The Octopus is the de facto transport pass in Hong Kong (well, it's started by the major transport companies) and commonly used in many shops, it's also used by some for building access.
Octopus takes an 1.5% cut, I'm not sure if it applies to the founding transport companies but I assume the money will flow back to them anyway.
Recently, some transport services started incorporating Chinese e-wallets like Alipay and WeChat Pay which utilizes QR codes, and the agony of seeing people (mainly Chinese tourists) repeatedly scan and fail at the gates blocking the whole queue during rush hours is quite depressing after years of smooth access.
“EMP” is mostly a Hollywood thing. Not that is entirely fabricated or anything, but it’s almost entirely popular science articles and action movies, very little real weapons systems, and the movies create a lot of misconceptions.
What you would actually do is see if you could jam its comms, hit it with a laser (these exist as actual practical weapons these days), or engineer tiny high altitude anti aircraft missiles, either something that already exists or small mods to existing tech for the use case.
The theory of international trade is based on the principle of comparative advantages. So theoretically if Taiwan can produces chips the cheapest, including transport and other costs, they shall do just that.
The decline of globalisation is due to, IMO, risk aversion of having too much of your supply chain, especially for essential and/or not easily replaceable merchandise, tied to an antagonistic or potentially antagonistic partner.
In other words, some of these "other" costs have become too high to just buy certain things somewhere else and call it day.
Many laser cartridges are legacy designs from before they started cheating on the amount of toner. That "extra" space was used to provide 10,000+ sheet capacity standard cartridges.
