Kagi is cool and all but...
I'm in Europe. I'm busy disengaging from US based services.
Any good EU alternatives?
I'm in Europe. I'm busy disengaging from US based services.
Any good EU alternatives?
Qwant and Ecosia, two European search engines, announced on October 24, 2023, a partnership to develop a European search index to lessen their dependence on US tech giants Google and Microsoft. https://insidetelecom.com/qwant-and-ecosia-are-building-an-i...
For the OpenWebSearch.eu initiative, 14 renowned European research and computer centers from 7 countries have joined forces to develop an open European infrastructure for web search https://openwebsearch.eu/
It’s hosted in Germany and uses the independent Brave search index.
However fwiw, Startpage is nice.
There is a common initiative by ecosia and qwant to build their own index [0], which is hopeful though, and something to look forward to.
Can you explain why? From privacy and free speech perspectives aren’t US services now better?
Kagi now probably has the best search privacy features in the world after recent upgrades with Privacy Pass and even a ToR endpoint.
buy-european-made.eu
We should also mention VAT. The EU’s 21% VAT jacks up prices, a €100 item hitting €121 will slash demand. This provided around €1 trillion revenue for EU governments in 2024. While the US’s typical 7% sales tax keeps a $100 item at $107, hurting demand less, total about $457 billion in 2024. This gap makes US goods pricier in the EU (27.7% markup with tariffs) versus EU goods in the US (10.8% markup), acting like an extra trade wall for American exports, while the EU’s VAT refund on exports gives their firms a edge.
Notice we haven’t even mentioned defense spending yet …
It's just an handful of countries like USA and Malaysia that are the weird ones, and don't implement a VAT tax
They already have a lot of ways to avoid taxes, but at least with VAT they pay the same as everybody else. They are going to buy expensive food or drinks at restaurants and 8% (in my country) of that is going to be taxed. Someone more modest is going to eat at a less expensive place and is going to pay 8% on something less expensive.
I'm aware of the luxury tax but I don't think it's better than the VAT tax.
Do you mean having a higher wealth and estate tax? They both exist where I live, although they tend to hit the poor much more than the rich.
> tax on stock trades
I agree on this one but I think it's not a good idea to penalize people that invest for the long term. Perhaps tax only trades that happened over less than 10 years or something.
I'm sorry, perhaps "poor" wasn't the best word. But let me explain what I was thinking: I live in Switzerland where wealth tax is very much more annoying to the middle-class than the rich. This is because it starts at around CHF80'000--a lot of people qualify--and isn't taxed progressively above CHF2 million. While the rich will pay the highest tier, the middle-class is going to suffer from it much more because they don't invest their wealth. Basically, they are losing wealth, especially after taking inflation into account.
Don't get me wrong, Switzerland is a very good country tax-wise. But your argument against VAT also works very much for other types of taxation.
> By estate tax, I mean an inheritance tax which again, the poor typically don't leave massive inheritances so I'm not seeing how this hits the poor hard
Yes, good point. In Switzerland there are actually only a few cantons that still have the inheritance tax. But I still think that most families would qualify for the estate tax. A middle class family is going to be hurt much more being taxed CHF10k than a rich one taxed CHF100k.
I hope I made myself understandable.
So the only issue I see with the Switzerland tax situation is that the numbers are too low and should be higher. The incentive should be to get people investing in the economy but not to a point of hoarding.
[1] https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/whats-the-so-called-weal...
I am very much in favor of increasing taxes for the very wealthy ($100 million in net worth seems like a good start).
I just don't want that kind of tax to do collateral damage to middle-class people. For example, Switzerland doesn't have capital gains tax (!!!) except if trading is your profession. If we introduce capital gains tax, sure it will tax the rich but they will be able to wave it off while middle-class investors will get hit too. That's why I said in my initial comment that it could be wise to only tax those that invested for less than 10 years. We could also imagine a system where your capital gains are taxed based on your net worth after the trade.
I'm not sure how that would change the incentive for European citizens to rely more on European products in the face of possible future tariffs.
Pretty sure that there is a similar trend in Canada or Mexico, for instance.
In regards to privacy, the country is increasingly trying to pass age verification bills as a way to backdoor more surveillance into law while a billionaire is running around slurping up everyone's private data.
In regards to free speech, the President sues journalist he doesn't agree with, passed an executive order to target lawyers he doesn't like, and is trying to get a law passed that will allow him to further target people who try to hold him accountable.
To say the US is better on both privacy and free speech is either uninformed or delusional.
As for privacy: American privacy laws are even more of a joke than the GDPR. The lack of privacy rights for non-American citizens is the main reason the GDPR bans storing PII in the US.
As for free speech: the kind of free speech American tech companies are offering right now is not something I'm very interested in. America ranking lower than my country in every freedom index I can find also doesn't help.
Furthermore, paying a browser that actively does business with Yandex doesn't sit well with me, even if it won't affect me directly. The comments the CEO made about not caring about "geopolitics" doesn't reassure me much, either.
If Kagi is truly cool, by cool I am including opposition to current American policies, and you think they offer a good product, then you shouldn't fret about supporting them. If they aren't cool, then by all means look for alternatives.
It's worth pointing out that you're going to struggle with this, and it's because (as all software engineers know) Europe has never supported a strong tech/software developer friendly culture. To be clear: I am not saying there are not fantastic devs in Europe (in fact, most of the devs I respect the most are European), but the EU has always struggled to pay competitively and grow its local software community. In fact, all the amazing software engineers I know in Europe.. work for US companies, making US software products (and making US total comp).
Here's a quote of Alan Kay talking about this is in 1997
> [Dijkstra] once wrote a paper—of the kind that he liked to write a lot of—which had the title On the fact that the Atlantic has two sides. It was basically all about how different the approaches to computing science were in Europe, especially in Holland and in the United States. In the US, here, we were not mathematical enough, and gee, in Holland, if you're a full professor, you're actually appointed by the Queen, and there are many other uh important distinctions made between the two cultures. So, uhm, I wrote a rebuttal paper, just called On the fact that most of the software in the world is written on one side of the Atlantic.
The time to address this, unfortunately for Europe, is not today, but 30-40 years ago.
> In fact, all the amazing software engineers I know in Europe.. work for US companies, making US software products (and making US total comp).
What is an amazing software developer if it is not someone who delivers business value? Because there are a lot of software development companies in the Netherlands for instance, or teams part of companies, and they surely deliver business value or they wouldn't exist.
By now I would also bet that of the small subset of developers considering emigrating to the States, sure think they've now dodged a bullet.
I am not sure exactly what are your motivations but if it is privacy and trying to fight some sort of tyranny, I am afraid this might be a bit naive and maybe counterproductive.
The EU is as much influenced by the interests of Big tech than the US. Maybe even more in a way. The regulations and fines you hear about are kayfabe.
It is looking more and more like the net of regulations the EU is rolling out is turning Europe into a digital Gulag.
Right now they only really met a resistance for that ChatControl one [0] but they have been trying for years over and over again, and will probably win at the end.
The irony is if you want and EU alternative you might need to defeat the EU first, who has been preventing the emergence of alternatives for decades now. Or just selfhost as much as possible at home for now.