The directors, Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, track the young perpetual-motion machine through his small Belgian city, where he pedals, runs, scampers, dives, and climbs past all clutches, and, when cornered, fights with an animal ferocity.

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Telecoms were going to carry workers along the information superhighway to the land of effortless wealth, and dotcoms promised to turn the stock market into a sort of perpetual-motion money-making machine at least until the Y2K bug brought the entire world to a crashing halt.

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This was the recently popular idea that a market leader can increase sales faster than it accumulates expenses, thus creating a turbocharged, perpetual-motion profit machine at least until the U.S. Justice Department decides to break it up.

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This creates a sort of government staffing perpetual motion machine, with agencies adding more and more headcount just to satisfy the demands of other government agencies.

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