Your example is unambiguously plural. It’s not a good illustration of “they” creating confusion.

It’s truly not a problem. I could contrive a reason to talk about a couple (they plural) and a nonbinary person (they singular) and end up with sentences where you don’t know which I’m referring to, but the exact same issue happens if I’m telling a story about two “he” or “she” subjects. And it’s solved in the same way.

People always said COBRA is too expensive but I had no clue how bad it could possibly be. Turns out, $1200 a month for the cheapest option for a married couple in my case. And I didn’t get that information in spite of repeated asking for months before I left, until I was nearly out the door.

This compared to the marketplace plans starting around $600, similarly decent plans to my work one in the realm of $800 and the APTC covering almost all of that cost if I’m not making too much money self-employed. COBRA is a joke.

You take care of that part later, I guess. The whole point of the shower orange IMO is to go primal on it and tear it open and chow down without concern for mess or eating it efficiently. Leaving the peel to pick up afterwards probably just gives the rest of your shower a nice citrus aroma.

Going on about how “censored” everything is and how “certain political ideologies” are the only opinions allowed and anything else is “insta-banned” reeks of right wing extremism (hence, dogwhistles). I know I’m sticking my neck out to say so but given nobody has yet provided a single receipt/anecdote to back up their claims I find myself super skeptical at the idea that they’re presenting even a marginally balanced version of the truth right now. There’s a reason “certain political ideologies” (ie. the “eradicate trans ideology” and “destroy wokeism” crowd) are not accepted in decent online circles. There’s no room for that kind of hate, and I’ve never met someone on that side of things willing to hold an honest conversation on it. They just want a platform to be hateful.

This strategy reminds me of right-wingers I’ve dealt with in the past who complained about being banned from Twitter for ‘simply saying “learn to code”’. If you understand the context, the harassment, kicking someone when they’re down, the dogpile they contributed to, the absolute hate campaign their seemingly innocuous (piece of a) comment contributed to, there’s completely sensible reasons why a ban like that took place. But I know the playbook; these guys thrive in the darkness. The moment I start prodding into the nuances, they pretend they were trolling the whole time and basically ragequit. If they control the messaging then they can make themselves sound reasonable by tearing away context and presenting a whitewashed and often unrealistic version of what happened.

I could be wrong; for all I know this guy’s talking about truly god-awful subs like r/TrueRateMyFace (I forget what the name was and it doesn’t deserve to be remembered, as the mods explicitly support men posting their exes on there and actively ban commenters who “overrate” the scores they give out, while pretending they’re working with an objective measure of true beauty) but I haven’t experienced this egregious political de-platforming they’re talking about and it’s telling that they didn’t go into any level of specifics except to keep harping on the “censorship” point. Not every opinion or argument deserves a platform.

If your place of work has chosen to pay you so poorly that it’s now my fault that I’ve failed to supply you an adequate wage for your work in an industry where service is not a big component (the bakery employee bagging up some cookies for me is not getting a tip no matter how awkward their PoS system tries to make it - delivery drivers and waiters obviously are a different story) then I’m simply not supporting your employer and I genuinely hope others follow they go out of business, well aware that that fact is the reason they stopped getting customers.

You’re screwed one way or the other unfortunately, but I’d rather we send a clear message to the people actually responsible for this awful situation you’re stuck in where you have to rely on the generosity of customers to make a decent living, than continuing to subsidize their terrible business practices and allow this cycle of abuse to continue not only unabated, but actively financially supported. This can’t be the norm everywhere. Arguably it shouldn’t be the norm even in aforementioned businesses where it’s long been accepted as the norm already. You and I both know your idea of this being “selling labor directly without the ownership class taking a cut” is a falsehood, because their cut is coming from your base wages, while enabling customers to effectively ‘not pay’ for your labor, with nothing you can do to prevent that because you’re not in control of what you earn.

I would be 1000% in favor of people having that power to sell their labor directly and name their prices. But it’s this duplicitous system that doesn’t allow the laborer any control, while stealing from them, raising prices without the ability to be up-front and honest about what something is going to cost. The only reason you’re mad at customers and not your employer, is you feel you have the power to change one, and not the other.

They effectively have, via tipping. And the employer pays less so ultimately the employee gets screwed no matter what.

The fact they look to us as the problem and not their employers just tells me the scheme is working. Count the money, twirl the moustache and pet the evil lap cat, villains of the world. You’ve won as always, and the downtrodden are still too busy infighting over scraps to realize whose boot they’re under.