Evernote - I haven't found any other program with such a good capture tool. I also regularly use Google Keep to capture small notes. But all these plaintexts ultimately go to an Emacs org file.
2) is not a valid concern. Unless you are planning to melt the cookware down, trepan yourself and inject the melted aluminum into your brain, you should be fine:
When it comes to date/time processing, it's all molehills. The problem is that there are many, many, many such molehills, and people keep claiming you can ignore them, until you find yourself with a lame horse.
The US has the trade deficit of mere ~2 billion with India. The US can try to stop moving the jobs to India. But surely it will backfire in some other way.
