Imagine the knee-jerk reaction to the next mass shooting being to remove whatever imagined influence (Ozzy Osbourne, Iron maiden, D&D, Magic the Gathering, Marilyn Manson, Call of Duty, etc) from the internet "to prevent it happening again".
Ozzy, Wizards of the Coast, Marilyn, and the Maidens would all like to thank you for your support. Ever since it became unfashionable to accuse them of being Ebul Influencers of the Childrens, their revenues have been dropping.
And yet, this article about alcohol does, in fact, include "secondary death (accident, inattention)" as part and parcel of the alcohol deaths....
Of course it did. It obviously has an agenda. A hopeless agenda, but an agenda.
In no culture in the world has an alcohol ban mattered one wit. That includes Muslim countries and the state of Utah. There's always some "legitimate" way around the prohibition, and if you run over it fast enough, the thin ice only cracks. The evils of Prohibition are well documented in US culture, both the original and the new version. Neither is good public policy.
Calling Marijuana marijuana racism is almost as much fun to listen to as the cultural appropriation assholes - Guessing from your post you are British, no doubt you know about overly white chef Jamie Oliver's apparent cultural appropriation crime with his "Punchy Jerk Rice" https://www.telegraph.co.uk/fo...
Quickly citizens, get rid of all of the spices in your cupboards, the cultural appropriation police are coming!
That bullshit made me more irate than anything out of the SJW crowd. I first heard about it when I watched Neil Degrasse Tyson's conversation with Katy Perry and she commented that she didn't know that cultural appropriation was a thing. She was very sad about it. Unfortunately Dr. Tyson didn't know enough to tell her it's NOT.
Human culture is derived from human culture, and nobody fucking owns it. This has never been more true in the history of the world than since the establishment of the United States and its cultural melting pot, famous the world over for a century at least. The subsequent creation of the Internet has allowed every culture to see and interact with every other culture in real time, a guaranteed recipe for cross-cultural seepage.
My theory is the cultural appropriation police have arisen in response to a decline in organized religion. The busybodies who always want to tell everyone else what to do are still with us. They used to be part of some god-bothering cult. Now they're part of a people-bothering cult. Same shit, different day.
Screw the Moon and Mars...build a Real Space Ship Then go to the Moon or Mars at your leisure.
1. Non-chemical propulsion 2. Nuclear powered 3. Rotating working/living quarters 4. Descent and ascent vehicles 5. Completely closed, long term life support 6. Magnetic Shielding against solar and other radiation 7. Whatever else is necessary so that it can just hang out in orbit and then be driven somewhere when you want.
I wouldn't insist on non-chemical propulsion. Other than that, it sounds exactly like the research NASA should be doing and funding, rather than the ridiculously useless Lunar Orbital Platform-Gateway. And by "research", I mean "specify, design, engineer, build, launch, try it out," not just produce a pile of paper.
First I'd read all the details for the latest version. I tend to agree with the criticisms. What a ridiculous boondoggle. This smells like Boeing and their terror of anything new. It's like somebody asked the question, "What can we build successfully?" and the answer was, "Something we've built before," and the response was, "OK, let's do that."
And look at all those timelines, all of which are completely fictional, and everyone knows it. That must be really demotivating, knowing you're going to spend the next 2 years "working" on something (producing exclusively paper, not actually bending metal), only to have it cancelled by the next administration. Congress's excuses for funneling money to the military-industrial complex via NASA are starting to wear transparently thin.
Another big thing that needs to be eliminated, the blatant gerrymanders and the gerrymander machine.... Behold the fruit of labor of evil republican hands.
That's a little disingenuous. Democrats have also gerrymandered districts. They're just not as good at it, and haven't done it as recently since Republicans worked very very hard to be certain they were in power in state legislatures when the last two censuses happened and it was redistricting time. Even when their handiwork is struck down by the courts (rare, given the preponderance of Republican judges, but it happens), they still benefit from it for at least an election cycle, since such cases take years in the courts.
I want to go much much further. I want to abolish Federal Congressional districts. Instead, all House representatives should be elected at large in a state, using one of the preference voting systems. This would result in more actual representation, since gerrymandering is impossible, and it's appropriate because at the Federal level, where I live is relatively unimportant. Having a Representative tied to a district results in quite a lot of harm, and a disproportionate amount of power for special interests. The general welfare gets swamped when the local special interest can unseat their pet Representative.
Won't happen, because the people with the job would have to put their job in jeopardy.
