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What Trump’s first 100 days have meant for tech, science, and the future http://ift.tt/2qeb1jL April 29th marks President Trump’s 100th day in office, a "ridiculous standard" that he has promised to surpass nonetheless. Trump had big plans going in: repealing and replacing Obamacare, suspending immigration from "terror-prone regions," building a border wall and making Mexico pay for it. While he’s had a handful of victories, like getting Neil Gorsuch on the Supreme Court, many other plans have collided the courts, Congress, or administrative chaos. Yet it has been an eventful hundred days. We won’t delve into every executive order and diplomatic shift, but the beginning of the Trump administration has had a profound impact on technology, science, and the future course of the planet. Media, politics, and so much else seems to have entered a new era, and it’s a surreal one. Even more than before he took office, Trump permeates the culture: news, television, music, even things that aren’t direct responses to Trump get pulled into his gravitational field. Rollbacks of environmental regulations and aggressive tweeting about North Korea mean we can now worry about two apocalypses at once: nuclear winter and climate change. (The fact that tweets can raise the specter of nuclear war is new, too.) The wall may end up being more of a fence or maybe just a metaphor, but metaphors have power, and hostile rhetoric coupled with aggressive deportations means the future looks more isolated and less connected than ever. Meanwhile, one of the primary drivers of interconnection, the internet, is being divvied up by corporations. Gadget News via The Verge http://ift.tt/oZfQdV April 28, 2017 at 01:07AM
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October 2020
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