Harry sometimes successfully resists the urge to drink Comed-Tea, and then something spit-take-inducing happens anyway. It’s just a prediction with a clever user interface, not an artifact of eldritch power (except to the extent that predicting the future constitutes eldritch power, which is a nontrivial extent).
Well, that depends on whether people’s decisions to drink Comed-Tea are controlled by the Tea’s knowledge (??) of when they’re going to see something ridiculous and whether it can affect anything else. It also depends on how powerful the mind-control is.
If it just sends a “drink Comed-Tea” impulse whenever something funny’s going to happen, the precommitment would probably beat it. If it controls your mind, either you’d only be able to decide that if you were fated for twelve consecutive days of surprises with breakfast, or you’d just forget about it when you weren’t fated for a surprise. If it can control the rest of the universe to any extent at all, it’d probably try to make you decide to begin at a time when you were likely to face a lot of surprises, and then conspire to delay breakfasts or make you forget to drink it until something surprising was going to happen. And we can’t rule out that, as a desperate measure, it could alter your sense of humor a little, or prompt you to, e.g., turn on the television at the right moment.
You might simply forget to do it, or the idea might simply not occur to you unless there are enough surprising events going to follow every morning. Or, if the idea occurs to you, it might be because there are a couple surprising events followed by a scary event that causes you to abandon the idea. (À la “do not mess with time”, but less obvious.) The space of possible stable time loops is huge.
Also, like somebody mentioned, it might not be perfect. It probably doesn’t work within Azkhaban, for example. The producer might simply make it “good enough” and expect that most people won’t bother to ask for their money back.
It’s already charmed to mess with your desires by making you want it at certain times. Why can’t it be charmed to make you not want it when it won’t work. You wouldn’t even notice that your preferences were being edited.
How far can that charm extend though? If I had never seen a can of Comed-Tea (hey, I already haven’t,) I’d want to try it out according to a consistent schedule. If a can of soda has the power to control people’s minds without their ever coming in contact with it, we’re already getting into realms of omnipotence-via-soda.
It’s likely that Harry’s assessment of how Comed-Tea works isn’t airtight. At the very least, it’s certainly not the only possible explanation. The other comments posted so far have already produced more than one solid alternative.
Most importantly, there’s no particular reason to suspect that the Tea relies on one thing alone. If it could be prescience + mind control, why not prescience + mind control + occasional bad taste? Harry’s current top theory of prescience + mind control, for one, is already more complicated than it needs to be; we could easily cut out the prescience part and presume that the Tea works by merely lowering the drinker’s threshold for choking on it/spitting it out.
It probably doesn’t matter when they actually open the can. The only thing that matters is that they sip the can at the exact right time. So every morning at breakfast, one of the many sips they take would be precisely timed with whatever the most shocking thing to occur during that period of time.
Question entirely unrelated to the current events of the story:
What would happen if a person bought a pack of Comed-Tea and committed to drinking one every morning with breakfast?
Harry sometimes successfully resists the urge to drink Comed-Tea, and then something spit-take-inducing happens anyway. It’s just a prediction with a clever user interface, not an artifact of eldritch power (except to the extent that predicting the future constitutes eldritch power, which is a nontrivial extent).
Getting you not to drink it at the wrong times seems at least as difficult as getting you to drink it at the right times though.
Well, that depends on whether people’s decisions to drink Comed-Tea are controlled by the Tea’s knowledge (??) of when they’re going to see something ridiculous and whether it can affect anything else. It also depends on how powerful the mind-control is.
If it just sends a “drink Comed-Tea” impulse whenever something funny’s going to happen, the precommitment would probably beat it. If it controls your mind, either you’d only be able to decide that if you were fated for twelve consecutive days of surprises with breakfast, or you’d just forget about it when you weren’t fated for a surprise. If it can control the rest of the universe to any extent at all, it’d probably try to make you decide to begin at a time when you were likely to face a lot of surprises, and then conspire to delay breakfasts or make you forget to drink it until something surprising was going to happen. And we can’t rule out that, as a desperate measure, it could alter your sense of humor a little, or prompt you to, e.g., turn on the television at the right moment.
You might simply forget to do it, or the idea might simply not occur to you unless there are enough surprising events going to follow every morning. Or, if the idea occurs to you, it might be because there are a couple surprising events followed by a scary event that causes you to abandon the idea. (À la “do not mess with time”, but less obvious.) The space of possible stable time loops is huge.
Also, like somebody mentioned, it might not be perfect. It probably doesn’t work within Azkhaban, for example. The producer might simply make it “good enough” and expect that most people won’t bother to ask for their money back.
I thought about it a bit more, and I’m going to hazard a guess.
It’s charmed to taste bad if drunk at the wrong times. If the customer insists on drinking it anyway, it won’t work and they can get their money back.
It’s already charmed to mess with your desires by making you want it at certain times. Why can’t it be charmed to make you not want it when it won’t work. You wouldn’t even notice that your preferences were being edited.
How far can that charm extend though? If I had never seen a can of Comed-Tea (hey, I already haven’t,) I’d want to try it out according to a consistent schedule. If a can of soda has the power to control people’s minds without their ever coming in contact with it, we’re already getting into realms of omnipotence-via-soda.
It’s likely that Harry’s assessment of how Comed-Tea works isn’t airtight. At the very least, it’s certainly not the only possible explanation. The other comments posted so far have already produced more than one solid alternative.
Most importantly, there’s no particular reason to suspect that the Tea relies on one thing alone. If it could be prescience + mind control, why not prescience + mind control + occasional bad taste? Harry’s current top theory of prescience + mind control, for one, is already more complicated than it needs to be; we could easily cut out the prescience part and presume that the Tea works by merely lowering the drinker’s threshold for choking on it/spitting it out.
It probably doesn’t matter when they actually open the can. The only thing that matters is that they sip the can at the exact right time. So every morning at breakfast, one of the many sips they take would be precisely timed with whatever the most shocking thing to occur during that period of time.