Joe Fec 2003 -joefec.blogspot.com

Note: I am consolidating blogs. Here is a hysterical post from me two years ago when I beat a good friend of mine at a video game. I titled the blog " Its always easy to doubt yourself. " I like that title and it seems apropos today.


Sat Apr 07, 2001 02:05:17 ]
As a 35 year old, I've learned that two things are necessary. In your 20's you have to search for wisdom and knowledge. Assuming that you know everything, or have a consistent philosphy, is mistaken if done too early. Then, into your 30s, I feel is when the concepts that have been experience-tested must rise to the top .Typically they are cliched truths. Nevertheless, its still easy to give up, to decide you're not smart enough, not pretty enough, whatever.

Sola Scriptura -- the scripture is enough. God deals with each individual on their own. Church is for community, but not for taking all of our time and money.

God spend a ton of time on our brains ....use them.

With effort, you may not beat everyone, but you can beat most of the people most of the time, you're doing great.

I play Ages of Emipres with a friend that is an ex navy nuke, knows 4 languages and is orgainized to the extreme.. Mensa member....and all that. 160+ iq.

Well, I beat him tonight. It took me 3 months of friday night game nights with him, and then practicing and reading during the week. He doesn't practice it anymore.
I beat him twice. Worse the second time. For RTS fans, I rushed his butt FAST. This is a guy if you let him get to the imperial age, he kills you with deadly efficiency.
But I knew his weaknesses, and I learned the short cuts, and passed him in knowledge of the game.

I was determined to beat him before the Empire Earth game came out.

And I did it.

I am a programmer. There are constant challenges of my mind there...I work harder than the others, read more, and stay ahead.

I want to be an entreprenuer. that will get me ahead of the worker bees.

I want to have a relationship with God without interference from others.

I want to be with my beautiful kids all the time.

I have a nearly consistent philosophy...based mostly in ayn rand.

and CS Lewis.

I have to sleep.

Thanks GOD !

Trying to settle my blogging. Gotta look at RSS too.

Anwyay, recently went through my first layoff since I graduated high school nearly 20 years ago. Its rather shocking, and though I did see it coming I'm still a little pissed off about it. If your interested, the company is WRQ, a midsized company here in Seattle. Its a great company to work for....that is, it used to be. Now, the struggles of the age are making them like rabid dogs, laying off people left and right, flaling about like a fish on the deck of a boat, futily gasping for air.

My critisim for them is not uniqe to them. I think, as a Personalist, that captialism must be heged by basic christian ethics. I do not believe that what happens in these layoffis is Chrstian in the least. Why ?

The whole predicate is to make me work effecitively whilst I'm there. Work the workers like slaves, even though they are going to be gone on the next round. They knew I was gone.... I was on the list since Christmas. The layoff pirannas are eating the way up the chain, and pretty much the only ones left are the most senior people and management.

Now this is an expected thing for a dying company -- CYA and that sort of thing. I can see the logic in trading up, getting some experienced people in there, tossing away the people who are too junior, don't have the years in,etc. It is much more difficult to see the humanity in it, but I'll touch on that later. What I can't excuse is the lack of honesty. They lie every day to everyone who they let go in this way. They specifically lied to me and others about our security at the company to my face when he very well knew that I was on this list.

It is hurtful when they replace you with senior people because it cuts off the experience you were getting. Lets face it, the only way to get the experience is to do it. If they hack everyone under 5 years, its bad mojo for the future. The hurtful part of is it is that you feel that all your hard work and good motivation and real caring for this entity called WRQ has been wasted. Pissed away. The perception is, even though I mad e it through 4 of these things prior to the one that got me, that I can't do the job, that the guy left there can.

Its akin to breaking up with a signficiant other I think. Your no longer pretty enough, no longer interesting.
The lie is what makes it worse.
In business, they were telling me and the others the exact opposite. They were telling me that everything was fine, WRQ has lots of money still, and your not in danger because your junior to this other fella. "no joe, he was not sent here to replace you, and there are no plans to clear out house at all to go to .Net."

That is EXACLTY what happend. And these guys were and still are friends of mine, so I'm a bit confused about the whole thing.

I'm sure they were put into this position, and this is the way alot of companies behave. However, that does not make it right.

An ethical company would do something like....
1) reduce the lie. Tell the truth, and say "Yes, junior people will go first here"
2) tell people that as of now, everyone is under a 6 month review process. You may or may not be extended after your review.
3) Goodness, if people are on a list for God's sake tell them ! Its only fair !

Look, towards the end I was killing myself, because I knew I was under the gun. I had hoped to 1) get some good experience before the hammer fell, and 2) perhaps impress so as not to be let go.

Thats reasonably cruel to watch someone do 70 hour weeks for 6 months and then hack him.

I am a VERY big Ayn Rand fan, and I am still a captialist. However, its never been more clear to me the need for controls on captialism than it is now. I'm not talking about government really, but a call to ethical/religious judgement on them. When you behave in this adulterous manner, you shoul get the big A put on around your neck. Its poor behavior, it gives business a bad name when they do this. Sure they help you get a job, they pass around your resume....all to alieviate their own guilt !

One of personalisms tenents is to use variable salaries to avoid layoffs. This is far more ethical since it shows a true -business wide- distribution of the suffering. Agilent did this, and others.

All I know is that this round of layoffs got all the little people, the worker ants, and it felt very opressive. Its a sour taste that I shall not forget soon. Hopefully I will get a chance some day to run my own thing. I can do better.

Fortunately , I interview well so I got a position even before my unemployment started. Its contract....so we'll see. At least a contract is honest.

