okay... then why is it hard to filter this out at the sewage plant? The microbeads are lower in density than water. Which means they should float to the surface in a settling tank or be deposited on the bottom if enmeshed in heavier sewage. Why are they passed through the system if they have a different density?

And consider that settling tanks are used to seperate out a lot of other things. if they're not skimming the microbeads off the surface of the tanks then what else aren't they filtering out?

This sounds like a flaw in the sewage treatment system more than anything.

That said, I have no problem with you banning them. As I said... Meh.

By all means... ban it or don't ban it. It is totally irrelevant from what I can tell.

The only revelation here is that the sewage plants are probably doing a worse job than I thought.

depends on the type of plastic and whether or not a given plastic can be digested by microorganisms.

Microbeads are mostly made out of PE for example which isn't readily biodegradable under many circumstances. However, there are some species of bacteria that can digest it.

The issue is less the beads than what they're made out of and what sort of treatment the water goes through

If the sewage treatment process is letting microbeads in any great quantity into the rivers or ocean then I have to ask what else are we releasing? Because PE has a LOWER density than water, it should float on the surface. Which means in a settling tank, it should get skimmed off the surface. If it isn't getting skimmed off the surface, then what else aren't we skimming off the surface?

If your water treatment system is anything short of a complete joke... how are microbeads even getting through the system at all?

Oh look, an AC judging someone that actually logs in? Shocking.

Do tell us, AC shithead, what is your record?

Oh that's right... you don't have one. You explicitly make it impossible for anyone to determine your contribution to the community.

And my guess is that all you do is what I see above. You just make mindlessly hostile comments to random posts on the site.

Well, thanks for that. We all appreciate your reminder that the internet is full of countless semi evolved primates that communicate entirely in their own flung feces.

Kill yourself.

It is still a fallacy though.

Let me help you understand how to stop fallacies:

X must equal Y because Variable M that does not require under all circumstances that X must equal Y given the presence of Variable M.

So for example, does news corp or the wallstreet journal ALWAYS lie? Obviously not.

What is more, MUST they lie? For example, if we had a computer program that reported on a binary value and it always gave the opposite value to whatever it read. Then you could conclude that variable X was the opposite of whatever that program said. Neither newscorp nor the Wallstreet journal are reliability reporting the opposite of anything.

Therefore it is logically fallacious to say that something they said is a lie because they said it.

See?

Fallacies are about LOGIC. Not you fucking politics.

You can't say anything is automatically bullshit no matter who says it because no one is reliably wrong 100 percent of the time.

You can of course take what they say with a grain of salt. You can choose to ignore them. You can hold any sort of opinion you want.

You cannot say that everything they say is wrong or that any given thing is wrong simply because they said it.

You have to actually wade into the issue and form a discrete opinion of it.

If you can't be bothered to do that, then your opinion is based entirely on your own bias and the value of your opinion is based on the value of your bias. Which in this place is literally nothing.

I can't imagine it is really a big water treatment issue since they have a different density than water and you could separate them with settling tanks and skimmers.

And I don't see it matters for industry really because they'll just go back to using what they were using before which is mostly - sand.

You use this stuff as an abrasive and maybe the microbeads are mildly less abrasive? I don't know... anyway, they'll just replace this with very fine sand.

Thus - Meh.

Its a nothing issue either way.

incumbents win because incumbent parties don't run primaries.

Not at all... there are many issues like all the time and they cut both ways.

You have black people going out to kill white people. You have white people going out to kill black people. You have criminals of some random race going out to kill other criminals of some other random race. You have police killing criminals of a race. You have criminals of a race killing police.

If you actually covered this stuff except when you wanted to support a political agenda, you'd cover it more and you'd cover a more varied spectrum of cases.

The fact that you convienently only find these cases to piggyback on a national story AND only report stories that support that message proves it since any moron that looks at the statistics will see that you can find LOTS of examples of the story going all sorts of other ways.

For example, there was a convict that wall pulled over by a female police officer... he got out of the police car when asked and waited for the female police officer to frisk him. Where upon he turned around quickly and beat the woman to death.

Did you hear about that? Not brutal enough? Would you like me to mix in some rape on top of that because there are other incidents where it went that way. I can also cite incidents where street gangs attacked businesses in their "territory" based on the race of the people that either owned or worked at the business.

Did you hear about that?

So no. You're pushing an agenda.

I'm including the population of the county... apparently only 10 million.
http://quickfacts.census.gov/q...

Doesn't matter. Though I underestimated the number of murders apparently over 500 in the last 12 months:
http://homicide.latimes.com/

Which is apparently low if anything. I see it has gone over 1000 in some years.

There is quite a bit of contradiction though which is AGAIN why people are blending alternative media into their mix. If you include the internet only media sources you tend to get that contradiction.

If you're only reading the online version of traditional media then you're in almost the same place you were before. But we've seen an explosion in interest in alternative media.

It is much harder to bury stories or manipulate the news.

That it works at all is mostly due to much of the baby boom generation still sticking with dead tree media.

Cite what you're talking about and tell me what you're trying to say with that plainly. I am very clear. Be clear.

The success of this sort of thing could cripple the walled garden model. We need a more decentralized software distribution system. Yes, people that are terrible at this sort of thing profit from a walled garden. But it is also a crutch, gives too much power to apple, google, etc, and is apparently a security risk.

potato po-tato.

No they don't. They just tribalistically follow:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

There are statistics that come out all the time:
http://www.gallup.com/poll/157...

The media is generally not trusted. It is just that it is the primary source for nearly all information so they have the ability to start a discussion and frame it. even if they're not trusted, their ability to manipulate the national discussion is quite extensive if they can merely bring choose when they want to bring up a topic and frame it.

Take the whole issue with police brutality. Are the media reports of police brutality valid? Sometimes. But a bigger issue is that they're very selective about what they talk about. Often they are pushing an ideological agenda so they'll talk about a specific case because it supports their position.

In my city, there are about 400 murders a year. That is in a population of about 12 million or so. How many of those incidents get reported by the media? Almost none. How many criminals are fatally killed by police officers? I'm sure there are at least dozens a year... and again... how often do you hear about them? Almost never.

Yet every so often one of these will get reported on, then get picked up by the social activists, and then get spun by the media as being indicative of a pattern of abuse. Now there could be a pattern there but a SINGLE incident does not give you a pattern. You'd need to look at a broader selection of examples and rather than coming to it with preconceptions, you instead would need to form you opinion from the data.

The media almost never does this since they're very narrative driven.

It is sort of as if creationists ran the news because their methodology is identical. They first form an opinion and then they look for what they call an "emblematic" case to promote that opinion. The rolling stone rape story was an example of that. They already knew what they wanted to say but didn't feel comfortable just making an editorial to say that. So instead, they looked for an example that they could use to validate their opinion. They couldn't find one which was sort of funny because they were claiming an epidemic. So after not being able to find an example they just settled for the sketchiest least reliable source they could get and tried to pull off a hoax.

It went disturbingly far before backfiring. But that sort of thing is quite common and most people take media reports with a grain of salt.

I can only speak to what I hear from other people and what reports and statistics I can gather.

My own information shows broad distrust of the media.

What is more, the decline of traditional media and growth of alternative media suggests that traditional media is not trusted.

This does not mean that alternative media is more trustworthy but it is easier to audit given that you can go through many sources on line very quickly where as trying to do the same thing with traditional media is impractical.

As to echo chamber news... can you give me some examples from multiple political factions so I can see what you're talking about?