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Top five ways to meet people in Tokyo, Japan

Dating in Japan is hard.

But you are not alone. Many people feel the same way – Thanks to the Japanese government saying all bars and restaurants should close by 8pm, most people stay at home and do not go out past 8pm. How can you meet someone… or anyone?!

Truthfully, there are still various ways to meet people in Tokyo…online!

#1. Go to TokyoTouchTime.com

If you are wondering whether you can find a place where Tokyo classified ads may lead to a date, TokyoTouchTime.com is the perfect website because it is exactly where you can discover a wide variety of Tokyo personal ads. It’s 100% free and there is no catch to this at all: people can safely post as many ads as they want on this platform. Better still, it’s streamlined interface makes everything straight to the point. Simply create an account with your email address, and you’ll be able to post ads and receive messages comfortably and privately.

#2. Download Tinder

If you prefer conveniently swiping left or right on the phone, Tinder is an ideal choice because everyone on this dating app already knows why everyone is using this app – you don’t need to explain yourself.

#3. Join a dating website

In this day and age, there are many dating websites on the market where you can meet people in Tokyo. Although not all of them are user-friendly, you may still try several reputable dating sites, thereby maximizing your chance of meeting someone suitable!

#4. Be active on social media

If you use social media, chances are you already have existing friends who interact with you online. Remember: your friends know other people that could be introduced to you. This can be easily done via social media. For example, if both you and someone cute comment on a mutual friend’s Facebook post, why not send a message to that person?! You never know what will happen!

#5. Build a local audience online.

This method might sound unusual, but please let me explain.

The pandemic has given you a gift: Now you have a lot of time at home, so you can leverage your time to build something on the Internet. For instance, if you like writing, you may start a blog and write about life in Tokyo – I’m sure many like-minded people in Tokyo will find your blog as long as you use tags such as ‘life in Tokyo’. In this way, people come to you automatically and… effortlessly!

(Jade Seashell is a columnist and relationship advisor.)

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What’s a? A fundraising professional explains

Craigslist founder Craig Newmark donates hundreds of thousands of {dollars} to journalism colleges in addition to different causes. Bryan Bedder/Getty Photos for Rush Philanthropic Arts Basis

Main donors are the individuals who give essentially the most cash to a selected nonprofit. The quantity they have to donate to realize that standing varies, relying on the nonprofit’s finances.

If you happen to gave US$500 to your neighborhood meals pantry, you’d most likely turn into one among its main donors. With a big college, hospital or another nonprofit with a multimillion-dollar finances, nonetheless, it might take an annual present of $100,000 to land in its high tier of supporters.

The most important class of giving posted on a nonprofit’s web site is an effective method to see what it considers a serious present. These ranges typically have splendidly pompous names. The Seattle Opera designates donors with “Visionary Circle” standing for giving $1 million, for instance. The Pittsburgh Opera considers donors giving $3,500 or extra to be members of its “Galaxy Society.”

Billionaires and others who give away hundreds of thousands of {dollars} at a time may be known as philanthropic “megadonors,” a time period additionally widespread for political funders with deep pockets.

Why main donors matter

Along with amassing many donors who give on a month-to-month or annual foundation, fundraisers take into account main presents an enormous precedence for campaigns centered round an enormous mission, such because the acquisition of a brand new constructing. These campaigns depend on substantial presents from the very wealthy individuals who fundraisers and bankers name ultra-high-net-worth people.

Up to now, fundraisers would anticipate seeing 80% of marketing campaign presents coming from 20% of all donors. What they used to name the 80-20 rule of thumb has modified, nonetheless, in tandem with rising financial inequality. Immediately, nonprofits increase nearer to 90% or extra of their funds from roughly 10% of their donors.

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Researchers have discovered that different folks could observe the lead of a serious donor. That’s, when a serious donor makes an enormous donation to a fundraising marketing campaign, smaller donors turn into extra more likely to help it, too. They usually are likely to make bigger donations than they in any other case would have.

Concentrated affect

Massive donations from the richest People are rising in measurement, and their proportion of complete giving is rising as properly.

The 0.1% of U.S. households with earnings exceeding $2 million yearly donate roughly 30% of all the cash given to nonprofits every year. This pattern is certain to proceed as a result of billionaires have gotten even wealthier.

Learn different brief, accessible explanations of newsworthy topics written by teachers of their areas of experience for The Dialog U.S. right here.

Renee Irvin doesn’t work for, seek the advice of, personal shares in or obtain funding from any firm or group that may profit from this text, and has disclosed no related affiliations past their educational appointment.

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Elon Musk’s Tesla Bot raises critical considerations – however in all probability not those you suppose

Elon Musk introduced a humanoid robotic designed to assist with these repetitive, boring duties folks hate doing. Musk recommended it may run to the grocery retailer for you, however presumably it might deal with any variety of duties involving guide labor.

