> s using GEM's vectors there somehow wrong just because it's a pain to deal with relatively boosted frames? No, that's not the issue. "GEM's vectors" still co

> s using GEM's vectors there somehow wrong just because it's a pain to deal with relatively boosted frames? No, that's not the issue. "GEM's vectors" still correspond to invariants--you can re-express them, if you like, as appropriate contractions of the stress-energy tensor or the Einstein tensor. Expressing them as vectors in a carefully chosen coordinate chart is just a convenience, to make the math easier to understand. The same is not true of the "pseudo-tensors" that are used in attempts to define a "total energy of the universe as a whole". Those do not correspond to invariants. Expressing them in a carefully chosen coordinate system is not just a convenience; it's a necessity, because in other coordinate charts they either vanish or you can't even write them down at all. That's the issue. > Brown & York 1993 The term "quasilocal" in the title should be an indicator that this method does not solve the issue I described above for the universe as a whole. It does give an alternate way of making sense of the concept of "gravitational binding energy" for a finite, bound system surrounded by vacuum, or of the idea of treating the mass of a black hole as a form of energy. But the universe as a whole is neither of these things.