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Comment by ryzvonusef | Hacker News Reader

    > Iran is the only country in the world where selling a kidney in legal.

    > Since the 1980s, the government has offered a fixed payment of 10 million rials (about $236) and subsidised health insurance to donors it matches with a person in need of a transplant, but many people head to the black market to bid for a better price.

    > On a well-known street near Tehran's Valiasr Square, walls are littered with signs advertising organs for sale, with sellers listing their blood type, age and phone number next to listings for livers, kidneys and corneas.

    > Keyhan, 39, said he “can’t count” how many people have contacted him to buy his kidney, which he has advertised on Twitter, Instagram and Telegram, where some organ-selling channels have tens of thousands of subscribers.

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

Very good point, up until know I hadn't considered the buyer. In my mental model they just collected kidneys.

But if course this is a huge spend because they too need this transaction.

Part of me wonders the quality of the match, and surgery.

I imagine the middle men make all the money

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.

239$ sounds insanely low

That's twice the average yearly salary. Still pretty low though.

I don't think this is true. https://www.averagesalarysurvey.com/iran

These SEO-optimized salary websites are a joke, and usually never cite sources for their figures. An average annual salary of $17,600 makes Iran a relatively rich country...in reality, it's much lower than that. With crippling sanctions and extreme inflation, it should be somewhere between $100 and $500 monthly.

What is this? I am living in Iran and avg salary a month is 15 million tomans which is around 330 usd a month.

Umm..no it is not. Minimum wage in Iran is ~$7500 USD/yr and average in the bigger cities is a lot higher than that.

I am Iranian, working as a software developer full time, I'm getting paid around 250 usd a month. It's a shit show here. I'm trying to buy a car and I should be paying about 20 month of my salary for this (shit)[https://dl.bahalmag.ir/images/%D8%B9%DA%A9%D8%B3_%D9%BE%D8%B...]

Super interesting. What's life like over there for you? Are you planning on moving away at some point?

Sorry your dealing this! 250 usd is really low for a software dev, Could you apply jobs abroad?

Iran is under US sanctions, which makes it impossible for developers to apply for remote jobs. It's even harder for boys, who are required to spend 2 years in conscription in the military without payment before they can leave the country.

Even after that, the government won't release the academic certificate and requires a high price of working at least 5 years to earn that money. In short, if anyone is born in Iran, they should also die there. Additionally, I should mention that the dollar exchange rate, which Google shows, is completely inaccurate and is even worse than that.

P.S. do not believe other claims either, as those who succeed in Iran usually come from wealthy families or have connections to the government, or they have both.

Sadly, this country is worse than North Korea (T-T).

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