Hodgkin's Lymphoma in 2009 still gave him possibly luckily a few years to have handled some things.)
Not that it makes it that much easier to deal with if you live that much time after a frightening diagnosis, especially because you likely can't know how much time you will actually have. But then again, none of us really know how much time we have. (How's your estate plan? Mine could use work.)