No comments about twelve years old, but two of the High Schools I attended had Rifle Teams, one had a Pistol Team. One of them did very well at State-level competitions, even.

And yeah, I expect that that sort of thing doesn't happen much anymore....

One calorie??? Wait, isn't the SI unit of energy the joule?

Also, it should be noted that a cc of water doesn't "weigh" one gram, since the gram is a unit of mass, not of force. And even if we let you fudge on the mass/force units, a cc of water only "weighs" one gram at 4C. At other temps, its density is different.

Oh, and the hydrogen thing is only true if your "hydrogen" is pure protium, with no deuterium or tritium included. Alas, the Real World(tm) insists on the presence of deuterium unless you make major efforts to remove it.

As to your final question (How much energy does it take to boil a room-temperature gallon of water?), it should be noted that local atmospheric pressure affects that (as it does in your "metric" example), which is why the phrase STP (Standard Pressure and Temperature) was invented. Note that at STP, one calorie will NOT increase the temp of a cc of water by 1C.

And all this ignores latent heat of vaporization (the energy required to transition from a liquid at the boiling point to a gas at the boiling point), which you didn't touch on at all in your learned (for values of learned more or less equal to "ignorant") comment.

Spider Man, Spider Man.

Discovers silk can't hold a grown Man.

Look out! There falls the Spider Man!

That leave the UK and...possibly Jamaica?...as English-speaking countries where Association Football is unambiguous described as just "football".

Not even the UK. Association Football was used as distinct from Rugby Football in the UK.

And American Football is a descendent of Rugby Football, hence the "football" name....

but since there are more than 4 liters in a gallon

Fewer than four liters in a gallon. 3.8 liters per gallon. Well, 3.78-odd, but close enough.

And at the time that gas stations tried to switch from gallons to liters, they were also going to the trouble of quietly raising the price of gas during the conversion - a buck a gallon becomes $0.30 per liter, for instance....

No. I don't.

First off, it hardly matters to most people (American or foreign) whether we're metric or not.

Everything in the USA is sold with both SI and Imperial units (except shotgun ammo, of course, which as far as I know, is still sold in the rest of the world the same way it's always been - 12gauge, 16gauge, 20gauge), so it's not like the rest of the world is terribly handicapped figuring out US products, since they can look on the box.

Ditto foreign products sold here. Okay, it's metric. It'll generally have a line of print with Imperial measurements on it for the people who can't do the conversions in their head.

Only real difference is that the native SI stuff uses round numbers of SI units and odd amounts for the Imperial translations, while the native Imperial stuff has round numbers of Imperial units and odd amounts of SI units.

Face it, noone much cares whether the gas can for their lawnmower is 1 gallon (3.8L) or 4.0L, nor do they really much care which of those numbers is written in the fine print on the box....

Ditto for almost everything else....

I am talking about guns that are specifically designed for combat situations, and whose specifications in terms of low accuracy, high firing rate etc,

Note that most military rifles (including the M16) are quite accurate. Or didn't you know that they were used at the National Matches at Camp Perry? Along with the M1 Garand, 1903A3 Springfield....

Note also that the "high firing rate" you speak of is pretty much the same firing rate a .22LR Ruger 10/22 has. Or a Winchester or Remington semiauto .22, for that matter. Or a 12 gauge semiauto shotgun (Browning, Winchester, Remington, many others). Or, for that matter, an M1 Garand, which has never been defined as an "assault weapon", but which couples that "high rate of fire" with a rather more powerful cartridge (.30-06) making it a FAR more deadly weapon....

There is a tendency in big companies to glorify small jobs.

At work there was a need for somebody to do a fairly administrative task. There was quite a bit of work - probably the better part of a full-time equivalent.

Now, if they had posted a job for $15-20/hr they could have hired somebody exceptionally qualified to do the work, and they would have done the work diligently and been happy to have the job.

Instead they used this as an excuse to hire an advanced degree position for probably $70/hr total cost, and then make it just a part of their duties splitting the work up among a few roles.

Once hired, predictably everybody looked down on the work as demeaning and did anything they could to get involved in more complex projects to have an excuse to not do the work. So, the work was done less-effectively and the original demand that justified the position in the first place was basically left unmet.

The task was something any high-school graduate could do, but it was still vital to the operation of the company. Indeed, it was actually a task fairly central to the mission of the organization.

So, the end result is that the mission was still done poorly, at 4x the cost. All because nobody wants to admit that some of the work done in their organization could be performed by a low-cost employee.

I have yet to run into an independent contractor who was hired because he was cheaper than in house staff. They are usually closer to twice as expensive. Employers generally use these contractors because of labor requirements than cannot be handled by current employees, and that is specialized, short lived in nature, or immediately needed so new hiring or training is not an effective solution. The overhead you mention is baked into the contractor rates.

You are misinformed. First off I don't believe there is a 1080 form. You probably mean a 1099. And there is no requirement to have multiple employers if you are a contractor. It is quite common for a contractor to only have one client at a time, and to have those clients for multiple years. The IRS does spend effort cracking down on companies who abuse the difference between employee and contractor, but the requirement you invented above is not accurate.

This appears to be a very short-sighted way of looking at the cost drivers of this company. The real cost driver is that your labor requirements have been increasing each year, and instead of hiring more entry level workers you have invested in experienced staff that can improve company efficiency. If done well, these experienced workers can reduce your hiring needs by far more than the meager 6-10% raises they have been given. If done poorly, you are wasting those raises on ineffective senior level employees.

Wage creep is similar to scope creep; a small amount is inevitable but proper management can keep it mostly at bay. If someone's wages are going up faster than inflation, they better be bringing more value than they did last year. Paying people more just because of seniority is idiotic. But seniority usually comes with increased knowledge of a company's business processes which does make them more valuable, so increased seniority usually comes with deserved raises above inflation. But your total wages should only go up if your total labor requirements go up. If labor requirements don't go up, and your senior employees are getting better at their jobs, it means there should be corresponding terminations to lower wages because you don't need as many employees anymore.