I remember when I was a kid in the 80's seeing some group destroying their televisions and thought they were just plain weird. I saw "Kill Your TV" bumper stickers and thought "those people seem a little nutty". I must admit as time keeps going on and these kinds of schemes keep getting cooked up it seems like a better and better idea.

Yeah, that is just unprofessional behavior regarding the loan/check. It seems that at some point there are likely banking products and services that are legitimately served by a commercial bank with experience in them, or with international presence, or if you are running a large business you need to know that they have the capital to, say, process your payroll. By and large most people are looking for those really basic services -- a checking account, savings account, etc.

I'm a member of Gen X and I'm fine with my credit union. It provides the best service of any financial institution I've ever used, and it does it with zero fees. It has every modern access method that other institutions had. Every other commercial bank I used (both online and also brick+mortar/online) ultimately changed their terms somewhere along the way and started charging me fees to access my own money. I don't care what generation you are, but I know people are sick of getting charged some random monthly fee to access their own money. I've also received the best service, bar none, of any other institution I have ever banked with.

First off, service. I was shopping for an auto loan. I called my credit union, and they were able to set up a loan for the car I wanted that beat the best the dealer could come up with to the point the dealer finance guy didn't even try a sales pitch on me. They were also able to structure the loan in a manner that didn't require me to put any money down and still keep the awesome low rate. The banks I called could barely give me the time of day, or would tell me the rates were on their website. I worked with one person, on the phone, and had his direct line. He would answer the phone or return my messages quickly, and walked me through every step of the process. I met him in person at a member appreciation day, and he remembered me and wanted to see my car!

They have an app. It's not going to win a design award, but honestly, it's a banking app. I need it to pay bills (it does this), allow transfers (yep), scan the occasional check (it does), and check my balances. No problems there.

Things done in person. I needed to set up the account at a branch. I did that because the branch is two minutes from my house. Everything else is done via web, app, or phone call.

Ineffective security measures ... my account uses multi-factor authentication when I access it remotely. They have been 100% on top of it when I had my card number stolen. They work with Google Pay and Android Pay. They issue chip cards.

Limited service offerings -- they offer personal and business accounts. Credit cards. Loans (auto/home/HELOC). Financial services and wealth management. Life insurance. What else do people expect from a financial institution? I had a few bank accounts before I had my credit union account, the only thing missing with the credit union account is that it hasn't grown a new set of fees that the bank hoped I wouldn't notice.

Young consumers who are frustrated with fees charged by larger brick and mortar banks should check out local credit unions. Our account with our local credit union has no fees, online banking, online bill pay, checking, credit cards, loans, insurance, and ATM access. They have physical branches when you need them on rare occasion. In the many years we have been using them, we haven't experienced any outages and have always had access to our money. When we had fraud/stolen card numbers their service was excellent. They also sponsor many community organizations and offer financial literacy classes for high school kids. On top of all that they have member appreciation days with free hot dogs and ice cream, and offer free bulk shredding at certain times of the year. It's backed by the NCUA (like FDIC but for credit unions), so the money is backed just like a "regular" bank.

We use rear door heat exchangers in our data centers, we have found that they work quite well vs. using air conditioning.

Agreed, there should be more transparency on what data is collected, how long it's retained, what it's used for, and the ability to opt out of data collection. That's also the reasoning behind the "contact preference" field mentioned in the OP. This is probably where they are storing the opt-in preferences to stay in compliance with the CAN-SPAM act.

In terms of the "why are they storing such things?", though, this list of stuff isn't exactly earth shattering in terms of what a hotel would store about a customer. It's not like they had DNA, a retinal scan, and a urine sample on file.

Could be a legal requirement for the area the hotel is located in. Some countries are creepier than others.

It's pretty routine information for a hotel to have on file. Imagine you were running a hotel ... what would you want to know about your customers?

• When they are coming. You need to know how many rooms are booked to schedule staff, etc.
• Who they are so you can verify them when they show up (name, address, DOB, etc)
• How to contact them if you need to. For example, a water pipe bursts making the hotel uninhabitable and you need to let them know.
• Passport number would be important for international visitors (and might be required by law)
• Past reservation history allows you to alert them of sales, promotions, discounts for a place they have stayed a lot
• Rewards number and balance is necessary for room upgrades, etc

Our many devices already understand how to play stuff from Amazon. If we want to shell out for this stuff I'd be willing to do it -- we like the MCU movies, and our kids like a lot of Disney stuff. I'd rather that it just work through an app our many devices already have and work fine with. It's kind of a model-view-controller approach to streaming video access -- just plug your content into one of the leaders in the space already, let them worry about the distribution and infrastructure, and get piles of money from licensing.

