A series of non sequiturs. My words mean what they mean. I've challenged you to be more specific in your assertions that they mean something else, and you've had to give up.
Yes, I know. I disingenuously pretended that you were asking a serious question rather than just snarkily pushing a straw man at me.
Snarky, well ok. Straw man, no way.
People setting up straw men rarely think they are doing so. The deform their opponent's argument in their own head first, and then speak.
I could go on, but I'd have to untangle all the pieces of straw. If you want to persist in this, give a clear and concise explanation of what you think I meant by "say so", and I will then point out how inaccurate it is.
To me, it sounded like you were saying morality needed to be legislated...so I asked you if that's what you meant.
There's no need to reiterate your question. I know what you asked. If you'd asked, "does the earth orbit the sun?" I would have responded in the same way, discussing the bizarreness of the question, rather than pointlessly delivering a literal answer.
Then you went all crazy left-wing on me and started bible bashing and Ayn Rand bashing. WTF does *any* of that have to do with my question?
They have to do with the insane ideology that's behind your earth-and-sun question.
The idea that the existence of regulation is the cause of the current crisis is like saying that AIDS is caused by the existence of doctors.
Nice analogy. But completely wrong. Try reading something on the topic.
Thanks. I'm slowly managing to tease it out of you. I provoked you into giving a link to a right-wing think-tank. As I said, your views are so loopy that you must have picked them up wholesale from some such source.
The linked article is not even about regulation. It's about the too-big-to-fail doctrine.
(I can understand how you'd feel that an individual can't think for themselves if you graduated from government schools).
This is the second jibe against education. I ignored the first, but it's really starting to look like you're one of those freaks one hears about whose parents pulled them out of school in order to teach them that the world was made by Jehovah in six days. I've been reading a lot about them recently. Scarily ignorant people. It would be best to tone down your attacks on education, lest people think you are one of those.
I also previously mentioned talk radio, as I have heard it is another central source of gun-toting, gummint-hating, black-lynching wackiness. I don't actually know where you personally got it; perhaps you masturbate nightly over Ayn Rand and Ann Coulter. It's just that the odds of any given individual deciding that a crisis involving banks lending when they shouldn't was caused by the existence of recently-removed lending restrictions, are slim. It's more likely to be a lie that has been spread as truth from a central repository. In the same way, the story of Noah was a lie/tale that was put in a book and spread as truth.
If you can understand this concept in relation to Noah, you should be able to understand it in relation to what we are discussing (even if you think there is no lie).
If you think that the Bible is true, however, then there is no hope at all.
You feel it's necessary to legislate morality?
You feel it's necessary to make legislation to prevent idiots from being idiots?
It's absolutely astonishing that anyone could ask such questions.
Again, I can barely imagine someone actually coming up with such a thing, in the same way that I can barely imagine someone coming up with the story of Noah and believing it. It's the sort of idea people only receive as part of belonging to a cult. I'm suspecting the cult of Ayn Rand here.
Did a gun-carrying radio talkshow host tell you that? It's not an idea anyone could have spontaneously formed.
Did the government education system teach you to refute arguments with irrelevant drivel? That's the only way anyone could have spontaneously come up with that reply.
Well, no, obviously not. Which is understandable, given that you're just using the tactic of "I'll repeat back my opponent's disparaging remark, changing a couple of words".
The idea that the existence of regulation is the cause of the current crisis is like saying that AIDS is caused by the existence of doctors. It's just so crazy that you must have obtained it from some repository of craziness — the odds of any given individual coming up with it himself are just way too slim.
But who determines how much is too much? The bank?
Yes, because they know. If they act unethically, regulation will be necessary.
According to your views, they've been screwing up and can't be trusted to assess loans. The government? They got the banks here in the first place with stupid regulations.
Did a gun-carrying radio talkshow host tell you that? It's not an idea anyone could have spontaneously formed.
There's a self-serving, conspiracy mindset. When the Conservatives and Libertarians were protesting during the town hall meetings, and holding their tea parties, there wasn't nearly the same sort of wanton disregard for authority. The Washington D.C. tea party, contrasting the G20 riot, was incident free. A Democrat-run D.C. and Democrat-run Congress/Executive would have gotten a lot of traction if the tea party had a riot. Why weren't there agent provocateurs?
That would be fine as a rhetorical question, but you actually don't know, do you?
