Hasta La Gadget!

A comet is headed to Earth, and despite dire warnings from scientists, almost everyone fails to take it seriously. That’s the basic premise of Don’t Look Up, the latest film from Adam McKay which premieres on Netflix today. It balances the blunt social commentary from his most recent Oscar nominated films (The Big Short and Vice), with the comic absurdity from his early hits, like Anchorman and Talladega Nights. The result is somewhat uneven and a bit too long, but it’s also a battlecry against the anti-science, fact-phobic reality we’re living through today.

The comet is an obvious metaphor for climate change, an apocalyptic scenario we’re hurtling towards while governments drag their heels, the fossil fuel industry feigns ignorance and most people go about their lives oblivious about what’s to come. But Don’t Look Up also describes humanity’s bumbling response to the COVID-19 pandemic, a global disaster that’s led to more than five million deaths. 

The film’s title is a mantra used by a conservative president (Meryl Streep) to make her red-capped supporters look down at the ground, and not at the glowing comet in the sky they can easily see in the sky. It’s hard not to be reminded of the politicization of COVID-19, which has led to people denying its existence and demonizing vaccines, all because of something they heard on Fox News or their family’s Facebook group.

After two astronomers (played by a surprisingly nebbish Leonardo DiCaprio and a spunky Jennifer Lawrence) rush to the White House with news about Earth’s impending destruction in six months, they’re forced to wait. Streep’s President Orlean is dealing with a potential scandal around a Supreme Court nominee, obviously that’s more important. By the time they lay out Earth’s impending doom, Orlean would rather wait and do nothing. “What’s this going to cost me? What’s the ask in place?” she says.

As the two scientists try to spread the word, first by leaking the doomsday scenario to the media, and then by becoming media personalities of their own, the film takes a scattershot aim at critiquing our modern society. The great Mark Rylance plays a Jobs-meets-Zuckerberg tech executive, the sort of mogul whose idea of innovation is a phone that’ll constantly monitor you to fix negative emotions. (Feeling down? Bash Life will automatically book a nearby therapy session for you.) Cate Blanchett and Tyler Perry pop up as cable news hosts who can only speak to their audience with faux, upbeat banter—yes, even if that news is about humanity’s imminent destruction.

Netflix

Don’t Look Up sometimes feels like it’s punching down, especially when it’s focusing on the sheer stupidity of President Orlean’s conservative followers. But the film isn’t afraid to criticize everyone, even its scientist leads. Both characters have trouble properly conveying the significance of their discovery. And when DiCaprio’s astronomer finds his media legs, he’s fully a part of the government propaganda machine.

By the time the American government finally decides to do something about the comet — only because it benefits the President, of course — it’s dressed up in patriotic showmanship, as if Michael Bay were directing George W. Bush’s tone deaf 2003 Mission Accomplished speech. I won’t spoil where the movie goes from there, but it’s clearly spoofing Bay’s Armageddon. One war hero and a big rocket is all it takes to stop a planet destroying threat, right?

Netflix

Don’t Look Up isn’t a complete success — the comedy is hit or miss, and it could seriously benefit from a shorter and more focused narrative. But the final act hits with a wallop, at times reenacting scenarios I’ve seen in far too many anxiety dreams. If the world were really ending in a few months, how would you react? What do we owe each other, as a civilization? And what will it take to protect this planet in the face of profit-seeking vampires, who would gladly risk humanity for a few more resources? Adam McKay doesn’t have any answers. But his anger is something we can all understand.

Why we still love the Grinch after more than 60 years.

<img width=”1280″ height=”720″ src=”https://cdn.slashgear.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/Smash-Bros-Sora-1280×720.jpg” class=”webfeedsFeaturedVisual wp-post-image” alt=”” style=”margin: auto;margin-bottom: 5px;max-width: 100%” data-attachment-id=”704041″ data-permalink=”https://www.slashgear.com/the-video-game-stories-that-defined-the-industry-in-2021-24703704/smash-bros-sora/” data-orig-file=”https://cdn.slashgear.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/Smash-Bros-Sora.jpg” data-orig-size=”1440,810″ data-comments-opened=”0″ data-image-meta=”{“aperture”:”0″,”credit”:””,”camera”:””,”caption”:””,”created_timestamp”:”0″,”copyright”:””,”focal_length”:”0″,”iso”:”0″,”shutter_speed”:”0″,”title”:””,”orientation”:”0″}” data-image-title=”Smash Bros Sora” data-image-description=”” data-image-caption=”

We’re nearly a year into the Joe Biden presidency, a presidency the man himself declared would be devoted to combatting climate change. He arrived in office at the start of a critical decade, and the Biden years will play a major role in shaping it.

Read more…

News of the global chip shortage has been so far-reaching this year, it’s become a meme. “I’m sorry I forgot to do the dishes, there’s a global chip shortage.” But as with many online jokes, there’s a kernel of truth to it. The semiconductor chip crisis is real, and it’s had a serious impact on our lives. Cars are more expensive and harder to build. Computer makers are rushing to keep up with an insatiable consumer demand for remote work and school devices. And countless products have been delayed, with release dates being pushed like dominoes throughout 2021 and into the coming years.

