Readit NewsStill sounds more fun than the basket weaving merit badge though.
However those that are in good shape typically sound terrific. The quality of the player is key (most currently produced cassette players are truly awful) and older machines can easily be brought back to life in most cases. Sony's old high-end walkman's are also magnificent for playback.
Metal tapes are hard to find new, but i have repurposed used ones to great effect. I would like to emphasize that even the boring stalwart type 1 cassettes can sound really good. The quality of pre-recorded could be incredibly inconsistent fresh out of the wrapper back in the day and I think this gave them a bad reputation.
Some of my vintage Beetles cassettes, and Peter Gabriel cassettes had extremely high production standards and really hold up. "Peter Gabriel's "Security" was digitally mastered and sounds fantastic.
I was watching the new film "Nobody" and the main character steals a hot rod with a cassette player and rocks out while driving. The rattle of the old cassette and sound of it loading really hit a nostalgia nerve but it was plainly cool. This kind of thing appearing in new media might be one reason people are going back.
Makes sense that most of the mass produced tapes at the hey day of cassette were inconsistent.
Cassettes on the other hand may be another story though, I don't know if the chemistry allows for old metal tapes to be produced anymore.
Let's put it this way, yes, people try to audit out cancer and there is an antivax cohort (this is more about external control, distrust of authority outside of Scientology, causing autism, your usual suspects), but it's not necessarily against modern medicine in most ways (obviously a carve out for all things psychiatric). Once that cancer gets into oh shit territory, they are on chemo, and often times too late, but that's a different discussion.
There's another option, which is growing the rules-based international order (as it's called). It had been growing for decades, and despite a bad few years, it is bigger than ever from any perspective other than ~2010 - for example, consider it from the perspective of 1985. And growing it is incredibly beneficial economically, for security, and for freedom - a far better outcome.
The semi-nuclear option only achieves short-term survival; it does not build a world for our future.
The main obstacle to growing it is not China and Russia, but the far-right nativist, reactionary political movements in democracies, especially the Republicans in the US. They oppose it (though being reactionaries, have no solution with which to replace it).
Ask them 2-3 LC easies/mediums in the language of their choice for them to prove they can actually write code, and that's really all you need. Unfortunately it somehow became "let's have a 5 hour long two-part panel interview where we ask you half a dozen LC hards and oh yeah don't google anything" as a way to hire experienced people who have a decade of work they can talk about the discuss ad nauseum.
This is just outsourcing 2.0, this time under the guise of a lack of qualified candidates.
Right after I graduated, they found the budget to upgrade to blueberry iMacs. The superintendent/principal was also the only person I ever saw using a G4 Cube in the wild; that Apple salesperson must have done a hell of a job. One of the office secretaries had one of the education-market-only beige all-in-one Power Mac G3s too.
I believe sometime in the mid-2000s, they moved on to a contract with Dell like everybody else. I guess the iPad era has seen Apple regain some education market share, but they used to absolutely dominate schools.