_njyk

It started before the war.

The cash that the governments printed via negative interests to give to the VCs and to real-estate owners really skewed the local market (increasing both prices and costs of producing).

The Estonian gov has basically no tools to fight against the real estate bubble either or to bankroll the most fragile startups (and they may not be as strong as they seem), so we're basically fucked.

Regarding energy, we had 4000 EUR / MWh prices a couple of weeks ago for an hour.

Think of it as oven / sauna / air conditioner costing you 10 to 25 euros per hour (if I remember right, it didn't matter that much when you have no other choice than turning them off).

For energy this is mostly because of the war, but ecological policies also affected (Estonia was known for "dirty" petrol, known as shale oil, and they are restricted there).

The only retail companies that try hard to provide good prices are LIDL and IKEA, and in that regards, they are great.

Other distributors have very poor logistics as they consider Estonia as the very end of their distribution chain (no matter if for Baltics, or for Scandinavia we are at the end of the West).

You pay health insurance in Europe, it's just that it's baked-in in the salary and you have no choice than to pay for the public system (as there is very little competition).

For example, in Estonia the minimum you have to pay per month just to health insurance is 201.20 EUR and this barely covers anything except extreme injuries, so on top you add a private insurance :|

Once the salaries get inflation adjusted (20%+ of inflation in my country), then the production costs are going to increase, which is going to increase the risk for the prices to spiral up again.

Well I hope that you are going to apply, because in Europe, the ECB didn't understand it at all (hi from a European country with 20%+ inflation)

I agree, the rate hikes are still very shy, and the supply-chain issues are not going to improve prices. Estonia (where I live in Europe) has 20.3% inflation, it's insanely bad and the ECB is a snail to react to the situation and still claiming "this is transient, don't worry".

Regarding Estonia prices are raising very fast (20%+ inflation), the weather is quite cold, people speak very well English in the cities, but if you plan to live in the country-side it's not that great. There is significant risk of geopolitical instability and conflicts in the society (last month lot of people were concerned). Also in the relative short-term, government plans to raise taxes (in particular land taxes) so I'm not sure I'd recommend it as a plan to settle for the next 10 years. You can look at country-side France (cities are generally horrible though but deep country-side is great to live), Switzerland or Slovenia.

Yeah it's public so nothing to leak, it's meant to be like this, same in Estonia, your address is public, your name, your birthdate, +/- your face picture, all the land you possess, you can interrogate who is the owner of a specific car plate without any restrictions, see a map of all the traffic accidents with precise information (date, why, what, what was damaged). Then you have semi-public data like phone location (you just need to sign NDA), and guess what ? Everything is fine.

On which planet this pricing applies ? In Estonia (north-east of Europe) it's 1000 to 1200 USD in the shops.

https://www.hinnavaatlus.ee/1891263/sony-playstation-5-digit...

Yes in Estonia is quite common

Estonia as well, everything online, very fast turnaround, all documents available electronically for everyone to see

Estonia was probably chosen because Estonia has very good experience doing laundry of the Russians if you know what I mean.

Joke aside, it seems one of the winner of the Finland->Estonia washing contract is actually a Finnish national that incorporated a company in Estonia: https://www.aripaev.ee/article/2011/2/22/soome-pesupesijad-u...

I'm not in favour of tax evasion (but I live in a low-tax country where "only" 40% of your work is taken by the government).

From my perspective, someone evading tax, is like someone directly stealing from my wallet.

If someone doesn't pay his taxes, then I will have to pay more to compensate.

There is also a negative feedback cycle with people not paying taxes. If the neighbour doesn't pay his taxes, then I will not be motivated to pay my taxes, etc. So it's better to break this circle early.

The problem of underpaid couriers should be solved at the root with the delivery companies and work-force laws.

The whole tipping culture is a big question itself and one of the leading cause for extremely low wages. In comparison, the quality of service is extraordinary in Japan and the waiters are clearly driven by other values than Tipping Money as God.

Cool project, need support for Estonian :)

In my town as well, street people are collecting plastic bottles as fast as possible in order to get back a couple of cents.

As a result, the trash is less full, it doesn't spill everywhere, and the "legitimate" waste pickers have less to carry as well.

And for myself, it's an added value: I don't need to sort, I don't need to pay.

It costs me 10 cents per bottle but I'm sure it will be properly processed and that the money will go to the most motivated.

Estonia, everything working fine

You're right.

About security, you provided very useful technical elements, so I'll review each of them (publicly) and we'll find solutions.

Yes, conflicts of interests are always an issue. Finding the right balance between sustainability and freedom.

Some companies outright want to maximize revenue at the expense of the user. This is not the case here (that's the benefit of no investors, or just being independent, with all the caveats it has too).

Some browsers (Vivaldi, Cheetah Mobile) for example do affiliates link, I'm not too much in favor of that.