Predictably, social media full of references to a string of dystopian sci-fi motion pictures about robots the place all the pieces goes horribly improper.

As troubling because the robotic futures in motion pictures like I, Robotic, The Terminator and others are, it’s the underlying applied sciences of actual humanoid robots – and the intent behind them – that must be trigger for concern.

Musk’s robotic is being developed by Tesla. It’s a seeming departure from the corporate’s car-making enterprise, till you take into account that Tesla isn’t a typical automotive producer. The so-called “Tesla Bot” is an idea for a glossy, 125-pound humanlike robotic that may incorporate Tesla’s automotive synthetic intelligence and autopilot applied sciences to plan and observe routes, navigate visitors – on this case, pedestrians – and keep away from obstacles.

Dystopian sci-fi overtones apart, the plan is sensible, albeit inside Musk’s enterprise technique. The constructed setting is made by people, for people. And as Musk argued on the Tesla Bot’s announcement, profitable superior applied sciences are going to should be taught to navigate it in the identical methods folks do.

But Tesla’s vehicles and robots are merely the seen merchandise of a much wider plan aimed toward making a future the place superior applied sciences liberate people from our organic roots by mixing biology and know-how. As a researcher who research the moral and socially accountable improvement and use of rising applied sciences, I discover that this plan raises considerations that transcend speculative sci-fi fears of super-smart robots.

A person with large plans

Self-driving vehicles, interplanetary rockets and brain-machine interfaces are steps towards the long run Musk envisions the place know-how is humanity’s savior. On this future, vitality might be low cost, ample and sustainable; folks will work in concord with clever machines and even merge with them; and people will grow to be an interplanetary species.

It’s a future that, judging by Musk’s numerous endeavors, might be constructed on a set of underlying interconnected applied sciences that embrace sensors, actuators, vitality and knowledge infrastructures, techniques integration and substantial advances in pc energy. Collectively, these make a formidable toolbox for creating transformative applied sciences.

Musk imagines people finally transcending our evolutionary heritage by applied sciences which are beyond-human, or “tremendous” human. However earlier than know-how can grow to be superhuman, it first must be human – or no less than be designed to thrive in a human-designed world.

This make-tech-more-human strategy to innovation is what’s underpinning the applied sciences in Tesla’s vehicles, together with the intensive use of optical cameras. These, when linked to an AI “mind,” are meant to assist the autos autonomously navigate street techniques which are, in Musk’s phrases, “designed for organic neural nets with optical imagers” – in different phrases, folks. In Musk’s telling, it’s a small step from human-inspired “robots on wheels” to humanlike robots on legs.

Simpler stated than accomplished

Tesla’s “full self-driving” know-how, which incorporates the dubiously named Autopilot, is a place to begin for the builders of the Tesla Bot. Spectacular as this know-how is, it’s proving to be lower than absolutely dependable. Crashes and fatalities related to Tesla’s Autopilot mode – the most recent having to do with the algorithms struggling to acknowledge parked emergency autos — are calling into query the knowledge of releasing the tech into the wild so quickly.

A sequence of crashes involving Tesla’s autopilot know-how has prompted a federal investigation. South Jordan Police Division through AP

This monitor document doesn’t bode properly for humanlike robots that depend on the identical know-how. But this isn’t only a case of getting the know-how proper. Tesla’s Autopilot glitches are exacerbated by human conduct. For instance, some Tesla drivers have handled their tech-enhanced vehicles as if they’re absolutely autonomous autos and didn’t pay ample consideration to driving. Might one thing comparable occur with the Tesla Bot?

Tesla Bot’s ‘orphan dangers’

In my work on socially useful know-how innovation, I’m particularly serious about orphan dangers – dangers which are arduous to quantify and simple to miss and but inevitably find yourself tripping up innovators. My colleagues and I work with entrepreneurs and others on navigating a majority of these challenges by the Danger Innovation Nexus, an initiative of the Arizona State College Orin Edson Entrepreneurship + Innovation Institute and International Futures Laboratory.

The Tesla Bot comes with an entire portfolio of orphan dangers. These embrace doable threats to privateness and autonomy because the bot collects, shares and acts on doubtlessly delicate data; challenges related to how persons are possible to consider and reply to humanoid robots; potential misalignments between moral or ideological views – for instance, in crime management or policing civil protests; and extra. These are challenges which are hardly ever coated within the coaching that engineers obtain, and but overlooking them can spell catastrophe.

Whereas the Tesla Bot could seem benign – or perhaps a little bit of a joke – if it’s to be useful in addition to commercially profitable, its builders, buyers, future shoppers and others should be asking powerful questions on the way it would possibly threaten what’s vital to them and learn how to navigate these threats.

