Seaphyre

Oh look! Everyone in these comments was way off. They dredged some sand and dragged it off - after days, not weeks.

I now wonder how regularly Gell-Mann Amnesia occurs for people on HN, really.

It's incredibly common in Europe as well, yes, but usually the numbers just about work out with some no-shows and reshuffling people across classes.

Also, the ones they do bump off are the standbys and reduced fare, which is why you don't often hear about fully paying passengers being forced to take another flight - and in any case, if they're still over capacity, the promises of free upgrades and money mostly result in enough volunteers to prevent that from happening.

I'm not sure about any differences in US regulations vs EU regulations for this issue though.

The actual offense is making handwavy statements like 'we're drugging kids for not wanting to concentrate on things they're not interested in'. ADHD is not as simple as that. And for people affected by it, even interesting things are often physically impossible to concentrate on - it's incredibly frustrating and a debilitating condition to live with without medication (depending on severity, of course). A different environment wouldn't solve the problem.

Aside from all that, I agree that forcing everyone to conform to the narrow range of 'normal' in general is less than ideal, but since this is the way current society is structured down to its very basis, the idealistic idea of turning that on its head is probably not very helpful to those presently impacted by it.