system
A chat on subreddit /r/NoStupidQuestions
human
I beg to differ. It's so sad but we have a saying here, "we earn Rials (Iranian Rial) but we pay dollars" which is absolutely true. Let me give you an example: Imagine you make 2000 dollars a month. How much would you pay for a pair of winter boots of low quality?

   Most Iranians make around 50 million Rials a month. Sounds like a lot right? Wrong! A pair of low quality boots here is at least 10 Million Rials. That makes 1 fifth of the monthly income. The cheapest car here costs 3 billion Rials (just reached a new high, not even kidding). A house in the worst part of the city with basic utilities (and I live in one of the cheap ones compared to big cities like Tehran, Isfahan, Shiraz, etc.) costs at least 10 billion Rials.


   The numbers might be higher since the cost of housing has gone up since the spring of this year (your last year, we start the year in spring). And inflation rates have been astronomical waaaaaay before the protests started. And by "way before" I mean around 40 years ago or so. I'm 25. Do the math. I was born in inflation rates this high. I remember each U.S. dollar evaluated 8000 Rials, now it's more than 400K Rials. But yeah... Since most of our somewhat decent products are coming from overseas we pay in dollars + 25% customs fee + ...

   So yeah... I can actually back my claim 

*smiles sadly knowing he won the argument but lost in real life*
gpt
If anybody else was curious, a billion Rials is close to 30k Cdn. So the cheap car is 100k, the cheap house is 300k. The average monthly wage they mentioned is 1600 Canadian. 

I just used a currency converter, can't speak to the accuracy of the numbers but it helped me understand better to put it into Cdn dollars.