My rates went down slightly without switching vendors, which is rare. Based on the article summary, I'm guessing it is because my family's newest vehicle is a 2014, so the costs of panels and such, while not cheap, has not risen like newer cars. It might even have been offset by depreciation of the vehicle value (since they can always just say its totaled).
My oldest is a 2005 which I only have liability and uninsured motorist coverage on anyway, so body repair costs on that one aren't a significant factor in its costs, but the 2014 is most of my bill.

CACM has usually been paid for out of membership fees to ACM (which I've been paying for years, because I actually find CACM and Queue interesting and thus worth funding). Presumably it will continue to be paid for the same way. There is a chance that enough folks will cancel their membership and read it for free that it will be costly for ACM. There's also a chance that enough folks will notice ACM and decide it is useful that they gain members. I wish them well and hope for the later, but in today's world I expect the former is more likely.

I'm wondering if we have reached the point (or will reach a point) where vendors selling to Backblaze and others that post these kinds of numbers are incentivized that if they do any sort of production binning they ship the best stuff from a forward reliability indicator prospective regardless of how its labeled to them.

Since that's beyond the free threshold, I assume you've been paying for the data storage. If you want to make them hurt a little, offer to some lawyer to be lead claimant on a class action suit. It won't help any of their customers any (since once any payout is divided the only ones who get enough to matter are the lawyers), but at least it'll let some lawyers annoy someone who deserves it for a while.

That fits us as well. We're paying less total than we have in years- we've gone from having a lot of stuff all the time to rotating between them, because nothing is worth holding on to all year anymore.

One nice thing about the flexibility my company offers for WFH vs office, is if you want to work while you are sick, you can say that you're going to be WFH to protect your coworkers until your symptoms subside, and everyone is happy with it. If you don't want to work while sick, you can still use your PTO and actually take the day off- but that middle case where you're functional but sick enough to infect others no longer leads to everyone else getting sick too.

That would seem to be kinda the minimum severance package, access to the pay level of tools

It might also make the insurgents popular.

To answer myself, having just done a Google search, it appears to have been 6% then recently changed to 7%. That puts it above most short term opportunities and below most unsecured debts.

What interest rate do they pay? Is it significantly more or less than you'd get selecting a good money market?

If it's more, then paper is good even when they are slow.
If it's less, then there's a window where getting your money back faster is worth more than the cost of a cheap efile to speed things along.

All this assumes that you aren't in any debt, obviously in such a case the highest debt interest rate would the rate to compare.

Of course, I'm assuming that the amount of refund is meaningful- if it's small enough it's a don't care situation. I prefer to tune withholdings to avoid significant refunds, but things change enough year to year that it sometimes happens anyway.

My first job was cashier at a certain fast food restaurant that has changed names since then.

They often had "combos" that cost more than the sum of their parts. It didn't even make the order easier to enter, you entered the items individually then grouped them to get the adder to apply (or discount in those cases where they were less than the sum of the parts). It was basically a tax on the customer's awareness and ability to do math in their heads while in line.

Since you asked,

My kids still pick out DVDs to watch in the minivan on the screen in the back as recently as this week.

I listened to some CDs on my commute yesterday. Those same CDs have been ripped and stored on my NAS for home listening, but my favorites still get used in the car player regularly.

I will admit to using a USB drive instead of CDs on my wife's car for road trips. Holds a lot more. Unlike streaming, doesn't run into issues driving through mountains or other remote areas.

Given the claims that they mix inventory between sellers for things they think are the same, could it be that those customers actually received the competitor's inferior product when they ordered yours? I.E. it's not the customer doing the substitution but Amazon?

Congress should pass a law that if a carrier says they serve an address, any resident of that address can report nonconformance and the carrier would be required to pay $1k / day until service as claimed is established to the notifier, and $1k / day to FCC to cover the costs of administering the program.The carrier would have the option to withdraw their claim and pay a sum of $1 million per claim so removed instead.

And since your save games don't work properly, you do get to replay it from the start! Bonus!