These threats could also be as particular as folks making unauthorized modifications that improve the robotic’s efficiency – making it transfer quicker than its designers meant, for instance – with out interested by the dangers, or as basic because the know-how being weaponized in novel methods. They’re additionally as delicate as how a humanoid robotic may threaten job safety, or how a robotic that features superior surveillance techniques may undermine privateness.

Then there are the challenges of technological bias which have been plaguing AI for a while, particularly the place it results in realized conduct that transform extremely discriminatory. For instance, AI algorithms have produced sexist and racist outcomes.

MIT’s Pleasure Buolamwini explains the specter of bias in AI.

Simply because we will, ought to we?

The Tesla Bot might look like a small step towards Musk’s imaginative and prescient of superhuman applied sciences, and one which’s straightforward to write down off as little greater than hubristic showmanship. However the audacious plans underpinning it are critical — they usually elevate equally critical questions.

As an illustration, how accountable is Musk’s imaginative and prescient? Simply because he can work towards creating the way forward for his goals, who’s to say that he ought to? Is the long run that Musk is striving to result in the very best one for humankind, or perhaps a good one? And who will undergo the results if issues go improper?

These are the deeper considerations that the Tesla Bot raises for me as somebody who research and writes concerning the future and the way our actions affect it. This isn’t to say that Tesla Bot isn’t a good suggestion, or that Elon Musk shouldn’t be capable to flex his future-building muscle mass. Utilized in the fitting approach, these are transformative concepts and applied sciences that would open up a future filled with promise for billions of individuals.

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But when shoppers, buyers and others are bedazzled by the glitz of latest tech or dismissive of the hype and overlook the larger image, society dangers handing the long run to rich innovators whose imaginative and prescient exceeds their understanding. If their visions of the long run don’t align with what most individuals aspire to, or are catastrophically flawed, they’re at risk of standing in the best way of constructing a simply and equitable future.

Perhaps that is the abiding lesson from dystopian robot-future sci-fi motion pictures that individuals must be taking away because the Tesla Bot strikes from concept to actuality — not the extra apparent considerations of making humanoid robots that run amok, however the far bigger problem of deciding who will get to think about the long run and be part of constructing it.

Andrew Maynard doesn’t work for, seek the advice of, personal shares in or obtain funding from any firm or group that may profit from this text, and has disclosed no related affiliations past their tutorial appointment.

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‘Tax the wealthy’? Democrats’ plans to make the rich pay a little bit extra will barely dent America’s lengthy slide from progressive taxation

U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez making a trend assertion. Ray Tamarra/GC Photographs through Getty Photographs

Demanding tax will increase on the wealthy is again in trend – each within the corridors of the Home of Representatives and on the crimson carpet of the Met Gala.

The Home Methods and Means Committee outlined plans on Sept. 13, 2021, to maneuver the highest marginal revenue price up a few notches to 39.6% and to introduce a 3% surtax on incomes above $5 million. That proposal would fall wanting calls to actually “tax the wealthy,” as Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s gown demanded at a glitzy New York bash simply hours later.

Tax coverage is deemed progressive if the chunk of revenue taken will increase with the revenue of the person – so rich People would pay a bigger proportion of their revenue than poorer ones. With a regressive tax coverage, decrease earners pay a bigger proportion of their earnings in tax than wealthier ones. The committee’s plan would roughly put tax progressivity again to the place it was simply earlier than President Donald Trump signed off on Republican tax cuts in 2017.

That will nonetheless be far beneath the extent of progressivity america embraced in the course of the twentieth century – when wealthier people paid a a lot greater share of their revenue in taxes than the poor.

In 1950, when taking a look at all federal, state and native taxes, the highest 0.01% of earners paid virtually 70% of their revenue in taxes. Within the postwar many years, company earnings – the principle supply of revenue for the wealthy – had been topic to an efficient company tax price of fifty%. In the meantime, the wealthy had been topic to excessive tax charges on wages, dividends, curiosity and revenue from partnerships.

The progressivity of the U.S. tax system has dramatically declined over the previous seven many years. The upshot is that for many revenue ranges the U.S. tax system now resembles a flat tax that turns into regressive on the very prime finish, which means the super-rich pay proportionately much less. Immediately, nearly all revenue teams pay roughly 28% of their revenue in taxes – aside from the 400 richest People, who every personal greater than $2 billion in wealth right now and pay round 25% in taxes.

Working-class and middle-class People pay a considerable quantity of taxes due to payroll taxes, that are excessive and barely have an effect on the wealthy, and state and native gross sales taxes, that are regressive – they take a much bigger chunk out of a smaller wage than out of a giant revenue. Even households that pay no federal revenue tax due to low earnings hand over a proportion just like that of wealthier households, due to these different taxes.

