No. Rabies is destroying neurons, causing the symptoms. The hydrophobia is not literal fear of water (like phobias so often aren't) but a result of your brain being fried to the point where you have issues swallowing. If it were an issue of hydration, just IV fluids would be a given, and you would probably want IV access anyway.
No. Costs rise all the time. Ideally, so does your income, giving you mostly the same purchasing power as before - just because 10 is a larger number than the 8 you paid a year or two ago, doesn't mean you realistically expended more value (e.g. time spent working, or foregoing other things).
Rejiggering this would involve a lot of work. It would not give you any more or less value, it would be cosmetic. It would also be based on a very subjective "this shouldn't cost as much as $X" where both X and the rough value of the $ are... just something you happen to be used to. A trivial example is how this looks to anyone with a different currency, or to an American in a different time.
Now, of course, a large amount of people in the entire Western world have gotten shafted for 50 years plus, and the purchasing power has gotten even worse in the past 5, but that's basically a separate issue.
(Also, coins are pretty expensive compared to paper money, IIRC)
Could be sort of a "break-even" point? Assuming it's even true, which is a pretty big assumption. You could ask them for a source next time if you hear it often, because I've heard it precisely 0 times before.
I think it would ultimately depend on a use case for that metric, otherwise you're putting the cart before the horse. There are many measurements and calculations you could come up with, but no obvious (to me, anyway) interpretation of "most discontinuous": something is either in one piece or not. If you needed a metric like this for a practical purpose, your specific needs would be a starting point for designing one. If it's more of a shower thought, you sort of have "too much freedom" to be able to define anything that's necessarily meaningful.
Simple examples would be just "number of 'discrete parts'", "minimal area needed to span all territories" and things like that. Maybe you're more interested in "total distance from all satellites to wherever the capital is" or something, in a different context. The point is they'd all tell you radically different things, so it's important to know which one to ask for.
You could argue that something like Hawaii and Alaska's distance from the rest of the US makes the US score highly.
You could argue that any number of island nations score highly because after all, most of e.g. the US is in one part.
You could argue e.g. Norway's territories near both poles make it pretty high-scoring too.
You could argue that for whatever reason, distribution of area and population matter, and so on.