Not the first time New Englanders have boycotted a supermarket chain either. When Market Basket ousted their president and voted to give the shareholders dividends rather than reinvesting in the company[1]. Though these workers wern't on strike they were protesting what they felt like was the first step of the company getting gutted and sold.
I haven't found a good replacement for Excel, maybe its because I learned all my shortcuts in it and anytime I go to something else it just feels "off". I would say the learning curve wasn't to bad for short documents or non-technical stuff I would say word has the edge because its east to just open a new document and type away. For my thesis I chose to use LaTeX because anytime I would try to insert a figure or a table into word it would destroy the whole pages formatting , and equations in word are just awful to format. I saw a picture once that showed exactly how I feel about LaTeX's difficulty I'll see if I can find it.
I find its excellent for article writing, but note writing not so much the semi coding style doesen't lend itself well to free form writing at least for me. I'm in engineering grad school and writing equations from board to free hand notes is much easier for me than writing to a program. Though I have some friends who prefer using computers and some of the note taking programs you can use with a stylus and tablet are excellent.
Personally I use LaTeX rather than word, theres a bit of a learning curve though so it might not be suitable for lower levels but for high schoolers+ I totally see being able to use it. Everything word does it does better and most of Academia uses it already.
I'm a car guy myself I've got a '75 F-100 its big its loud and sucks down gas like its going out of style (which it totally is) but we are definitely a minority. I drive an old truck because of the exact reason you listed modern cars feel like cheap use up and throw away appliances, you cant service them yourself because they all require proprietary dealer scan tools.
But for everyone of us there are dozens of Karen in HR who just wants to go to work and the store and have comfortable, easy unoffensive driving experience and that's who car companies target. Car companies don't care about enthusiasts except for maybe a few specialty models because they don't make them their money. Hell Ford makes more profit from extending credit to people than actually selling the cars.
Word of advice I've been giving to my car buddies is grab whatever car/bike you want at this point and hold on to it like grim death cause the used car markets going to go nowhere but up especially for pre OBD cars as more get junked and the cars made with planned obsolescence cant be really resold because they need $5k of sensors replaced, gas might be going away in the future but we can embrace things like Ethanol (objectively a better fuel than gas anyways and carbon neutral) and keep them driving well into the future.
They must be because the Chinese civil war was still ongoing when the declaration of human rights was voted on in 1948, and the PRC wasn't even seated in the UN until 1971.
Propellers have a fundamental speed limit on them, the tips can not exceed the speed of sound or else shock waves form which cause the efficiency to drop off sharply, as well as creating massive noise pollution from the sonic boom constantly coming off the propeller. Todays commercial "jet" engines are actually closer related to propeller planes than pure jets, turbofans provide the majority of their thrust from the ducted fan rather than the jet exhaust coming out the back.
Yea thats how it tied in with the over all microcombusters talk, they were using tiny swiss roll burners to power the nitinol motors. Due to liquid fuels having higher energy densities than batteries apparently they could go for much longer than their electrical counterparts even though they weren't as efficient.
I recently went to a talk at my university on microcombusters but the professor (I cant remember his name off the top of my head) was also working on small insect like drones. There were videos of nitonol powered beetle crawling and a non flying prototype of a bee drone with nitinol wing flappers. Rather cool but he said they are incredibly inefficient compared to traditional electric motors.
I would say sloop maybe? Traditionally that was the next size down from corvettes but the corvette is the smallest warship. Maybe PT boat? GM tried to evoke the corvette name with the chevette but that thing was about as far from a sports car as you could get.
You're right we don't currently, that just means its time to boot up space race 2, I hope China's space program kicks NASA back into high gear, shift a couple of the DOD's billions around and get space race 2 electric boogaloo going.
Fort Collins where I am is the third most "bike friendly" city in the US, there are amble bike lanes and a strong bike culture but its amazing how many of them think the rules of the road don't apply to them, running stop signs, lane changes without hand signals, using the road lane rather than the bike lane. I get very nervous driving around town because you never know if the persons going to follow the rules and stop or just run the stop sign and slam into the side of your car. I'm all for bikes but they need to follow the same rules as the cars if they want to share the space.
I live in Colorado (Larimer County) and there is a county and city level road use tax when you register your car and it aint cheap my registration was $450.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Market_Basket_protests