Thank you for sharing this one! It's from a beautiful parable found only in Luke's gospel, from which only "no slave can serve two masters" seems to have entered the popular lexicon. Your quote, or the closing line "you cannot serve God and wealth", better speak to the spirit of the passage.
For anyone interested in approaching the Bible this season, perhaps as part of a New Year's resolution, there are many wonderful free and paid resources to do so. It's easy to get bogged down in a comparison of translations and tools, or to ambitiously pick a Bible in a Year reading plan and get waylaid in the pentateuch. Instead, I'd recommend starting with the Berean Standard Bible (a modern, public domain translation with good footnotes) and Mark (Matthew is my favorite, but it starts with a genealogy and requires some Old Testament knowledge to fully enjoy.)
Your attitude is exactly what the parent comment is describing. You have the benefit of decades of scientific research and government mandates that didn't exist for previous generations. Modern cigarettes date to the late 1800's but the link between smoking and cancer wasn't established until the 1950's. It took over a decade after that for the first warning labels to appear on packs, and the photo type you're describing didn't exist until the 2000's.
It seems obvious to you because it has been made obvious to you. It wasn't the same for people in the first half of the 1900's. The parent comment is making the same point: it's not obvious to most people today, but in fifty years from now, people will look at the research, the decline in the birth rate, the increase of anxiety, and effects we can't imagine today and go "social media has very visible side effects fairly soon, how did they not know?"
The two brands that could have a claim to producing "the model that everyone says are the best" are Bose and Sony. For Bose, the QuietComfort Ultra are the top of the line, but the cheaper/older QuietComfort 45 and 35 are both good too. For Sony, the WH-1000XM4 is the consensus favorite, even though the XM5 is newer. I own the XM4 and the older XM3 and I prefer the XM3 because I like the way it sounds with nothing playing better. I don't know how to describe it but the "silence" of the XM4 with ANC on but nothing playing feels too artificial for me. For office use, though, I prefer the XM4 since it has bluetooth multipoint and I can use them easily with both my laptop and phone without mucking around in settings.
I'm changing jobs and going from having my own office to hoteling desks, so I imagine I'll be wearing the Sony's a lot more and I'm not sure if they'll be comfortable enough for all day use. At home or on a plane, I usually need to give my ears a rest every hour or so. I'll give one of the Bose a shot if I can't deal with the Sony's all day.
Apple is also very popular. I haven't tried the new AirPods with ANC, but I love the Pros. I have to fuss with them a bit to get a good seal, and they don't stand up to city or airplane use, but they're fine in a relatively quiet environment, and they're so small I pretty much always have them on me. I have no experience with the Max, but from what I've read they can be uncomfortable for some people.
I haven't used ledger-cli much; I ruled it out pretty quickly when I was testing PTA software. For me, I loved the reporting and hledger-add for entering transactions manually. As I learned to automate my input, I started to appreciate beancount's automatic strict enforcement, BQL, and fava web front-end. Then I learned some pandas and was able to replicate most of the hledger reporting I liked with my beancount data and some python scripts.
If I were in your shoes, my only question would be: am I happy with the output? If you are, I'd stick with ledger. If you're not, fava is pretty cool.
Reading the LWN post about why they chose GnuCash was a great reminder to me of why I chose beancount--all the other financial solutions out there did about 80-90% of what I wanted, but never 100%, and no way to get them to 100% either.
I'm not a programmer, so I had to install and learn a lot of tools along the way, but now there's literally nothing I want to do with my financial data that I can't. It's all just text files, python, git, csv, and json. I haven't encountered a single problem that I wasn't able to solve with just a bit of time and searching through stackoverflow or github.
If you're a paid iCloud user or an MS365 user, both have ways to use a custom domain and tap into the storage you're already paying for at no extra cost. MS365 locks you in to GoDaddy as a registrar and I'm on Cloudflare, so I use iCloud. I'm not sure what your threat model is, so you may not be willing to consider either of these options. For me, email privacy is an oxymoron and I prefer communication methods with forward secrecy like Signal. For email, I'm mainly just looking for a vanity domain I can share with my wife for spam and mailing lists.
Growing past the above suggestions, at the cheap tier, I'd recommend Migadu, MXRoute, or Zoho.
If you're willing to pay what I consider to be Too Much For Email, then my favorites are Proton Mail, StartMail, or Fastmail. You'll want to research these heavily before transitioning though, as they may be missing features you're used to from Gmail that you find you can't live without.
I really tried to like Signal and convince my family to use it, but the lack of iOS backups, CarPlay support, and web client were dealbreakers for me. I'm no Meta fan but I've found WhatsApp to be the best mix of secure default settings plus usability. It's ugly as sin and doesn't have a Linux app, though.
I'm in finished vehicle logistics, and I've worked directly with a wide variety of truckers, including three years in California. You are very right that the amount of cargo that needs to be moved will not change because of this law, but you are, in my opinion, wrong about everything else.
I don't want to stereotype truckers because it is a diverse group. But I will say that in my anecdotal experience, this is a job that tends to attract people who want to be left alone. These are people who value freedom and hard work above everything else and many of them will change careers or retire if they are forced to work for big corporations. The average trucker is 55 years old, and many of them will just sell their and retire if AB5 is not overturned.
Supplying a $150,000 truck is not at all a barrier to entry. There is a major shortage of truckers and employers are offering free training, big sign on bonuses, and high starting pay to attract talent. Walmart, which is certainly not known for paying its employees well, pays truckers an average of almost $88,000 per year--and Walmart supplies the truck. The people spending $150,000 on a truck are doing it because they want to, not because they have to. This is not a medallion situation.
As for your "wink wink" comment, ELD's have been mandated since the end of 2017, and even companies that are small enough to not legally be compelled to use one are often forced to comply due to customer contracts. (Shippers want the data the ELD provides to offer better ETAs to their customers.)
In my opinion, the most likely outcome of this law is that some truckers retire and sell their rigs to big corporations, some decide to work for big corporations, and prices go up for everyone who ships goods or buys shipped goods. Unless you're in asset based trucking and looking to expand, the chances are that AB5 is going to hurt you, not help you.
I use nano because I don't have to remember anything to use it. If you put me in front of nano I can open a config file, go to the line I need, edit in something, save it, and exit without knowing a single thing about nano. If you put me in front of emacs or vi I have absolutely no idea what I'm looking at.
I am sure vi and emacs are much powerful than nano, but the time I'd have to invest in learning them would outweigh the benefit. I just don't edit text files enough for it to pay off.
This isn't true in the vast majority of states. Private sales, regardless of if they're at a gun show or a parking lot, only require a background check in six states (and three of those don't require a background check for long arms.)
My own experience is just the opposite--I've never had a problem with Uber but have had plenty of problems with taxis. Just yesterday coming home from the airport the taxi driver got off the highway in the wrong neighborhood, ignored my verbal directions three separate times, and when he finally got to my house refused to get out and help me with my luggage.
I commute to work by bike in Philadelphia, and not just in the good weather. In the last year I've missed three days--once the day after I cracked a rib going down in snow and twice when I woke up to a flat tire and didn't have time to swap it out and make it to work on time. (I've got better tires and am much better at replacing a tube, now.)
You know the old saying, cheap/good/fast, pick two? With bike helmets it's attractive, comfortable, or cheap: pick one. You can get a sweaty, dorky Bell for $30, or you can get a sweaty, cool Bern for $70, or you can get a comfortable, dorky Rudy Project for $200.