Historically? Shutter the police department and open a new one, putting people you can trust to do good things in the face of adversity (like cops who were pushed out of the previous department for whistleblowing or refusing to engage in malfeasance) in charge of setting up the new system.

This was the traditional FBI strategy for dealing with bad departments and it works well, while most other approaches don't. Getting good people to be cops is difficult while bad cops are calling the shots and actively working to keep them out.

Getting good folks in charge from the get go lets them develop appropriate methods of identifying and retaining good officers appropriate to their locality.

Wheels are incredibly limiting for many of the dangerous-to-humans purposes robots would be very useful for. Wheels only really work at all in an environment explicitly built to support wheels, and they can't handle any kind of rapid elevation change with fixed infrastructure.

What a strange usage of the word irreplaceable

Also, speciation isn't, like... Actually a real thing. Because species aren't a real thing. "Species" are just an arbitrary categorization and classification tool we use because it's, well, useful. Grouping things together is useful, but it's not really reality, evolution doesn't happen to species, it happens to lineages.

Has there ever been any evidence of the world being worse off without ticks in it? All the other animals listed I can see, but ticks are completely parasitic at every stage in their lifecycle, don't make up any significant part of any creatures diet that I can recall, and generally make things miserable for everything they interact with. Everything I've seen has put ticks as 'ecosystem non-contributors'. They don't have a bunch of redeeming qualities like, say, mosquitos do.

Driving ticks to extinction seems like it would have about the same negative impact as driving ebola or rabies to extinction.

These... were written in 2006.

That's a little bit more recent than Plato.

No, we're discussing the same emerald tablets. It's where we get the phrase "As above, so below" from. I've heard (from rather unreliable sources) that there are mythical versions from 36,000 bc thing as well, but, and this is important, we have never actually found them. Nor do we have any ancient historical sources that mention them existing. We do have multiple copies, but the oldest we have is from 800ad (found in the Sirr al-khalīqa wa-ṣanʿat al-ṭabīʿa) - which is in itself odd, because supposedly they were part of the hermetica from the beginning, but the previous thousand years of copies we have of the hermetica don't have them.

But the thing about mythical not yet found things is that they don't actually work as evidence of anything.

And all of this is of course ignoring the significantly larger problem that the Emerald Tablet doesn't mention Atlantis.

Here's the entire contents, seriously tell me what any of this has to do with Atlantis:

> Tis true without lying, certain and most true.
> That which is below is like that which is above and that which is above is like that which is below
> to do the miracle of one only thing
> And as all things have been and arose from one by the mediation of one: so all things have their birth from this one thing by adaptation.
> The Sun is its father, the moon its mother,
the wind hath carried it in its belly, the earth is its nurse.
> The father of all perfection in the whole world is here.
> Its force or power is entire if it be converted into earth.
> Separate thou the earth from the fire,
> the subtle from the gross
> sweetly with great industry.
> It ascends from the earth to the heaven and again it descends to the earth
and receives the force of things superior and inferior.
> By this means you shall have the glory of the whole world and thereby all obscurity shall fly from you.
> Its force is above all force,
> for it vanquishes every subtle thing and penetrates every solid thing.
> So was the world created.
> From this are and do come admirable adaptations where of the means is here in this.
> Hence I am called Hermes Trismegist, having the three parts of the philosophy of the whole world.
> That which I have said of the operation of the Sun is accomplished and ended.

At the very least you recognize it is first found in an explicit work of fiction, right?

The oldest texts in the hermetica (of which the emerald tablet is part) are still only estimated to be, at their oldest, written over a hundred years after Plato died, and the earliest version of the Emerald Tablet we're aware of we have only been able to trace back to an even more recent era, several hundred years afterwards. Even if we assume the traditions on which the hermetica were base are and much older we are left with, and this is perhaps the most dire problem - they don't actually mention Atlantis or anything like it.

Apparently, since I can't find any. Or maybe, just maybe, your many examples don't actually exit! Gee, I wonder which is more likely.

