"Obviously you have limited experience or familiarity with password managers. LastPass, among others, keeps your encrypted passwords "in the cloud", so that they are accessible even if your local disk "takes a dump"."
That's EXACTLY WHY I don't use it. Keep my passwords on SOMEONE ELSE'S COMPUTER?!?!?! That's FUCKUP NUMBER ONE of security.
" If you can come up with an authentication scheme better than passwords that you can get every online service to use, then please let us know."
Same fucking one I got my bank to switch to - same one that I've used on my anime forums for over a decade. Picture/your custom caption/password. Same fucking one I've been telling people on /. about for YEARS. Spammers haven't beaten it, hackers haven't beaten it (because it's actually more than two-factor auth) and even in the case of being hacked, you would still need the matching image file (which resides on another server and is accessed by a constantly-changing encrypted variable for filename so you can't just rip it) to make the phrase and password usable.
I've been at this game almost 30 years. When are you n00bs ever going to catch up with the basic security of things like Air Gaps and separated content passwords, which have been around since, well, PROHIBITION?