Exactly: why would I go out of my way to try to figure out why [thousands of concerned citizens] are doing what they're doing [about a series of dire problems that affect the world]? If [the corporate media feed me skewed and sensationalised stories] about the police using rubber bullets and sound canons and whatever else, but I have no idea why you were protesting [because the media choose not to give this information, and I am too lazy to google for it], then your protest has completely and utterly failed, and you need to rethink your strategy.
Similarly, I can imagine a kid who sits in the back of the class sending text messages and chewing gum saying, "Why would I go out of my way to try to figure out what this nutjob teacher is saying? If my stoner friends tell me that learning is for losers, and I have no idea why you are trying to make me literate and numerate, then your teaching has completely failed, and you need to rethink it."
It's always good to re-evaluate strategies, but it's not for you to say so. It is yours to listen for once.
8pm - 8am is exactly what they are offering on the front page of their website.
Ah, I considered the possibility that the summary might be talking about a different deal from the one I have, but when I saw that the Youtube video also said 2am, I took that as confirmation. Anyway, the controversy over the encouragement of illegal download applies to both deals.
I see that the ad for the 8pm–8am deal mentions 5GB of peak traffic and says that if you go over it, you will be throttled both off and on peak. In my case, I did not respond to an ad. AAPT phoned me up and orally offered me 20GB on peak, with unlimited downloads off peak. We did an audio contract right there on the phone. I never agreed to my offpeak broadband being cut off if I went over my onpeak limit.
I am currently on AAPT's unlimited-offpeak plan. The article summary is wrong. The offpeak period in fact begins at 2am. You can actually see this in the fine print at the bottom of the linked Youtube video.
In passing, I'll moan about something related. Last month, we went over our onpeak limit of 20GB. Our broadband was cut off, and we had to content ourselves with dial-up speed for the rest of the month. We sighed, and thought, "oh well, at least the broadband will only be cut off from 8am till 2am. We're paying for unlimited traffic from 2am till 8am, so we'll still have that."
I had, of course, forgotten that it was AAPT we were dealing with -- that cesspit of incompetence, greed and malice. The wankers cut us off overnight too.
Since then, I have resolved to be careful during the day, and to download the Internet every frickin' night from 2am till 8am.
Under the terms of the GPL, they are entitled to the source.
So are you and I. Can we sue [AFPA] as well?
Maybe.
There are two ways to be compliant: ship the code with the product, or make it available to all. The latters applies to you and me; both the latter and the former apply to Edu4. They therefore have a much better case to make.
It's best to leave these lawsuits to the recipient or the copyright holder, but it is true that everyone in the world has the right that AFPA trampled on. Perhaps a class-action suit would be appropriate.
I've tried OpenSolaris, and also NexentaOS/StormOS, which is Ubuntu running on the OpenSolaris kernel instead of Linux.
I found that there was a lack of good documentation, and incompatibilities with certain hardware (for example, the hardware emulated by VirtualBox). Also, it seems to be hard to get ZFS to play nicely with other filesystems on the same hard disk.
Ubuntu already does everything I need it to. Persisting with OpenSolaris would be a bit masochistic.
Other people may be able to tell you a happier story
They have these crazy things in Europe called "trains" that connect city centres without having to hang around in an unfashionable suburb for a few hours waiting to be put into a metal tube. You don't even have to take your shoes off to get on them.
Silly Europeans always have such a skewed sense of geography. Newark to Tampa is 1,000 miles, exactly. It's a two and a half hour flight and a 20 hour train ride.
He's talking about London-Paris, not Newark-Tampa.
(And you got three people modding you "insightful".
Definitely too many Americans with mod points.)
Placebo is not only a type of control. It can also be used to refer to the pleasing effect of knowing you are getting a real treatment.
People who get morphine without knowing it only get about as much relief as people who think they are getting morphine but aren't. (People who think they're getting it, and are indeed getting it, report even greater relief.)
From this, we can see that the placebo effect surrounding morphine is about equal to its actual clinical effect. This is an important finding. It's helpful to be able to quantify the effect in this way.
You keep saying "best" and "most", but no one is disputing "best" and "most". The problem arises when people get so used to two things being much the same "most" of the time and in the "best" cases, that they end up making the mistake of thinking that the things are actually synonymous.
The writer of the article does this when he says "It is not possible to create strong or weak placebos, since the placebo effect is a measure of poorly defined effects and of chance alone." If he changed that to refer to "scientific controls", then he'd be closer to the mark. But he is wrong to say it of placebo.