Putin keeps getting elected because he remains popular in Russia, while the best the opposition can put forward are convicted felons. Those convictions could be legit or purely political, but your party is weak-assed-weak if that's the best you can put forward.
Opponents to Putin in Russia are 'weak-assed weak', in purely physical terms. No reasonable candidate will run against him because they know with absolute certainty that they're likely to turn up dead. Only a convicted felon harbors the belief that he's just as good at violence as Putin's thugs.
The office of the President of Russia was created in 1991 with a constitutional amendment. It began with a four year term. Boris Yeltsin was the first, serving two terms through the end of 1999. Putin took office in 2000 and served two full 4 year terms. Being term limited to 2 consecutive terms, Putin let Dmitry Medvedev be president from 2008 to 2012. During his term, the constitution was amended to change the term of the president to 6 years. Putin took back the presidency in 2012. His second term began this year and expires in 2024, at which point Putin will be 72 years old.
At that point, the real fun begins. Will Putin allow someone else to become president as scheduled or will he change the rules again in the next 6 years? Personally I think he will leave office as scheduled, allow another puppet to be elected, then have that puppet resign in 2 years, have the Chairman call a special election, and retake the office for two more terms or until his death. The 2 year break will satisfy the constitutional requirement for non-consecutive terms, while not allowing Putin's control to really lapse much.
Vladimir Putin is essentially Russian President for life, regardless of what Russians really think of him. Given the serious decline in free oil money, it's likely that they don't like him as well as they once did, but it doesn't matter.
Miami averages a couple meters above Sealevel. Oceans aren't going to rise three meters+ in 15 years. Not even with worst-case sealevel rise. Hell, we won't see that much sealevel rise this century, much less in the next 15 years (again, worst case).
A good deal of Miami Beach is below storm surge levels last seen in 1984. Parts of it are below ordinary daily high tide. What the NOAA calls technically "mean higher high water". This being Slashdot, we should use the technical term. It's the higher of the two high tides per day, colloquially understood as "high tide". There's a road in Miami Beach that's literally built below the daily high tide mark. It floods every day when the tide comes in.
If you have such bullets flying at you, we call you "military engineers."
No we don't. We call you a combat engineer. Military engineers work on military projects, but are not in combat, and do not perform combat-specific duties.
There have been recent advances in traffic engineering too. Ever see a diverging diamond interchange?
Yes. There are at least two of them on I-70, one over, one under. The one over made a great deal of sense. It serves a mall, with the majority of traffic being required to cross the highway after exiting. The other one seems a little gratuitous. The crossroad it was constructed for was fairly low-traffic to begin with, and that hasn't changed appreciably.
Yes, but which one? man has created thousands of gods over the span of history.
I bet you can't even name 200.
Challenge accepted.
Continued from previous post. Slashdot's filter is racist.
So racist it's blocking even an additional list of ten names. So have a fucking Wikipedia link instead. There's more than 200 in the Hindu pantheon alone, nevermind the ancient Egyptian pantheon, Norse pantheon, Roman and Greek pantheons, Mayan pantheon, not to mention the DC and Marvel pantheons.
The list of 200 would have had more impact... Fucking filters. My karma is Excellent, assholes. I should be exempt.
I bought a cheap 4K TV with the intent of using it as a monitor. Unfortunately, it has a whopping 250 ms of input lag on every input including broadcast TV. I had to dial the delay on the audio all the way up (to 200 ms) and it still has the audio running just a shade ahead of the video.
I also have a cheap one. I found it would behave much better if I turned off ALL native picture processing. Fortunately the firmware in mine had an option for that. You might see if yours does. The native processing algorithms do uselessly stupid things to a computer signal anyway.
And company loyalty went out the door well over a decade ago.
Going for an understatement award? Company loyalty went out the door in the 1970s, some 40 years ago. It happened to my father's generation.
I get on average 4 calls a week from some heavily accented person from ComTechSysEng.com firm, trying to press me into wage discussions right off the bat, and would I commit to them without even knowing the position.
Those are the easiest to get rid of. I just demand triple the prevailing wage for the region the job is in. They stop bothering me after that.
This is very clearly a case of a worker's market. HR and others have been used to it being an employer's market, for years.
Time to step up to the new reality.
Hardly. Time for the next "economic downturn". I give it 17 months. I expect the next downturn to come just after Trump is inaugurated for the second time, though it will be happening largely independently of Trump. It will happen precisely because "it's a worker's market" and that can not stand. After raking in a few quarters of record profits, it will be time to lay off tens of thousands, to put the fear of God back into the masses. Real wages have just started creeping up, and that's intolerable.
