Canada

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the key word is "better." America does NOT want to be better, our defects are seen by too many as salient features.

embarrassing.

having to live in the same country as them? yeah

they're part of making living here unbearable but they give you hell if you leave.

USA might've been better off if it had let the south go. it might have turned out more like Canada, eventually.

Ironically, when I was in Georgia the people there were quite friendly, and they practically worshipped me and my parents when we told them we were Canadians. It wasn't until I met a man from Chicago on one of the flights home that I had met a "rude" American in person. If I had to live in the US, I would definitely choose rural Georgia over some place like Chicago or NYC.

It's weird how we use the metric system. You go to the grocery store and everything is sold in grams, kilograms, and liters, and distance is measured in kilometers. But when it comes to our own height and weight we still nearly always use pounds and feet. This used to confuse me as a kid, and once I thought meters were the same as feet and I told my brother I was around five meters tall and he laughed hysterically and told me meters are much longer than feet and I'd be a giant or something. I only recently learned that a quart is actually a quarter of a gallon while watching Canada's Worst Handyman on Discovery, and they had buckets of some kind of plaster mix that only had "American" instructions and the people on the show were asking "How many liters in a gallon? How many gallons in a liter?"

a big reason America did not follow the rest of the world to the metric promised land, was through the efforts of journalist bob greene and his "WE AIN'T METRIC" [WAM] movement back in the 70s.

The medical industry is f****d up. A lot of doctors, particularly specialists, who could operate in Canada flock to the US because there's more money to be made there, but because of the way the system is set up there, many people who need healthcare can't afford it. There are good doctors here, but there are also a lot that are just shills for the drug companies, much like in the US. The main difference between our healthcare system and the one in the US is that people can actually afford things here, but it's just as corrupt of an industry on either side of the border.

A common misconception is that our healthcare is totally free. The fact is, it's not. It's free to go to the hospital and get them to work on your broken leg, or to go to the clinic for a checkup, but you still have to pay for things like prescriptions and private hospital rooms. IIRC certain specialized procedures can cost money as well. We have a publicly-subsidized private healthcare system, not a true "public" system.

Doctors seem to love their fat paychecks. I understand that medical school is tough, and that saving people's lives is a lot of hard work, but people are being gouged unnecessarily. There's no justification for it either, what with the number of people who can't even get treatment in the first place due to financial reasons. One would think that these doctors could treat more people and make about the same amount of money just by lowering their prices.