The super-rich’s low tax charges of right now are partially aided by the collapse of federal company taxation. Within the Nineteen Fifties, 5% to 7% of nationwide revenue got here from company taxes. By 2018, that determine had fallen to only 1.5%.

The efficient tax price collapses for billionaires additional as a result of they’ll keep away from reporting particular person revenue by instructing their firms to not pay dividends and holding on to their shares with out realizing their positive factors.

The proposal unveiled by Home Democrats would enhance taxes on millionaires considerably. However it could largely depart billionaires off the hook, regardless of the explosion of their wealth throughout the pandemic. Extra formidable proposals within the Senate would tax their unrealized capital positive factors. In our view, this is able to be a daring addition that may assist america reconnect with its custom of tax justice.

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The authors don’t work for, seek the advice of, personal shares in or obtain funding from any firm or group that may profit from this text, and have disclosed no related affiliations past their tutorial appointment.

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Some wealthy individuals will love no less than one sweetener in Democrats’ $3.5 trillion plan

A number of lawmakers from high-tax states like New York are pushing for adjustments to a key tax deduction in Democrats' $3.5 trillion spending bundle. Kent Nishimura/Los Angeles Instances by way of Getty Photographs

Whereas liberal lawmakers search for methods to boost taxes on the wealthy to finance their US$3.5 trillion spending bundle, some Home Democrats are aiming to decrease them.

Particularly, a number of Democrats from high-tax states resembling New York and New Jersey need to eradicate or no less than increase the $10,000 cap on the federal deduction of state and native taxes – often known as SALT – as a part of the invoice. The Democrats argue lifting the cap would assist middle-class taxpayers and assist homeownership.

“We’re dedicated to enacting a regulation that can embrace significant SALT aid that’s so important to our middle-class communities, and we’re working every day towards that aim,” a number of lawmakers mentioned in a Sept. 13, 2021, assertion.

However our analysis suggests wealthier People would see many of the financial savings.

A deduction primarily utilized by the wealthy

Earlier than 2017, taxpayers who itemized might deduct each penny of their state and native revenue or property taxes from their federal taxable revenue. This benefited householders as a result of they’re extra prone to itemize their taxes as a result of mortgage curiosity deduction.

Over 90% of households that earned $200,000 or extra took the deduction in 2017 in contrast with lower than 20% for these making beneath $100,000, in line with the IRS.

That modified after Congress handed a bundle of tax cuts in December 2017 that, amongst different issues, elevated the usual deduction for all taxpayers however added the cap on the state and native tax deduction for individuals who itemize.

In consequence, the share of households who itemized their taxes shrank from 31% in 2017 to 11% in 2018.

We examined the affect of the tax code change in a latest analysis paper, which used knowledge from the American Housing Survey and a Nationwide Bureau of Financial Analysis tax simulator. Primarily, we needed to estimate the federal revenue tax legal responsibility and tax advantages related to homeownership for a consultant set of taxpayers throughout the USA.

Our evaluation reveals that eliminating the cap would end in considerably decrease federal revenue taxes for high-income households, whereas making little distinction for individuals who earned much less.

For instance, a typical New Jersey family that earns $400,000 to $1.1 million would see federal revenue taxes lower by $14,401 if the cap have been eliminated, or 15.7% of all 2018 revenue taxes paid. Even in a comparatively low-cost state resembling Ohio, eliminating the cap would scale back federal revenue taxes for the same family by $5,466, or 5.2% of its 2018 tax invoice.

However, most significantly for individuals who favor a progressive tax code, our evaluation discovered that lifting the cap would barely have an effect on middle-income households.

For instance, a typical New York family incomes $100,000 to $150,000 would see its federal tax invoice go down $149 have been the cap lifted, whereas the median financial savings could be $16 in California and $407 in New Jersey. However for the overwhelming majority of states, eliminating the cap would don’t have any impact on most individuals on this revenue bracket, largely as a result of the 2017 tax regulation doubled the usual deduction. Throughout all states, the typical change in taxes for individuals incomes between $100,000 and $150,000 could be $49.

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The affect of eradicating the cap would have a really small affect on most lower-income taxpayers since lower than 5% of them claimed the state and native tax deduction in 2018.

A middle-class false impression

The affiliation of the state and native tax deduction with middle-class homeownership is probably going the explanation for this false impression about who would profit from repealing the cap.

However in actual fact, one of many predominant methods middle-income householders profit from the tax code is thru the exclusion from capital positive factors taxes of as much as $250,000 in internet revenue from the sale of a house – $500,000 if submitting collectively.

The state and native tax deduction, nevertheless, primarily helps the wealthiest People.

The authors don’t work for, seek the advice of, personal shares in or obtain funding from any firm or organisation that will profit from this text, and have disclosed no related affiliations past their educational appointment.