The finding that placebo pills' effectiveness change with colour (blue is better for tranquillisers; red is seen as a tougher weapon against disease) is not something to sweep under the carpet by saying that it "is not possible to create strong or weak placebos". Instead, this knowledge helps us create better controls (by making sure the pills are the same colour as the real drug, where the researchers might otherwise have assumed it was irrelevant). It also allows us to make more effective drugs on the market, by deliberately creating a strong placebo effect along with the real effects.
N.B.: I am not defending the Wired article, which I find is also sloppy with its terminology. I'm just criticising the sloppiness of the scienceblogs.com one.
Your post partly just repeats what I said was the purpose of placebo, and partly expresses an overly narrow view of the matter.
The scienceblogs.com article equated placebo with control, and I am extricating them. You are wrong to say the only meaningful drug test is drug versus placebo.
Interesting data have also been gleaned from situations where people receive treatment but don't know it. Their outcomes can then be compared with people who receive treatment and know it, people who don't receive treatment but think they are, and people who know they're not getting treatment. There is no need to do these experiments at different times or in different places.
No, the guy who wrote that article is wrong. He is using "placebo" where he should be saying "control". A control is what you use to measure the difference between normality and the thing you are testing. In medicine, this may or may not involve a placebo (which means a "pleaser"). For example, I can give 1000 people my new drug, and put another 1000 people in a control group, with no drug. However, I may worry that some of the improvement in my patients is due to the psychological effect of popping a pill; I therefore may give the control group a fake pill to take, called a placebo. If I have enough funding, I may even have three groups: one with the real drug, one control group with the placebo, and one true control group with absolutely nothing. This will often produce three levels of improvement.
A control cannot be described as strong or weak, but a placebo given as part of a control certainly can be. Although it is something designed to have no real effect, the fact is that every aspect of the treatment situation (the colour of the pills, frequency of treatment, the crispness of the white coats...) alters the strength of the pleasing effect, which can have major consequences for health and well-being.
I am in the Army and, while I'm not sending texts in the middle of a battle or something, a lot of my admin messages are time sensitive or I can't wait til the next time I can pull over.
Unless you are in the army of a country currently being invaded, your SMSs are not that important. In fact, it would probably be better if you didn't answer them, or even walked off the job.
I've also met some Poles who were... old-fashioned, let's say.
But let's not use this to make a cheap attack. The original photo was perhaps appropriate for politically-correct America, where it is normal to have ads in which 100% of the people in them belong to a minority. In Poland, that is pushing it too much. They modified the ad so that only 67% of the people were a minority (an Oriental guy, a white guy and a white girl). It's not as if they knocked it down to 33% or 0%. Do you realise that Poland has a population that is 96.7% ethnic Polish? Once you count other groups, that means that ~99% of the people are white. And you're whining that they only have 33% ethnic minorities in an advert, plus 33% female (in a male-dominated industry).
What the fuck? Is Poland on the fucking Moon or something?
"Oooh mommy, this ad scares me. What's the strange dark alien person doing there?"
Let's be blunt. Poland is a backwards place. Most Poles happily stood by as the Nazis pretty much emptied the country of its Jewry (despite the fact that the Nazis thought the Poles little better). Anti-semitism is rife, as is homophobia.
It's not a matter of being "scared". Do you not have even a layman's understanding of marketing, of localisation?
No. We lack public transportation because the population isn't dense enough to make it feasable.
Some parts are; some parts aren't. And I'm not saying that everywhere has to end up very well connected. Some places obviously don't merit a New-York-style subway, but they could perhaps have a bus come through once a week instead of never, or once a day instead of once a week. It all depends.
More needs to be done before you can just say you are at the saturation point for the existing density. The fewer cars are used everywhere, the easier it will be to push for better transport, and thus the vicious circle becomes virtuous.
So us phasing out our cars, and applying political pressure, will gradually prompt the relevant authorities to provide better public transport, which will in turn make it easier for us to phase out our cars? Yes, I see that there is no excuse for glibly accepting the status quo.
Slashdot Mirror
A series of non sequiturs. My words mean what they mean. I've challenged you to be more specific in your assertions that they mean something else, and you've had to give up.
Yes, I know. I disingenuously pretended that you were asking a serious question rather than just snarkily pushing a straw man at me.
Snarky, well ok. Straw man, no way.
People setting up straw men rarely think they are doing so. The deform their opponent's argument in their own head first, and then speak.