Joe

[ Mon Aug 06, 06:52:39 PM - paste from other blog]
Think of what the death of Death will do to our theology.
Think of the economy and the society.

Will our immortality make us more reckless?

Why not drive 110 MPH ? Why not...die? Why not experience the End?

I've always held that our reality IS eternity. That there is no difference and that time is a solid chunk. When one person dies, I've always held, time stops for him....eventually everyone will die and we will know God.

So there is a reflection of us beyond the one way mirror of our universe, and ethereal Joe Fecarotta looking down, or across, at our reality.

There has been thought that reality divides every time that we make a decision, and the other decision tree is played out in another dimension.

The only think preventing the copy & paste of 1000 joe fecarotta's walking around is the economics of the situation. The storage and backing up is one thing, but the robotic form to move around in is another, and will be very expensive.

I imagine that the experience of dying and then waking up in another body, having your mind only remember to the point of your being synched with your computer, is going to be very unpleasant. The early machines that we'll have are not going to be good simulations of the human experience.

I bet we'll have cancer patients volunteer first... They sign 100 papers and boom.... They kill the body and physically and (later electronically) transfer the brain contents over to the robotic body. It is from these men and women we will get to improve our new bodies.

Above all, you really have to admit that this kind of potential really changes and challenges your concepts of self, of God, and what it means to be a human



[ Thu Jul 05, 11:35:02 PM from other blog -- ]

There is an article about IBM developing a cube of 3 dimensional memory that will hold terabytes of information. With the enormity of storage doubling even faster than processor speeds are, it is simple to say that storage or processor speed will not be an issue come future computers. We will be able to record our whole life on to a disk, indexed and searchable. More than likely, as our understanding of Neurology advances, our future computers will be able to download our entire mind into a datacube. We can save our minds, a backup of us. But I get ahead of myself.


Today we are deluged with nearly daily torrent of news about scientists’ cloning this animal and that, we may be tempted to become complacent or bored with the news of milestones being reached. The potential cannot, however, be overstated. With the advent of genetic engineering we have the possibility of controlling the previously random processes that creates human life. There is nothing that will stopping humanity from manipulating life itself.

Replacing the random processes can eliminate disease of the most awful sort.... leukemia, obesity, retardation, Alzheimer’s. We can create smart, beautiful wonderfully healthy people consistently. That, with nutrition, and anti-aging drugs, we could see life’s extend well beyond 100 years in the bodies of what would be a 25 year old. Controversial as genetic engineering and the biology of life is, the physics of life give ethicists and theologians even more to worry about.

There is nothing preventing us from regenerating life itself as a physical process. What is the spark of life ? What is resurrection? Assume a man dies of a heart attack. If we repair the hole in his heart, what prevents us from restoring the mind? It is merely a computer, a device that calculates and perceives and remembers. There is control of it, we call it free will. The ability to direct our consciousness and our decisions is wielding of the force of energy of life and there is no violation of the 2nd law in the restoration of life. I am actually surprised we haven't restored life to simpler creatures. Theologians have posited that the soul may reside in the mind but i do not feel that God was limited to using discoverable processes to encrypt his own presence. the nature of light is an indicator of what nature can do if it wants to hide itself.

Now combine the concepts of genetic engineering, life extension and restoration, and computer aided human biology, cybernetics.

A world of perfect, but infinitely varied people: their teeth are perfect due to enzymes that were engineered into our saliva ducts, their body fat is perfectly regulated by preventing our over indulgence, a gentic stomach staple. We are all geniuses, but since the minds are so varied, you have to choose which genius you want (artistic, mathematical, etc) . Our bodies are either micheal jordans, or ken griffeys, or tiger woods. For the females.....Charile Theron, Marylin Monroe, or Christy Brinkley. More than likely all randomness will not be able to be removed from the processes that create humans....probably just the things that are either dangerous or cosmetic. Even the natural counter that makes us die, the release of oxidants into our bodies, may be removed. We could live to 1000 years old.

And, if we die by getting disintegrated by some lazer beam, one of the family members goes back to the home Pentium X computer, gets a datacube and sends it into Clonz-R-Us. The insurance pays for 50% of the new body if it was an accident. Dad is loaded into either a robotic body, or a human clone 'blank', though the later has so much ethical baggage I simply cannot see it happening. So, dad is now a robot, but he's still with us, and death is defeated once again.

You see ,in the future, Death's days are numbered.

In the 30's the New York times reported that God is Dead.
in the 21st Century I am sure they will run the headline Death is dead !

With eternal humans, space travel will once again be though of as a human endeavor, not a robotic one. And we'll need to explore. Indeed, I suggest that the only way dad gets a new body is if he aggrees to become a space settler. We cannot have a bunch of 500 year olds running around our planet. With the death of death, we need an alternative way to get humans out of the planet and have a fresh rotation in the job market, etc.

If we can keep our hands off of the button, and stop socializing everything, I think we can get to this very desirable place.

One thing this is going to require is certainly a giant thriving world economy.

Recently time magazine reported that the universe is going to die a dismal death. I think its a bit quick to say such things since we really don't know about how the unusual state of the beginning of the universe. The first moments of the universe are extremely rare, a giant singularity, with the laws of physics we love no where in site. Imagine instead a universe full of humans, for billions of years.

Then, at the twilight of our universe's existence, when the fundamental forces that hold our atoms and our reality together giveaway to entropy, God comes out of another reality, says, 'Good Show!' and welcomes us to the new plane of existence, which before we couldn’t' possibly comprehend.