Day 102 – YACC

Friday April 29, 2021

When I first got into computers I saw an entry for Yet Another Compiler Compiler (ie YACC), The author asked how many do you need? This in the vein of “If you seen one, you’ve seen them all” or something like that. A compiler is computer code that translates from one computer language to another. Originally, the idea of a compiler was to allow people to write in a way that was closer to what they understood, say mathematical equations, than what a computer understood which would be registers, memory, and functional units. One of the early compilers was FORTRAN. It allowed scientists and engineers to work in formulae and equations. For every new fangled machine you would need to write the code for FORTRAN to run on that machine. The idea of a compiler compiler was to automatically generate code for the new machine or the new computer language. This is not a new idea. It’s been around since the earliest days of computers. 

The same could be said for economics or politics. Doesn’t seem that there are any new ideas, just the same old stuff being repackaged and regurgitated. 

But then we get to today and the face of the New Republican Party! I put the “N” in capital to emphasis it. Is what we are seeing new and different or is it YACC or perhaps SOS (Same Old Stuff)? 

Ah grasshopper, here is where art and knowledge of art can be a guide. What? Let’s take a very quick tour of art from the dark ages onward through and past the Renaissance. If you remember at first we got flat lifeless block like figures in the early Renaissance. Then we got depth and perspective and shading and very lifelike figures. Fabulous stuff., Michelangelo and all that. Then what happened? All of a sudden the figures became elongated and the colors were not quite right. They were slightly more garish. What happened? It was called Mannerism. The explanation by art historians was that the artists had taken the realism thing as far as it would go. 

In other words, either they got bored with it or they couldn’t sell it (ie find a sponsor) so they moved on to something else.

I contend, or at least I’m willing to ask the question, “Is that what has happened to the republican party?” Have people gotten bored with reality? 

Is there a new reality? A phony “as seen on TV” reality? Is that what has overtaken the republican party? 

Most people who seem to know and follow politics deeply say that effectively running a government is boring work by and large. Hey? Why not spice it up? Why not elect a no-nothing and watch him do stupid things? 

I see that as one explanation. I also see it as a smokescreen for the powerful to manipulate the political scene to their economic advantage. 

Why not just pass laws that work in your favor? So what if they screw over most of the people? 

We have seen in literature and Hollywood a particular strain of thinking which is “let it collapse and then we’ll come in and fix it” or “we’ll hide out in our little corner of the world where everything is terrific and let the rest of the world go to hell” or “oh snikey, we let the rest of the world go to hell and now it came to visit upon us and we are in a sand swept wasteland fighting for our lives against a bunch of mutants.”

If you think about it Ayn Rand wrote about this. Paul Ryan made his staff read her stuff, which I gotta say is pretty inspiring stuff. Until you realize some of the backstory. She was really writing about Soviet Russia. Her hero was based on real life psychopath who lured the local banker’s daughter out of school, dismembered her, got a ransom, reassembled the girl to do so (like holding her eyelids open with wires) all so he could have enough money to enroll in a Christian school in California. (No, I didn’t make that up.)

The theme of hiding out is also the backstory of Black Panther. There was what appeared to be a remote backward African nation, but in reality they were light years ahead of the rest of the world.

Rand’s folks were hiding out in the Rockies waiting for the world to collapse. 

Some folks have asked, “What’s the answer?”

Well, I say, “We don’t know.”

I can look at various things that have worked to some degree, but nothing that we’ve come up with is perfect. Some things are better than others. We can also identify trends and predict where things are going because we’ve seen it before.

Bill Maher did a piece recently that said just because it’s an idea that you’ve just thought of doesn’t make it a good idea.

The “Oh gee, let’s try this” is not necessarily a great way to go. Especially, if you’ve seen the movie before. In economics I was having a Facebook discussion with someone about bits of this. The conversation was about the minimum wage. There are two sides to this: 1 – everyone has to cut their own deal. If you don’t like the deal, move on. 2 – There are jobs that don’t require a great deal of skill or knowledge that need to be done for a society to function. If left to their own devices employers in those areas will pay as little as possible and those people will live in poverty.

Do we want to permit that? As a society? 

What’s the answer? 

If you hone to 1 above then you say those people should move on and find another deal. 

Great. How many times can a person do that in their lifetime? If you read “The Grapes of Wrath” remember the scenes about the people who read handbills saying their were good paying jobs somewhere else? They’d go there to find the market was flooded with people who were willing to work for less and less, because they had to eat. There’s a fancy economic term for this, but the reality is that the people who needed the pickers generated those handbills and distributed them so they’d be able to pay as little as possible. Is there any difference now with what WalMart does? Or Burger King? Or any of those places?

What if everyone who could work there decided not to? Boom. Bye bye Walmart. But that isn’t how the world works is it? It’s like saying that a gas could be released into an enclosed room and all the molecules could huddle in the corner, but that’s not what happens. 

In order for workers to get a better wage they have to act as a group. There are lots of ways that this can be done. In Germany, the autoworkers approached all the German carmakers and asked, “How can we help you make better cars so you can sell more and we can make more money?” This is the idea of you want a slice of the pie and you want to make the pie bigger, and get a large slice too perhaps.

This has worked well for German autoworkers, However, there are other workers left out. What about them? Maybe there’s a way to help others in that economy. So far that hasn’t happened.

The idea of the $15 an hour minimum wage is being treated by some like it’s a radical idea. Socialism, or something like that. I think we ought to get some really smart economists together and have them come up with some sort of economic model that automatically adjusts the minimum wage so people don’t live in poverty.

I can tell you this. Leaving it to politicians doesn’t work. Politicians have shown over and over again that they are “too little, too late.” In fact, I have seen numerous articles that argue that politicians tend to add to economic woes more than help them in an economic cycle because they act so slowly they add fuel at just the wrong time and vice versa, thus exacerbating the economic cycle woes, not helping it. Thus the argument can be made that regulations in place that kick in automatically are better.

There is the argument that “we don’t need no stinkin’ regulations.” Yeah, I’ve heard that one. No regulations is regulation. The strongest will get stronger and the weak will whither. Which is great if you are the bloated 800 pound gorilla. But you aren’t. And we’re back to Ayn Rand. This is exactly what she wrote about. The fat bloated industries will influence government to give them a break. 

We’ve seen it before. Let’s change the dance.

YACC

PS And yesterday I said it was time to hear from Matt Gaetz again. Whew. Boy Howdy. More on that later.