I could go on, but I'd have to untangle all the pieces of straw. If you want to persist in this, give a clear and concise explanation of what you think I meant by "say so", and I will then point out how inaccurate it is.
To me, it sounded like you were saying morality needed to be legislated...so I asked you if that's what you meant.
There's no need to reiterate your question. I know what you asked. If you'd asked, "does the earth orbit the sun?" I would have responded in the same way, discussing the bizarreness of the question, rather than pointlessly delivering a literal answer.
Then you went all crazy left-wing on me and started bible bashing and Ayn Rand bashing. WTF does *any* of that have to do with my question?
They have to do with the insane ideology that's behind your earth-and-sun question.
The idea that the existence of regulation is the cause of the current crisis is like saying that AIDS is caused by the existence of doctors.
Nice analogy. But completely wrong. Try reading something on the topic.
Thanks. I'm slowly managing to tease it out of you. I provoked you into giving a link to a right-wing think-tank. As I said, your views are so loopy that you must have picked them up wholesale from some such source.
The linked article is not even about regulation. It's about the too-big-to-fail doctrine.
(I can understand how you'd feel that an individual can't think for themselves if you graduated from government schools).
This is the second jibe against education. I ignored the first, but it's really starting to look like you're one of those freaks one hears about whose parents pulled them out of school in order to teach them that the world was made by Jehovah in six days. I've been reading a lot about them recently. Scarily ignorant people. It would be best to tone down your attacks on education, lest people think you are one of those.
I also previously mentioned talk radio, as I have heard it is another central source of gun-toting, gummint-hating, black-lynching wackiness. I don't actually know where you personally got it; perhaps you masturbate nightly over Ayn Rand and Ann Coulter. It's just that the odds of any given individual deciding that a crisis involving banks lending when they shouldn't was caused by the existence of recently-removed lending restrictions, are slim. It's more likely to be a lie that has been spread as truth from a central repository. In the same way, the story of Noah was a lie/tale that was put in a book and spread as truth.
If you can understand this concept in relation to Noah, you should be able to understand it in relation to what we are discussing (even if you think there is no lie). If you think that the Bible is true, however, then there is no hope at all.
I just picked on the bit I disagreed with.
Yes, I know. I disingenuously pretended that you were asking a serious question rather than just snarkily pushing a straw man at me.
You feel it's necessary to legislate morality? You feel it's necessary to make legislation to prevent idiots from being idiots?
It's absolutely astonishing that anyone could ask such questions. Again, I can barely imagine someone actually coming up with such a thing, in the same way that I can barely imagine someone coming up with the story of Noah and believing it. It's the sort of idea people only receive as part of belonging to a cult. I'm suspecting the cult of Ayn Rand here.
Did a gun-carrying radio talkshow host tell you that? It's not an idea anyone could have spontaneously formed.
Did the government education system teach you to refute arguments with irrelevant drivel? That's the only way anyone could have spontaneously come up with that reply.
Well, no, obviously not. Which is understandable, given that you're just using the tactic of "I'll repeat back my opponent's disparaging remark, changing a couple of words".
The idea that the existence of regulation is the cause of the current crisis is like saying that AIDS is caused by the existence of doctors. It's just so crazy that you must have obtained it from some repository of craziness — the odds of any given individual coming up with it himself are just way too slim.
But who determines how much is too much? The bank?
Yes, because they know. If they act unethically, regulation will be necessary.
According to your views, they've been screwing up and can't be trusted to assess loans. The government? They got the banks here in the first place with stupid regulations.
Did a gun-carrying radio talkshow host tell you that? It's not an idea anyone could have spontaneously formed.
So the message of the protesters is that we should shut up and listen?
Essentially, yeah. Except the shutting-up part is optional. And after the listening there should ideally be an action phase.
There's a self-serving, conspiracy mindset. When the Conservatives and Libertarians were protesting during the town hall meetings, and holding their tea parties, there wasn't nearly the same sort of wanton disregard for authority. The Washington D.C. tea party, contrasting the G20 riot, was incident free. A Democrat-run D.C. and Democrat-run Congress/Executive would have gotten a lot of traction if the tea party had a riot. Why weren't there agent provocateurs?
That would be fine as a rhetorical question, but you actually don't know, do you?