You get me nervous sometimes with your strong opinions, but I actually appreciate that someone skilled takes so much time and interest.

About DDG, maybe it's worth talking to them or Qwant (Qwant are friends of Kiwi, so you can say Hi to them from me).

It's in their interest to promote a privacy-focused browser, and yours to pair with the best ethical match (donations are fine too, just personally I think they create another type of pressure)

I thought it was you when seeing the Bromite posts (but apparently no).

There is some confusion about the notion of up-to-date, from a Kiwi perspective, we do not see the most recent version of Chromium as improvements.

We created Kiwi (with other users) because we disagreed with Chromium on functionalities like Duet, or APIs changes like with Manifest V2 and adblockers.

This is the reason to completely fork Chromium (or why Samsung diverged from Chromium 77 in 2019)

By definition will always diverge from Chromium v81+.

It's a choice.

About security fixes, yes, between end of 2019 and today, new problems emerged in Chromium (not specific to Kiwi though), and there is some work to backport. Should it have been done earlier ? Certainly.

About the last point, Kiwi makes money if you use Microsoft Bing or Yahoo, that's life, and that's how I pay for the build servers, some contributors, advertising Kiwi, logo designer, sometimes the programmers, etc.

Firefox does the same but with Google, Brave with DuckDuckGo, etc.

I see you have StartPage, DuckDuckGo, AdGuard, already in partners, and if they don't pay you, I encourage you to contact them, as they should.

Regarding the policy of Kiwi:

====

We do not collect the websites that you visit. What you do in the browser is your own freedom and responsibility.

We do not collect or sell location data. We do not collect telemetry data. We do not collect history data. We do not track users. We do not integrate third-party analytics SDKs.

We collect and store: how many installs are active, where the person has installed the browser from.

Our business model:

When you enter a search query, the query is sent to the Search Engine that you have selected (Microsoft Bing or Yahoo by default, Google, DuckDuckGo, or any provider of your choice).

If you choose to use the recommended search engine by Kiwi, Kiwi will process the request and will receive money for every search query it forwards to the partner search engine (example: Microsoft Bing).

====

and you know, with the releasing of Kiwi as a free software (and not just open-source), now there is no limitation. If you disagree with how the project is managed, then you can absolutely make your own product (or just use another search engine heh), or take the pieces you want (and over time, a better picture over commit history will build), and this is a very good thing.

Also, thanks for the kind words at the end, you really pushed onto open-sourcing Kiwi too. Though sometimes you are a bit extreme for me :)

csagan5: I give all the code of a large project, for anyone to use, with detailed and functional build instructions.

I don't ask for anything in return, and you can do basically what you want with it.

Ok, you repeat on this thread that your own browser (Bromite) is better and so on essentially spreading FUD, but for what result ?

We both have something else to do than spending time on that.

He is referring to the fact that Kiwi is based on a mix of different Chromium versions of 2019. Chromium does new release almost every month. It's difficult to keep track of Chromium modifications with such large forks (and Chromium had lot of performance issue at the end of 2019 too with stuttering and lags).

UCBrowser for example is an engine of 2017, Samsung Internet from 2019, etc

"squalala" Country Estonia

100% match between DDG and Yahoo from my tests

chrome://extensions Enter Developer Mode and Load from folder (also valid on Kiwi Browser for Android and Yandex Browser)

Wow, the second situation is actually very close to the one in Estonia.

The country with easy ICOs and many guys who became rich after launching coins, and sadly today the pariah of international finance.

The worst part of it, is that literally 99.9% of the population are totally honest persons and get punished for everyone else.

10% live in "absolute poverty" and it's certainly not the lack of money that caused it.

Hundreds of billions of USD are/were in the country.

There are almost daily builds on Discord if you want to join

The way you share quotes sounds like you personally have a problem with the browser :D

Kiwi was started as a fun+independent project, then more and more people asked access to some source to be able to develop their own hacks (new tab page, extensions, bottom toolbar, import/export bookmarks, AMP, etc) and they are shared when the devs ask politely.

At the end of the day, if you use Samsung, Kiwi, Fennec or Yandex, what matters is to understand why the developers are doing their project, what do they get from it (not necessarily money), and what are the influences around. The source-code is one indicator, and, unless you actually have reproducible builds (and only Fennec has them from all the mentioned browsers) you have to use your intuition.

Kiwi Browser (Chromium-based) runs Nano Adblocker and uBlock Origin with full support (like on Firefox)

Yep, but it's not only Kiwi. There is zero full open-source Chromium browsers for now (with reproducible builds, that's why no Chromium on F-Droid)

Nice try but doesn't work on Kiwi Browser ;) Shows "This content should be overriden by GTM". This is because an heuristic is used instead of a blacklist. So to answer, yes this can be blocked easily.

You can try Kiwi or Bromite as well. Brave lags sometimes very much when you have long pages to scroll.