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Nah, it was originally about making sure your population had good morals, then about controlling your population more generally, then about making money, then about banning fun for some reason, then about making money again

It's been quite the wild ride

Product placement is advertising, and as such saying "no ads" while not blurring out product placement would be misselling the service

The Italian economy always used to be on par with UK, France, Germany, but look at it now...

Better a muzzled monarchy than a power vacuum every time, it's worked in the UK, Spain, (um... probably elsewhere but it worked well enough in those two places after their autocratic dictators kicked the bucket, and look where it left Russia and to an extent Italy - mafia, economy stagnating etc)

Everyone also thinks their country has the worst human rights because "some clause buried in the constitution means you can't eat fish on a Tuesday if you're from X religion" or "somebody lost a court case against a corporation so they didn't have to make Y accessible" which is room for improvement, sure, but then you've got places like Malaysia where you get drastically reduced rights per the constitution if you're not both ethnically Malay and Muslim (other places with bad human rights exist, this is just a hopefully non-controversial example)

I was under the impression it was the intersection of the venn diagram of communists and imperialists, as long as imperialist means imperialist (defined as using economic, military, diplomatic and cultural power to influence countries around you in a way that is beneficial to you, and may be either beneficial, inconsequential or detrimental to them) and not just "western and capitalist"

No - there's fuses in the plugs themselves, the switch is largely for convenience and safety - if you want to unplug something broken and potentially live, it's much safer to switch it off at the wall than risk a shock given the current limit is on the breaker is so high

The lack of rich people doesn't imply freedom - people who are forced to hunt, gather, fish or farm for subsistence only with no reward beyond that are enslaved to the need to produce food and find shelter, but that differs from a society where there's sufficient food and shelter, it's just hoarded by those who have too much

Additionally the presence of rich people doesn't imply a lack of freedom - you could have a "safety net" system where everyone is guaranteed housing and enough grains and beans/similar to survive, and if they want more they can work for it (some of the taxes from this go towards compensating farmers and builders), giving people the freedom to not have to worry about survival, while also allowing for people to earn lots of money and buy nice things if they want and/or can

That's a lot of expense compared to just importing US-grown hops, as there's a lot of soil to adjust

And yeah, trademarks on plants are no joke, there's a bunch of restrictions on buying/selling them etc.

Hops are highly sensitive to the soil acidity and minerals in terms of the compounds the plants produce, so sharing plants is largely infeasible, plus because it's the US many of them are trademarked so there's no sharing for that reason

I get it's a big jump, but I've been clear I'm restricting it to the most popular types of beer and explained why US bred and grown hops had the good fortune to be the most aromatic disease resistant hops, so I still don't think it's unreasonable

Again, none of this applies for styles beyond 3-7% golden beer fermented with yeast only, and even then there's a few exceptions for certain styles where the aromatics are different (eg bitter, which is less about the aromatic hops and more about the earthy notes of the bittering hops), but for the most popular lagers and pale ales I think it holds

So there's obviously a split between objective fact and opinion and conjecture, but:

• Outbreaks of powdery mildew in the early 20th century meant it became somewhat infeasible to grow most aromatic and flavoursome hops, leading to research and breeding programmes to produce disease resistant hops with other desired characteristics
• Most of the mildew-resistant hops were wild and from the US and Canada
• Hop breeding and research started in the UK but ended in the 2000s
• Oregon State University has been breeding hops for almost 100 years
• The USDA also has their hop research center in Oregon
• The US is responsible for 40% of hop production, of which over 98% is in Oregon, Washington and Idaho
• Cascade hops, from the USDA research center in Oregon, started the craft beer movement due to the combination of high flavour and disease tolerance
• German hop research started in 1926, but only had any real success after the 1980s

So essentially, the US has just got very lucky when it comes to hop production with good soils and disease resistance, while German beermaking was set back leading other styles to become and remain popular, such as very lightly hopped wheat beers, sour beers where the acidity comes from the fermentation instead of hops, and more recently Belgian style beers that are stronger abv so the stronger alcohol taste substitutes for some of the strength of the hops

There probably are also studies, but they tend to look into mechanisms/variations whereas this is more of a series of coinciding factors which don't really need much research to make sense