army1987 comments on Ask an experimental physicist - Less Wrong
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If you're not thinking of moving a lot of stuff at once, every time you pull a piece of the stuff back off the magnet where it was before you're returning energy back to the system, so the energy needn't eventually be exhausted. (Though I guess it still eventually be if the system is at a non-zero temperature, because in each cycle some of the energy could be wasted as heat.)