Rob Raffety
3.4K posts
@RobRaffety
Host of Raff’s Brain 🎙 — my playground for goofy stories, real-life adventures, & experiments in how openness, creativity, & tech can bring people together.
This game also features the greatest call of Mike Lange’s career. He put everyone on notice. He knew Lemieux was about to make history and he warns you not to turn the game off. Just pristine work from him and Steiggy here. Two absolute GOATs in their prime with unreal chemistry.
We decided on a book title! “Free Speech Generation: The Civil Libertarians Who Saved the First Amendment and Transformed America” Most people I surveyed preferred “Let Them Speak” as the main title, but there are already other (albeit minor) titles with that name, and I worried it wasn’t distinctive enough. If my book is on a bookshelf and a potential reader can see only the title on the spine, “Free Speech Generation” will stand out more than “Let Them Speak,” which could be about almost anything. I also like the double meaning of "generation": a group of people and the act of producing something. In this case, speech. I struggled a lot with the subtitle. My one must-have was including “civil libertarians,” because it’s how the people I feature in the book describe themselves, and it’s a minor project of mine to mainline that phrase into popular discourse. I also loved the subtitle “The Civil Libertarians Who Forged America’s Free Speech Century.” It felt expansive, and the idea of a “Free Speech Century” is central to the book. But it worked better paired with “Let Them Speak.” Having free speech in both the main title and subtitle felt a little repetitive. Some people recommended “The Civil Libertarians Who Gave Voice to the First Amendment.” That’s not bad, and I like the “gave voice” idea, but I worried that emphasizing the First Amendment in the subtitle would make the book seem more legalistic than it is. Then my agent suggested the option we ultimately chose. The combination of “saved” and “transformed” added some drama and avoided the narrower focus on the First Amendment, which I liked. So that’s where we landed. Thank you to everyone who shared such thoughtful feedback. I’m not generally an indecisive person, but this decision took me a while. I poured a lot into this book, and I wanted to get the title right. When I made my movie "Mighty Ira" in 2020, I was never fully in love with that title. I wanted to feel differently about this one. “Love” may be too strong a word for how I feel about the title now, but I do really like it, and who knows, I may even grow to love it. Onward!
Cash for Clunkers destroyed 690,000 functional vehicles in 2009, creating an artificial scarcity that rippled through used car markets for over a decade. The Obama administration sold this $3 billion program as environmental salvation and economic stimulus, but any free market economist could predict the real outcome: massive wealth destruction disguised as progress. The program forced dealers to pour sodium silicate into engines, permanently destroying cars that poor families could have afforded. Politicians eliminated the bottom tier of the used car market overnight. Suddenly, a reliable $3,000 Honda Civic became a $7,000 Honda Civic (if you could find one). The supposed beneficiaries — working-class Americans who needed affordable transportation — got priced out entirely. Government intervention always creates unseen victims, and Cash for Clunkers delivered them by the millions. Single mothers, college students, and minimum-wage workers watched their mobility options vanish as used car prices soared 30% between 2009 and 2014. The environmental gains proved negligible too: most clunkers averaged 15-17 MPG while replacements hit 24-25 MPG. Destroying half a million cars to improve average fuel economy by 8 MPG represents the kind of central planning that would give Soviet bureaucrats a hard-on. The wealth destruction extended beyond sticker prices. Higher transportation costs forced people into longer payment terms, creating a debt cycle that persists today. Cash for Clunkers normalized 84-month auto loans, turning cars from depreciating assets into multi-year financial anchors. Bureaucrats congratulated themselves for moving inventory off dealer lots while condemning an entire generation to transportation poverty.
Max Talbot That guy rocked.
Happy Anniversary, Orange Nation 🏆