Exactly: why would I go out of my way to try to figure out why [thousands of concerned citizens] are doing what they're doing [about a series of dire problems that affect the world]? If [the corporate media feed me skewed and sensationalised stories] about the police using rubber bullets and sound canons and whatever else, but I have no idea why you were protesting [because the media choose not to give this information, and I am too lazy to google for it], then your protest has completely and utterly failed, and you need to rethink your strategy.
Similarly, I can imagine a kid who sits in the back of the class sending text messages and chewing gum saying, "Why would I go out of my way to try to figure out what this nutjob teacher is saying? If my stoner friends tell me that learning is for losers, and I have no idea why you are trying to make me literate and numerate, then your teaching has completely failed, and you need to rethink it."
It's always good to re-evaluate strategies, but it's not for you to say so. It is yours to listen for once.
8pm - 8am is exactly what they are offering on the front page of their website.
Ah, I considered the possibility that the summary might be talking about a different deal from the one I have, but when I saw that the Youtube video also said 2am, I took that as confirmation. Anyway, the controversy over the encouragement of illegal download applies to both deals.
I see that the ad for the 8pm–8am deal mentions 5GB of peak traffic and says that if you go over it, you will be throttled both off and on peak. In my case, I did not respond to an ad. AAPT phoned me up and orally offered me 20GB on peak, with unlimited downloads off peak. We did an audio contract right there on the phone. I never agreed to my offpeak broadband being cut off if I went over my onpeak limit.
8pm to 8am? I wish!
I am currently on AAPT's unlimited-offpeak plan. The article summary is wrong. The offpeak period in fact begins at 2am. You can actually see this in the fine print at the bottom of the linked Youtube video.
In passing, I'll moan about something related. Last month, we went over our onpeak limit of 20GB. Our broadband was cut off, and we had to content ourselves with dial-up speed for the rest of the month. We sighed, and thought, "oh well, at least the broadband will only be cut off from 8am till 2am. We're paying for unlimited traffic from 2am till 8am, so we'll still have that."
I had, of course, forgotten that it was AAPT we were dealing with -- that cesspit of incompetence, greed and malice. The wankers cut us off overnight too.
Since then, I have resolved to be careful during the day, and to download the Internet every frickin' night from 2am till 8am.
Under the terms of the GPL, they are entitled to the source.
So are you and I. Can we sue [AFPA] as well?
Maybe. There are two ways to be compliant: ship the code with the product, or make it available to all. The latters applies to you and me; both the latter and the former apply to Edu4. They therefore have a much better case to make.
It's best to leave these lawsuits to the recipient or the copyright holder, but it is true that everyone in the world has the right that AFPA trampled on. Perhaps a class-action suit would be appropriate.
There isn't any misspelling in the quoted text.
I've tried OpenSolaris, and also NexentaOS/StormOS, which is Ubuntu running on the OpenSolaris kernel instead of Linux.
I found that there was a lack of good documentation, and incompatibilities with certain hardware (for example, the hardware emulated by VirtualBox). Also, it seems to be hard to get ZFS to play nicely with other filesystems on the same hard disk.
Ubuntu already does everything I need it to. Persisting with OpenSolaris would be a bit masochistic.
Other people may be able to tell you a happier story
They have these crazy things in Europe called "trains" that connect city centres without having to hang around in an unfashionable suburb for a few hours waiting to be put into a metal tube. You don't even have to take your shoes off to get on them.
Silly Europeans always have such a skewed sense of geography. Newark to Tampa is 1,000 miles, exactly. It's a two and a half hour flight and a 20 hour train ride.
He's talking about London-Paris, not Newark-Tampa.
(And you got three people modding you "insightful". Definitely too many Americans with mod points.)
Placebo is not only a type of control. It can also be used to refer to the pleasing effect of knowing you are getting a real treatment.
People who get morphine without knowing it only get about as much relief as people who think they are getting morphine but aren't. (People who think they're getting it, and are indeed getting it, report even greater relief.)
From this, we can see that the placebo effect surrounding morphine is about equal to its actual clinical effect. This is an important finding. It's helpful to be able to quantify the effect in this way.
You keep saying "best" and "most", but no one is disputing "best" and "most". The problem arises when people get so used to two things being much the same "most" of the time and in the "best" cases, that they end up making the mistake of thinking that the things are actually synonymous.
The writer of the article does this when he says "It is not possible to create strong or weak placebos, since the placebo effect is a measure of poorly defined effects and of chance alone." If he changed that to refer to "scientific controls", then he'd be closer to the mark. But he is wrong to say it of placebo.
