Yes it is.

I agree that we have excess, and am glad you're pro tech. We don't need disposable novelty singing rubber fish or bottled water. It's just an illustration of the level of production we've made possible. And yes, it'd be nice if we all boycotted these things and considered the hidden costs of such tripe.

I just see it as democracy, in a sense. People apparently enjoy all this crap. To deny it is authoritarian, though. I wish we had some benevolent dictatorship running things, but that's another argument.

Ultimately, I see the current state of affairs as a natural offshoot of the processes that lead to canned food, antibiotics, and utilities. Gotta take the bad with the good.

And go nuclear power! Best option that the same people who often claim to defend the planet deride. We need to pick the best of the evils we require.

Mostly, I don't see utility in being an idealist. I understand its purity, but anticipate its futility.

Self indulgence. We turned paradise into shit? I disagree. What we've done is natural and beneficial. We addressed our needs. Food, shelter, disease remedies, mental stimulation. You'd rather starve or die of an infected molar? Freeze to death? Elitist romanticism.

Yes, we're still primitive. We'll never have Star Trek, but we'll hopefully have more control over our lives than we've historically managed. What's so bad about that?

Because no one would believe it if he were 9

My thoughts too. Once any form has taken root, it monopolizes this route. It took all the low hanging fruit that spurred the process to begin with, The environment isn't the same as it once was.

Don't worry, they're already sounding their cry with the rationalization that warmer air is pushing the colder air south - all theory, of course, with no examination of actual observation to support it.

We're hitting temperatures not seen since the 1990's. And that's it. And last summer wasn't particularly hot. Where are the dramatic weather extremes we've been told would occur?

Indeed - that was my first reaction. How dare the price of things go down over time! If you care about the poor, you should make everything more expensive by giving (certain) people more free money to spend.

What do you think will be the inception date for the Nexus-6 Android, and will it come with a built-in expiration date of a few years? Will you be able to jailbreak it, or is it not possible for the coding sequence to be revised once it's been established?

Hmm?

How do you figure? The global mean temperature has been flat for 17 years now. Where is this "whole lot faster" of which you speak?

That's the key, once again: the government - including the courts - have become skewed toward favoring massive numbers of lobbyists and legal teams. So even though the neighbor might have a case, he could never win. The government has become the enforcer of rights violations.

So long as you believe that, or that another law is going to stop pollution on public grounds, politicians and their cronies will continue to laugh at you. So long as there exists public property and the potential for government to violate the rights of one group to benefit another, there will always be lobbyists buying politicians. The solution is not to pretend that another law against companies is going to fix the problem. The solution is to prohibit government violation of individual rights: privatize all property, and restrict government to the minimal role of police, courts, and military, to only uphold and protect individual rights. Such a system, so long as it existed, would offer no incentive for lobbyism as an industry to exist.

Why does the corporation have no incentive to minimize pollution? Because the open waterways have been deemed "public" property by the government. Whereas if you dumped your waste on your neighbor's property, he could sue you for contamination, with public property - such as rivers, lakes, even oceans - there is the potential for corruption and political pull to override all legal deterrents.

Answering my own question:

"U.S. Army says it does not provide hormones or sex-reassignment surgery after Wikileaks convict Bradley Manning says he wants to live as a woman"

Will they really provide that in prison?