Making sense of minus

You’d think, going by the ease with which I tend to bring my balance to zero, I’m an expert on subtraction:

0 = x – x

Alas!

Admittedly the force with which ‘insufficient funds’ makes its presence felt was not enough to make me pause–seek an explanation, which was just a click away from the above familiar identity.  What puzzles me the most, now that I have seen the explanation of difference, is not all the work I need to do to understand the explanation, but the trouble I’m having in formulating a question–a line of inquiry beginning with something I’m at home with–answered in the given explanation.  No wonder some prehistoric oral traditions named their gods KA–a mere question.

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