The Multi-account containers extension does sync via Firefox sync, but you have to go into the extension's settings in each browser and manually enable it. Annoying, and took me a while to find it, but it's there at least. Hopefully won't be necessary to manually switch on once containers are a part of Firefox proper.
The attitute expressed in the quote, "until mothers no longer are forced to have 'the talk' when their daughters get their first mobile phone," is both wrong in its assumptions and dangerous for its well-known consequence: the enabling of petty tyranny. Forced, indeed.
There will never be a world populated by humans in which you do not need to have numerous talks with your children about the nature of humans, especially humans they do not know and cannot trust, and about the technology those other humans know how to use. Saying you are forced to do so on account of some particular new technology is like saying you are forced to provision food for yourself on account of this newfangled capitalist system... As if needing to provision food for oneself were not a state of affairs dating back to the dawn of cellular life. And as if the uglier parts of human nature emerge from the smartphone and do not in fact date back to the dawn of humanity as a species.
Demanding everyone on the Internet show their papers to the government so that the author can hand their teenage daughter a free, always-networked pocket computer plus microphone and video camera without having to think about any related risks is an attitude repugnant for its laziness, its entitlement, its delusion, and most of all its contempt for the freedoms of others.
But the problem is, those same forces you're describing are employed to fool people into believing the fictions that support these regressive movements. The real danger we should be focusing on is "won't someone think of the impressionable adults".
Long term, I think we need computer age fables. As in: stories children can listen to and read growing up to acquire effective instincts about computers and the digital, networked world, rather than trying to apply instincts about the analog world to computers. Inter-human societal complexity has long outstripped our genetically developed instincts, but we've already solved that problem with storytelling and cultural transmission/cultivation of instincts. That solution is as ancient as spoken language.
When humans come to these deeply flawed conclusions about computers, networks, and governments, it's a new case of an old problem. Maybe the old problem is screaming toward us at a new velocity and intensity. But I think we can improve the existing humane cultural solution with new stories for our children, rather than surrendering to the supposed inevitability of government mandates to lock down and restrict general purpose computing to only well identified citizens in good standing. The restriction to "in good standing" almost inevitablty follows from the "well identified."
After all, look at religions. The major ones have survived, and perpetuated their positions - including many glaringly counterfactual beliefs! - for thousands of years.
If we want to communicate to the majority of humanity, fables seem like the only way.
But the fables will need to be assembled into a coherent ideology, with a motivation for following it.
Whenever I have discussions like this I'm reminded of the L. Ron Hubbard quote: "You don't get rich writing science fiction. If you want to get rich, you start a religion."
It's a bit surprising that more religions haven't started with the motivation of making life better for everyone, instead of getting rich. Another strike against human nature.
The stories still passed down and translated into other languages two thousand years from now will be the answer. I think Sherman's memoirs could become something like the Iliad. They're surprisingly funny, engaging, and insightful, and Mark Twain (mentioned in this comment thread) had a hand in the memoirs IIRC.
It wasn't just fax machines. Throughout the Eastern bloc, typewriters were strictly controlled and registered. There's a great scene in The Lives of Others [1], a German movie about a Stasi agent and a dissident writer, in which the Stasi (East German secret police) have recovered a typed manuscript that was smuggled to the West, and are interviewing a forensic expert to determine the make/model of typewriter used, in an attempt to cross reference against anyone who owns that typewriter.
We still do similar things now, though for ostensibly different reasons. Inkjet and laser printers have long had various signatures they add to every printed page, barely noticeable to the naked eye, that can lead back to the specific printer used. The stated motivation is to prevent counterfeitting. Similarly, there is a pattern of "O" symbols called the EURion constellation that, if present in an image file, most commercial image editing software will refuse to print [2].
It's not surprising that politicians are trying these sorts of strategies with 3D printing, because they've already tried and used them often in the past.
Another proxmox-esque project I've been watching is Sylve, a control plane for FreeBSD that provides a web interface to jails, bhyve VMs, and containers [1]. It's new-ish, but it looks like a possible sweet spot replacement for both proxmox and TrueNAS (which was originally also built on FreeBSD before they switched to Linux IIRC), at least for my homelab-ing use case. Potentially eventually for environments at greater scale also. The company behind it is a software consultancy and Sylve is built with their actual business needs in mind, and is BSD-licensed like the OS it runs atop.
One of the developers building Sylve gave a talk last year [2].
Sylve, proxmox, and TrueNAS are all tools focused on: virtualization, containers, storage, and clusters. I've not used webmin, but it looks like a broader focus. Something like a kitchen sink of administering anything Unix-like via a web browser.
I wouldn't be surprised, glancing at webmin's site and docs, if it can do most/all of what more focused management tools like Sylve or proxmox can, but it seems to have so many other dials and knobs that IDK if I'd reach for webmin unless I were already familiar with it.
So Sylve is sort of the opposite of webmin in certain ways: highly focused, very new, built on a specific OS. It just looks interesting to me because FreeBSD has been great to work with already at my network gateway (running opnsense for firewall and routing), and I like the idea it replacing TrueNAS on a box I already own and use both for storage and running various self-hosted services (e.g. Jellyfin, Vaultwarden, Home Assistant, and the like) in containers and/or VMs as appropriate.
Germany uses mixed-member proportional representation. You cast two votes in each federal election: one vote for a registered political party at the federal level and one vote for among a list of local candidates from those parties. The ballots famously have the phrase "You have 2 voices/votes" ("Sie haben 2 Stimmen") on the top [1].
The seats in the Bundestag are parceled out in proportion to shares of the national vote among federally recognized parties, and each party has a list of candidates who may or may not get a seat from that party's resulting allotment, based in part on the popularity of those candidates in their local list elections. The math of it is a bit more complicated than that, but it works quite well to completely sidestep the gerrymandering problem. The flipside is that parties must be registered federally to participate, and this gives the government a great deal of implicit power to exclude parties it doesn't like.
CGP Grey has a good YouTube video explaining it, probably better than I have here [2].
I picked up a copy on ebay a while after the Kickstarter!
Mapmaker is a great game for tabletop veterans and newbies alike, although the first playthrough can be a little opaque even to regular gamers (especially the first few moves when there are no established district boundaries yet). It definitely benefits from repeat play, goes quickly once you know the rules, and has you doing only one thing each turn.
Definitely a game that has earned a permanent place in my collection.
I remembered seeing this game as a kid, but the name sounded off... And Wikipedia reveals it was released in North America (NTSC format) as "Shipwreckers!"[1]. It also featured 5-player local multiplayer if you had multitap, according to the article, and I remember most other games of the era supporting at most 4 players locally. I'll have to find this one and give it a try!
There are two split-keyboards made by Ultimate Hacking Keyboard [1], UHK 60 and UHK 80, that have an optional trackpoint or trackball module. They're not cheap, though.
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