Okay, then please propose a concrete example with costs of labor, premium for print subscription etc.

Happy to be proven wrong, but USD 2500 seems unrealistic.

I live in India. My newspaper costs ₹230 a month. That's ₹2,760 a year and ₹27,600 for a decade (not factoring inflation). At today's conversion rates, that's $333.58 for entire decade.

If I pay the remaining amount of $2166.42 to the delivery person over 10 years, that's about ₹1493 per month, which is over 6 times the cost of newspaper subscription. For that amount, yeah, they'll be happy to hang the paper on a wall.

I've just done that in reply to your previous comment, but will add here: they said "pay the person who delivers my daily newspaper", so it's $2500 on top of an existing delivery, not $2500 including paying for a new subscription & deliveries.

edit: oops I noticed the other comment I replied to wasn't you, but anyway - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36629620

No worries, appreciate your concrete calculation.

I would argue it's just one more convenient assumption that leads us away from a realistic estimation.

It seems to me USD 2500 is an idealistic best case scenario.

$250 is a tad lower than the median monthly salary in India. I bet you can find hundreds of millions of people willing to earn a cool $0.7 a day doing something as easy as this. That’s a meal or two for a poor person.

Someone already used India as an example.

With millions of people living in conditions where even safe drinkable water is not something you are guaranteed to get - 250$/year equivalent seems wild.