Why doesn't anyone complain about what Congress gets paid and the benefits? Talk about royalty!
You must be new here. Every single time the issue of healthcare comes up, somebody points out that the nation would be far better off if Congress was required by law to have the median health care of the nation.
Queue people who disagree with me... they of course cannot have any valid thoughts by definition (c'mon, they disagree with me - with me!); they must be idiots or victims of brainwashing.
By every measure, there are a great many more idiots than there are people like me. So... yeah, that sounds about right.
It turns out that those jobs pay reasonably well and a plumber who gains sufficient experience and starts his or her own business would not have much trouble netting six figures. But that is seen as an "undesirable" occupation.
It is an undesirable job. I do my own plumbing, because I'm a cheap bastard, and I wouldn't want to fish the things I've fished out of the shower drain for anyone else, six figures or not.
Some of the skilled trades are less icky than plumbing, but a great many of them are doomed to being marginalized because the Internet can tell you everything you need to know. I fixed my dryer myself last week. The Internet told me where to find the circuit diagram, told me what to check first, and let me order the replacement parts I needed. The hour of my time it took would have cost me $100 or more if I'd paid someone else to do it, and sorry, but I don't get paid well enough to pay someone else that well. Worse, when I did pay someone else, they failed to fix my refrigerator anyway.
Maybe there's a shortage of welders, but plumbers and handymen, not so much.
There most definitely was a capitalist revolution. A whole series of them. They're what unseated the nobility as the sole holders of power the world over. It started by making it possible to buy your way into the nobility. Ultimately it dismantled the nobility. The Barons' War attempting to enforce the Magna Carta is acknowledged as the first capitalist revolution in England, and make no mistake, it was a capitalist revolutionary war, started, pursued, and funded by a bunch of wealthy landowners who didn't like paying feudal taxes to the Crown. Capitalism didn't have a name yet, but the shift from serfs to paid labor was happening right then. The economic system in the 16th century was morphing into what has been retroactively labeled "agrarian capitalism."
...dear ignorant socialist.
Your snide condescension is noted. Too bad you're even more ignorant.
The reason some people have influence over government is not that they are wealthy, its because some people in government are for sale.
The solution to that is not to create more government, you fucking retards.
The bigger a society gets, the bigger its government needs to get. Capitalism needs governing. If it's ungoverned, it devolves into feudalism at the drop of a hat. One rich nobleman and everybody in the vicinity has to do what he says.
The US federal government definitely is not big enough because it's not big enough to take on and BEAT massive cartels like Comcast/Spectrum/AT&T. Dealing with giant corporations requires a similarly giant government. There's no other way to bring enough hands and eyes and brains to bear. If they out-lawyer you, you lose. I don't want my government to lose to these assholes.
You can have your small federal government if and only if you enforce the Sherman Antitrust Act with vicious thoroughness. Any company starts to even smell too big to fail, bam, government breaks it up. Any company that big is a failure of government, because government's job is to keep things running, and monopolies and cartels gum up the works.
Even after you enforce antitrust to the full extent of the law, you will still need a fairly large government. It is guaranteed to be larger now than it ever has been in the past, because there are more people now than there ever were in the past. Automation has reduced the need of government to scale up along with the population quite so closely, but it has not eliminated the need to scale up. That's because government only works if it employs humans paying attention. Human attention can only be spread so thin, and computers can't pay attention. Not yet, anyway. So government has to be bigger.
Slashdot Mirror
Imagine the knee-jerk reaction to the next mass shooting being to remove whatever imagined influence (Ozzy Osbourne, Iron maiden, D&D, Magic the Gathering, Marilyn Manson, Call of Duty, etc) from the internet "to prevent it happening again".
Ozzy, Wizards of the Coast, Marilyn, and the Maidens would all like to thank you for your support. Ever since it became unfashionable to accuse them of being Ebul Influencers of the Childrens, their revenues have been dropping.
I personally barely know who Alex Jones is and have never watched/read/listened to him (I'm not even sure what his preferred medium is)
Radio, actually. He also releases video of himself doing his radio show, but his principle medium is radio.
He is the professional wrestling commentator of the right wing. Everything he says is fake and scripted and he knows it and he's fine with it.
Any time one tries for office they instantly become evil.
It's not instant. It usually only happens after they start taking RNC money.
This is exactly why Usenet and IRC are — and always have been — a better alternative.
