I've only read Into Thin Air, but that book makes Boukreev (author of The Climb) seem like an unreliable narrator. I have zero interest in high altitude mountaineering (I prefer lower altitude rock climbing) but I should probably check out The Climb to get both sides.
Xilinx is/was an FPGA company until AMD bought them. Their primary revenue stream is selling chips. This is the equivalent of going back to the days of paid C/C++ compilers (anybody else remember that?).
The "free" version of Vivado is used to develop for Xilinx/AMD's lower tier FPGAs. While offering what I assume are lower profit margins, these lower tier FPGAs make up a large portion of Xilinx/AMD's chip volume.
Xilinx/AMD charging for any of their tools is also a recent thing. 20 years ago, you could download these tools freely without even having to register on their website.
It is probably a good idea to review some instructions before jump starting a car because even though it is simple, if you do it wrong (connect the battery terminal last) you can blow up your battery from the ignition of hydrogen gas.
It is almost like the flip-flopping policy was never meant to boost US manufacturing, but to secure kickbacks and deals from big companies and countries to get favored treatment.
My minivan has more 50% weight capacity than a Toyota Tacoma. I can haul more construction debris and load/unload them easier because my tailgate is lower. I wouldn't want to try to haul mulch or manure though. That being said, most of my friends with trucks have caps on the back and can't haul mulch any easier than me.
Loading drywall into my minivan is a lot easier than a truck. I can fit whole sheets and close the back gate so I don't need to strap them down and they are protected from the elements.
mm/hr is more useful for areas that get lots of rain. When I was living in Seattle, chance of rain was meaningless but mm/hr made the difference between being able to do an outside activity or not. In California, chance of rain makes sense because it rains very little.
Jobs was actually a technician at Atari, assembling circuit boards during the night shift. Jobs was later paid by Atari to make Breakout, but basically subcontracted it to Wozniak for 50% of the contract. Jobs ended up paying Wozniak less than 1/10 of how much Atari paid him.
I think this can just be summarized to "write any HDL like you are modeling real hardware." Both VHDL and Systemverilog were primarily intended for validation and synthesis is a second class citizen.
You can pretty much do everything in Vivado from the command line as long as you know Tcl...
Also, modern Verilog (AKA Systemverilog) fixes a bunch of the issues you might have had. There isn't much advantage to VHDL these days unless perhaps you are in Europe or work in certain US defense companies.
I live near both wind turbines and oil/gas fracking sites in Colorado. The wind turbines are far less obtrusive. Fracking sites produce a lot of noise and they try to hide them with these giant walls that look like a post-apocalyptic fort. On top of that, because they don't disclose their fracking fluids you always kind of have ground water contamination near your home on the back of your mind.
I'm not even against fracking but the alternatives to wind and solar are more a public nuisance to live around.