Glancing quickly at the iBlacklist app, you need to create contacts to blacklist (or whitelist) them anyway.

In any event, you don't need to create separate contacts for every robocaller. I'm still on iOS6 and don't have the proper call block function that was added in iOS7, but I have a single contact for them called "spammer", every time an unknown number fails the 800notes.com / whocallsme.com lookup test it gets added to this contact in just a few taps as well. It has a silent ringtone and custom vibration pattern so faint I never feel it. I have about three dozen numbers listed in that one spam contact.

Don't put words in my mouth. I said very clearly said the first time:

so of course there are significant disadvantages known, just as the US system has its own. And Canada was dead last on this one metric, compared against 11 developed countries, not the entire world.

The *only* real issue I had with your original post was that the title "30 day wait to see a doctor in Canada" is a clear lie of omission, barely improved when you clarified "For a GP, most wait less than 30 days." 2 days wait is a whole order of magnitude difference from 30 days. It's like me claiming "most broken arms cost less than $9,000 to take care of in the US" even though average out-of-pocket expense might be only $300-500.

Since I've cited sources for my key point about GP wait times, and you're using a flimsy excuse not to look for even a single credible source to back up your claim that 20-30% of Canadians wait 30+ days to see their GP, I accept your surrender.

My beef is not with your pointing out the waiting period to see a specialist.

Per this report, of the 85% of Canadians with a family doctor, the average wait time to see the GP was 2 days. The report also ranks Canada dead last among countries compared on this metric, with only 45% able to see their doctor within two days for an illness.

But, when you first wrote "for a GP, most wait less than 30 days" you implied that a significant minority (which you've now explicitly stated as 20-30%) face 30+ days to see a GP.

Please quote the text and link to source (if not the wiki article) that says 20-30% had to wait more than a month to see a GP, or at least give me the actual number they used so I can search for it. I'm not seeing anything that could be reasonably interpreted the way you have.

SOME Canadians go to the US for medical care, for more urgent medium/long term health issues.

You are misrepresenting the "see a doctor within 30 days" metric, the 30 days stat is *specifically* to see a specialist. To see a GP? Sure, waiting a few days is "less than 30 days" but that's a severe misrepresentation.

For more mundane matters, I can see my doctor or nurse practitioner within 48 business hours, sometimes the same day if I call in the morning. Getting a family doctor is an issue for some, but they (or I) can go to a walk-in clinic, with average wait times of maybe an hour (I was seen at a walk-in after a mere 15 minutes when visiting another province), but can walk out with a prescription or doctor's note. For broken limbs or moderate emergencies like appendicitis, you're seen within hours at a hospital, and major emergencies like heart attacks, strokes and car accident trauma it's immediate. And it's all "free".

Yeah, yeah, let's be pedantic and admit it's hidden in taxes, but when a broken arm in the US can cost some people over $1000 *after* insurance, I'm pretty confident I could suffer a broken arm, heart attack and appendicitis at different times in the same year and will have paid far less into the health care system than it would cost the average joe American who suffers a single major emergency. Never mind we don't have to fill out all those insurance forms.

No, of course it's not perfect, I wouldn't even call it great, merely adequate. But it's very hard to argue the average Canadian is worse off healthcare-wise than the average American per dollar spent.

The crash of Asiana flight 214, where the pilots got so flummoxed that they couldn't safely land on a clear and sunny day when the runway's ILS was offline for upgrades, suggests that this line of thinking may have gone too far.

Yeah, not to mention other earth-shattering changes like getting rid of the penny, changing from paper to plastic bills, going mostly chip-and-pin for credit cards... all in the last 5 years.

Sure there've been hiccups along the way, but it's unbelievable how resistant Americans are to changes in "the way things are" when it's suggested by government, as if it's some socialist/communist plot or something. There was even bitching about adding colour (barely) to paper currency.

The once-weekly visits will be a very small minority. I lived with communal boxes for years (since the community was built in the late 80s). Almost every household visits daily, it's never more than half a block away. Oftentimes people coming from work stop their cars nearby, get the mail, then drive the rest of the short distance home. It really isn't that big a deal.

I don't know how long it takes to be considered abandoned, but I've left stuff in mine for a week while I was away, it was all there when I got back (I had the same junkmail on top that a neighbour who checks daily had).

It kind of works with the joke that every time a Canadian immigrates to the US, they increase the average IQ of both countries :-)

I notice you didn't include seat belts in that list. Cars lacking those, I'd definitely put in the category of "too dangerous."

Mind you, I know what you're getting at--a lot of modern conveniences are making people overconfident about their driving ability, so they're doing even riskier things thinking the safety features will protect them.

Serious question: what exactly are the consequences of expressing gun control sentiment on a bumper sticker "unsafely"? Does it stop at harassment, bullying, slashing your tires and keying the car? Or will some go so far as to take actual shots at your car?

If dogs are banned in Central Park, they're doing a poor job of enforcement. I visited in July and at least two families had dogs with them. One of the dogs was even stalking a pigeon on a grassed area.

No, it's not. Unlike "breakfast" and "therefore", what you think is a good word is too close in spelling to an existing word with a completely different meaning, "allot".

To be fair, it *is* slower when paying individually at restaurants, since the server can't take all the bills and cards and run it through a magstripe terminal, then bring them all back for signing. Now, a single wireless POS machine (very rarely two) has to make its way to every person at the table.

Contactless or tap payments, while convenient, ironically seems to contradict the entire point of having chip & PIN by skipping both authentication methods. Though as long as tap payments are limited to a per-transaction amount ($25? $50?), thieves will get get less POS mileage out of stolen cards.

The US hasn't switched to metric system or dollar coins yet. Partly due to cost, partly due to "things works fine the way they are," and I suspect partly because they must be "leaders" in everything and can't be seen as "following the rest of the world."

I predict that the US still won't have fully (or at least 99%) converted to chip&pin credit card terminals (even with magstripe fallback) by 2020.

Or a Nexus 4. Or a Nexus 5. Or an HTC One / One X+. Or a Sony Xperia Z1. Or an LG G2. Or a Nokia Lumia 1020.

The AC is correct. A surprising number of high-end smartphones, including Google's own flagship units, have followed Apple by using non-replaceable batteries.