The finding that placebo pills' effectiveness change with colour (blue is better for tranquillisers; red is seen as a tougher weapon against disease) is not something to sweep under the carpet by saying that it "is not possible to create strong or weak placebos". Instead, this knowledge helps us create better controls (by making sure the pills are the same colour as the real drug, where the researchers might otherwise have assumed it was irrelevant). It also allows us to make more effective drugs on the market, by deliberately creating a strong placebo effect along with the real effects.
N.B.: I am not defending the Wired article, which I find is also sloppy with its terminology. I'm just criticising the sloppiness of the scienceblogs.com one.
We're not talking about what is best. We're talking about what placebo is.
Your post partly just repeats what I said was the purpose of placebo, and partly expresses an overly narrow view of the matter.
The scienceblogs.com article equated placebo with control, and I am extricating them. You are wrong to say the only meaningful drug test is drug versus placebo.
Interesting data have also been gleaned from situations where people receive treatment but don't know it. Their outcomes can then be compared with people who receive treatment and know it, people who don't receive treatment but think they are, and people who know they're not getting treatment. There is no need to do these experiments at different times or in different places.
You keep saying that word, I do not think it means what you think it means.
No, the guy who wrote that article is wrong. He is using "placebo" where he should be saying "control". A control is what you use to measure the difference between normality and the thing you are testing. In medicine, this may or may not involve a placebo (which means a "pleaser"). For example, I can give 1000 people my new drug, and put another 1000 people in a control group, with no drug. However, I may worry that some of the improvement in my patients is due to the psychological effect of popping a pill; I therefore may give the control group a fake pill to take, called a placebo. If I have enough funding, I may even have three groups: one with the real drug, one control group with the placebo, and one true control group with absolutely nothing. This will often produce three levels of improvement.
A control cannot be described as strong or weak, but a placebo given as part of a control certainly can be. Although it is something designed to have no real effect, the fact is that every aspect of the treatment situation (the colour of the pills, frequency of treatment, the crispness of the white coats...) alters the strength of the pleasing effect, which can have major consequences for health and well-being.
I am in the Army and, while I'm not sending texts in the middle of a battle or something, a lot of my admin messages are time sensitive or I can't wait til the next time I can pull over.
Unless you are in the army of a country currently being invaded, your SMSs are not that important. In fact, it would probably be better if you didn't answer them, or even walked off the job.
Look, I use Linux, and Microsoft is evil, etc.
I've also met some Poles who were... old-fashioned, let's say.
But let's not use this to make a cheap attack. The original photo was perhaps appropriate for politically-correct America, where it is normal to have ads in which 100% of the people in them belong to a minority. In Poland, that is pushing it too much. They modified the ad so that only 67% of the people were a minority (an Oriental guy, a white guy and a white girl). It's not as if they knocked it down to 33% or 0%. Do you realise that Poland has a population that is 96.7% ethnic Polish? Once you count other groups, that means that ~99% of the people are white. And you're whining that they only have 33% ethnic minorities in an advert, plus 33% female (in a male-dominated industry).
What the fuck? Is Poland on the fucking Moon or something?
"Oooh mommy, this ad scares me. What's the strange dark alien person doing there?"
Let's be blunt. Poland is a backwards place. Most Poles happily stood by as the Nazis pretty much emptied the country of its Jewry (despite the fact that the Nazis thought the Poles little better). Anti-semitism is rife, as is homophobia.
It's not a matter of being "scared". Do you not have even a layman's understanding of marketing, of localisation?
You don't have to. You can just click anywhere in the timezone. You seem to be seeking problems.
I've never heard O'Reilly demand the other side be silenced, only his own right to be heard.
What, pray tell, is the first result if one googles for " cut his mic! "?
No. We lack public transportation because the population isn't dense enough to make it feasable.
Some parts are; some parts aren't. And I'm not saying that everywhere has to end up very well connected. Some places obviously don't merit a New-York-style subway, but they could perhaps have a bus come through once a week instead of never, or once a day instead of once a week. It all depends.
More needs to be done before you can just say you are at the saturation point for the existing density. The fewer cars are used everywhere, the easier it will be to push for better transport, and thus the vicious circle becomes virtuous.
So us phasing out our cars, and applying political pressure, will gradually prompt the relevant authorities to provide better public transport, which will in turn make it easier for us to phase out our cars? Yes, I see that there is no excuse for glibly accepting the status quo.
There, I fixed it for you.