While it’s an issue that affects practically everyone, the chip shortage has been particularly painful for gamers. A year after the PlayStation 5’s launch, it’s still practically impossible to order one. (At least, not without paying an exorbitant markup, or following stock bots like a machine.) And PC players itching to upgrade their GPUs, who have already gotten used to dwindling hardware supplies and skyrocketing prices, will have to live with their old video cards a bit longer.

As Forrester Analytics’ Glenn O’Donnell tells Engadget, the issue is mostly a simple supply and demand problem. You can point to several reasons for that: carmakers lowered their hardware orders at the start of the pandemic, with the assumption that consumers wouldn’t be interested in buying new vehicles. It turns out the opposite was true – the overwhelming demand has pushed used car prices up significantly. Chipmakers were also forced to keep up with a rising demand for PCs, game consoles and a wide assortment of gadgets while also dealing with production slowdowns amid COVID lockdowns and other precautions.

Aaron Souppouris/Engadget

“I’d like to say things have improved, but they actually have gotten a little bit worse, and I’m not surprised,” O’Donnell said in a recent interview with Engadget. In April, he argued that the global chip shortage would continue throughout 2022 and into 2023. Now, he’s even more convinced that we won’t see any major relief until then. While future chip fabs from Intel, TSMC and Samsung could boost supplies, it will still take at least two years from when those companies break ground to when they’re up and running. Intel began construction on its two Arizona chip factories in September, and it doesn’t expect to have them operational until 2024.

Basically, get used to chip shortage, as we’ll be suffering through it for a while. In an interview with Nikkei last week, Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger also confirmed that he expects the situation to last until 2023. “COVID disrupted the supply chains, causing it to go negative,” he said during a press event in Malaysia, where the company is investing $7.1 billion in manufacturing and packaging lines. “Demand exploded to 20 percent year-over-year and disrupted supply chains created a very large gap … and that exploding demand has persisted.”

NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang echoed that sentiment in a recent Yahoo Finance interview, saying he doesn’t think there are any “magic bullets” when it comes to dealing with the supply chain. Huang also noted that NVIDIA’s own group of suppliers is multi-sourced and diverse, so the shortage shouldn’t dramatically affect the development of new products. But NVIDIA has also struggled to keep up with gamer demands even before the pandemic. Scalpers and cryptominers usually bought up all of the available stock, leaving average consumers with a limited amount of inventory from stores and resellers.

While Huang expects production to ramp back up in 2023, he also believes the pandemic-driven push towards buying more computers and gaming hardware is here to stay. “I think these are permanent conditions, and we’re going to see new computers being built for quite a while,” he told Yahoo. “People are building home offices, and you could see all of the implications.”

In the US, there’s a glimmer of hope that the Innovation and Competition Act (USICA), which includes $52 billion in funding for the CHIPs for America Act, could spur on more semiconductor production. But after passing the Senate earlier this year, the legislation has stalled in the House of Representatives, where Republican members said they would block USICA. The bill also includes $190 billion towards improving American semiconductor R&D, all in the hopes of becoming more competitive with China, which dramatically boosted its chip production over the last decade.

The manufacturing conflict between the two countries came to a head this year, when the Biden administration reportedly discouraged Intel from ramping up its chip production in China. And, of course, it doesn’t help that the US and China have been engaged in a quiet cyberwar for years. That’s despite the agreement made between President Barack Obama and Chinese President Xi Jinping in 2015, where both leaders said they wouldn’t support or engage in online intellectual property theft. Most recently, the US, UK and security experts blamed China for the massive Microsoft Exchange hack earlier this year, which infiltrated over 30,000 American companies.

Given the many obstacles in the way of fixing the chip supply chain, there’s one thing everyone may have to get used to: Just be prepared to live with your gear longer. O’Donnell says he’s noticed corporate suppliers trying to eke out another year or two before they refresh their business machines. For gamers, there’s surely a healthy backlog of titles for your existing consoles, so don’t stress about not being able to grab that PlayStation 5 or Xbox Series X so much. And despite the droolworthy benchmarks we’ve seen from NVIDIA’s new RTX 30-series cards, you can still play almost every major game on a 20-series GPU (and even many older ones!).

The chip shortage could conceivably stretch out this latest console generation, as well. But really, who knows what the gaming world will look like in five to seven years? The PS5 and Xbox Series X are already plenty fast, with support for 4K, 120FPS and a bit of ray tracing. And if we’ve learned anything from the success of the Switch, it’s that you can do a lot with aging hardware.

By 2026, it may also make more sense to stream games over the cloud, instead of demanding the fastest hardware possible under your TV. But even if the cloud ends up dominating the gaming landscape within the decade, it’ll still rely on servers, displays, accessories and powerful networking hardware to make it all possible. Hopefully by then, suppliers will actually be able to keep up with our insatiable desire for chips.