I similarly bought a surface laptop during Covid WFH - better Remote Desktop experience for the windows shop I was working at. Assumed that spending the extra for premium Microsoft hardware, “it just works” - not at all. I ended up using my Mac’s USB-C Ethernet dongle because the dock would just lose the Ethernet driver. Insane for an ecosystem fully owned by one company, but very telling of the company.

For the same reason a winglet is used on an airplane, or a ducted fan is more efficient than a propeller: there is a large pressure difference on the end of a wing or propeller, and the high pressure side will jump around to the low pressure side and cause a tip vortex. This causes an induced drag, which moves the lift vector backwards (as drag, but not skin friction drag). Higher aspect (think wind turbine blades or glider wings) minimise this, as do winglets or ducting.

You are talking about velocities 100x faster than the air in your chassis is moving. You might be right about the effect, but it seems so tiny in this application.

Not sure which natural gas that’s referencing, but looks to be a US index (Henry Hub or so) - note the peak corresponds to a cold snap, not the Iran war. Natgas is tricky because it’s: difficult to store and difficult to transport (aside from well-established pipelines), so you have a massively disjointed market between various deliver markets (look at NY Henry Hub vs Dutch TTF), and also a massively disjointed market between delivery delivery dates (natgas calendar spread trades has been nicknamed “widowmakers”)