Nah postdocs make far below 100k in the US (OP was talking about researchers/scientists in academia), but certainly far less stressful and competitive compared to doing the same job back in China.

Many people stayed in Western countries to get away from the stressful life and very competitive environment in China. If you make a decent salary in the US, you can live quite a comfortable, stress free life.

I can tell you that it is quite normal to have work meeting on Sunday mornings in China. This is the country you Westerners are trying to compete with. A nation full of hardworking people, and you think you can beat China in the long run? Those who don’t want to work as hard will prefer the Western lifestyle and that’s why they choose to stay there.

It generates demand for US dollar.

Clearly investment in real productive sector is not fashionable these days, nor can many of the traditional American industries compete with other industrialized countries in the long run. Nobody wants to invest in actually realistic technology or industry that only pays dividends in 30 years. They want quick get rich scheme that promises good yield within a year, within a quarter even. AI and crypto (in the form of stablecoins that allow hard currencies to be swapped in and out easily) are the perfect avenues as fictitious speculative assets that can draw in billions and billions of investments from all over the world hoping to make a quick buck. This pumps up the dollar in the process as you’d need to obtain or exchange other currencies into dollars to make the investment.

It is also no coincidence that they just gave out 2 Nobel Prizes for AI. That’s going to generate a huge interest for investing in a technology that is more hyped than its actual utility.

Regarding crypto, Michael Hudson described the utility of crypto in relation to the dollar exchange rate as such, comparing it to how the US made itself as the tax haven for money laundering in the 1960s:

Today, as foreign countries de-dollarize their trade – for instance, when Russia and China trade for oil and industrial products in each others’ currencies – U.S. financial strategists worry about what this will mean for the dollar’s exchange rate.

Actually, transacting such foreign trade in non-dollar currencies has no effect on the U.S. balance of payments. It does not appear in the trade balance or even in foreign investment, although de-dollarization may deprive U.S. banks of currency-trading commissions to handle such transactions.

What does affect the demand for dollars is conversion of assets denominated in foreign currency into the dollar. This king of confidential banking is what pressed up the Swiss franc so much in the 1970s and ‘80s that it priced Swiss manufactures out of foreign markets. Companies like Ciba-Geigy had to move their production across the border to Germany to prevent the rising franc’s valuation from making them uncompetitive. (When that company brought me over in 1976, I found that the price of a coke was over $10, and a regular meal cost $100.)

The U.S. is seeking to protect the dollar’s high value, not lower it, so it sees acting as the destination for world’s tax avoiders, criminals and others as a positive national strategy. (“Kleptocracy is us.”) The plan is not to condemn tax crime and more violent criminal activities, but seeking to profit for being the banker for these functions. The logic is, “As the world’s leading free-market democracy, we’re providing a secure for the world’s capital, however it may be ‘earned’ or otherwise obtained.”

It’s purely speculative asset. Lots of people are going to lose their money when the whales do their pump and dump.

The question is whether there is a realistic chance of revolution in the Imperial Core? I don’t know, but I feel like people would rather support a fascist crackdown of leftists in the name of restoring law and order than to join the revolutionary side, if there is even one to begin with.

Yes it’s very obvious that AI and crypto are the next avenues the US dollar is now moving into.

AI is truly the perfect avenue for the dollar: it’s all hype with some functional utility that are actually useful for real world tasks - a deep well where billions and billions of investment money can be sunk into to pump up the US dollar, which in turn allows the US imperialists to crush other countries’ economies, without actually producing any useful goods and services.

The same with crypto, which has been fully “tethered” with the dollar at this point. Another scam to sink billions of investment money into to prop up the strength of the US currency.

Marx and Lenin would be bewildered to see how hyper-financialized capitalism has turned itself into if they were to be alive today.

I think this is just cope. We all dislike our landlords, yet we still pay the rent every month just to have a shelter over our heads. It doesn’t matter what 99% of the people think, if there is no revolution from the people, the exploitation will continue.

