Yeah, they don't need to do that anymore. Around me, enough towers have battery backups that I can count on 2 hours of coverage when utility power goes out (if it goes out late at night or early morning, there's usually coverage until 6-7 am when people start waking up and use up the rest of the power). I don't have a real landline, but the telco DSL would drop instantly with utility power so I don't have big hopes and I wasn't willing to pay $60/month to find out.
Around when I moved, stores would pull out the credit card imprint machines, but those don't work anymore because cards are flat. Cash might work, and I've got some, but I don't think many people in my community do; people don't have cash for the snack shack we run at my kid's sports, so I doubt they have it for restaurants and stores either. And we get frequent 2-4 hour power outages, at least one, usually two or three per year; and ~ 24 hour outages every few years. The snack shack runs during summer where electricity is most reliable, but I doubt people stock up on cash in the fall and use it all up before spring/summer; they probably just don't have any.
It's the other way around: Cards are flat because a carbon imprint doesn't afford the merchant any payment guarantee by the card issuer anymore anyway. (In other words, the "floor limit" above which cards require electronic authorization is now zero.)
The people operating these imprinters are sales clerks and waitstaff, not graphologists or experts in detecting altered physical credit cards. The sophistication of fraudsters has also advanced, and as a result, a system that might have been good enough in a pinch 20+ years ago isn't necessarily good enough today.
That said, in my view there's no excuse to not leverage the physical chip present on effectively all credit and debit cards these days, which is technically capable of making limited autonomous spending decisions even with both the issuer and terminal offline in scenarios like this. It probably won't happen without regulatory pressure, though.
Unfortunately, too many cards, and all mobile wallets, don’t support offline authorization for that to be viable.
In fact, even verifying the signature is no longer required in at least the US.
Signature verification also only solves cardholder authentication, not card authorization (i.e. figuring out if the card is funded, still valid etc.)
In Poland alone we have far right, a lot of centric parties and some more or less leftist parties.
The most popular (by popular votes) "right wing" PiS is not "right" for the most part for several years now, had a Marxist/socialist prime minister and gave so many social benefits away to grab votes that it made "left" blush. They are "right" only on the level needed to get church-goers votes.
And, with antisemitist agenta, PiS was buying Pegasus subscriptions from NSO to spy on opposition and unvafourable journalists just in hopes that they'll get something from it.
So - which "particular politicians" are you quoting?
Maybe it depends on the country, but my memory of 2003 is almost every non-elderly adult I knew (in my own upper-middle class milieu) already had a mobile phone. Not a smart phone as we understand the term today, but a lot of phones back then had primitive smarts that are now largely forgotten, such as WAP/WML browsers (which maybe not many people used, but I certainly remember using one), JavaME applets (vaguely remember using them too-maybe post-2003, but higher end 2003 phones definitely could run them), vendor-specific mobile app formats such as Symbian
It's interesting to think about and realize how much things have changed now though, and how reliant people are on everything, and especially their tiktoks etc. working all the time.
Some of the panic is likely related to the war in Europe too, and especially the general talk about war
We were just two years removed from 9/11 so terror talk was the first thing that happened. We got that news from AM radio in our cars. Still no panic.