I wonder how much of this is because of early adoption and then a laggy update cycle because of that. There's quite a few European countries that look much mor

I wonder how much of this is because of early adoption and then a laggy update cycle because of that. There's quite a few European countries that look much more modern than the U.S. in their roads and ports and buildings, and it's always been my pet theory that later modernization has something to do with it. Much of the major U.S. infrastructure was created in the 50's and 60's as we went though a major modernization (the highway system, for example), but that means that all those "modern" works are now half a century old or more. Countries that went through modernization more recently often look much newer to my eyes. Was Japan early to adopt technology in the 90's? If so, maybe what we're seeing is that modernization effort left them somewhat stuck at that level in some industries, just like it sometimes feels like the U.S. is stuck a decade or two or three behind in some industries based on the last time the majority of it retooled and modernized. If so, maybe we'll see another modernization effort soon. In some respects this is just like buying a brand new top of the line TV with all the bells and whistles, and then skipping the next 2-3 cycles of innovation trends until the current TV seems like it's just not cutting it anymore. That seems to be a natural cycle for a lot of things.