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In Australia we recently had a telecom outage with Optus; there were untold amount of damage - card payments at shops/cafes were out. - rural towns completely cut off (a few in particular are only serviced by Optus) - emergency services unavailable; for example a snake wrangler was unable to receive his call-outs - hospitals infrastructure came to a halt

And I'm only going off of examples I have heard. These outages are very damaging.

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cashiers always look at me dumbstruck when I tell them about the mechanical offline credit card machines we had when I was a cashier back in 2004

If we're thinking of the same thing, I have fond memories of those at mall department stores in the 80s and 90s.

I think Sears around '04-06 (?) was the last time I saw one of those used. I think I bought a dehumidifier or air purifier.

When they started rolling out credit and debit cards without the raised numbers I thought fondly of those and how they were definitely done for now.

Oh yeah I didn’t even think about the raised numbers thing! Cash is still king.

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