quicko: big stuff

So I'm going to take a great, big huge group of ideas that I have no real knowledge of and clump them into one clumsy blog post:  pretty much everything with the government works way differently here.  Particularly I'm thinking of government programs and social security numbers (here, tax file numbers) and retirement savings plans and all that nitty gritty stuff ... yeah, some of the time I know how it works in America and some of the time I know how it works here ... and some of the time I just don't get it in either country.