I’m not saying they do, but to assume that Iran transferred all data on how to produce a Shahed drone without some kind of ensurance that they will keep getting paid out in some form and not just forgotten the moment being friends with Iran is inconvenient for Russia is a graver error to commit. They may not be being paid in money but before this current bombing campaign I’m sure Russia was transferring the minimum they could get away with to Iran without hampering their own technologly transfer for the drones. All dictatorial governments (call them small coalition governments for more accuracy for this discussion as all brands of autocracy have their own rules but rely on a small group of people to run the government with loyalty to the ruler being paramount) have a corruption issue, be it Russia with their crony Oligarchy or Iran who has a specific group of people who handle the money for the country and can never be legally prosecuted for money disappearing from the government coffers. If we can know for sure that both of those governments have corruption issues we can also surmise that pocketing as much money as they can is going to be a part of their governments standard operating procedure and to avoid being robbed if they have a licensing agreement they will have physical impedements to avoid the licensing infringement, and they are not the only people to do this the F-35 for all exports except for 1 have a similar scheme in place.

While they may produce most of the components for the drones Iran probably kept some production parts homegrown to ensure Russia pays their licensing fees. That doesn’t mean Russia can’t make their entirely homegrown production line from beginning to end but that would take time when most of the production line was set up on Iran and they could purchase those components for their production run. Even if that isn’t a factor in a shooting war you probably want the maximum production of weapons needed to continue shooting.

Yeah it’s probably like corruption the optimal number isn’t 0 but as close as we can get without hamstringing society. Make it just hard enough so that those who would do it if it was easy can’t do it easily and then you have 90% less corruption. Think of it like piracy, it was big in the 2000’s when buying DVDs was a thing and storage was getting cheap but record labels and studios were not able to update their business model and the easiest way to get most media for the average user was something like Napster. When streaming came along and Netflix had a massive catalogue and was better in every way to cable and same with music streaming platforms at first piracy almost stopped completely and is only coming back due to enshitification. We need to implement a model like Netflix streaming which aligns incentives for politicians to make good policies and not sell out the country from under us for personal gain by making said decisions have actual negative and immediate consequences, be it trading in the stock market while in office or for a ster period of 2 terms after they serve their time in office, being a lobbyist for a set amount of time before or after presenting themselves as a candidate, and enforcing an open period after a law is drafted for public review and ability to lodge complaints and a 2-4 year reassessment of the law to see if it is actually doing what it was set out to do or not and repeal it if not (with exceptions for laws that govern long term policy such as schools where it can take 14 years for the policy to actually show concrete results.

I mean yes it raises gas prices which will help Russia on the one hand but for their war in Ukraine that may not be as big a help as having Iran still standing and putting political pressure on NATO assets as well as being a weapons manufacturing hub that Ukraine couldn’t easily infiltrate and bomb.

But that would make sense and be an effective way of making laws and governing and more importantly would stop those who haven’t meaningfully added to society from being able to easily profit from it in a way that others can’t.

While that may be true it doesn’t mean that the spending on the shindig in iran is where all that money goes, a large majority of it goes into salaries for soldiers and soldier benefits such as the GI bill and the VA, even if the care and salaries aren’t very good there are millions of Americans getting their salary from the DOD or military directly.

While I agree with the sentiment, social security pays out over 1.2 USD trillion annually. The cost of this “short operation” will be in the trillion dollar plus eventually if it turns out like the last few wars in the area but even the AP says that bot Iraq and Afghanistan came out to 2 trillion USD over the course of their respective conflicts. . Much of domestic payments from the federal government is for the Pentagon and Social security, with social security being the biggest line item on the US budget.

Didn’t Texas and Florida start this? California just has more “tech literate” politicians.

Yeah one of my favorite ones is how donkeys and horses can mate for mules but some of those mules will be able to make with either eachother or one of the two parent species but not both, but most mules are infertile.