Nice SCTV quotes. No waits for health care in my area. Other provinces may be different.

Sure, the networks (and banking systems) are entangled, to say the least. The 2 countries even share the same international dial prefix (1). However, in terms of things like intellectual property and digital rights management, they might as well be on different planets. There is no such thing as Hulu, Peacock or TiVo in Canada, but there is also no such thing as Crave, Gem or CFB in the US. If I bring up a web page with an embedded video clip from a US TV broadcast, like ‘The Daily Show’, in Canada we see a black empty box and the words; ‘This content is not available in your area’. I suspect (but have never tested this) that an American viewer trying to see a “This Hour Has 22 Minutes” video clip in a web page would get the same result.

Great news. Not.

I don't know if I was the only one to notice this, but lumping the US and Canada together is kind of daft for 2 reasons: First of all, they aren't the same price for Internet; not even close. As someone who moved to Canada from the US back in 2005, I noticed immediately (and this hasn't changed in the intervening years) that Internet costs in Canada are double (and sometimes even more than that) of the US. I see ads on TV channels that are carried here for deals at US Internet companies like Verizon, Comcast and AT&T that make our heads spin in terms of how cheap they are and what you get for the monthly fees. The second way that the US and Canada are different is the degree of competition. Yes, Canada is a smaller market per capita than the US (but is actually an even larger land mass - with much of it to the North uninhabited and with virtually no Internet service save satellite), but our number of providers in most of the country boils down to 3 or 4. It's Telus, Shaw, Bell or Rogers. That's pretty much it. The main reason there is so little choice in Canada (and way higher prices) is a dreadful government organization formed in Canada back in 1968 that was tasked with managing licensing, regulation and (*ahem*) promotion of competition in this area. Unlike the FCC in the US that rarely messes things up, in practice, the CRTC does exactly the opposite of that last duty (competition), and have been in pocket of those 4 telecommunication companies, making rules that pave the way for their sweetheart deal to divvy up the market in Canada remains in place. It's because of the CRTC and it's application of recent bills in the Federal Legislature that Google and Facebook recently have pulled news feeds from their services in this country (it's a horrible state of affairs and utterly destructive to the Canadian citizenry, but that's a whole other mess - but is just another example that demonstrates the nearly constant damage the CRTC does to Canada.). Over the years I've lived here, it seems as if the CRTC is almost always the single worst thing about Canada and that's counting Nickleback, Justin Bieber and politeness masking passive aggression. If it weren't for the gun insanity, religion, racism and Trump/MAGA, the CRTC sometimes makes the US look like OK to return to. Then I turn on the News and remember why I left. At any rate, when it comes to Internet, talking about Canada and the US in the same breath is ridiculous. It's WAY more expensive here with WAY less competition, and looks to stay that way - there's talk of Shaw and Rogers merging. (So then there would be 3. That will make things even worse. Thanks CRTC.)

There's a novel by Larry Niven called 'A Gift From Earth' about a fellow named Matthew Keller who has the ability to control the pupils of _other_ peoples' eyes, making them less or more interested in him (effectively giving him an odd sort of invisibility). He also doesn't realize that he has the ability, and had, up to the point he learned of his ability, always had trouble with women, because his own fear would instinctively make a woman's pupils smaller, making her move on to someone else. Keller uses his ability in a Civil War (he is in a colony world with a highly socio-economically stratified society that depends on organ transplants from the underclass to the elite) By the end of the story, he's learned to widen the pupils of someone, creating the effect of 'fascination', which has obvious advantages as well.