I went to bed at 10:05 last night, and wouldn’t you know it, my site went down at 10:10 (or so I learned in the morning). I’ve had to dedicate some time this morning to trying to resurrect it. At this point it seems a little bit stable–stable enough to try to post this. However, it may well crash again. There is a team of people trying to fix it and they seem to be making a little bit of progress.
Trying to get the site running stole from my writing time. So instead of posting something spiritual and profound, I found this post, a work in progress, that tells you why you shouldn’t live in Canada. Don’t get me wrong; there are hundreds of great reasons to live in Canada. But I can’t deny that there are also some good reasons not to live here. Here are a few of them.
Amazon Hates Us
Amazon offers only a small portion of their total catalog to Canada. They offer CDs, but not MP3s, DVDs but not streaming video. They have a few other categories of products, but overall it’s a rather sad collection compared to what Americans can take advantage of. As if this is not bad enough, they also have no equivalent to Amazon Prime (which is the greatest deal in tech, don’t you know).
3-Year Cell Phone Contracts
All of Canada’s major carriers will only offer their good best smartphones with 3-year contracts. The only alternative is to buy the phone outright which incurs a large up-front cost. You might think the 3-year contract would then mean that the carriers could offer lower monthly rates, but the opposite is actually true: Canada is one of the most expensive countries for cell phone use.
Hockey Obsession
A long time ago someone invented a silly game that involves slapping a puck across an icy surface. For some reason most of my fellow Canadians are obsessed with this game. While I can grant that it makes an occasional entertaining distraction, and especially so during The Olympics, I simply cannot understand why people get so carried away with it.
Death by Taxes
Canadians carry a heavy tax burden. Now we have to grant that this “free” health care is not free at all but funded by taxes. And we have to grant that Canada has first-rate, first-world infrastructure (just drive Michigan highways and then Ontario highways to see the difference). But the taxes can seem overwhelming at times. Canada’s “Tax Freedom Day,” the day of the year when you’ve finished paying your tax load and will now work to keep your money, falls 58 days later in the year than it does in the United States.
Justin Bieber
Sorry. And I mean that. I’m sorry that for the past few years Canada’s largest export has been a hairstyle. But hold on; I’m pretty sure Bieber has moved to the United States, so he is your problem now.
