And it's taken a long time for cell phones to replace landlines. In most places, landlines are still important and they pretty much have to be maintained at great cost.

The replacement of mag strip cards by chip-based cards is a slow, expensive, and arduous process.

In a nutshell, the reason for all three is that an early idea was implemented. When a better idea came along, the older implementation was firmly in place, with defenders and a heavy investment that nobody wanted to throw away and redo all over.

The ideas sucked. And somebody came up with a better one. The good was the enemy of the better.

No, these aren't great analogies. In the case of phones, landlines were around for a century before cell phones became practicable. But some countries in Africa lept right over the US in this regard--cheaper, faster to install, better in many ways, more easily upgraded, more flexible. The problem will be eliminating land lines entirely and saving that money. Each land line number is getting more and more expensive to maintain.

Mag strip credit cards are expensive now. It wasn't until the net losses due to hacking and thefts exceeded the likely cost of spending probably billions of dollars to replace them that the replacement started. It'll make for an awkward transition, and in the end hurt the smaller stores more than the bigger ones. They'll be the least able to cover the cost of conversion when it's forced upon them. Large vendors now have dual key pads.

There's still not much of a push to upgrade Internet infrastructure. It's not cost effective.

But of course, these aren't government programs. Once something's entrenched--say, farm subsidies--it's really easy to change them if it's a government program.

"Repeal and Regress" is more like it.

I don't see how any fiscal conservative can think pre-ACA was cheaper. Emergency rooms filoverwhelmed with routine health care cases that could/should be handled by a GP? Emergency health care delivered without a hope of collecting on the hyperinflated charges? That was madness.

It's not all fixed yet, but it's getting better.