You forgot the first rule of Usenet again...
Usenet was shut down 100 years ago! IRC is a myth! Nothing to see here!
*kicks mi under the table*
And yet, this article about alcohol does, in fact, include "secondary death (accident, inattention)" as part and parcel of the alcohol deaths....
Of course it did. It obviously has an agenda. A hopeless agenda, but an agenda.
In no culture in the world has an alcohol ban mattered one wit. That includes Muslim countries and the state of Utah. There's always some "legitimate" way around the prohibition, and if you run over it fast enough, the thin ice only cracks. The evils of Prohibition are well documented in US culture, both the original and the new version. Neither is good public policy.
Calling Marijuana marijuana racism is almost as much fun to listen to as the cultural appropriation assholes - Guessing from your post you are British, no doubt you know about overly white chef Jamie Oliver's apparent cultural appropriation crime with his "Punchy Jerk Rice" https://www.telegraph.co.uk/fo...
Quickly citizens, get rid of all of the spices in your cupboards, the cultural appropriation police are coming!
That bullshit made me more irate than anything out of the SJW crowd. I first heard about it when I watched Neil Degrasse Tyson's conversation with Katy Perry and she commented that she didn't know that cultural appropriation was a thing. She was very sad about it. Unfortunately Dr. Tyson didn't know enough to tell her it's NOT.
Human culture is derived from human culture, and nobody fucking owns it. This has never been more true in the history of the world than since the establishment of the United States and its cultural melting pot, famous the world over for a century at least. The subsequent creation of the Internet has allowed every culture to see and interact with every other culture in real time, a guaranteed recipe for cross-cultural seepage.
My theory is the cultural appropriation police have arisen in response to a decline in organized religion. The busybodies who always want to tell everyone else what to do are still with us. They used to be part of some god-bothering cult. Now they're part of a people-bothering cult. Same shit, different day.
So adapting to our environment would be burning 4000 calories a day just sitting around.
It's called speed. Methamphetamine.
Screw the Moon and Mars...build a Real Space Ship
Then go to the Moon or Mars at your leisure.
1. Non-chemical propulsion
2. Nuclear powered
3. Rotating working/living quarters
4. Descent and ascent vehicles
5. Completely closed, long term life support
6. Magnetic Shielding against solar and other radiation
7. Whatever else is necessary so that it can just hang out in orbit and then be driven somewhere when you want.
I wouldn't insist on non-chemical propulsion. Other than that, it sounds exactly like the research NASA should be doing and funding, rather than the ridiculously useless Lunar Orbital Platform-Gateway. And by "research", I mean "specify, design, engineer, build, launch, try it out," not just produce a pile of paper.
Wikipedia article on the Lunar Orbital Platform: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [Do check out #Critisisms section]
First I'd read all the details for the latest version. I tend to agree with the criticisms. What a ridiculous boondoggle. This smells like Boeing and their terror of anything new. It's like somebody asked the question, "What can we build successfully?" and the answer was, "Something we've built before," and the response was, "OK, let's do that."
And look at all those timelines, all of which are completely fictional, and everyone knows it. That must be really demotivating, knowing you're going to spend the next 2 years "working" on something (producing exclusively paper, not actually bending metal), only to have it cancelled by the next administration. Congress's excuses for funneling money to the military-industrial complex via NASA are starting to wear transparently thin.
Another big thing that needs to be eliminated, the blatant gerrymanders and the gerrymander machine. ... Behold the fruit of labor of evil republican hands.
That's a little disingenuous. Democrats have also gerrymandered districts. They're just not as good at it, and haven't done it as recently since Republicans worked very very hard to be certain they were in power in state legislatures when the last two censuses happened and it was redistricting time. Even when their handiwork is struck down by the courts (rare, given the preponderance of Republican judges, but it happens), they still benefit from it for at least an election cycle, since such cases take years in the courts.
I want to go much much further. I want to abolish Federal Congressional districts. Instead, all House representatives should be elected at large in a state, using one of the preference voting systems. This would result in more actual representation, since gerrymandering is impossible, and it's appropriate because at the Federal level, where I live is relatively unimportant. Having a Representative tied to a district results in quite a lot of harm, and a disproportionate amount of power for special interests. The general welfare gets swamped when the local special interest can unseat their pet Representative.
Won't happen, because the people with the job would have to put their job in jeopardy.
Putin keeps getting elected because he remains popular in Russia, while the best the opposition can put forward are convicted felons. Those convictions could be legit or purely political, but your party is weak-assed-weak if that's the best you can put forward.
