Now it's there, now it's not.

Maybe we are talking semantics here. I didn’t say the money was gone forever, it could come back someday and it could come back, maybe a hundredfold. I don’t quite track this money in your example, but on the day the stock went down, the guy I bought it from has just as much money as he did they day before, but on that day I am fifty dollars poorer, so that fifty dollars has ceased to exist. The next day the stock may rise by fifty bucks and I will be fifty bucks richer. If you take a snapshot of the money in the stock market on any given day it will always have a different amount of money. Since the stock market is a big part of our economy whenever there is a crash that money just disappears.

Currency goes up and down too, as you acknowledge. A lot of people think the federal reserve is the root of all evil, but then a lot of people believe almost anything.

There two paragraphs about money and my eyes are beginning to glaze over and I am not sure what I am talking about.

Now matter and energy are always the same, there is exactly as much now as there was yesterday, and at the first instant of the big bang and will be when we are in the big rip, which will be forever. Maybe fifty years ago it was decided that this is the way it is, and every now and then some experiment seems to indicate maybe it isn’t so, and the scientific world is shook up like the math world is when somebody tries to divide by zero, but then it turns out it isn’t. Another thing the scientific establishment is absolutely sure of is that the laws of he universe have ever been so, and will ever be, though I have to wonder how can they know that.

I’ve been reading a couple books lately, one is called Room 302 about the County courthouse at 26th and California, and the other is called Through the Eye of the Needle, about what wealth meant to the early Christians as they were just emerging from the crumbling Roman Empire, but it’s been a busy day and I’ll see if I can get to them tomorrow.