Neccessary Excise

Cooper chapter 11 talks about eliminating exise. Cooper claims that software is often "top heavy", "requiring extra work". Therefore by eliminating excise you decrease the amount of cognitive and physical effort when using the software or product. My question is, is there a need for excise in certain situations? When it comes to user interaction, isn't there times where you need that confirmation or alert message? There maybe be information that needs to be relayed to the user before completing a task. For example, I have always appreciated the "Are you sure you want to delete this?" alert message. That has saved me plenty of times, but I do understand that these types of things irritate some. So where is the balance? Or do we need not need a balance? I guess in the end Cooper does imply that excise isn't necessarily bad if the effort to complete the excise task is kept to a minimum. Then, how do we assess the effort? When you are in a rush, any extra click is too much. Your thoughts?