Good find nothing. The very passage that Balko quotes from Thwaites contradicts his assessment. It's not just uncharitable but slightly fantastical. Thwaites sa

Good find nothing. The very passage that Balko quotes from Thwaites contradicts his assessment. It's not just uncharitable but slightly fantastical. Thwaites says: "Commercial extraction and processing of the necessary materials happens on a scale that is difficult to resolve into the humble toaster. This contrast in scale is a bit absurd—massive industrial activity devoted to making objects which enable us, the consumer, to toast bread more efficiently. However, this ridiculousness dissipates somewhat when you consider that life pre-toasters required stoking the fire when a piece of toast was desired." Where does he speak of 'waste' here? He speaks of absurdity, to be sure, but only the most steely-minded libertarian, who has diligently eliminated any trace of aesthetic sentiment from his mind in favor of cold market-based reason, could fail to acknowledge that the notion of the great powers of the earth, bringing all their force to bear on the basic stuff of nature, digging and tearing down mountains, all leading to a single $8 toaster, is more or less as absurd as it gets. To point out that NO, STUPID, it's not a single toaster, it's a million toasters! And insulin, too! What are you, some kind of Commie? Is what I would characterize as churlish. And certainly uninteresting. Indeed, even in the middle of considering the absurdity of the toaster Thwaites follows his train of thought to allow for the real value of convenience, as provided by consumer technology. And again, who would deny that there is a component of helplessness when we can't even toast bread without buying a toaster from a supermarket? Thwaites doesn't sound like an ideologue, he sounds like an artist, whose job it is to consider an issue from new perspectives, and hopefully to cast light on all its components. Balko, on the other hand, is clearly an inveterate ideologue, who misreads ambivalence and curiosity as doubt and its never-far companion, condemnation. I'd rather watch somebody try to build his own toaster than read this kind of boosterism, which thinks it detects a threat to its beloved system and tries to drown out nuance or even-handedness.