Opponents to Putin in Russia are 'weak-assed weak', in purely physical terms. No reasonable candidate will run against him because they know with absolute certainty that they're likely to turn up dead. Only a convicted felon harbors the belief that he's just as good at violence as Putin's thugs.
The office of the President of Russia was created in 1991 with a constitutional amendment. It began with a four year term. Boris Yeltsin was the first, serving two terms through the end of 1999. Putin took office in 2000 and served two full 4 year terms. Being term limited to 2 consecutive terms, Putin let Dmitry Medvedev be president from 2008 to 2012. During his term, the constitution was amended to change the term of the president to 6 years. Putin took back the presidency in 2012. His second term began this year and expires in 2024, at which point Putin will be 72 years old.
At that point, the real fun begins. Will Putin allow someone else to become president as scheduled or will he change the rules again in the next 6 years? Personally I think he will leave office as scheduled, allow another puppet to be elected, then have that puppet resign in 2 years, have the Chairman call a special election, and retake the office for two more terms or until his death. The 2 year break will satisfy the constitutional requirement for non-consecutive terms, while not allowing Putin's control to really lapse much.
Vladimir Putin is essentially Russian President for life, regardless of what Russians really think of him. Given the serious decline in free oil money, it's likely that they don't like him as well as they once did, but it doesn't matter.
Miami averages a couple meters above Sealevel. Oceans aren't going to rise three meters+ in 15 years. Not even with worst-case sealevel rise. Hell, we won't see that much sealevel rise this century, much less in the next 15 years (again, worst case).
A good deal of Miami Beach is below storm surge levels last seen in 1984. Parts of it are below ordinary daily high tide. What the NOAA calls technically "mean higher high water". This being Slashdot, we should use the technical term. It's the higher of the two high tides per day, colloquially understood as "high tide". There's a road in Miami Beach that's literally built below the daily high tide mark. It floods every day when the tide comes in.
If you have such bullets flying at you, we call you "military engineers."
No we don't. We call you a combat engineer. Military engineers work on military projects, but are not in combat, and do not perform combat-specific duties.
There have been recent advances in traffic engineering too. Ever see a diverging diamond interchange?
Yes. There are at least two of them on I-70, one over, one under. The one over made a great deal of sense. It serves a mall, with the majority of traffic being required to cross the highway after exiting. The other one seems a little gratuitous. The crossroad it was constructed for was fairly low-traffic to begin with, and that hasn't changed appreciably.
Yes, but which one? man has created thousands of gods over the span of history.
I bet you can't even name 200.
Challenge accepted.
Continued from previous post. Slashdot's filter is racist.
So racist it's blocking even an additional list of ten names. So have a fucking Wikipedia link instead. There's more than 200 in the Hindu pantheon alone, nevermind the ancient Egyptian pantheon, Norse pantheon, Roman and Greek pantheons, Mayan pantheon, not to mention the DC and Marvel pantheons.
The list of 200 would have had more impact... Fucking filters. My karma is Excellent, assholes. I should be exempt.
Yes, but which one? man has created thousands of gods over the span of history.
I bet you can't even name 200.
Challenge accepted.
God
Jehovah
JHVH
Allah
Aakash
Aditi
Agni
Anila
Annapurna Devi Mata
Anumati
Anuradha
Ap
Apam Napat
Aranyani
Aravan
Ardhanari
Ardra
Arjuna
Aruna
Arundhati
Aryaman
Ashapura-Mata no Madh
Asura
Asvayujau
Aswiniis
Ayyappan
Ayyanar
Ayya Vaikundar
Bagalamukhi
Bahuchara Mata
Balarama
Bhadra
Bhadrakali
Bhaga
Bhairava
Bhairavi
Bharani
Bharati
Bhavani
Bhishma
"Filter error: That's an awful long string of letters there." Slashdot's filter is racist. Continued in next post.
I bought a cheap 4K TV with the intent of using it as a monitor. Unfortunately, it has a whopping 250 ms of input lag on every input including broadcast TV. I had to dial the delay on the audio all the way up (to 200 ms) and it still has the audio running just a shade ahead of the video.
I also have a cheap one. I found it would behave much better if I turned off ALL native picture processing. Fortunately the firmware in mine had an option for that. You might see if yours does. The native processing algorithms do uselessly stupid things to a computer signal anyway.
And company loyalty went out the door well over a decade ago.
