Look up the works of Rife.
Very short summary. He invented a microscope that used two UV (short wavelength) sources and optically mixed them to produce visible light as the difference (same principal as a radio mixer) so he could see live cance cells.
He then used VHF carriers that were AM modulated at certain frequencies. He was able to find the resonance of cancer cells and obliterate them. His labs including the microscopes we destroyed.

Ten years ago we had Steve Jobs, Johnny Cash, and Bob Hope. Now we have no Jobs, no Cash and no Hope. Please God don't let Kevin Bacon die!

Isn't drano Sodium Hydroxide (NaOH). It's a strong base used to turn fats into soap. I used to use it all the time as a kid to make hydrogen (in 1l glass bottles with a baloon). It's very exothermic but not a particularly fast reaction unless you can get powdered aluminium. She probabbly did it in a sealed container which would be very dumb, esp on school property.
All the dangerous stuff I did as a kid was good for learning risk management. Today, I feel like maybe the idocracy movie has some truth to it.

Growing up in Australia, before we became a nanny country as a pre teen/teen I'd:
Made gun powder (looked it up in the school encylopedia in primary school)
Bought a chemistry kit with real chemicals.
Made brake fluid/chlorine bombs.
Sawn apart shotgun shells for detonators and black powder.
Tried making anfo bombs.
Made rockets.
Made hydrogen from Al/NaOH as a lift mechanism for our acetelene/oxygen bombs. (A plumber showed me the acetelene one)

So how did my terrorist life turn out.
I became an engineer developing hi tech electronics who now employs 30 staff.

Why do you yanks use the confusing term gas (aka Petrol or Gasoline). I thought you were talking about LPG at the beginning of your post (what the rest of the world means when the word gas is mentioned) eg A gas pipeline.

And what is wrong with socialised health care?
The rest of the modern world uses it.

I have to agre with mjwx.
Also as an Australian, whenever I have travelled and had CNN in the hotel, this fog of brain deadness eminates from the tv. Issues are not really discussed. A broken fire hydrant becomes a 24/7 reporting event.
Your news is like your fast food; designed to be slightly sweet and swallowed with as few chews as possible.
It's almost if someone wants to deliberately dumb the masses as much as possible.

Back in the day, most engineers wish IBM had gone with motorollas 68000 rather than the address hobbled 8086 series. Oh how we hated paging 640k hell.

You would be the exception. Most people a have a pride level where they don't accept much below their last paid position.

From our hiring experience, the overqualified ones are usually too expensive and the ones out of uni often useless. (Note we have taken on many graduates as a small percentage are very good)

Suck all the air out of the room. Problem Solved!

Remember, most businesses ethics are only governed by what their government has legislated. There are always execptions but this is the general rule. This is why the USA is having so many structural problems. By making being elected such an expensive exercise, a politician who's most important priority is re-election, needs funding from corporate sponsors. This creates an obigation to support those sponsors, which creates legislation to support corporates over the public interest which courts must enforce.
The best thing to happen for American Politics is to break the obligation cycle. I'll leave that to others on how you would achieve that.

There are a couple of reasons your stuff is so cheap.
Your wages for service workers is crap. It starts at 2.80/hr for waitresses who need tips to survive and is $7ish per hour for Cleaners. Australia is $15/hr for a min wage.
Your cheap food is factory produced high fructose crap making you a nation of obese diabetics and you are now printing money Weimar style after outsourcing all your low IQ work to china and Mexico.
Is it sustainable? Probobably not, but you have a uncanny ability to kick the can down the road.

I hear Chuck Norris just twitches his left eye while sleeping to encode binary updates to the BSD kernal.