Hacker Cinema
Gleaming the Cube
1989 · Film · 106 min
Directed by Graeme Clifford
An Orange County teenager's carefree life of ditching class and skateboarding abandoned pools comes to a screeching halt when someone close to him dies. The cops rule the death a suicide, but the bereaved skater believes he was murdered. It's up to him to solve the case, with a skateboard.
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3 comments on Hacker News
Soda in the US is batshit crazy, and has gotten way worse over recent decades. People will have the equivalent of a couple of candy bars worth of sugar with a lunch (and then do it again for dinner... plus have the equivalent of one or two more candy bars between meals) when they'd probably be grossed out by the idea of having a pile of skittles or something with their burger. But liquify it, and it's fine I guess?
We have free refills (was rare until some time around the late '90s—see the '80s film Gleaming the Cube where there's a sign on a Pizza Hut in a scene near the end of the movie advertising a special on pitchers of soda, which probably seems weird to anyone used to just having their soda constantly topped off, or walking to the fountain and doing it themselves) so it's easy to thoughtlessly sip down three or four glasses of soda with a long meal, and to-go sizes at fast food joints have ballooned in size in the last 20 years or so, like, the medium sizes are often larger than what I'd have classified as a large before.
> Are fast food portions actually larger?
Oh my god, yes.
"Free refills" also didn't become standard until some time in the 90s. In the 80s, a refill cost money and often the cups were smaller to begin with. You'd buy a pitcher (just like with beer) if you wanted a lot at a bit of a discount. You can see this on an ad on a pizza hut in the skater movie Gleaming the Cube, near the end of the film. Now the idea of buying a pitcher of soda makes no sense because everywhere has free refills, but almost none did in the 80s. In the early 90s some places did but it was often just during certain hours (lunch, say) as a draw. It spread from there until it became normal, fast-food joints started letting you fill (and re-fill) your own cup, et c.
In the era of glass bottles and real-sugar soda, we drank a hell of a lot less soda. The era of free refills on sodas not just existing but being expected, and 32-ounce "medium" size soft drinks is quite recent.
Also, I'm unconvinced a small difference in the balance between glucose and fructose is worth treating HFCS as different from beet or cane sugar. Its effect on the price of sugar is a different matter, however.
[EDIT] see the 1989 skate film Gleaming the Cube for an example from a few years before free refills started being advertised fairly frequently, and a solid decade before they became the overwhelming norm: there's a Pizza Hut in it with an advertisement posted on the side of the building for a special on pitchers... of soda, not of beer.