What you call a "necessary evil" is what we call "capitalism" and some people call "making a living."

Head alignment had nothing to do with Dolby B performance. If your playback head was out of alignment, output was going to be poor regardless.

Getting metal tapes to perform was a challenge. They weren't worth the money unless you had a high end deck. I had JVC and TEAC, and although they claimed to support metal tapes they sounded way better with chrome.

Had to use compression otherwise the hiss would make dynamic range pretty small.

You mean, like Dolby B/C? Yeah, that went with the territory. You got 60 dB S/N on a good deck with Dolby on, maybe 70 if you used chrome tapes. Use high quality TDK, Maxell, or Memorex in a quality deck, and they rarely broke. Couldn't burn to a CD back then. That S/N ratio rivaled vinyl. I bet your PC sucked back then, too. Total garbage, couldn't even do 4K res video at 60 fps!

Maxell XLII-S were the best. Excellent tape and the shells were tanks you could get away with stepping on.

That's like something we had here in the USA when I was growing up: What's worse than...

Q. What's worse than a barrel of dead babies?
A. One still alive at the bottom.
Q. What's worse than that?
A. He has to eat his way out.

And one that only works if you speak North American English:
Q. What's worse than ants in your pants?
A: Uncles in your pants!

Yeah, starving yourself. That sounds like a great plan!

Don't you think it should be up to the PATIENT to decide that?

Whether this is a step toward "death panels" or not, were we to have single payer here in the USA this would be unconstitutional. Everyone should be treated equally under the law.

abortion and gay rights and drugs

One of these is not like the others.

Hmm, I'm surprised I had to read this far down to find the ignorant troll.

Came here for the story but decided to log in again and say hi.

$30K for 3 weeks? Sounds like a challenging but satisfying gig. Not sure I'd want more than one like that, though.

Sounds like a great candidate for POTUS.

His face started getting a very deep red color

Like rust?