The people who say the Iraq war isn't a major drag use the past 4 years of growth to justify their claim. To me, this is the typical short sighted analysis that make macroeconomics so confusing to the layman.

The US has been running huge current account deficit, and it's well known that inflation initially provides a growth surge and increases employment. The keyword here is initially, because there's no such thing as a free lunch, and printing massive amounts of money inevitably leads to the type of financial crisis we're beginning to see now. This phenomenon is called the inflation/unemployment trade-off (in a global scale), and is taught in every single economics freshman course out there.

Of course there are other factors that permitted the US to print so much money for so long before any measurable side-effects. It only happened because the USD is the world currency, and that Asian markets bought an enormous quantity of US treasury issues (bills, notes, bonds) during this period. No one in the world in their right mind would bet against the US dollar, so every international banker played along.

While the US analysts are playing this short sighted game and placing the blame on subprime loans and rising food prices (not a joke -- this was published on Yahoo News today), the Chinese have secured 25 year contracts with all major suppliers. The US totally lost track of the big picture, and is going to pay for it.

You're right in saying that these motors can be efficient if well designed. Tesla realised this more than a century ago, when he invented the AC polyphase design that we use to this day (which uses electromagnets to create the magnetic field). The challenge with the permanent magnet motor doesn't concern the proper alignment of the magnetic fields, but the magnets themselves.

Permanent magnets aren't forever permanent. They weaken as you use them to provide work. For example, the motor from your other clip would eventually slow down and stop altogether, and it wouldn't take long if you put a load on its axle.

Unfortunately, natural permanent magnets (lodestones) aren't nearly as magnetic as the commercially produced ones. They're not abundant either.

I'm an electrical engineer and a Ph.D. student of electrical engineering, so I do have a strong background in electromagnetism and power generation and conversion.

My issue with this clip isn't regarding the impossibility to make a motor based on permanent magnets. Your second clip demonstrates this (and I think it's neat). My problem with this clip is that it's advocating a false claim (i.e., a free energy, perpetual motion machine).

(BTW, any device capable of producing more energy than it consumes falls in the perpetual motion category, because you could hook up its output to its input and make it run indefinitely. By definition, efficiency is (output power)/(input power) averaged over a long enough period, so this machine would have over 100% efficiency.)

This is a textbook case of a bogus free energy claim.

It has the inventor without a scientific background, the engineer with no credentials, zero technical information and a clueless reporter talking about magnets.

I glanced at this guy's patent application, and all he describes is a crude, specific way of controlling a motor in order to alternately operate it as a motor and a generator.

The Australian Skeptics is a group dedicated to investigating claims such as this, and they've investigated Lutec (this inventor's company) in 2001. Here's the executive summary: the people at Lutec don't even know what the physical definition of work is, they didn't properly calculate this device's efficiency and are most likely trying to con small investors into wiring money to an account in Singapore: http://www.skeptics.com.au/journal/2001/3_lutec1.pdf

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I love this one! *dead

http://vids.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=vids.individual&videoid=12799820

choggie: Ritter doesn't disagree with you. What he criticizes is the notion that the US should go to war against Iran, because this would have catastrophic consequences.

I could expand the argument, but it's all in the video.

The current video isn't the actual Shipoopi clip from Family Guy, since it has a different soundtrack. *dead

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I say go for it. Videosift has a bias against long videos, and by not upvoting your own submission you've actually increased that bias. If this doesn't go too far, I suggest you requeue monday morning. With the new 2 day deadline, weekend submissions are trickier.

Again, great sift.