Iranians sell kidneys on Instagram to survive economic hardship

That's difficult to read. I can only imagine how desperate BOTH sellers and buyers must be.

239$ sounds insanely low

The exchange rate used to get to the $236 amount is the "official" exchange rate stated by the government which even the government itself doesn't use. 10 million rials is $20.28 based on the real exchange rate used by literally everyone inside the country (see bonbast.com for the real rates - also, as an aside, "bonbast" means deadend in Farsi, which aptly describes the current economical situation in Iran).

For context, the minimum wage is $152 per month (around 75,182,000 rials).

The economy has gone to shit in the past 10 years. The minimum wage was around $425/month, or $2.4/hour back then, compared to $0.86/hour now.

The Rail has lost much of its value since then but the salaries haven't increased enough to cover the brutal inflation, resulting in extreme poverty for the majority of the population and situations like the one explained in the article.

TL;DR - what you really need to fix is poverty. Second (and third and fourth...) order effects will then automatically fix themselves.

Or they can just stop getting nuclear weapons. And spending all their money funding terror against Israel, in Yemen and in Syria. You know, the sane option that they could've done for years.

Truth is that Iran is a terrorist organization leaching of its people. They have plenty of options to fix their problem, but their priorities are holy wars and nuclear weapons. Sadly it will be incredibly difficult for the Iranian people to overthrow this regime, and many of the Iranians who could've fight back had been leaving the country for years. I can't blame them, but sadly, regimes like these usually spiral downward in this way.

No one has ever found any actual evidence for that though. There are just people repeating each other claims as sources or citing poorly understood stats...

Start from understanding that the list of people waiting on kidney donations in the United States is long, and the average wait time is 3-5 years. Some awaiting kidneys will die before getting a donated one.

If selling kidneys were legal in the United States then people would be buying and selling them here.

Why should sentiment be neutral, especially from a single journalist? It seems absurd to assume that there must be an equal amount of positive and negative things to cover.

Yeah, they should write an article about all the other countries were people don’t sell their kidneys!

If you are e.g. A war correspondent and that's your job, you're probably going to have mostly negative sentiment stories. Similarly If you focus on reporting child abuse topics, similar. If your shtick is to embed yourself in poverty areas and bring true stories, it won't be lolipops and rainbows. Outside of journalism, same thing. There are jobs where you get exposed to wonderful things day in and day out, and there are jobs where you get exposed to bad sad stuff. and everything in between.

Particularly if your goal to be in journalism in the first place may be to change / improve the world, you might focus on things that need changing / improving.

Finally, outside of some very specific places, in a lot of the world things suck more than they don't.

I don't know if that answers your question or you had a different question / point to make?

Uranium, urinating, kidneys.. I see what you did there...

Right- is it really more ethical to let recipients die on a waiting list?

yeah it might look a little something like this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Ppw5yTa3uk

We should definitely seek rent from these desperate people.

This is the most capitalist thing I've ever seen.

James Mickens came up with tooth.ie, where poor people rich in teeth can donate for a market-determined price to rich people poor in teeth.

(YC S24) lifeline - we're disrupting the grassroots medical industry by connecting donaters and buyers directly

The only startup opportunity you should be thinking about is how to reduce this situation from existing in the first place.

Such a sociopathic take.

When I was in prison I was approached about creating an app to sell/buy kidneys for third world countries by a guy with really good connections. I was like traffic in human body parts? Yeah no.

Then the next app old boy wanted help with was 'arranged marriage' in countries that practice that where it was more of a bride auction marketplace. So now straight human trafficking? Again pass.

He finally settled on a project where he and his son arrange for people overseas to come study in the USA. What? How do you go from human trafficking to something harmless like that? They have to live/stay on his properties so he was directing money straight to himself, and after they got to the USA his 'associates' coerced them into signing contracts to work for his companies for X years. So basically human trafficking again, and sanctioned and sponsored by these peoples home country (whom he had connections within and who was paying for these people to study overseas). Now that I'm thinking about this I should probably look into if there is a way to report this.

Smart dude with lots of money but he just couldn't not be shady AF. He thought all of these were perfectly legit things and was surprised when I didn't.

Remind me of the 2010 movie Repo Men which is about someone with the job to reposes organs from people who can't pay the bills on them.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Repo_Men

Do sanctions like this work? I imagine it would only serve to unite the people against the sanctioner.

edit: I realize from the responses that I assumed the goal was to cause the sanctioned government to fall. Of course there may be other goals.

> Sanctions are literally war and illegal unless approved by the UN.

Are you saying that war is illegal unless approved by the UN, or this specific means of war?

The UN is just an office building on First Ave. It has no actual power.

The USA can do whatever the fuck it wants, the UN has 0 jurisdiction over us.

This is a false narrative. While true that the sanctions have pushed the value of IRR down, the lifting of sanctions, during Obama / Khatami era only fed the corrupt IRGC and its shadow economy. It is easy to think that people are being forced to sell kidneys because of the economic sanctions and as countries imposing the sanctions we are implicit in this, but the Iranian government and Khamenei are the main culprits here. They have the power and the means stop playing menace in the region, stop their proxy wars and move towards lifting of sanctions. There is a small but vocal Iranian backed lobby in the US (NIAC specifically) that is constantly pushing for the lifting of sanctions, even during the most brutal suppressions of the Iranian people by the government, peddling a narrative that the Iranians are dissatisfied with the economy and if the sanctions are lifted, all is going to be ok.

There is a shadow army, government and economy in Iran, created and tightly controlled by the office of the supreme leader, Khamenei and enforced by IRGC. They have a chokehold on the economy, imports and exports as well as almost exclusive control over critical foreign affairs. While lifting of sanctions will marginally reduce the pressure on the IRR in the short term, it will feed this cancerous growth which is not in the interest of the Iranian people and the world.

> Sanctions are literally war

No, they aren't.

Providing money and weapons to known terrorists is also an act of war, yet here we are.