100% serious.

If capital is planning on being this dumb, as labor I have no problem whatsoever relieving them of their monetary burdens.

I'm surprised anyone thinks this might not be intended seriously. It's a pretty common sentiment among the working class. Stole from the little people? You suck. Ripped off the owning class? Nice job, please do more of that.

It’s not even about stealing. With 100m I would have the resources to found multiple companies that could fix real problems and provide good paying jobs.

It's simply turnabout. The owning class regularly, illegally, rips off the working class and gets away with it because it's so difficult to prove in courts.

This isn't stealing though. The owning class agreed to this.

I mean, who's ripping off? It's a legal contract.

Why does having a contract eliminate the possibility of getting ripped off? Tons of places commonly associated with ripping people off use contracts to do it. Car lots, telcos. Banks.

If I were to formalize my colloquial understanding of the phrase "ripped off" it would be something like: a transaction took place between two parties where upon evaluation of the results of the transaction after-the-fact revealed that the overall expectations were not met by one party and had the offended party known fully how the transaction was going to play out, the either would not have entered into it or would have only entered into it for a drastically different amount of money.

This morning, I went to a bakery and ordered a blueberry muffin. It was fresh and moist and delicious. I was satisfied. If it had instead cost the same money but been dry and crumbly and had a taste of old socks, I would have considered myself to have been "ripped off". So now, you ask:

> Why does having a contract eliminate the possibility of getting ripped off?

Every step along the way to having a signed contract normally involves an increased awareness of expectations by both parties. That's what the contract is. And the moment of signing a contract is an intentional decision to move forward with the transaction as specified. It's certainly possible to subvert the normal process in such a way that you obfuscate your intentions, but even then, the results of your intentions must show up in the contract language itself, or they won't count. Unless someone is holding a gun to your head, or you're not intellectually capable of entering a contractual relationship, the moment of signing your name to a contract is a moment where you are affirming that you aren't being "ripped off", that you've considered the terms and are willingly agreeing to abide by them.

Perhaps it's still possible to do all that and consider yourself to have been ripped off. And perhaps your examples are good examples of such cases. But if your board or C-level executives sign a contract for employment of a high-level executive which includes a 9-figure deal for compensation and they don't have more awareness than a poor person going to a car lot, they didn't get "ripped off", they're ripping off the investors or shareholders by collecting whatever salary they're collecting.

IANAL, also not a C-level exec, also not particularly smart about how crypto "works", but this all seems like fairly obvious stuff.

Ripping off, literally, is theft. In the legal contexts you're talking about, it's used as a hyperbolic metaphor. Those are distinct meanings. Arguing about it is pointless.

I bet I see or hear "ripoff" and derivatives used to describe what turned out to be a shitty deal, about 100x more often than I see or hear it used to mean "stealing".

[EDIT] But perhaps it connotes differently outside American English? That could be.

The metaphorical usage might be more common. But here's the definition: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/rip-off

It is common to everyone. Proof: wage theft is about $1 Billion a year. https://www.epi.org/publication/wage-theft-2021/ The post is interesting that someone actually working got money out of a company.

Yeah, while I think this is ridiculous, if some company wants to pay me millions of dollars regardless of the companies performance then sign me up.