"We've learned to live with centralized water and electricity and banking, all outside of our control, rather than rely on on-premises solutions." Not necessar

"We've learned to live with centralized water and electricity and banking, all outside of our control, rather than rely on on-premises solutions." Not necessarily true. I'd argue that banking is much less centralized (clearing behind the various banks you might choose from is, of course, but in the meanwhile I can get most of what I need done if their independent system is up), and I grew up on a property at the edge of my town of ~50K with only electricity and phone as centralized services. We were on our own for everything else, water from a well, sewage treatment with a septic tank, heating from a big propane tank, which can be filled by various vendors, although the systems behind them are centralized, but there's plenty of reserves so that short term outages aren't an issue, we even burned our trash.... A lot of us believe in having a greater degree of self-reliance, e.g. I do backups to disk and LTO tape (some tapes of which live in a safe deposit box), and use rsync.net, a very low level SaaS provider for further redundancy. I'd never allow my livelihood to depend on 24x7 external services except for electricity (no electricity == no modern civilization, which would eventually kill me for medical reasons).