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Thieves Use Vacuum To Siphon Cash From Safes
Tootech writes "A gang of thieves armed with a powerful vacuum cleaner that sucks cash from supermarket safes has struck for the fifteenth time in France. The burglars broke into their latest store near Paris and drilled a hole in the pneumatic tube that siphons money from the checkout to the strong-room. They then sucked rolls of cash totaling £60,000 from the safe without even having to break its lock. Police said the gang — dubbed the Vacuum Burglars — always raid Monoprix supermarkets and have hit 15 of the stores branches around Paris in the past four years. A spokesman added: 'They spotted a weakness in the company's security system and have been exploiting it ever since.'"
Wouldn't a vacuum cleaner that size be really loud?
One of our competitors trademarked the term "hypothesis". From now on, we will call them "boneheaded ideas".
It goes back even more, to the 1960s or 1970s, in the "Casino" episode of Mission: Impossible (the real one, the good one, not that crap with the self-aggrandizing Tom Cruise). They drilled into a vault and ran a vacuum to suck out all the money.
I dont remember that one, but I do remember the one where they drilled under a vault of gold, ran up a heating coil, melted the gold and had it drop out the bottom, and put it back into classic bar molds. Then they ran up a spraypaint can and repainted the vault so it wasn't obvious how they got the gold.
The scaling is not linear. As a company gets bigger they do make more money but not as much more as it costs to run things.
That's a problem in general with all sorts of designs that need to scale. Once you get past a certain point you run into all sorts of organizational and operational issues that are difficult to solve.
In other words, it's much harder to maintain a huge successful business than a small successful one. Think of it as a King of the Hill game.