Provide a single example of anyone talking about Atlantis at any point prior to Plato. You said there are lots of those writings. Share just one.

> And there are lots of writings about an “Atlantis” long before Plato.

If they're so easy to google why not, I dunno... bring one up?

> In Platos own words, his grandfather told him about the story of Atlantis.

Bro, do you even understand how fiction works lmfao

There's no conclusive proof of anything in history, only preponderance of evidence.

And the preponderance of evidence is that Plato invented Atlantis. It first historical appearance is in Timaeus, where it is explicitly allegorical, among other fictional accounts. His student, Aristotle, explicitly talks about it being a fictional account used to make a philosophical point. Even Athens, which is a real place, is pretty explicitly fictionalized for the story.

There is zero mention of Atlantis anywhere in history prior to Plato's description, despite him describing a place that absolutely would have been worthy of mention. The sources that talk about it after he died all point to him as the originator of the tale. The things that happen in the story are also, y'know, literally physically impossible.

Just pointing out that "thing is disputed" is not a good reason to stop treating it like a fact, by itself, and providing an example.

No, there isn't a single reference to Atlantis prior to Plato. And in the work in which he introduced it it is very obviously not intended to be taken as factual history, anymore than Tatooine is supposed to be thought of as an actual historical place

Yeah, but uh... for this particular fact its not particularly debatable, we actually have the primary sources.

People dispute that the holocaust happened, the existence of dispute isn't what I'd go by in terms of wondering whether something happened, historically.

It's as close to fact as you're ever gonna get in history, I don't think history is banned from TIL?

It was Plato, yes, in Timaeus, which we still have copies of. You can read a translation of it here: http://classics.mit.edu/Plato/timaeus.html

It's possible it was inspired by some other story (in the same way as the places in "Gullivers Travels" are inspired by real places and previous stories, I suppose), but Atlantis itself, and certainly all the details he gives, are clearly created part of the allegory.

... are there? There's really just... the one. No one who came after Plato could have thought it up (because we know Plato did) and anyone who came before him that thought it up never mentioned it as far as we have evidence of.

There's really only the one, lol.

There is no "proof" when it comes to history - all we have is the balance of evidence. Every decent piece of evidence we have available points to Atlantis (at least the version that became widely known and survived into the modern day) being a piece of fiction created by Plato as a rhetorical advice.

Evidence:

Atlantis appears in Timaeus and Critias, works by Plato, as an allegory and express fiction.

There is no earlier reference to Atlantis we have ever discovered.

All references to Atlantis we are familiar with from the time period after Plato seem to be referring directly back to his work.

Plato making Atlantis up is about as close to a fact as you can get, historically speaking. It is the most likely situation based on what we know, and there's no evidence to the contrary.

I did, yes! On my way back from Dunks.

Forgetting to mail in the ballot is a lot easier than forgetting to vote in person, though, for me! I'm a lot more likely to forget to mail it in several times over several weeks, even with reminders, than I am to actually stop in and vote. I've actually tried to vote by mail several times now and have yet to succeed.

Also, with early voting in this state you can get a second chance sometimes even if you're the sort of person who prefers to vote in person. :D

Just easier for me. Maybe it's the ADHD but I'm terrible at getting through the mail in a timely manner and voting by mail often involves... logistical complexities. Remember to fill it out, remembering to put in the envelope, remembering to take the envelope with me when I leave the house, just... lots of possible points of failure for my scattered brain to mess things up.

Voting in person I can literally do in 5 minutes on my way back from Dunks in the morning and its done, very little in the way of logistical effort involved and no distractions for the duration of the process. Walk in, say my address twice and my name once, go where I'm told, do what I'm told, and then I'm done.

Learning is work, and working is often the best way to learn. The only real question is whether the curriculum is designed to encourage learning effectively.

God knows there's plenty of work-that-doesn't-encourage-learning-effectively in your average school where you don't get to spend time with plans.