U.S.A. for the win
There’s nothing like two-straight weeks of Olympic glory. Especially if you’re American and can’t help but cry at every medal we win, every upset we cause, every sport we dominate. (Sometimes we wonder if the Olympics would be nearly as exciting if we didn’t hail from the all-so-dominate U.S. of A. But moving on.)
For the athletes who compete, it’s often the highlight of their athletic careers. The zenith of all competition. The pinnacle. The apogee. The climax.
That is until they actually win gold, and realize that little medal will cost them more than the blood, sweat and tears of a lifetime of workouts, tryouts and sacrifice. While the medals themselves aren’t worth as much as they seem, the United States Olympic Committee (USOC) doles out cash prizes to the medal earners as well — taxable income according to the U.S. Tax Code. Want to win a gold and the $25,000 cash that comes with it? Be prepared to pay the government up to $9,000 in taxes on that bad boy. Oh, you only got a meager bronze metal and $10,000 from USOC? Say goodbye to as much as $3,960 of that.
While this “victory tax” may be no problem for celebrity athletes such as Michael Phelps, who could be taxed up to $55,000 for his Rio wins, it is a harsh blow to athletes such as Sarah Robles. After living near the poverty-line at $400 a month while training for the games, Robles recently won the bronze medal in weightlifting.
She’s the first U.S. athlete to win a medal in the sport since 2000. And how do we, the proud Americans eagerly awaiting the country medal count each night to revel in athletic victory from the comforts of our own couch, reward her? We ask for a third of the cash money, while expecting more from Robles in 4 years. U.S.A. for the win.
What’s this mean for those of us at the bottom of the food chain?
So the big news story this week is that a group of hackers calling itself the “Shadow Brokers” has managed to actually hack the NSA’s hackers and steel our super secret government spy agency’s hacking tools.
We know, it sounds like a big circle of double negatives, hackers hacking hackers who are hacking us.
But that’s the real story.
It’s bad enough that our government now collects all of our emails and cell-phone calls and stores them in some massive maze of servers in a giant building in Nevada or Utah or some other empty state where giant square buildings can go undetected for decades. But if you’re going to collect all of our information and spy on us, could you at least be competent enough not to make our information vulnerable to a bunch of slackers calling themselves by a name better suited to a video game?
Shadow Brokers has already released some of the NSA’s hacking programs so now any smart high-school kid has the capabilities to infiltrate computer networks as effectively as a super power. But that’s not the whole story.
These shadow folks says they’re holding back the really good NSA hacking tools, which it will sell to the highest bidder. That’s effing great.
Oh, and did we mention that Wikileaks also has the NSA documents and we can only suppose that Wikileaks founder Julian Assange will be really careful and responsible with them because hey, he wouldn’t want to cause a problem for the U.S.A., the country that framed him on rape charges causing him to live in an 8-by-10 room in a foreign embassy for years on end so we couldn’t knock him off or throw him into prison for the rest of his life? Why would he hold a grudge?
So how long before the world’s bad-boy hackers figure out that the real money is in hacking our governments collected information on all of us. Then they can just start extorting money out of all 300 million of us.
The moral of the story for the U.S. government is this: If you’re not smart enough to keep the information you illegally collect on your own citizens safe from hackers, stop collecting it. And guess what, you are obviously not smart enough.
