I agree the style of beers made "locally" is weird, but the justification for local beer, on keg at least, is that it does seem hard to transport them successfully. In the UK beers do taste best on tap when you're within about 50 miles of the brewery. I'm sure they could be transported further safely, but in practice them almost never are.
The UK beer market is quite different, especially when considering cask ale.
This beer is unpasteurised and still fermenting in the cask when it leaves the brewery! The carbonation of the beer comes from creation of CO2 during fermentation, rather than injection of CO2 post-fermentation.
This makes for a pretty unstable beer, that doesn’t travel particularly well and should be consumed reasonably quickly!
British cask ale is the most underrated beer. Amazing you can’t find it outside the UK. I have a feeling someone will make some form of it in the USA to differentiate.
Nothing like getting a proper pint of whatever is local.
I'm with GP on reliability though - I'd rather have a can of a known bitter than a local 'IPA' on tap that I don't know (and the other side of the bar doesn't care, or share a common language to decide) if is a 'proper' IPA, or one of these very pale, extremely fizzy things that seem to be in vogue and call themselves IPAs, when to me they're closer to a lager and almost any (non IPA-style) bitter would've been closer to what I expected. Sometimes I can tell from the label it will (or I fear it will, so don't try and can't say for sure) be like that, but certainly not always, and that's not always practical.
This assumes that you can't steal information to catch up quickly, or that progress made isn't easy to copy once it's obvious that it works.
A big part of why chatgpt is a big deal is that it shows that the overall approach is worth pursuing. Throwing stupid numbers of GPUs at a problem you don't know will be solvable is hard to justify. It's easy to throw money at a problem you know is solvable.
Nuclear weapons are the prime example of this: Russia caught up both by stealing information and just by knowing fission was possible/feasible as an explosive.
Given the scale of investment we are talking about, it's also plausible that EU based manufacturing of solar panels could emerge given the right incentives.
In fact, solar on roof often loads the local grid in unhelpful ways (they were designed for asymmetric loads).
I'm in favour of renewables, but done in the way that actually makes most economic and environmental sense. In the Uk we threw money at rich people with £15k to install 4kwh solar rigs on their houses. That money would have been much better spent subsidising large industrial installations.
This is oft repeated, but once the cost of renewables is low enough it would have (usually un-modelled) second order effects on end users which may make this less important.
Some industries literally can't turn off production without damaging plant, but if some can then where energy cost is ~30% of fossil/nuclear than it might make sense to over-provision industrial capacity and only run it when the sun is shining.
This is a really lazy response, but given the possibility that you genuinely don't understand the gp: Writing better software and reducing the (currently massive) waste of energy on enterprise bullshit and cryptomining would have a meaningful impact on international energy usage, and so help climate change.
