In some cases, perhaps he's right.
I bought HP 61s
Plus, I imagine everyone made more effort to be civil when interacting because everything was face-to-face.
In New Zealand, which is similar population to say Oregon, the modern systems absolutely spank the old systems.
Tax: the majority of people don’t need to file a tax return, instead it is all automatic. You only file if you have income from uncommon sources, such as foreign investments. Any questions, and I can call my tax department, and I get a person who answers the phone call, and answers the difficult questions correctly. They don’t treat you like a criminal: 10 years ago I personally did five years of unfiled tax returns simultaneously . . . I rang and asked questions of the tax department, and got my refunds without any trouble. I believe you can trust the tax department (YMMV).
Local government: I can walk in to their help desk and ask questions for free about the council rules and processes. I admit the help desk does not provide legally binding opinions, instead you need to go through formal processes. The local council may be slow and difficult for some things, but the process is fairly transparent and you can get closure on questions if you persist. The local council has restrictions on what it can do. There are automatic rights to house development, so if you follow the planning rules (setbacks, recession planes, etcetera), then it is unlikely for neighbours or local government to be able to chuck a spanner into your plans to build on your own property.
Passport renewal: last time I did it over the internet.
Mostly the government interactions New Zealand at least functional, and sometimes they are even pleasant.
The exception is our legal system, which is still mostly paper based, and archaic. Although anecdotally it works better than the US system.
(Paper file navigation is so easy my Gram can do it faster than me!)
Computers added:
-Hardware abstraction -Software abstraction -Storage abstraction -Search abstraction -Indexing abstraction -Networking abstraction -Legislative abstraction (When you have a computer to program once instead of a workforce to train, people are more willing to complicate things instead of leaving well enough alone)
Honestly, I can totally believe it worked better.
Can't find it now but one of my all-time favorite engineering memes goes something like, "modern engineer, cries when Matlab crashes; Roman engineer, built aqueducts by eyeballing them."
> In 1935, the first group of female human computers were hired. Before electronic computers, all mathematical equations and computations would be done by hand by people, often known as human computers. With the advent of World War II, many male employees at NACA left to fight overseas. More and more women were needed to fill their roles, and soon African American women were hired to help with the shortfall.
> These African American women were sent to a segregated computing section known as the West Area Computing Unit, which was the center of the 2016 movie Hidden Figures. In April 1942, a memo was passed around stating that, “The engineers admit themselves that the girl computers do the work more rapidly and accurately than they could.” The women computers were becoming increasingly more valuable and doing incredible work along the way.