My Chevy Volt is doing 175 MPG for its lifetime average. My driving is averaging about 85-90% electric. My next vehicle will very likely be a full EV. My power comes from a power portfolio that is pretty clean already and is getting cleaner, plus I opt for paying more for green power on my bill to create demand for renewable sources versus fossil fuels. I live in a climate where two wheeled vehicles don't do well several months out of the year due to snow and ice. Yes, I know there are ways for cyclists and motorcyclists to deal with snow, ice, freezing temperatures and all that -- but most people aren't going to deal with that. Scooters and motorcycles powered by gasoline also sidestep a lot of emissions laws that cars don't, and can pollute quite a bit, even though they consume less fuel. Small engines can be emissions nightmares, especially two stroke engines.

Of course it is ... since it was soldered in place in the last "upgrade" it's 0 (insert meme of guy touching his temple, caption is "There is no demand for upgrades when we solder the stuff in place"). We had a large lab to support and were buying Mac Minis by the pallet. At that scale, spending a couple days swapping bulk RAM and drives to save the cost premium of paying Apple for the privilege was well worth it. It was kind of like shelling peas -- we sat around and pretty much chewed the fat while management was happy we were saving a pile of money.

I'm actually more fixed on the TB3 port being a thing. For a current project I'm working on with external GPUs it's so much easier to deal with the Mac Mini form factor than a laptop or iMac factor. If I could get nearly the same form factor as the Mini the rest of the job is shrugging my shoulders at management and telling them to take it up with Tim Cook when they ask why DIY RAM and disk isn't a thing.

Do you remember when you could buy a Mac Mini with non-soldered RAM, a quad core CPU, and a replaceable disk? Pepperidge Farm remembers. Update the thing already, or kill it. Please. Thunderbolt 3, decent, CPU, non-soldered on RAM/disk and I'm pleased as punch.

Your information is incorrect. I drive a 2014 Volt. It still has the same range as I had at the start of ownership (6K miles) as today (50K miles). By your logic I would be replacing the battery pack. I'm not. Not even close. Chevrolet also provides a 8 year/80K mile warranty on the drivetrain -- including the battery. Would GM offer a warranty that would require two replacements of the battery on average? There are at this point more than 70 EVs at my office from a range of manufacturers. I'm in touch with a lot of that community. No battery replacements. There are longevity tests conducted by Idaho National Labs (a US DOE testing facility) that show the battery of an EV will last hundreds of thousands of miles. A nice summary with backing data for the Volt is presented here Tesla owners have gathered real world data to show 10% degradation at 160K miles There are many other such studies in this vein. Batteries are also to some extent like hard drives. They are sold with extra capacity to allow for failure of cells over the vehicle lifetime. Hard drives and SSDs also have this same capacity with blocks/sectors the user cannot access but are remapped as others fail. So even if a battery drops 10% of its capacity, the range presented may not change. Or in the case of the Volt, a 10% change in capacity would present itself as the loss of a couple of miles of range.

It's remarkably similar to the FUD that traces electric power back to the generation source to criticize EVs, but then assumes gasoline magically appears in underground tanks below the gas pump. No mention of the cost of erecting extraction platforms, transporting crude around the globe, cracking it to make gas/diesel, then putting it in trucks to deliver to the tank. The FUD also assumes the dirtiest coal plant from the era of Charles Dickens is generating the power.

There are plenty of used full electric and plug-in cars on the market now. Plenty of used Volts and Leafs out there, at prices very comparable to other used small sedans. In a few years we will have used Bolts and Model 3s coming into the used market when people trade them in at the 3-5 year mark.

Battery prices continue to drop, but the more I hear the "OMG THE BATTERY IS SOOOOO EXPENSIVE", the more I'm convinced it's ignorance, FUD, or some combination of both. No one says "OMG REPLACING MY ENGINE OR TRANSMISSION WILL COST THOUSANDS OF DOLLARS", they expect the engine or transmission to last the useful lifetime of the car. The battery in an EV is designed to do the exact same thing. There was tons of this when the Prius came out, but the widespread failure of Prius batteries never materialized. Even better, there are now companies who will sell rebuilt / remanufactured batteries at lower cost. Some people even will replace failed battery modules.

EVs also beat the tar out of ICE in terms of operating cost and simplicity. There is "car stuff" that can go wrong -- you smack a curb in an EV and you are going to have to replace stuff. But you don't have an exhaust system, spark plugs, air intakes, emissions controls, multi-speed transmissions, etc. An EV's motor has one spinning part. The transmission is one gear. Brakes largely go unused because of regenerative braking. You don't have to change the oil, and so on and so forth. A friend of mine who has a Leaf had to replace tires and wiper blades, that's it.

I have a Volt I got used, it's fantastic. It's very likely that my next car will be a full on EV. The driving experience is so much better than any of the ICE cars I drove before it. It's only when the battery runs out of range and it switches to hybrid mode am I reminded of the ICE. Driving my wife's van just feels like a step backwards, I need to wait for torque to happen and it makes all this noise, unlike the no noise the Volt makes when in EV mode.