Going for an understatement award? Company loyalty went out the door in the 1970s, some 40 years ago. It happened to my father's generation.
I get on average 4 calls a week from some heavily accented person from ComTechSysEng.com firm, trying to press me into wage discussions right off the bat, and would I commit to them without even knowing the position.
Those are the easiest to get rid of. I just demand triple the prevailing wage for the region the job is in. They stop bothering me after that.
This is very clearly a case of a worker's market. HR and others have been used to it being an employer's market, for years.
Time to step up to the new reality.
Hardly. Time for the next "economic downturn". I give it 17 months. I expect the next downturn to come just after Trump is inaugurated for the second time, though it will be happening largely independently of Trump. It will happen precisely because "it's a worker's market" and that can not stand. After raking in a few quarters of record profits, it will be time to lay off tens of thousands, to put the fear of God back into the masses. Real wages have just started creeping up, and that's intolerable.
Student convicted and expelled and blacklisted for being an ebul hax0r after unplugging one of them in 3... 2.... 1....
Why doesn't anyone complain about what Congress gets paid and the benefits? Talk about royalty!
You must be new here. Every single time the issue of healthcare comes up, somebody points out that the nation would be far better off if Congress was required by law to have the median health care of the nation.
But guess who passes laws...
Queue people who disagree with me ... they of course cannot have any valid thoughts by definition (c'mon, they disagree with me - with me!); they must be idiots or victims of brainwashing.
By every measure, there are a great many more idiots than there are people like me. So... yeah, that sounds about right.
It turns out that those jobs pay reasonably well and a plumber who gains sufficient experience and starts his or her own business would not have much trouble netting six figures. But that is seen as an "undesirable" occupation.
It is an undesirable job. I do my own plumbing, because I'm a cheap bastard, and I wouldn't want to fish the things I've fished out of the shower drain for anyone else, six figures or not.
Some of the skilled trades are less icky than plumbing, but a great many of them are doomed to being marginalized because the Internet can tell you everything you need to know. I fixed my dryer myself last week. The Internet told me where to find the circuit diagram, told me what to check first, and let me order the replacement parts I needed. The hour of my time it took would have cost me $100 or more if I'd paid someone else to do it, and sorry, but I don't get paid well enough to pay someone else that well. Worse, when I did pay someone else, they failed to fix my refrigerator anyway.
Maybe there's a shortage of welders, but plumbers and handymen, not so much.
There was no "capitalist revolution"...
King John would beg to differ.
There most definitely was a capitalist revolution. A whole series of them. They're what unseated the nobility as the sole holders of power the world over. It started by making it possible to buy your way into the nobility. Ultimately it dismantled the nobility. The Barons' War attempting to enforce the Magna Carta is acknowledged as the first capitalist revolution in England, and make no mistake, it was a capitalist revolutionary war, started, pursued, and funded by a bunch of wealthy landowners who didn't like paying feudal taxes to the Crown. Capitalism didn't have a name yet, but the shift from serfs to paid labor was happening right then. The economic system in the 16th century was morphing into what has been retroactively labeled "agrarian capitalism."
...dear ignorant socialist.
Your snide condescension is noted. Too bad you're even more ignorant.
The reason some people have influence over government is not that they are wealthy, its because some people in government are for sale.
The solution to that is not to create more government, you fucking retards.
The bigger a society gets, the bigger its government needs to get. Capitalism needs governing. If it's ungoverned, it devolves into feudalism at the drop of a hat. One rich nobleman and everybody in the vicinity has to do what he says.
The US federal government definitely is not big enough because it's not big enough to take on and BEAT massive cartels like Comcast/Spectrum/AT&T. Dealing with giant corporations requires a similarly giant government. There's no other way to bring enough hands and eyes and brains to bear. If they out-lawyer you, you lose. I don't want my government to lose to these assholes.
You can have your small federal government if and only if you enforce the Sherman Antitrust Act with vicious thoroughness. Any company starts to even smell too big to fail, bam, government breaks it up. Any company that big is a failure of government, because government's job is to keep things running, and monopolies and cartels gum up the works.
Even after you enforce antitrust to the full extent of the law, you will still need a fairly large government. It is guaranteed to be larger now than it ever has been in the past, because there are more people now than there ever were in the past. Automation has reduced the need of government to scale up along with the population quite so closely, but it has not eliminated the need to scale up. That's because government only works if it employs humans paying attention. Human attention can only be spread so thin, and computers can't pay attention. Not yet, anyway. So government has to be bigger.