Where did you get that "probably"? I suspect from a lower orifice. The private sector has advanced the art of money creation such that they create at least an order of magnitude more money than governments.

Banks are fully hedged. When Goldman Sachs stood to lose a few billions because AIG was the victim of a groupthink market panic so they couldn't roll over their loans, the Fed stepped in to reimburse Goldman Sachs. And AIG is still around, I see their upbeat commercials on TV all the time. So who really lost money? Money was created. The private sector creates tens, or hundreds, of trillions of dollars a year.

Are you sure that Apple suffered a loss in this case? I really doubt they were charged back. The companies are all insured, and the insurers reinsure to hedge. Basically money is created to cover the losses. Shh though, don't tell the Quantity Theory of Money people, their heads will explode.

It should be the same for shoplifting. Why kill someone like Michael Brown for some cigars? Insure the loss and reinsure the insurer so they're hedged. Money is created to cover the loss, no taxes needed.

Use zero-cost funding through the Fed to give Brown a basic income so he doesn't have to steal.

I'm sure Mastercard's insured. I bet no one loses money. The private sector creates money out of the hot air they use to make promises to themselves.

The companies are hedged, I bet. Insured. I bet no one loses any money. The insurance companies reinsure and profit no matter what happens.

Why even prosecute shoplifters? Physical stores should get the same kind of insurance.

Michael Brown should have been let off, not even chased. No one loses money because the finance industry creates money out of thin air to cover all losses.

Couldn't sit through them, couldn't skip them. Is this what science has come to? "Newton's laws ... brought to you by Fig Newtons!" Why is all the money in the hands of the private sector, so they have to annoy you by forcing you to watch a full 30-second ad? If their product was really good wouldn't word-of-mouth suffice?

The universe seems to be speeding up its expansion. Doesn't that violate every conservation law?

"When somebody sounds like a total fucking crackpot, they almost always are."

Aristarchus of Samos sounded like a total fucking crackpot, and if you had called him out your prediction would have been right - for a couple millennia.

What if instead of taking your attitude, the Greeks had devoted their energy to developing better sensors to test Aristarchus's claims about the parallax motion of the stars? Instead of sitting around calling him a crackpot, we could have had an accepted heliocentric model of the solar system some 1800 years before Copernicus.

Why the fetishistic obsession with balance? Isn't anti-symmetry the reason we exist at all?

Laws of conservation are derived from Thermodynamics which makes very limiting assumptions.

Violations of conservation laws are empirically measured: Dark Energy, for example.

I just saw this article on today's front page:

http://science.slashdot.org/st...

The EM drive is controversial in that it appears to violate conventional physics and the law of conservation of momentum; the engine, invented by British scientist Roger Sawyer, converts electric power to thrust without the need for any propellant by bouncing microwaves within a closed container. So, with no expulsion of propellant, thereâ(TM)s nothing to balance the change in the spacecraftâ(TM)s momentum during acceleration.

Hey, it was Purge day.

Bacteria? Don't they keep finding it on Mars craft and such?

They should have shipped the Kansas state government up there to monitor the whole thing, make sure the computers weren't lazing around in the sunshine.