No sweat. I was just curious to see how your experience went.

Take care!

How did it go?

Oof, it reads like paragraph wise AI-generated marketing copy.

After skimming it, I’m leaning towards a human having written it as it is too bad to be acceptable by any machine. But I can’t say what it is other than than hype and banalities.

I don’t think you’ll get that type of strength from more tea or loose leaf tea, but you can always make an experiment:

Do 10x what you usually would, like 10 teabags to a cup of water, and let steep overnight. Then dilute that until you get the flavor you want. 1 parts concentrate to 4-5 parts water is what’s usually used in Russian tradition (with samovar and chainik), and the concentrate by itself might actually be bad for you if you drink a lot of it (like a whole pot, a cup is mostly safe).

If you want to be all scientific and advanced about it, you can also try to notice how the flavor profile changes with different concentrations.

But from your description I would guess that you’re after more punchy flavors, which are usually from blends with flavor oils (like the bergamot in Earl Grey) and/or the flavor enhancers. If you can’t do sugar, you could try Stevia or artificial sweetener to get some of that kick without it.

Lapsang Souchang is one of the most famous and smokiest teas, with a very clear smoky flavor that could work.

But beyond that, feel free to try loose leaf, but I’m afraid you’ve had to have very very bad/old teas for them to be watery at a bag steeped for two minutes, not to mention your recipes.

What do you mean by weak then?

Much of the charm of higher quality teas come from the subtleties in the flavors, they won’t ever be overpowering. They can taste muted with age or improper dosing/brewing. And using too much tea and/or oversteeping will make the flavor profile saturated/flat, rather than be overpowering.

If you’re looking for a clear, piercing flavor to “slap you in the face”, you’ll probably want something with a lot of aromatics, like a smoky Lapsang, a reinforced Earl Grey or other flavored blend, maybe a Gunpowder with it’s bitterness, or even Matcha. In the herbals section, Hibiscus and many Rooibos blends might have something of what you’re looking for.

And you might want to pair it with flavor enhancers like sugar and milk/cream depending on flavor profile.

A Lapsang sweet tea, or a Matcha Latte might do the trick for you.

Ah, but they gave him back story and motivation.

Spoiler warning: He wasn’t purely evil for evil"s sake, he just tried to rebuild society for the scions of humanity, and had already discarded the normies (can’t remember the term they used) as primitive, albeit barbaric, creatures.

The genius of Bester is that he was so self assured and uncontested, making him almost cartoonishly evil, but also that he was so essentially human. Driving home the major themes of the series: the dangers of unchecked power, the human drive to self determination, and that wielding power over others perpetuates a cycle of violence.

I came to say precisely this.

The standard hp for a regular human, which for the setting is probably in better shape than the office honed bodies of today, to be incapacitated for combat and eventually die is about 4 (depending on edition).

There is maybe one way a trained human could perform a combat biting attack that would render someone unable to fight back, which is a bite to crush the wind pipe, and with all anatomical protection in place, it seems unfeasible even if they would have the jaw strength for it.

Theoretically you can put any amount of energy into a laser, as long as you can redirect and synchronise waves. And as several stars and black holes have gravities and stuff that can affect the starships, it seems evident you should be able to charge a laser enough to damage any USS starship.

And as the phase cannons seem to output 80-500 GJ, you should be able to match that fairly easily with 10 grams of matter annihilation or a second of about 10e-15 of the energy output of a sun type star.

Interestingly enough, phase modulation of a laser weapon makes more sense than of a particle beam (which the phaser weapons are), and also you don’t suffer from recoil like from phasers.

Good thing this is for a dozen city blocks at the center of an organically grown city then.

Walkable in about 15 minutes, and no highways.

There are many issues with ICE cars, and it wouldn’t surprise if one of the main motivations behind the ban is to lessen dependence on fossil fuels.

This is a fairly low risk step to see if deliveries and short range transport will switch into EV. It also lowers a lot of air pollution and noise, it looks suitably progressive and is easily reversible if shit goes wrong.

ITT: potential life is more important than real life.

Removed by mod

The whole point is that there’s already thousands of people dying for no reason.

In the history of the end of the First USAmerican Era, we are already past the opening paragraph. Societal mass inequality, unrest, bickering self-absorbed politi, and the populace suffering starvation, homelessness, rising rates of crime and police oppression…

Sounds like most of the setting for almost any major upheaval the last 5000 years

Because they are the same underlying condition, only presented at different levels of impediment.

Diagnosis works the same, treatment is the same, it’s mostly the amount of support needed that differs.

Fruit yoghurt is nice, soda is nice.

Mixing them is abomination.

Both of those politicians are duly elected representatives, of the same party.

A) If the people wouldn’t want to be represented by a soulless, friendless husk or a notorious sex pervert, they wouldn’t have voted for them. Obviously a lot of people see that as an appropriate representation of their values and world view.

B) Them sabotaging eachother is actually democracy at work, representing their constituents will in the governing of the collective resources and issues that face the nation. Otherwise, they would be impeached or at least not re-elected.

This is the government the Republican voters want and continue to vote for.

It just happens to be hilarious as it plays out like a farce, we’re only a few poop jokes away from getting cultural grants.

Several teams actually

But you could also do a mean time analysis on specific tasks and have it cut off at a standard deviation or two (90-98% of task times covered), and have a checkbox or something for when the user expects longer times.

You could probably even make this adaptive, with a cutoff at 2x the standard time, and updating the median estimate after each run.

By that standard the only countries not monstrous are those too feeble to ally with.

Plenty of countries on all continents have sided with oppressive regimes, and conveniently ignored atrocities as long as they’re aimed at someone else. In anything from the Korea or Pakistani wars, to genocides in Central America, to slave trading within the African continent.

The West is due some criticism, but this approach is useless.

To be fair, the USAmericans also have a few notable occasions of standing up against oppressive rulers.