The distinction often is more akin to "promising" and "not promising". Universities, employers, creditors, those looking for a spouse, etc. Everyone does it to some degree. Why can't a country?
Professional Tetris players and people who classify pictures of cats and dogs.
Machine learning is not a mature or robust field. Real world applications are brittle and extremely narrow in scope. The past few years has seen a burst funding and hype, as a result of deep learning advancements, but that will gradually wane as all the low hanging fruit is picked. Many applications that are promising (like self-drive cars and medical classification) will face major regulatory hurdles. It will take a much more radical (and, frankly, unexpected) breakthrough before most humans have to worry.
You are playing a semantics game. Replace disobey with ignore, and the intent is the same.
> you can't be disobeying if you're the boss and decide who gets tried and who doesn't
The United States is a constitutional democracy, not a fascist regime. In the past, presidents have indeed disobeyed, and one was consequently impeached.
There is no human organization that should be free from scrutiny. Actions taken by members of the media and academia have significantly contributed to public distrust, long before Trump entered the political arena. He is simply capitalizing quite effectively on those, and other, sentiments.
If coal is dead, so are millions of humans. It remains a significant source of global energy, especially in developing countries.
We can craft strawmen and knock them down with cherry-picked quotes all day long.
Modify your hosts file to block all porn domains. Here is an extremely popular list on github: https://github.com/StevenBlack/hosts. It can block malware, adware, porn, gambling, and social sites. I personally use it for all of those and have been pleased so far.
Neighborhoods are segregation. Let's all live in a big, happy neighborhood together because segregation is bad.
My point being that you cannot, by definition, eliminate segregation until everyone is made equal in all things. Attempting to do so is fundamentally evil.
What's the big deal with climate change and famine? I am sitting in an air-conditioned room and have a pantry full of food! We as a species have hilariously overblown reactions to perceived threats.
The smug your-problem-aren't-real attitude by the elite is certainly another reason for populism.