on today's long walk, met a friend, we're on a dirt road which essentially goes nowhere (which we like), when suddenly seven van loads of soldiers shoot by us....laughter ensues, had to figure they were lost (there IS a military firing range and Mountain Warfare School in the area, but in the complete opposite direction)...sure enough, five minutes later, back they come. These guys are taught to read maps, right? I smell a GPS snafu, very common around here.
In fact they really don't want us, at least as residents...a good friend is a big time microprocessor designer, has a huge skill, plenty of money, but he's in his fifties and the Canucks said no thanks to his residence inquiry, they see us as
healthcare fugitives. Maybe being in one's forties would change that...
It's been a long time, but I was aware (did not participate in it myself) of a study on healthcare satisfaction across several countries. Results: Canadians love their healthcare system until you ask them if they would be as satisfied if they could never go to the US when wait times became to difficult to manage. Without the safety net of traveling to the US when absolutely necessary, Canadians' satisfaction with their healthcare system drops significantly.
No country has healthcare completely figured out. If there were an easy solution, somebody would have found it.
Case in point of an area where the Canadian healthcare system fails - covid vaccines. The US has gotten 265 million shots in arms, 118 million (35.8%) people fully vaccinated (nearly 4 times the adult population of Canada) while Canada has managed ~17 million shots in arms and 1.3 (3.5%) fully vaccinated. Darn straight that border should remained close - to protect US! And Canada wouldn't even be doing that well if the US hadn't started sharing doses with them in late March. (There are several factors that get into PPB territory to explain why Canada failed so miserably, but a large contributing factor has to do with how their healthcare system is structured.)
Speaking of fully vaxxed, I got my second shot yesterday. So far, I'm tired but otherwise doing OK.
I am very very conversant with the top U.S. hospitals within easy range of Montreal, e.g. UVM and Dartmouth, and I can report that they get precious little visitation from Canada....but our local airport gets tons of Canadian business, probably 40%.
So Canadians love to come here, just not for medical care...
And I know lots and lots of Canadians, we talk about this a lot, they laugh about the U.S. (mostly political) propaganda that their healthcare system is not as good as ours...so maybe the study you are referencing is badly dated, because I see no evidence that Canadians are, in any meaningful way, dependent upon a U.S. safety net.
Apple has released ALAC to open source, now, so a lot of players have both ALAC and FLAC capability. Apple Music (formerly iTunes) still doesn't support FLAC, though. As far as sound quality, they are identical. ALAC can embed metadata in the file (like album art), which FLAC can't do, if that kind of thing matters to you. As far as file sizes, there's conflicting reports about which gives smaller files. I suspect it depends on what metadata you have and what kind of music it is, primarily. Both seem to come in around half the size of raw WAV. Both support Hi-Res encoding, if you believe in that. Personally, I can't tell the difference between Redbook and Hi-Res, even on VERY good equipment (in a side-by-side, blind, A-B-X test).
In short, there's not much to choose between them, except that ALAC is more thoroughly supported by Apple/Mac, and FLAC is more thoroughly supported on PC-based systems.
I agree, it could be badly dated. The primary use of the US healthcare system at the time was for elective surgeries (including CABG). As to the Canadian healthcare system being better or worse than ours, it depends on what question you are asking. If you have a kid with an inoperable brain tumor? There are no proton beam radiation treatment centers in Canada. None. As for Canadians not going to Vermont for medical care, I believe you. I have, however, met more than one Canadian family seeking treatment for their kid with cancer at MGH. (Kids come from Vermont to MGH as well.)
And based on the vaccine rollout, healthcare system aside, our public health network is better than Canada's. They aren't the same thing.