If after Trump they can find a new figure who can re-capture the appeal of the bourgeois elites, or if the Harris administration failed so badly that they ended up worse than Trump (never say never because the blowbacks in a multi-front war can be very real), then it’s a possibility.

But the paradigm shift right now happens because Biden has managed to regain the confidence of the bourgeois class - the war in Ukraine propelled weapons sales and defense contractor stocks through the roof, the US regaining its leading role as a global net exporter of oil and natural gas after the fossil fuel industry (literally the Bush family stronghold) got screwed hard by Trump, the national security state getting its wishes of finally having a war with Russia and Iran (and soon China), and the Wall Street are having fun with Bidenomics handling the inflation by sacrificing the working class to make the line go up. S&P has never been higher especially under such high interest rates and inflation.

All the bourgeois bases are consolidating around Biden’s performance, compared to how Trump had utterly failed advancing all of their interests from 2016-2020.

Why closed doors when the voters don’t even matter to them? It’s a rebranding phase - the Democrats have to make it explicit to their new donors. You know, make them feel welcomed.

There is also no need for a “secret conspiracy” here because when politicians make their public statements, they are just talking to the donor class. This has always been the case. No need to hide behind anything when the voters don’t matter to you.

I don’t understand why people still keep trying to twist reality into fitting what they want to see, when everyone here knows deep down, the Democrats and the Republicans have always blatantly make statements without taking the voters into account. If this hadn’t been the case, public pressure and protests would have worked. But we all know they haven’t.

You are not that important. Only the top 1% matters.

No, that’s just strategic thinking for the long term.

The Democrats want to become the Republican Party. They have been explicitly trying to do so for the last few decades. Now they have a real chance of capturing the traditional bourgeois sectors that have always been core to the Republican base - the military industrial complex and the fossil fuel industry, and to a lesser extent, the national security state. Trump has managed to piss off all of them on top of the Wall Street finance capitalists that he himself is a part of.

Because of the way Citizens United works, no political party in America can win elections without campaign contributions. Capturing the donor class thus becomes the key priority to win elections. The Democrats can lose this election (they won’t though), but if they strip away the bourgeois donor base of the Republican Party and leave the latter with their Trumpian MAGA petty bourgeois voters, then the Republican Party is as good as dead.

This is why support from the Reaganites and the Cheneys are so important to the Democrats. They represent a new paradigm where traditional Republican donor class is now jumping ship to the Democratic Party. The Republican Party will end up being the MAGA culture war party with barren financial support to sustain their future electoral campaigns.

In other words, the Republican Party is cooked.

Capturing the donor class is far more important than getting votes. That’s why Citizens United exists - to make sure that politicians will always prioritize the donor class.

This is the one chance the Democrats have to become the new Republican party thanks to Trump burning bridges with all its traditional bourgeois base. It would be stupid not for them to take the opportunity.

You’re not going to convince any libs who call themselves “leftists” because Trump being a right winger isn’t the reason they hate him.

All the American libs I’ve talked to are voting for Kamala because they don’t want to think or care about politics at all. They want to go back to brunch and watch Netflix and not having to feel second hand embarrassment from Trump being a buffoon on world stage. They want the adults in the room to be in charge and they can sleep soundly knowing that American interests will be well protected from foreign adversaries. They want the genocides to be committed off screen, and not having to deal with these uncomfortable topics in their everyday lives.

Seriously, go out and talk to libs. None of them want to hear about Palestine. They know it’s bad but they don’t want to hear about it. And if you keep bringing up the issue in conversation you’d soon find yourself talking to a bunch of people who have these words going in their heads: “oh here they go again. how long are they gonna take before shutting up this time? we’ll just pretend to agree so they’ll shut up faster”.

Every time you’re in the room, you can almost feel as if people are silently begging for “please… please don’t bring up anything about Israel and Palestine… we don’t want to hear about it….” And keep doing that a couple more times, soon enough you’d find yourself “uninvited” to social gatherings you used to be a part of.

That’s just the reality if you are friends with liberals.