As I said to him, “in the US you don’t get to vote and get someone better than Joe Biden

Actually, write-ins are a thing, so you literally can vote for anyone else than him and Trump.

I think you misunderstood the author. You can literally vote for anyone, but the winner of the next US presidential election is only going to be Biden or Trump (barring a crazy twist, e.g. death or criminal conviction). I think the author’s point is that, in any given election, you should probably vote strategically, but getting better options takes a lot of work for a long time to make it happen, so get working if you can.

You know, I once read an analysis on what if turtles had a hat. Maybe those results would apply here.

I’m an engineer, and I make it a point to teach young engineers that “a ton” can mean any one of three things:

• Short ton = 2000 lb
• Long ton = 2240 lb
• Metric ton = 1000 kg = ~2204 lb

And which is being used is often not spelled out, but is just known from context, and usually should be clarified. I once nearly got in trouble by thinking a measurement was in short tons when it was actually metric tons.

So my own act of rebellion is to use “Mg” when I’m writing my personal notes.

From a quick search, a MATLAB student license is $50 (USD, probably), which is less than most textbooks but still not nothing. Whether piracy is justified or not, I just want to point out that this is how they get you. Microsoft gives cheap Office licenses to schools and Adobe turns a blind eye to amateur piracy of Photoshop because they know that getting you comfortable with their software early means you’re more likely to pay to keep using it professionally later. I don’t know if MathWorks had a hand in the MATLAB requirement (I would bet it was just a prof who wants to stick with what they know), but good on you for trying to push for alternatives and testing against Octave.

I’ve also been on freedns.afraid.org for many years. Back when I switched from dyndns, it wasn’t possible to get Let’s Encrypt certificates on afraid.org’s domains, but that might have changed. I worked around it by taking a domain I already owned and using a CNAME to point it at my afraid.org domain.